In Central America, crime is king

The distinguished guests from El Salvador entered this capital city with one set of police officers as bodyguards, and another set of police officers waiting to ambush them.

As they drove along mountain roads, Eduardo Jose D’Aubuisson and fellow legislators were entering a trap set by rogue Guatemalan police officers at the hire of drug traffickers, officials said. Those officers believed the Salvadorans were using their diplomatic immunity to work for rival traffickers.

The final, violent hours of D’Aubuisson’s life, and the events of the days that followed, seem plucked from the plot of the Oscar-winning movie “The Departed,” where trust is illusory and crosses and double-crosses are bloody. But that is reality in today’s Central America, a region of weak institutions where crime bosses control police death squads and organized crime is said to be more powerful than the state.

Fear of rogue police is widespread.

“There are criminal cases where a witness has named a police officer, and the prosecutor will say to the witness, ‘Are you really sure you want to say that?’ ” said an advisor to Guatemala’s public prosecutor’s office, who spoke on condition of anonymity citing fear for his safety. “The prosecutor says this not only because he is afraid that the witness might be killed. The prosecutor is afraid he will be killed too.”

Guatemalan Vice President Eduardo Stein said in an interview last week that organized-crime groups have “penetrated” most of the agencies of the criminal justice system, including the police, the public prosecutor’s office, the courts and the attorney general’s office. Such corruption is also endemic in El Salvador and Honduras. “This is not just a Guatemalan problem, it’s a regional problem,” Stein said. “These groups transcend borders, and they have more resources than we do.”

Four Guatemalan police officers were arrested in the killing of D’Aubuisson and two other legislators. The suspects were slain in a maximum-security prison three days later, in a stunning extrajudicial crime that placed new pressures on the government to take radical steps.

At one point, Guatemalan defense officials, business leaders and diplomats “from a friendly country” suggested to President Oscar Berger that he declare a state of emergency and place the police under military control, Stein said. The president ignored this advice.

“We don’t want to relive the past ... with the military running civilian agencies in violation of the constitution,” Stein said. To do so would have been a violation of the peace accords that ended Guatemala’s civil war a decade ago, he added.

Berger is expected to ask President Bush for help in fighting organized crime when the two men meet here today.

A swirl of accusation, official leaks and rumor has linked the killings to top officials of the Guatemalan security forces, and also to crime groups and legislators in El Salvador.

Many fear the authors of the crime will escape justice.

“There will not be an exhaustive investigation, either in El Salvador, or in Guatemala, to reach the truth,” said Beatrice Alamanni de Carrillo, El Salvador’s ombudswoman for human rights. “Organized crime is a problem in three countries.... In each place it is destroying the rule of law.”

D’Aubuisson, William Pichinte and Jose Gonzalez Rivas were members of the Central American Parliament, a body that promotes and regulates regional trade. They left San Salvador by car the morning of Feb. 19 for a meeting of that body in Guatemala City.

‘What was the motive?’

Guatemalan officials said privately that they have long suspected that some members of the parliament engage in drug dealing. Central America is a key conduit of cocaine between Colombia and Mexico. The legislators have diplomatic immunity and their cars cross Central American borders without being inspected.

Officials in Guatemala and El Salvador say there were no indications that D’Aubuisson, 32, was involved in illicit activities.

“My brother was an upstanding person who was just starting his political career,” Roberto D’Aubuisson Jr. said. But he said he didn’t believe the killing was a case of mistaken identity either, a theory floated by some Salvadoran officials. “The question is: What was the motive?”

Roberto D’Aubuisson said he believed former Salvadoran Congressman Roberto Silva, who was thrown out of the legislature last year for alleged drug ties, ordered the killing of his brother as “payback” against the government of Salvadoran President Tony Saca. The D’Aubuissons are sons of the late Roberto D’Aubuisson, the controversial founder of the ruling party in El Salvador. Silva evaded arrest and remains a fugitive.

The rogue officers were led by Luis Arturo Herrera, head of the national police’s anti-organized-crime unit. On the surface, he was a respected officer. When armed robbers stole $8 million in cash at Guatemala City’s airport that was headed for the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank in September, Herrera helped lead the probe.

But he allegedly worked for a “cleansing unit” in the national police. Also known as death squads, the groups had their origins in the 1990s, when they began carrying out extrajudicial executions of crime suspects.

The cleansing squads and other groups of rogue officers have evolved into multipurpose crime groups linked to a variety of illicit activities, including shipping stolen cars, kidnapping, human trafficking and running drug-trafficking networks that bring Colombian cocaine to the U.S., according to official sources here and human rights groups.

Last week, retired Gen. Otto Perez Molina, a Guatemalan presidential candidate and former chief of military intelligence, charged that Victor Rivera, a top advisor to the interior minister, ran one of the cleansing squads. Members of Molina’s Patriot Party also produced evidence that they said linked Rivera to kidnappings. Rivera has not responded to the charges.

The allegations echoed those long made by human rights activists in the region.

“These groups were established during the counterinsurgency campaigns [of the 1980s and ‘90s] and were never dismantled,” said Adriana Beltran of the Washington Office on Latin America. “Through the years, they’ve transformed themselves and established links with organized-crime networks.”

In Honduras, former President Ricardo Maduro said in a recent interview that organized-crime groups effectively controlled parts of eastern Honduras where drugs are shipped by sea and air. He said the government had little hope of asserting its authority there.

A longtime problem

Drug trafficking among top officials in Guatemala’s security forces has long been a problem. In 2005, U.S. officials lured Adan Castillo, Guatemala’s then-top drug officer, to Virginia and arrested him and two other top officials on charges of smuggling several tons of cocaine.

U.S. officials said they had assisted Guatemalan authorities in background checks on all new hires to the security forces. But that vetting process did not apply to old hires, and many corrupt elements remain in the police force. U.S. officials also expressed frustration at resistance to implement a plan to create a United Nations-backed commission to assist the criminal justice system.

Drug money has filtered not only into the police force, but also into the Guatemalan Congress, U.S. officials said. “The money involved, and the weakness of the institutions makes it inevitable,” one U.S. official said.

Intelligence sources in the region say investigators have linked the rogue officers charged in D’Aubuisson’s killing to Guatemalan bands of drug traffickers who engage in a lucrative trade with Mexican and Colombian traffickers.

Guatemalan officials say that just before the kidnapping, and during the two hours the Salvadorans were held, Herrera and the other rogue officers made 17 calls on two phones to El Salvador, a fact that suggested a plot to arrest involved confederates in that country. The officers allegedly took the legislators to a farm and beat and tortured them before killing them and setting their bodies on fire.

On Feb. 25, the four officers were killed in their prison cells. Guatemalan authorities arrested 20 prison officials, including the warden.

Alamanni, the Salvadoran human rights ombudswoman, said she found the prison killings even more disturbing than the slayings of the legislators.

“This case shows that the criminal power is so strong that they are challenging the state to stop it from running over all legal institutions,” she said. “The message is clear, not only for the government of Guatemala but for El Salvador too: ‘We’ll kill anyone we want, and we are more powerful than the state.’ ”

hector.tobar@latimes.com

chris.kraul@latimes.com

Tobar reported from Guatemala City and Kraul from San Salvador.