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Crimes chill guatemala politics { November 6 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/caribbean/sfl-hguatzamora06nov06,0,7796868.story?coll=sfla-news-caribbeanhttp://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/caribbean/sfl-hguatzamora06nov06,0,7796868.story?coll=sfla-news-caribbean
Crimes chill nation's politics
By Michael Deibert
SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
November 6, 2003
GUATEMALA CITY · Jose Ruben Zamora, editor of Guatemala's El Periodico newspaper and one of the most strident critics of the nation's ruling Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) party, thinks he has already seen a glimpse of his country's future should the FRG's presidential candidate win this week's elections.
It is a glimpse of a country dominated by armed groups that act with impunity and a body politic that can easily resort to violence when its interests are threatened.
On June 24 Zamora, who has made his newspaper a forum for detailing the links between government figures and the country's criminal underworld, was held captive along with his family and domestic servants. A dozen armed individuals brandishing the identification of a government ministry and the national police stormed his home, stripped him, and beat his two teenage sons.
Zamora, who was awarded the 1995 International Press Freedom Award by the Committee to Protect Journalists, sent his family into exile in the United States.
"I will continue on in Guatemala, but my family definitely will not," Zamora said.
Independent investigators have identified some of the assailants as former government employees with links to a controversial military unit, the Estado Mayor Presidencial (Presidential General Staff, or EMP). The unit, which President Alfonso Portillo officially disbanded last month, historically has been responsible for presidential security but has long been fingered by human rights group as a tool of political terror. Its dismantling was one of the tenets of the 1996 peace accords that ended Guatemala's 30-year civil war.
The EMP was linked to a series of high-profile assassinations over the years, including the 1990 murder of anthropologist Myrna Mack, the 1994 killing of Constitutional Court President Eduardo Epaminondas Gonzalez Dubon and the 1998 beating death of Guatemalan Bishop Juan Gerardi.
Amnesty International, though applauding the disbanding of the EMP, said in an October report that former EMP agents were playing a large role in the supposedly "cleansed" agency slated as its replacement, the Secretariat for Administrative and Security Affairs, and that would prolong the climate of fear.
Given this history, many see the Zamora assault as no mere idle threat but as an attempt to silence those who dare to speak out linking official government groups with clandestine bodies for crimes past and present. Coming in tandem with the presidential aspirations of FRG presidential candidate Efrain Rios Montt, who ruled Guatemala as a dictator during the height of the war in the early 1980s, critics say the country is in danger of further institutionalizing violence in the government ranks. Rios Montt, despite gaining in some recent polls, still trails conservative former Guatemala City Mayor Oscar Bergier and center-left candidate Alvaro Clom, though his mere presence in the election worries some.
"[The government and the clandestine groups] both need impunity, they both need the justice system to go away," says Frank LaRue, the director of the Center for Legal Action on Human Rights, a human rights group that has filed genocide charges against Rios Montt for massacres committed during the civil war. "Rios Montt [needs impunity] because of the massacres and human rights violations and [the criminal groups] because of their dirty business. For them it would be very dangerous if any other government came in. They basically need each other. The FRG needs their money and their support and their death squads."
For its part, the FRG has denied links to Guatemala's criminal underworld and, with Rios Montt running on a law-and-order ticket, claims that corruption and violence have proved to be problems too pervasive to overcome in so short a time.
Zamora advocates a commission being set up to purge the army or a constitutional amendment to abolish the armed forces. He says that these fundamental changes will never happen if the FRG remains in power and Rios Montt assumes the presidency.
Copyright © 2003, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
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