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Wave of killings raises specter of death squads

By Ginger Thompson
The New York Times

January 17, 2006

GUATEMALA CITY · There were 52 bodies at the morgue on a recent Monday morning; 52 new chances for Guadalupe Diaz to find her son, Mario Toscano.

He was no angel, Diaz said of her son. Toscano, 20, known around the neighborhood as Chespy, was the leader of the violent Mara 18 street gang. His mother long feared he might wind up dead, but not disappeared.

Toscano has been missing since Aug. 27, Diaz said, when he was abducted at a convenience store by three gunmen. Diaz said that when neighbors tried to intervene, the gunmen pulled out their weapons, identified themselves as police officers, warned the neighbors to move back, then loaded Toscano into an unmarked car and drove away.

Since then, Diaz, a maid, stops at the morgue on her way to work most every Monday.

"To see them," she said of examining so many bodies, "I get chills."

A neighbor named Rosa Morales, 71, said her 15-year-old grandson, who was not a member of a gang, had been kidnapped by the same kind of mob two months ago. When asked who she thought was responsible for the attacks, she raised an evil from the past.

"The people say it's the death squads that are disappearing the people," Morales said, sobbing. "What gives them the right?"

Nearly a decade after the end of a guerrilla war that left 200,000 people dead or missing in this country of 14 million people, a new wave of violence has hit Guatemala and it looks a lot like the old one, some say worse.

Even in peace, governments across Central America have said violence remains the principal threat to stability.

In Guatemala, as in neighboring Honduras and El Salvador, the violence comes with rape, torture kidnappings and killings. Now, as they did during the war, human rights investigators have raised concerns about a clandestine "social cleansing campaign," led by rogue police officers and vigilante mobs.

This latest cycle of violence began five years ago, when street gangs with roots in Los Angeles, especially the Mara 18 and the Mara Salvatruchas, known as MS-13, began to spread across Central America and southern Mexico.

Then, last year, men and boys suspected of being members of street gangs began to disappear in much the same way suspected guerrillas did during the 1980s: abducted from streets or ambushed in their beds, and forced into unmarked cars with tinted windows and no license plates.

Almost none of those kidnapped turn up alive. Some never turn up at all. When they do, they are often not found in one piece.

Beyond the attacks against gang members and youths suspected of being gang members, international human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have expressed concern about a disproportionate increase in the killing of women. The Guatemalan Human Rights Ombudsman reported that from 2002 to 2004, killings of women increased by almost 57 percent, while the killings of men increased 21 percent.

The root causes and perpetrators of the violence have been so obscured by government cover-ups and corruption that they are often impossible to identify.

In the cases of the killing of women, for example, fewer than 12 of the more than 1,800 murders since 2001 have been resolved, according to the nonprofit Center for Legal Action on Human Rights.

Relatives of the victims, especially the relatives of dead gang members, said they thought police officers and private security guards had led much of the kidnapping and killing in a secret campaign of state-sponsored "social cleansing," aimed at the young and the poor.

Interior Minister Carlos Vielmann denies those accusations. Unlike the governments in Honduras and El Salvador, which adopted tough laws that made it a felony to belong to a gang, the Guatemalan government has launched a softer war against gangs that focused on recreation and rehabilitation programs.

Vielmann said the government had also taken important steps to root out corruption in the police force by punishing dozens of officers responsible for abuses, upgrading equipment and training.

Still, Vielmann acknowledged corruption remained rampant among the officers of the National Civil Police. He said he suspected that some of the secret security structures created during the civil war had become instruments of organized crime.

The interior minister attributed much of Guatemala's violence to fighting among rival gang members, and he included in that category much of the violence against women, who he said have become increasingly involved in street gangs and dealing dope. But he did not reject the theory that some of the attacks had been committed by rogue police officers and citizen vigilantes, many of them frustrated by the government's inability to deliver justice.

"I am not going to guarantee you that agents of state security forces or of private security forces have not in some moment committed an excess and killed someone," Vielmann said. "But I can tell you that this is not a policy of the state. And we would never allow this to be the policy of the state."