Word: guatemala
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...village of La Reforma in eastern Guatemala doesn't seem like the kind of place that would have a first-rate hospital and a handful of mansions. There's no bank, no grocery store and more than 70% of the inhabitants of the municipality that includes La Reforma, called Huite, are poor. But officials tell TIME they suspect a few locals are making a handsome profit by assuring that Colombian cocaine makes it safely through Guatemala to Mexico and then...
...created jobs - both directly for their alleged drug-running enterprises and indirectly through businesses that federal officials say are possible fronts for laundering drug profits. "They're the source of employment," says a 30-year-old woman who grew up near La Reforma and now studies law in Guatemala City. "They're the principal investors." The woman has family in Huite and asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal. (See pictures of the narco netherworld...
...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...
...economy, says Sigfrido Lee, former Vice Minister of Economy and an analyst at the Center for National Economic Investigations, a Guatemalan think tank. This indicates, he says, a likely inflow of illegal money. The U.S. government's recently released 2009 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report backs up those suspicions. Guatemala also has an unusually high number of luxury cars and high-end real estate purchases, Lee says, and buyers often pay in 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...
...they write. Americans are "exporting their faith" by wedding it to their other gods: belief in free markets and "putting the consumer first." Corporations proudly tout Christian values, pastors like Rick Warren are launching publishing empires from the pulpit, and U.S.-style megachurches are sprouting from Seoul to Guatemala City, where one cavernous house of worship boasts a helipad (and an address off "Burger King Drive"). The authors falter by limiting their discussion of non-Christian faiths--including virulently antimodern strains of radical Islam. Readers are left to decide whether this religious revival is something to relish...