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Guatemala has long been a drug transshipment point between South and North America. But only in recent years have investigators begun to see how firmly a narco-economy is taking hold there, which is always bad news for small, poor and corrupt countries like Guatemala. Experts say it's hard to know just how much the Guatemalan economy depends on drug profits, but they agree that it's a significant source of employment and capital today. If trafficking and related businesses were shut down, unemployment would skyrocket in certain parts of the country, like La Reforma, says Leonel Ruiz, second...
...cash. Guatemala City has seen a boom in fancy high-rise apartment and office buildings in recent years, which authorities and analysts suspect is driven in no small part by money laundering. "One can find entire condominium complexes that never sold" any units, says Lee. (See pictures of drug lords' latest cocaine hubs...
...last December for alleged weapons possession but was released soon after without being charged. A Lorenzana representative did not respond to TIME's attempts to contact the family. But last year, Waldemar wrote a letter to a Guatemala newspaper denying reports that he or his family were involved in drug trafficking. He admitted he'd once sold land to a man who then constructed a clandestine airstrip on it to transport drugs but said "that wasn't my fault...
...Lorenzana and other members of his family under government suspicion, however, do not appear on many of the titles to their assets, officials say. Rather, those documents use front men (or women) to register businesses, which officials note is a common tactic for laundering money. "The families that run [drug trafficking] know they can't leave a trace," says the narcotics prosecutor, Ruiz...
...FATF blacklist in 2004. Still, the country's suspected narcobosses are rarely prosecuted. Nor is there much public outrage about the cash doled out by traffickers. In Huite, says the law student, the majority of her childhood friends are now employed in some form by people she calls drug traffickers. In the past, she notes, most local youth had to migrate to the U.S. to look for work. It's also common, she adds, to see long lines of La Reforma's poor waiting for favors outside the homes of suspected narcofamilies, who also send food to remote villages...