Source: Sunday Telegraph

Guatemala 'on brink of ruin' after 40 murdered

Guatemala 'on brink of ruin' after 40 murdered
By Philip Sherwell in Guatemala City, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 1:42am BST 26/08/2007

excerpts:

Quote Hector Montenegro took a break from election campaigning in Guatemala last week - to bury his murdered teenage daughter. Her killers had pulled out her fingernails, tied her hands behind her back, slit her throat, then stuffed the corpse into the boot of a taxi with two other victims of similarly brutal attacks.

The distraught congressional candidate for the leading party was in no doubt that 15-year-old Marta Cristina was the latest victim of a particularly violent election campaign, even by the standards of a country that endured a bloody 36-year civil war.

"I am sure that her killing was politically motivated," said Mr Montenegro, 71, a veteran activist for the poor and elderly. "I am used to the threatening phone calls, the insults, the people calling me a communist. But what sort of animal could do this to a teenage girl?"

***






This article denies anti-Americanism in Guatemala politics in this disclaimer:


Quote The anti-American populism that has featured prominently in other Latin American countries, promoted by the oil wealth of the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, plays no part in Guatemalan politics. The economy depends on the $3 billion in remittances sent home each year by Guatemalans living in America. Both Mr Colom and Gen Perez Molina are pro-American.

Rather, this election is about violence and corruption. The chiefs of the police, prison and tax services all acknowledge that their organisations are riddled with corrupt officials and crimes are rarely prosecuted. The government recently turned to the United Nations for help in supplying legal experts in various fields in an unprecedented attempt to jump-start its stalled justice system. In the most notorious recent example of its failings, four police detectives were arrested on charges of murdering three Salvadoran congressmen - only to be shot dead execution-style inside their supposedly maximum-security prison cell.


I'll leave it to wacco readers to discern as to the veracity of such claims.

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For for more historical context of the geo-political dynamics and the role the United States has played in the destabilzation of Guatemala (as in Chile and other countries in Latin America) read William Blum's : Killing Hope,(great excerpts also provided/posted at Third World Traveler)...