Word: guatemala
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...scandal began two weeks ago when the bodies of the congressmen, who were representatives to the Central American parliament, and their driver were found bullet-ridden and charred on an abandoned dirt road in Guatemala. Days later, four Guatemalan policemen - including the head of the organized crime investigation unit - were accused of the murders. But before they could be tried for the crimes, the four were assassinated inside their maximum-security prison cell, left face down in a pool of blood, shot with their throats slit. Authorities and opposition politicians in Guatemala say the policemen were part of a group...
...reputations of the conservative governments of Tony Saca in El Salvador and Oscar Berger in Guatemala, two of Washington's few remaining allies in Latin America, have taken a severe hit. The countries share a southern border and have two of the strongest economies in Central America. Both are members of the Central American Free Trade Agreement and are seen by the U.S. as partners in the war on drugs. Just last fall the Bush Administration nominated Guatemala to take the Latin American seat on the U.N. Security Council as a means of shutting out Venezuela. The U.S. government says...
...Berger, it means a failure of his campaign promise four years ago to clean up Guatemala's politics, notoriously corrupt since the country's 36-year civil war ended a decade ago. During that war, which claimed nearly a quarter-million lives, the Guatemalan military launched a scorched-earth counterinsurgency campaign against leftist guerillas, massacring entire Mayan villages accused of supporting the rebels. Many wartime figures were never prosecuted for their offenses, and human rights groups and the U.N. have warned that former state security forces - laid off after the peace accords mandated a downsizing of the military - could...
...drug trafficking. The murdered politicians, Eduardo D'Aubuisson, William Pichinte and Jose Ramon Gonzalez, belonged to El Salvador's ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance party, known as ARENA. All were members of the regional parliament, which has 132 members representing five of the seven Central American nations. Based in Guatemala City, the parliament, known by its Spanish acronym PARLACEN, has been mired in drug-trafficking scandals in recent years. In 2003 a Honduran member of the body was convicted of trafficking several kilos of heroin...
...That is why the Guatemalan government, with the leading voice of Vice President Eduardo Stein, has repeatedly stressed the need to create the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), a U.N.-backed independent body that would be allowed to investigate high-level government corruption in the country. The proposal for the commission has been around for years but has failed to build up enough support to allow its passage in Congress. Authorities and human rights activists say it is the only way Guatemala will be able to uncover the full extent of illegal armed groups operating in the country...