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Arms and Mandela: After the Honeymoon, He Faces the Deadly Dilemmas of South Africa’s Arms Industry

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THE LITTLE-NOTICED role of South African-made arms in the catastrophe of Rwanda presents Nelson Mandela with an early test of his ability to reconcile realism and idealism. At least 3,000 of Rwanda’s soldiers and militiamen carry South African-made R-4 automatic rifles. Rwanda bought them in 1992 from Armscor — South Africa’s state-owned arms corporation — along with 10,000 hand grenades, 20,000 rifle grenades, 10,000 launching grenades and more than 1 million rounds of ammunition.

In Rwanda’s killing fields, such grenades and automatic rifles have been weapons of choice, after machetes. At the Christ Spirituality Center in Kigali, soldiers opened fire with automatic rifles, killing five diocesan priests, nine congregated women, three Jesuits and their cook. In Rukara, journalists came upon about 500 corpses inside a church. One supervisor said the people had died when militiamen threw dozens of grenades inside the people.

Will the new South Africa sell arms to countries like Rwanda? Mandela, with his international reputation as a peacemaker, may not want to. But the United Nations trade embargo against South Africa is expected to be lifted soon and new markets are already opening up for South Africa’s deadliest goods. Andre Buys, an executive for Armscor, told Defense News last month that “we expect that by 1996 [arms] exports will at least double, and possibly quadruple.”

Like Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia before him, Mandela may find that his humanitarian impulses are not strong enough to resist the financial attractions of the arms trade. When Havel became president of Czechoslovakia in 1989, he promised to end arms exports. But last year, after the country split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, both renewed sales.

Before Mandela’s inauguration, ANC spokesman Madala Mthembu carefully suggested that the post-apartheid government would not abstain from the arms business. “Once the new government is up and running, we will welcome a complete lifting of all remaining sanctions and embargoes against South Africa,” Mthembu told Defense News. “We also wish to state the new government will be in full compliance with international standards governing exports of technologies and materials that would threaten world security.”

Such standards would preclude arms sales to states like Lybia, which is also currently subject to a U.N. embargo. But states like Rwanda before its present crisis would still be able to legally buy arms. Ethnic strife, which plagues much of the world, makes for a boom market in the weapons trade. And South African weapons are generally more reliable, accurate and durable than comparable arms made by Egypt, Russia, Romania, and even Israel in some categories. While the world rejoices in witnessing apartheid’s downfall, it will have the unexpected effect of adding to the glut of arms already flooding the places that least need them, such as Rwanda, Sudan and Cambodia.

No one expects Mandela to turn his back on what promises to become one of the new South Africa’s best earners of foreign exchange. But few would expect, either, a man who has devoted his life to his country’s struggle for justice, equality, and human rights to turn his back on future victims of other abusive regimes. He doesn’t necessarily have to.

South Africa can afford to forgo sales of guns and grenades because it actually makes most of its profits from the sale of expensive, high technology systems like laser-designated missiles, tactical radios, anti-radiation bombs and battlefield mobility systems. This sort of weaponry, while potentially deadly, is much less likely to be used in human rights abuses than small arms.

In anticipation of an end to the U.N. embargo, South Africa created the Denel Corp. in 1992. While Armscor has since served as the government’s defense procurement organization, Denel has operated as a private manufacturing consortium, representing 60 percent of the arms industry. Denel expects to lead export sales; such sales averaged $127.5 million in the early 1990s, and increased to $222.2 million in 1993. Rwanda’s purchase of $5.9 million of grenades, mortars and ammunition from Denel made only a tiny addition to South Africa’s balance sheet.

South Africa also has a technological edge in land mine detection and sweeping equipment especially needed by Cambodia and other countries. While South Africa has already begun to market this equipment, it announced in March that it would not sell land mines at the same time, and stopped exports. Although it could be argued that this announcement was motivated more by appearance than principle, it was a welcome sign.

But Mandela and the ANC’s stated policy isn’t good enough. Exporting minesweeping equipment is a legitimate way to earn foreign exchange; sales of any arms to human rights violators are not. The new South Africa should re-examine its export policy on such items. International prohibitions against arms sales to abusive regimes are at present nonexistent or weak. Rwanda, with its long-documented history of ethnic strife and its grisly record of human rights abuses, is a case in point. Rather than sink to this standard, Mandela should lead the world in raising it up.

Blood Money and Geopolitics

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The April 6 plane crash that killed the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi (they may have been shot down) is only the latest violent act for these neighboring Central African countries. As many as 100,000 people have died and more than a million have fled ethnic and politically based attacks in recent years. Elements of the Tutsi-dominated army in Burundi assassinated its prior President, a Hutu, in October. Similarly, Rwanda’s Hutu-dominated army is responsible for most abuses them according to Human Rights Watch/Africa. On top of that, one in eight people in Rwanda is on the verge of starving, according to a new report by aid agencies including Oxfam.

Rwanda’s renewed terror broke out as it was tentatively moving toward a peaceful settlement of a three-year civil war, which ended last August. The conflict was fueled by third-party governments supplying arms, which typifies the accelerated dumping of weapons into underdeveloped countries since the cold war ended.

In October 1990, guerrillas of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (R.P.F.), seeking to overthrow the government of President Juvenal Habyarimana, invaded the country from its northern border with Uganda. From around the world came a steady flow of weapons, including Kalashnikov AKM (AK-47) assault rifles, long-range 120-millimeter mortars, 122-millimeter howitzers and Soviet-made Katyusha multiple rocket launchers, which can cover with shrapnel an area wider and longer than a soccer field. Thousands died, both combatants and civilians, and one million people were uprooted from their homes. “I think in this type of market everybody wants to get in:” said James Gasana, Rwanda’s defense minister last year, adding that most countries and independent dealers that supplied the weapons were less interested in who won the war than in making money on it.

The government forces are made up primarily of Hutu; the guerrillas, of Tutsi. Their conflict dates back to the seventeenth century, when the Kingdom of Rwanda was established as a highly organized and stratified state. Most nobles, military commanders, local officials and cattle herders were Tutsi, who today are about 14 percent of the population; the rest of the people were Hutu, who were and remain predominantly subsistence farmers. Their differences are not tribal but ethnic and social, with the Tutsi historically regarding themselves as superior.

The Tutsi monarchy dominated Rwanda until it was overthrown by the Hutu in 1961, a year before the country’s independence from Belgium, which over the years had allied itself with the Tutsi but had shifted sides in the late 1950s. One of the new government’s first acts was to execute some twenty prominent Tutsi leaders; Hutu crowds killed up to 20,000 Tutsi citizens. By 1964, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that about 150,000 Rwandan Tutsi had fled to Tanzania, Burundi, Zaire and Uganda. Twenty-five years later, these people and their descendants, called Banyarwanda, had swollen to a population of some 500,000. Most lack citizenship or legal residence in the countries to which they escaped, which has left them vulnerable to deportation, displacement and harassment.

In 1973, Defense Minister Habyarimana, a Hutu, seized power. He promised to be fair to both Hutu and Tutsi; instead he distributed most of the resources and key positions to family, friends and associates from the region of his birthplace in northwestern Rwanda. Until recently, Habyarimana ruled the country as a one-party state, and most government ministers were related to him by either birth or marriage. After the guerrillas invaded, Habyarimana’s regime distributed at least 500 Kalashnikov assault rifles to municipal authorities, working in collaboration with militia from his ruling party. With government officials in the lead, these militia organized mobs of agitated Hutu that went to villages and fields in search of Tutsi.

They stole beans and slaughtered goats and cattle. They divided up the meat along with clothes before setting many bamboo huts on fire. About 2,000 people died, most of them hacked to death by machete. The Habyarimana regime arbitrarily arrested at least 8,000 others. Hundreds were beaten, raped and tortured. The guerrillas also committed abuses, executing hundreds of civilians suspected of collaborating with the Habyarimana regime, as well as military prisoners. They forcibly dislocated hundreds, if not thousands, more, and forced an unknown number of civilians into slave labor as porters for the troops. Although the abuses on both sides were documented by an international commission that included Human Rights Watch and three Francophone organizations, both the government and the guerrillas deny them.

Most of the countries and dealers facilitating the Rwanda slaughter are similarly closemouthed. The Russians and other former Warsaw Pact members are now prolific suppliers of small arms. The collapse of Moscow’s central control has given governments as well as the officials left in charge of existing stockpiles a free hand. Since these weapons are already paid for, they can be loosed on the world market at prices below cost. With the Russian ruble losing its value, and Eastern European nations also in need of hard currency, their governments are likely to sell even more arms in years to come. They are no longer constrained by the bounds of superpower loyalties; the only thing that counts now is cash.

Although exact numbers are unknown, Kalashnikov rifles have been flooding markets and wars throughout Africa and Asia. As late as March 1992 belligerents in Central Africa could pick them up in bulk for $220 each; prices have since dropped well below $200. In countries like Rwanda, Kalashnikovs were once more common than cars; now they are more common than bicycles. About 80 percent of the weapons used by the R.P.F. guerrillas were Kalashnikovs, many of Romanian manufacture. Among those fighters who had uniforms, most wore rain-pattem camouflage from the former East Germany; these are now also available through commercial military catalogues. African arms dealers living in Brussels appear to have facilitated the delivery of Warsaw Pact materiel to East Africa. The trend is global and not limited to guns and camouflage: In 1992 the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration confiscated Soviet-made AH-72 cargo jets that Colombia’s Cali cartel had used to smuggle cocaine.

In South Africa, the government-owned Armscor has for years manufactured high-quality weapons for its security and defense forces, which could not buy guns abroad because of a U.N. embargo. While this resolution was binding, another one, against buying arms from South Africa, was not; Rwanda has ignored it. According to Armscor invoices dated October 19, 1992, South Africa sold Rwanda at least $5.9 million worth of light arms, machine guns, mortars and ammunition. About 3,000 Rwanda troops are now equipped with the R-4 assault rifle, which is superior to the Kalashnikov. The status of Armscor and its subsidiaries in the new South Africa has yet to be determined, but it is likely to become a private industry. The lifting of stigma and sanctions against the former apartheid state will give Armscor the opportunity to market its products openly and aggressively for the first time.

A weapons contract signed on March 30, 1992, reads: “The BUYER and the SUPPLIER agree not to show the contents of this contract to third parties.” The buyer was Rwanda and the supplier was Egypt, in a $6 million transaction that included Egyptian-made Kalashnikov rifles, anti-personnel mines, plastic explosives, mortars and long-range artillery. Other documents indicate that the sale was financed by a “first-rate, international bank approved by” Egypt. Rwanda paid $1 million in cash up front and promised to pay another $1 million with the proceeds from 615 tons of harvested tea, and $1 million a year over the next four years. The “first-rate international bank” guaranteed Rwanda’s payment of the full $6 million. Few private commercial banks, operating on the profit motive, would take on such a risk. But Credit Lyonnais did. Although it may be privatized soon, in March 1992 it was still a nationalized bank of France. The sale was, in fact, a secret military assistance credit from France to Rwanda.

This credit has since become a subsidy. What Credit Lyonnais and Rwanda didn’t count on was that the R.P.F. guerrillas would launch a new offensive in February 1993 and take over the Mulindi tea plantation. The tea there spoiled and never made it to harvest. “Our economy was already ailing in 1990, and of course the war has not resolved anything,” President Habyarimana said last October. “Now we want to improve our macroeconomic outlook, but we have a serious shortage of currency.” As for Rwanda’s outstanding debt to Egypt, Credit Lyonnais, and by extension France, is obligated to pick up the tab.

The French government’s willingness to do so, and to keep propping up Habyarimana militarily, arose from its determination to maintain its credibility in French-speaking Africa. From Rwanda’s independence in 1962 until the war broke out in 1990, the nation’s main trading partner, political ally and military patron was Belgium. But once the war began, that role was assumed by France. Belgium is unique among NATO member states in that its laws explicitly prohibit it from selling or providing arms to a country at war. Shortly after the 1990 R.P.F. invasion, Belgium cut off all lethal aid. And last year, following the release of the international commission’s human rights report, Belgium recalled its ambassador for consultation. Accusations that Belgium has aided the R.P.F. are false, and stem from the Habyarimana regime’s resentment of Belgian neutrality.

French officials, however, have defended the record of the Habyarimana regime. “Civilians were killed as in any war,” said Colonel Cussac, the French military attaché in the capital of Kigali and head of the French military assistance mission. (In an apparent act of disdain for journalists and others who question France’s role, Colonel Cussac declined to give me his first name.) “Are you saying that the providing of military assistance is a human rights violation?” he asked, adding that officials in the U.S. Embassy in Kigali supported French policy. “France and the United States have a common history — for example, in Vietnam.” In fact, all non-French Western diplomats in Kigali are critical of France’s role.

Immediately after the war started, France deployed at least 300 combat troops in Rwanda, drawing them from its forces stationed in the Central African Republic. France also rushed in advisers, helicopter parts, mortars and munitions. After the R.P.F. launched its offensive last February, the number of French troops in Rwanda swelled to at least 680, comprising four companies, including paratroopers. “French military troops are here in Rwanda to protect French citizens and other foreigners,” Colonel Cussac told me. “They have never been given a mission against the R.P.F.” But Western diplomats, relief workers and Rwandan army officers all said these troops have provided artillery support for Rwandan infantry troops, and that French advisers have been attached to Rwandan combat commanders.

France’s Ambassador said the country’s presence is necessary to defend Rwanda against aggression from Uganda. It is true that Uganda has not sat on the sidelines during the conflict, although its government categorically denies this. Almost all of Uganda knew about the impending invasion in 1990, as Tutsi soldiers in the Ugandan army openly bid farewell to their families and friends. They traveled with their weapons, in plain view of Ugandan authorities, over two days, and then gathered in a soccer stadium in Kabale, about 200 miles southwest of Kampala and just north of the Rwandan border. Their weaponry included land mines, rocket-propelled grenades, 60-millimeter mortars, recoilless cannons and Katyusha rocket launchers. According to Western diplomats, international military observers, Ugandan army officers and eyewitnesses who saw soldiers unloading crates of Kalashnikovs, Uganda willingly provided more arms, food, gasoline, batteries and ammunition to the R.P.F. throughout the war. “We are committed to the R.P.F.” one Ugandan army operations officer boasted after a few beets in Kampala. “If they didn’t have our support, they wouldn’t be as successful as they are.”

Along with the Tutsi refugees who have served in the Ugandan army, about 200,000 other Tutsi have been living in Uganda. While President Yoweri Museveni tries to rebuild the country in the wake of its wholesale destruction under Idi Amin, these refugees have competed, sometimes violently, with Ugandans for water, land, and other resources. In supporting the guerrillas, President Museveni seems less interested in claiming Rwandan territory than in facilitating Tutsi repatriation. Many top R.P.F. leaders also fought alongside Museveni in Uganda with the expectation that some day he would help them invade Rwanda.

The R.P.F. and President Habyarimana signed a treaty last August, but his untimely death provoked Rwanda’s most severe wave of bloodshed since independence. Hours after his plane went down, the regime’s Presidential Guard began targeting political opponents and critics irrespective of ethnicity. They included the interim Hutu Prime Minister, 10 Belgian peacekeepers who tried to save her, many priests and nuns, and journalists and human rights monitors. While these victims, running into the thousands, were primarily Hutu like the regime itself, the ruling-party militia along with bands of soldiers and drunken armed Hutu men killed tens of thousands of Tutsi. Six days after the carnage started, the first of the main body of Tutsi R.P.F. guerrillas arrived in Kigali.

While Uganda harbored and largely armed the R.P.F., Egypt, South Africa and especially France armed the Habyarimana regime, which is most responsible for the recent bloodletting. Uganda denies it. Egypt and South Africa will not comment, and France has yet to fully disclose its role.

Bearing Witness

Monique Mujawamariya slapped her hand into mine and said “Ca va?” In Kigali a year ago, her smile was contagious, although the scars on three sides of her mouth were ugly. One of Rwanda’s most active human rights monitors, she was cut in an accident when someone tried to run her car off the road.

Monique, as she is generally known, couldn’t prove who did it. But she was later threatened by Capt. Pascal Simbikangwa in front of Western witnesses. Simbikangwa is a member of the Akazu (“the little house”), the clique of thugs and top ministers that kept President Juvenal Habyarimana in power for so long through its organization of the Presidential Guard and militia. Akazu members deny responsibility for any abuses.

Many of Rwanda’s opposition party leaders have been assassinated in recent years; Dissidents and West- ern diplomats suspect the Akazu. “Shadow groups are behind the violence. But nobody can provide concrete evidence,” said Dr. Dismas Nsengiyaremye, a former prime minister. “Take the example of the mafia: Their chief may recruit from churches, the government or private companies, which allow him to conduct criminal activities without being seen.”

This made for a dangerous climate. Because of it, Human Rights Watch/Africa arranged for Monique to meet with President Clinton last December in the Oval Office. “Your courage, Madame, is an inspiration to all of us, and we thank you:” the President told Monique. “I want to assure you that the United States will continue to be in the forefront of nations pushing the cause of human rights.”

After President Habyarimana was killed in Kigali on April 6, Monique felt she was in danger. She called United Nations peacekeepers in Kigali, but they were under siege and unable to help her. (Belgium says ten of its peacekeepers were tortured and murdered by the Presidential Guard.) Monique also appealed to U.S. Embassy officials, who were busy safeguarding Americans.

By then Monique was in touch with a friend in the United States, historian Alison DesForges. “Around 5 A.M. I called Monique and she said that she had seen two [member] of the Presidential Guard go into a house two removed from hers,” DesForges wrote. They brought out three people and shot them. “Around 6 when I called the soldiers had entered the house next door and had just killed someone. I told her to stay on the line with me, to open the door for them and to tell them that I was the White House.” Instead, Monique hid for six hours on the ground in the rain and then crawled into her ceiling space. They missed her, and she survived.

French Guns, Rwandan Blood

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Read the original article here.

HAWTHORNE, N.J. — The horrendous violence that has seized the tiny African republic of Rwanda is not as random as it looks. For the members of the Akazu, the ruling clan around the late President Juvenal Habyarimana, the only way to retain a 21-year monopoly on power was to kill their enemies as fast as they could. And until yesterday, when anti-Government rebels overran the capital of Kigali, that brutal clique was getting help from an unlikely quarter: France.

Rwanda was a Belgian protectorate until it gained independence in 1962, and until recently it got most of its military aid from Belgium. But Belgian law prohibits any lethal aid to a country at war. In 1975, two years “after he seized power by deposing the President who had appointed him, Mr. Habyarimana signed a military cooperation agreement with France. When the rebel guerrillas of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (harbored and largely armed by neighboring Uganda) invaded in 1990 and again last year, it was France that rushed in combat troops, mortars and artillery to help the Government.

Why France? Rwanda is “nobody’s idea of a choice colonial prize,” as The Economist tartly put it. It has few resources, little industry and a lot of AIDS. Like its neighbor Burundi, it has been torn by decades of ethnic strife between the Hutu and the Tutsi. But French is an official language — even though one in six adults are fluent in it – and that counts for a great deal. France has invested heavily in Francophone Africa and provides military and financial aid to a network of its own former colonies. Mr. Habyarimana was a friend of President Francois Mitterrand.

France’s commitment to the Habyarimana regime was underscored by its recent subsidy of Rwanda’s purchase of $6 million in arms from Egypt. A contract signed in Kigali in 1992 includes a full arsenal of mortars, long-range artillery, plastic explosives and automatic rifles. Payment was guaranteed by the nationalized French bank Credit Lyonnais.

Nor has France had much to say about Rwanda’s atrocious record on human rights. Mr. Habyarimana — who died with the President of Burundi in a suspicious plane crash last week — was a classic despot, ruthless and corrupt. He installed relatives and cronies in key ministries, the army and a paramilitary militia. (This group is known as the Akazu.)

When the rebels, who are largely Tutsi, invaded in 1990, the Akazu incited a policy of ethnic cleansing. Carrying placards of Mr. Habyarimana above their heads, local officials and militiamen organized mobs of agitated Hutu. They killed thousands of Tutsi, while Tutsi killed hundreds of Hutu. Victims were hacked to death with machetes.

Last August, Rwanda and the rebels agreed to end their three-year war, and six months later the President agreed to a transitional government, dividing ministerial posts three ways among the Akazu, Hutu opposition parties led by Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, and Tutsi representatives. Among these groups, the Akazu was the most reluctant to share power.

Hours after the President was killed last Wednesday, his Presidential Guard went on a rampage. They killed Prime Minister Uwilingiyimana, along with Belgian peacekeepers who had tried to save her; most other opposition party members; priests and nuns, journalists and human rights monitors. Militiamen and soldiers under irregular command randomly attacked Tutsi or anyone suspected of being one.

Now the Government forces are in retreat, killing and burning as they flee. If the rebels take control, they have said that they will share power with other parties; the world will have to wait to see.

For now, the horror in Rwanda should serve as a grisly lesson in the dangers of imperial reach. Of 21 French-speaking African regimes, most are dictatorships with scant respect for human rights. In January, when France devalued the currency used by 14 of these nations, it sent a welcome signal that it would cut back its subsidy of their economies. But its military policy lags behind its economic one; in propping up the Rwandan regime for so long, it bears part of the blame for the current bloodbath.

A New Kingdom Of Cocaine: For Colombia’s Powerful Cali Cartel, the Crucial Connection Is Guatemala

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The ignominious end of cocaine baron Pablo Escobar obscured the fact that his Medellin cartel had long since been eclipsed by another network of cocaine traffickers based in the Colombian city of Cali. The Cali cartel, led by the Rodriguez Orejuela family, is now said to control up to 85 percent of the world trade in the illicit drug. Two reasons for Cali’s success are clear: It has a reputation for eschewing violence and for distributing its profits widely. A third less often noted reason is that the cartel has established operations in Guatemala, a new safe haven for large cocaine shipments headed north.

Guatemala has become the largest warehouse for cocaine in Central America, according to Colombian and U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration experts. Analysts at the DEA and the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics Matters now estimate that Guatemala serves as the trans-shipment point for 50 to 75 tons of cocaine a year. That’s a substantial portion of the 300 to 400 tons that reach the United States every year.

“The vast majority of cocaine trafficking in Guatemala is Cali cartel-related,” Lee McCIenny, U.S. Embassy press attaché, says. In July 1992, authorities found 2.8 metric tons of cocaine in a house near the Guatemalan town of Antigua. (A metric ton is equivalent of 2,200 pounds.) Three months earlier, in April 1992, drug enforcement authorities in Miami had searched a load of frozen broccoli that had been shipped from Guatemala. They found 6.7 tons of cocaine, enough to supply every user in the United States for a week. It was one of the five largest drug seizures in U.S. history. The seizure resulted in the arrest of Francisco Guzman, the brother-in-law of one of the cartel’s top leaders, and Harold Ackerman, whom the DEA describes as “the Cali cartel’s ambassador to Miami” and the highest-ranking Cali member ever arrested.

The cartel is more violent than its reputation suggests. According to Siglo Veintiuno, Guatemala’s most respected daily newspaper, the cartel was also responsible for the recent assassination of Rony Sagastume, a Guatemalan national police detective. Sagastume had just been assigned to investigate the cartel’s activities in Guatemala in September 1992 when he was shot while he sat in a car with two other passengers. Siglo Veintiuno reported that sources close to the police said that Sagastume had been terminated by a death squad of the Cali cartel that had arrived in Guatemala one day before.

Members of the Guatemalan officer corps have been implicated in the cocaine trade. The 2.8 tons seized in Antigua were found in a house owned, but not occupied, by a retired Air Force captain. In December 1990 Col. Carlos Ochoa Ruiz was arrested by Guatemalan authorities working with the U.S. DEA. He was later indicted by prosecutors in Tampa, Fla., for smuggling half a ton of cocaine into that city. DEA agents say that Ochoa was working for the Cali cartel.

Guatemala’s officer corps is a relative newcomer to the drug business. The Guatemalan military was previously known, not just in Central America but also around the world, for its record of massacres, torture, disappearances and assassinations. The killing reached its peak in 1982 when a campaign of unprecedented savagery in the Guatemalan countryside effectively crushed the country’s left-wing insurgency. The resulting political stability was one feature that attracted the Colombian cocaine cartels. They chose Guatemala, according to a Latin American drug enforcement official, “because it is near Mexico, which its an obvious entrance point to the U.S., and because the Mexicans have a long-established mafia. It is also a better transit and storage country than El Salvador because it offers more stability and was easier to control.”

The signs of drug trafficking are visible in the Guatemalan economy. “The traffickers have begun to buy property and invest large sums of money for the construction of runways and warehouses for the storage of drugs,” according to an assessment of the Colombian activity in Guatemala done by one country in the region. In the capital, the construction industry has been growing at least four times faster than the rest of the economy.

Some Guatemalan officials suggest that stable policies and a healthy investment climate are behind the boom. But legitimate business leaders say the stampede of cocaine profits threatens either to crowd them out or draw them in. The problem became so pervasive that a year ago a group of exporters organized a conference around an unprecedented theme: how to detect whether their products were being used to run drugs.

Guatemalan newspapers have reported the presence of the Cali cartel in the country but have printed hardly a word about the cartel’s local confederates. A group of Mayan peasants say they had the misfortune to stumble across Guatemalan drug trafficking first-hand. The peasants were farmers living in the village of Los Amates in eastern Guatemala. They allege that, beginning in November 1990, soldiers from a local military base tried to drive them off their land. The soldiers took three men to the base where, the peasants claim, they were beaten and tortured. One of the men filed a complaint with the country’s human rights ombudsman, including a doctor’s medical report on his injuries and photos of a pencil-thin laceration around the entire base of his neck.

Five more peasants from Los Amates filed a second complaint in March 1992. It alleges that nine people from their community were murdered by the local soldiers and provides the dates, times, circumstances, names and titles or military ranks of those allegedly responsible. Some of the statements charge that the killers were protecting a drug trafficking operation.

“On April 18, 1991, they [the soldiers] assassinated Mr. Daniel Melgar, a tractor driver. Since this man had worked on [and knew about] the construction of the clandestine runway owned by Francisco Villafuerte, these narcotraffickers paid assassins to kill him. [When not in use] the runway is camouflaged with logs strewn over it.”

The surviving peasants claim the army has built so many runways in and around Los Amates that it has “converted its five hamlets into warehouses for drugs.” The complaint names a total of 67 individuals as being responsible. They include four army colonels, a major, a captain and 20 military-appointed civilian commissioners.

Local army officers denied any involvement; the country’s minister of defense also denied any knowledge of human rights violations or cocaine trafficking in the area.

How credible were the peasants’ complaints? One suspect named in their complaints was Arnoldo Vargas Estrada, one of the military commissioners who later became the mayor of the nearby town of Zacapa. Apparently unbeknownst to the peasant witnesses, Vargas had already been indicted on drug charges in New York in 1991. A joint DEA-Guatemalan police operation had confiscated 1.8 tons of cocaine in Guatemala which led to the arrest of Vargas and nine other people. The suspects were charged with smuggling several tons per month by tractor-trailer through Mexico to the United States. Vargas was extradited to Brooklyn in May 1992 and is expected to come to trial next year.

There is no known link between the U.S. indictment of Vargas and the peasants’ complaints against him and local army officers. Likewise, the murders of nine peasants in Los Amates remain unsolved. And Lt. Col. Ochoa, still under indictment in Tampa, is a free man. The military court that dishonorably discharged him from the army also ordered that no further action be taken against him, due to “insufficient evidence.”

The Cali cartel is in no danger of being driven out of Guatemala.

Guatemala’s Gross National Products: Cocadollars, Repression, and Disinformation

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In the early 1980s, leftist guerrillas in Guatemala blew up bridges, ambushed army convoys, and attacked military outposts. A decade later, the fighting in Guatemala’s civil war is winding down. Combat between the government and the guerrillas now occurs in only a few departments and only a few times each year. But political violence, almost exclusively by the government, continues. Even the U.S. State Department reported in 1991 that the military, civil patrols and the police continued to commit a majority of the major human rights abuses, including extrajudicial killings, torture and disappearances.

The Guatemalan counterinsurgency campaign was conceived with the support of U.S. counterinsurgency experts such as Caesar Sereseres and Colonel George Minas. Sereseres has served as both a consultant to the Rand Corporation and a Central America expert in the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning. Today, Guatemalan army officers still describe him as someone who understands our situation. Minas served as a U.S. military attache in Guatemala in the early 1980s. Both encouraged Guatemala’s population control strategy, involving the use of Vietnam-style military-controlled strategic hamlets and civilian defense patrols.

The strategy of control was also characterized by a litany of human rights crimes that stand out not only in the region but in the world. The violence was so severe in the early 1980s in Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchu’s home department of Quich, to cite but one example, that the entire Catholic archdiocese shut down and withdrew, with all its priests, nuns, catechists, and many parishioners. The situation there and in other departments by 1982 led Guatemala’s Conference of Catholic Bishops to conclude: Not even the lives of old people, pregnant women or innocent children were respected. Never in our history has it come to such grave extremes.

REAPING THE BENEFITS OF STABILITY

Not everyone suffered. Guatemalan army spokesmen openly point out that the carnage has given Guatemala a level of national stability it lacked earlier in the war, and made the country comparatively more stable than El Salvador, Honduras, or even Mexico. With the military firmly in charge, and the civilian government largely irrelevant, foreign investment has climbed. Low wages have attracted Asian firms wanting to set up sweatshops, as well as European and U.S. tourists.

It has also attracted the network of cocaine traffickers based in the Colombian city of Cali. The cartel picked Guatemala because it is near Mexico, which is an obvious entrance point to the U.S., and because the Mexicans have a long established and well organized mafia, said a Latin America drug enforcement expert. It is also a better transit and storage country than El Salvador because it offers more stability and was easier to control.

THE GUATEMALAN CONNECTION

In the 1980s, Guatemala was an insignificant player in the cocaine trade. Today, however, Guatemala is the largest Central American bodega or warehouse for cocaine transshipments to the U.S., and ranks behind only Mexico and, perhaps, the Bahamas in transshipping cocaine to the U.S. Analysts at the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics Matters (INM) now estimate that between 50 and 75 metric tons of cocaine are shipped through Guatemala each year. (In comparison, the same experts estimate that before the present embargo, between 6 and 12 metric tons a year passed through Haiti.) Mexico and Guatemala, which share a common frontier, together move at least two-thirds of the cocaine now reaching the U.S.

Guatemala’s booming cocaine trade now distorts the Guatemalan economy, drawing local businesses into a web of cocadollars and fostering corruption in both business and the military. The Cali cartel and its Guatemalan partners are trafficking cocaine that, at the wholesale price of $15,000 a kilogram, is worth as much as one billion dollars a year or one-tenth of Guatemala’s entire GNP.

Evidence of the cash flow generated by the cocaine trade is abundant: Real estate prices in Guatemala City, by conservative estimates, rose over 350 percent in just three years, while inflation dropped from 60 to 14 percent over the same period. Even more illicit funds appear to be channeled into the construction industry, which has grown steadily at a rate four times faster than the rest of the economy. While other Central American capital cities only seem to deteriorate, Guatemala City’s skyline continues to expand even though the newly constructed buildings still have ample vacant office space.

The situation became so unnerving by November 1992 that a group of local exporters organized an unprecedented conference: how to detect whether their export products are being used to run drugs. They held the conference seven months after 6.7 tons of cocaine enough to supply the total U.S. demand for a week was discovered in cases of frozen broccoli shipped to Miami. Even these business leaders concede that, in a sluggish global economy with many export markets depressed, the profits available from cocaine trafficking can be extremely tempting. Newspaper editors say that the cocaine trade in Guatemala has been able to buy out entire businesses as well as institutions. But although everybody in Guatemala seems to know about it, hardly anybody is willing, publicly, to say even a word.

PLACING THE BLAME

Off the record, Western diplomats, leading entrepreneurs, church officials and others all charge that senior Guatemalan army officers are deeply involved in the cocaine traffic. Although not even one military official has yet to be prosecuted in either Guatemala or the U.S., 10 military officers and 20 paramilitaries under them have already been indicted or implicated. They include:

1) Ex-Lt. Colonel Carlos Ochoa Ruiz and two army captains, all of whom were caught in a DEA sting back in 1990, smuggling a half metric ton of cocaine, worth $7.5 million wholesale, to Tampa, Florida.
2) A retired Guatemalan Air Force captain who owned a safe house outside Antigua where the DEA found 2.8 metric tons of cocaine.
3) Four army colonels, a major, a captain and 20 army-appointed civilian commissioners in Los Amates in eastern Guatemala, who are accused in legal testimony by survivors of having ordered the separate murders of nine peasants, and the torture and abuse of many more.

The Los Amates survivors charge that the army drove them off their land to build runways to smuggle drugs. One of the military commissioners they name, Arnoldo Vargas Estrada, was later extradited to Brooklyn, New York, where he will be tried for smuggling several tons of cocaine a month by tractor trailers to the U.S.

SHIFTING THE BLAME

The Guatemalan army’s office of Information and Dissemination, on the other hand, counters that leftist guerrillas of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) are responsible. Not one guerrilla or political opponent of the Guatemalan government has been either charged or indicted. Yet the Guatemalan army maintains that they should be.

Its Department of Information and Dissemination has a manila envelope, marked with an official stamp SECRETO, which spokesmen are eager to show to journalists upon request. The documents describe an alleged anti-drug operation high up in Guatemala’s northern Peten jungle, where the URNG guerrillas were once strong. According to the documents, in July 1991 a Treasury Police unit engaged in combat with guerrillas discovered a small plane with Colombian registration. Included in the file is a photograph of a white male wearing a baseball cap with the letters, in place of a ball team, DEA. He is standing over the plane’s cargo stacked brown paper-wrapped packages and holding up a flag with the initials FAR the acronym for one of three wings of the URNG.

For reasons still unexplained, the Army waited 16 months until November 1992 to release the secret file, the color Polaroids, and an army-produced video of the alleged raid.

The video begins with members of the Treasury Police running single file up to a line of trees, and firing automatic weapons in sequence at an unseen enemy. Later, these armed soldiers are seen around a small plane and the brown packages. The film then zeros in on the Polaroid of the white male wearing the baseball cap with the letters DEA. When asked whether this man with the DEA baseball cap was a DEA agent, army spokesman Captain Yon Rivera said, Look at it. You can see for yourself. When asked why the DEA hasn’t said anything about the guerrillas running cocaine, spokesman Yon Rivera, commonly identified in local newspapers as The Voice of the Armed Forces said: The DEA has not accused the guerrillas for this. I don’t know why they don’t want to say it.

U.S. Embassy officials in Guatemala City declined comment. When asked about the raid, Joyce McDonald at DEA headquarters in Washington faxed a description of the raid, the video, and the man with the DEA baseball cap to the DEA Field Division in Guatemala City. That office faxed back a brief response: DEA is unfamiliar with the film or scenario described above.

Blaming the guerrillas is not without a certain irony. The same army spokesmen who claim the guerrillas are running tons of cocaine boast in the same breath how the guerrillas are militarily defeated. The army estimates that there are fewer than 500 full-time guerrilla combatants left.Yet, the army fails to explain how a mere 500 stragglers under pressure just to stay alive, let alone fight could be responsible for receiving, storing and transshipping the bulk of Guatemala’s flow of cocaine.

THE ARMY AND THE PRESS

Although the charge that the guerrillas are behind the cocaine traffic is, on the face of it, without basis, it is regularly reported as fact throughout Guatemala. The Guatemalan army’s ability to manipulate the press is yet another violent legacy of its past. After seeing more of their colleagues killed or disappeared than in any other country in Central America (and that is saying a lot), Guatemalan journalists rarely challenge anything the military says. No matter how broad or baseless, the military’s allegations are still regularly reported in Guatemalan daily newspapers, radio, and television reports in most cases, without a word of qualification. And regionally based foreign journalists have simply ignored the military’s accusations, if they’ve bothered to report on Guatemala at all.

As a result, neither Guatemala’s nine million citizens (most of whom, like the peasants in Mexico’s Chiapas, are of Mayan descent), nor North American consumers of news about Guatemala are well served. Guatemalan citizens have been saturated with the view that their tiny country is the victim of a global communist conspiracy that endures despite the end of the Cold War. And countless Guatemalans, especially among the whiter, wealthier members of its population, very much do believe it. This is a war here, said one such businessman, between the country and those who want to destroy it, the guerrillas. Meanwhile, North American readers have been insulated from the most outlandish of Guatemalan officials’ accusations, and their by any post-Cold War standard extreme world view. The failure of the U.S. press to adequately report on Guatemala is one reason why the Clinton administration enjoys warm relations with Guatemala despite its authoritarian past and present.

The Guatemalan army maintains that the URNG guerrillas have compensated for their battlefield losses by shifting their resources to a political warfare campaign. While the guerrillas are poor military commanders, say Guatemalan army representatives, they are brilliant manipulators of world opinion. The army claims that the guerrillas’ propaganda campaign is not only successful but has managed to either manipulate or control individuals, organizations, publications, and even governments.

In August 1992, Newsweek ran a story, “Subtle Clues in Shallow Graves: Uncovering evidence of massacres in Guatemala”. In response, then Guatemalan Minister of Defense Jos Garcia Samayoa threatened to press charges against Newsweek and respected forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow, who conducted the investigation. The General said, “It worries us to see how foreign interference in this case has grown in dimension, injuring…the independence and sovereignty of Guatemalans.”

International authority Clyde Snow, who has examined cadavers in Kurdistan, Chile, Argentina, and most recently Mexico’s Chiapas, has harsh words for the Guatemalan army: The military guys who do this are like serial killers. They got away with it once, so they think they’ll always get away with it. If Jeffrey Dahmer had been in Guatemala, he would be a general by now. Around the same time, indigenous leader Rigoberta Menchu, from Guatemala’s most war-torn department of Quich, was a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. Then army spokesman Yon Rivera was not impressed: The only thing Miss Menchu has done abroad is create a very bad image of our country. After she won the prize, Rivera charged that Guatemala had been the victim of a global political warfare campaign, but he didn’t know whether it was a case of direct infiltration. At the very least, he charged, the Nobel committee itself had been, somehow, unduly influenced by the URNG.30

The Guatemalan army has accused the U.S. of participating in the political warfare as well. By 1991, congressional critics had helped persuade the Bush administration to cut military aid to Guatemala, which it did partly over the murder of an American innkeeper, Michael Devine. That led the Guatemalan army to claim that the U.S. government itself had been unduly influenced by the URNG. According to the army’s Department of Information and Dissemination, members of the U.S. Congress and the State Department have been, respectively, conspirators and dupes. There is a U.S. congressman who has on his staff a member of the URNG, spokesman Rivera said in an interview, although Rivera could remember neither the congressman nor his staff member’s name. But one name he could recall was that of Frank LaRue, whose activities Rivera said proves his point. According to Rivera, LaRue is a lobbyist for the URNG, who enjoys undue influence in the State Department. “He has an open door,” said Rivera, nodding his head. He has the key.

LaRue made the Guatemalan national stage over a decade ago when he defended Coca-Cola workers in a bitter strike in Guatemala City, after which he went into political exile until 1994, when he returned briefly to Guatemala. While in the U.S., LaRue was a well-known activist in the Guatemalan opposition movement, and continued to work on labor and human rights issues in Guatemala through the privately-funded Center for Human Rights Legal Action in Washington, D.C. It was in this capacity that he was invited to the State Department for meetings with Guatemalan army representatives to discuss issues of military justice and human rights.

U.S. journalists who criticize the military are also accused of being part of the conspiracy. After the Washington Post published an article by the author about the Cali cartel and the Guatemalan army on December 26, 1993, the Army’s Department of Information and Dissemination held a press conference the following day to respond: Members of the Department of Information and dissemination of the Guatemalan Army reiterated that `there exists a campaign against the prestige of the government and the armed forces on the part of groups that seek to satisfy their own interests by creating a negative image of the country and the democratic process that we live in.

FROM THE QUESTIONABLE TO THE RIDICULOUS

Indeed, according to the Guatemalan army, this campaign against the prestige of the government and armed forces is one of the broadest in the history of the Cold War, which, it maintains, has yet to end. And, if the Guatemalan military is to be believed, the propaganda campaign has extended its tentacles to some very unlikely places. In January 1993, the army uncovered a conspiracy involving an entertainment establishment, a local television station and U.S. Secret Service agents attached to United Nations dignitaries visiting New York.

Guatemala’s then formal head of state, President Jorge Serrano (who last May failed to survive his own Fujimori-style self-coup), was on an official trip to the United Nations. Although the visit coincided with President Clinton’s inauguration, the Guatemalan leader was not invited. After Serrano spoke to the U.N. General Assembly, blaming Guatemala’s leftist guerrillas for much of his country’s problems, he went for a drink at Stringfellows of NY, Ltd. in the posh Gramercy Park neighborhood of lower Manhattan.

The Guatemalan leader found a table facing a stage with naked, dancing women. A local free-lance cameraman happened to be having a drink and watching the show too.

The next day at 6:00 p.m., WNBC-TV’s News 4 New York aired an exclusive report. It captured the Guatemalan leader trying to hide his face behind a white ski parka and hood, while exiting the club and entering the back seat of his waiting limousine. In addition to close-ups of the President’s face, viewers saw his armed U.S. Secret Service escorts as well as his entire diplomatic motorcade. After running the tape, the news anchor added that President Serrano is an outspoken born-again, evangelical Christian.

News 4 New York aired the report again at 11:00 p.m. But in the later broadcast, the anchor included President Serrano’s official response. He blamed his capture on film at the go go bar on manipulation by Guatemala’s leftist guerrillas.

Spokespersons for News 4 New York, Stringfellows of NY, Ltd., and the Secret Service were all, at first, incredulous and then offended. All deny the charge.

What the Guatemalan army fails to realize is that the more it blames leftist guerrillas for its problems, the more isolated it becomes. During the Cold War, Guatemala was already a pariah regime within the world community. But with changes and reforms now taking place or on the horizon in places as troubled as South Africa, the Middle East, and Northern Ireland, continuing Guatemalan political violence, cocaine trafficking, and military impunity leave that country more alone than ever.

Mysterious Influx of Soviet & Chinese Arms for Salvador Rebels

/in /by

Title: A Mysterious Influx of Soviet and Chinese Arms for Salvador Rebels
Source: The Sacramento Bee
Date: June 4, 1989

Morazan, El Salvador — Seventeen-year-old Odilia playfully pushed her tongue through her teeth as she recalled how she shot seven Salvadoran army soldiers in an ambush a few days before.

Odilia’s under five feet tall, and her high-powered, Soviet-made Dragunov rifle is almost as big as she is. No matter. The bashful Salvadoran teenager is a highly trained sharpshooter for the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN).

Over the past several months, eastern-bloc and Chinese-made weapons have been distributed to FMLN guerrilla forces nationwide. The rebels say they bought the majority of the new arms, most of which are AK-47 assault rifles, from the U.S.-backed Contras in Nicaragua, who are now in decline. Officials at the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador say the arms and ammunition have been supplied by the leftist governments of Nicaragua and Cuba, a charge those countries deny.

Regardless of the weapons’ origins, they have bolstered rebel morale in the nine-year civil war. I have just spent two weeks travelling with FMLN guerrillas in northern Morazán province. In dozens of interviews, rebel combatants were confident they could defeat the government led by President Alfredo Cristiani of the ultra-conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party. Cristiani began his five-year term on Thursday.

Cristiani’s victory in elections last March was widely seen as a backlash against Christian Democrat President Jose Napoleon Duarte. During their campaign, ARENA party leaders blamed the Christian Democrats for failing to defeat the rebels. But most Western diplomats and military analysts agree that the FMLN guerrillas represent the most difficult challenge the Cristiani government will face.

It appears that Cristiani will take a tough line with the rebels. Prior to his inauguration, he announced the appointment of General Rafael Larios and two other hard-line army officers as minister and vice-ministers of defense. U.S. officials had lobbied for the more moderate choice of Chief of Staff Rene Emilio Ponce for the posts.

U.S. officials still defend Cristiani. But most non-American Western diplomats expect human rights abuses to increase as the government escalates the war effort against the FMLN.

“We are ready to talk to them,” said rebel sharpshooter Odilia. “But if they don’t want to talk, we’ll hit them hard.”

On Monday, the FMLN offered to implement a cease-fire and begin negotiations with the new government. But as part of the plan, the rebels demanded that the government prosecute those implicated in the 1980 murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero, including cashiered army major and leading ARENA deputy Roberto D’Aubuisson.

ARENA leaders rejected the rebel offer. “They are asking for something that is not negotiable, nor subject to discussion,” said Ricardo Alvarenga, president of the ARENA-controlled Legislative Assembly.

Rebel leaders promised to “back up” their offer of negotiations with military force. “Both roads are integrated into our strategy,” said Gustavo, a nom de guerre for a senior FMLN official in Morazán. “If the [peace] proposal is not accepted, the people will defend the situation in another way.

There is still the possibility of insurrection,” he added, “and an increase in the war.”

The introduction of Soviet and Chinese arms has already produced a tactical change in the conflict. Both AK-47 and Dragunov rifles use a heavier bullet and have a greater range than American-made M-16 rifles traditionally used by both the Salvadoran army and the FMLN. On Election Day, March 19, for instance, rebel forces used their new weapons in attacks nationwide. According to Salvadoran military sources, following a day of combat many of the helicopters in the government’s fleet returned damaged from rebel rounds.

During a guerrilla ambush last week against about 40 army soldiers between the villages of San Isidro and San Simon in northern Morazán, I watched as an army helicopter arrived to provide air support. But to avoid being hit by rebel fire, the pilot flew extremely high, neutralizing his own ability to fire effectively at the attacking rebel force.

According to Lucio, a veteran rebel fighter in charge of arms distribution in Morazán, 30 percent of the FMLN’s regular forces and five to 10 percent of its special assault forces are equipped with AK-47 rifles. With an estimated 6,000 to 8,000 full-time FMLN fighters, which means upwards of 1,000 AK-47 rifles have entered the country from foreign sources over the past year.

The regular force in rebel rearguard areas such as northern Morazán, Lucio said, benefit more from the AKs’ greater range. The Salvadoran army does not use AKs.

On Wednesday, Salvadoran authorities showed reporters more than 300 Soviet- and Chinese-made weapons captured from FMLN forces. It is the largest arms cache recovered by the government in the war. Weapons were of diverse origin, including AK-47s with Soviet, Chinese, and Yugoslavian markings. But authorities offered no evidence as to how the arms entered the country.

According to FMLN official Gustavo, most of the weapons were bought from the Nicaraguan Contras. But he conceded that some of the weapons were obtained from “other channels.” Asked to elaborate on those channels, the guerrilla leader refused, saying they were secrets of war.

U.S. officials, on the other hand, deny that rebels bought the AKs from the Contras. In a seven-page document which journalists were allowed to read but not copy, embassy officials claimed that Cuba and Nicaragua are the “bulk suppliers” of the new arms.

According to the embassy document, which is labeled “For Official Use Only,” Salvadoran authorities have captured documents indicating arms and ammunition shipments. The embassy document also states that weapons shipments by boat along El Salvador’s Pacific coast have been detected. But when asked to produce further evidence, a U.S. official said he could not because the information was classified.

In a telephone interview, Dr. Wayne Smith of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies doubted the embassy’s claim. “My yardstick, based on past experience, is to accept nothing that the embassy says, nothing the U.S. government says on this subject without seeing the hard evidence and the data to back it.” An ex-career diplomat and the former head of the U.S. Interests Section in Cuba, Smith added, “They’ve said this so many times that their credibility is gone.”

Despite the presence of the AK-47s, FMLN rebels maintained that they capture or make most of their weapons inside the country. At a secret FMLN bomb factory, about 20 rebels worked at making explosives from land mines to homemade anti-personnel rockets.