UN Blasts Guatemala for Continuing Counterinsurgency

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Reuters via Yahoo - May 17, 2002

UN attacks Guatemala demilitarization as too slow

By Greg Brosnan 

GUATEMALA CITY, May 17 (Reuters) - The United Nations on Friday
criticized Guatemala's government for failing to cut military
spending and dismantle its counterinsurgency apparatus as promised in
1996 peace accords that ended a bloody 36-year civil war.

"The process of demilitarization must speed up," said Gerd Merrem,
head of the U.N. peace verification mission in Guatemala (Minugua),
presenting a report focusing on the army's post-war presence in the
Central American nation.

The mission said in the report that Guatemala's military spending had
soared in 2000 and 2001 to 0.83 percent and 0.96 percent of gross
domestic product -- levels not seen since the end of the war.

Guatemala signed peace accords in 1996 with leftist guerrillas,
ending a conflict in which some 200,000 people died, many in
countless political slayings and massacres of Mayan Indians by state
security forces.

A cornerstone of the deal was shrinking the size and power of the
U.S.-trained and financed army that used an extensive intelligence
network to hunt down perceived rebels.

As stipulated under the accords, the army was reduced in 1998 by 33
percent to 31,423 members from 46,900. Yearly budgets have frozen
military spending on paper at around 0.66 percent of GDP, a nation's
total output of goods and services.

But demilitarization had recently "stagnated and even regressed,"
said Julian Camamero, head of Minugua's public security and army
analysis section.

During the last two years, the government of President Alfonso
Portillo has pumped extra money from outside its budget into the
army, the report said, adding that limited access to information had
prevented it from pinning down where the additional funds had gone.

Guatemala was meant to have complied with all the stipulations of the
peace accords by 2000, but due to delays deadlines were later
stretched out between 2000 and 2004.

Under the accords, in which the army was a major negotiator,
Guatemala was supposed to have steered money away from the army and
funneled it into crumbling, resource-starved health, education and
public security sectors.

WARTIME MENTALITY PERSISTS

Once a left-leaning guerrilla sympathizer, Portillo has earned
himself a reputation as a populist since taking office in January
2000 through fiery speeches railing against Guatemala's traditional
economic elite.

Paradoxically his government is dominated by a right-wing ruling
party heavily influenced by retired military brass and presided over
by Efrain Rios Montt, an ex-general. Montt is a former wartime
dictator accused by human rights groups of ordering genocide of Maya
Indians during his coup-led 1982-83 presidency at the height of the
conflict.

The report said Guatemala's army had maintained a structure and
philosophy geared toward a counterinsurgency war rather than a
peace-time role of defending international borders.

It said an unnecessary number of military bases still operated around
the countryside, especially in areas hardest hit by the war, in a
system still based on controlling the population.

The report also urged Guatemala to speed up efforts to disband the
army's infamous Presidential High Command, a presidential bodyguard
unit linked to numerous political assassinations during the war, and
some since 1996.

Military training was still geared to instilling soldiers with
hostility toward the population -- something that was out of line
with the peace accords, it said.

Minugua singled out a jungle training school where tough commandos
known as "Kaibiles" still used physical punishment, including blows
to the genitals, as a way of training soldiers to lead small attack
units.

When Reuters journalists visited the center recently, commandos
absailed down hills, swam across a pond and completed an assault
course while shouting the battle cry: "If I advance follow me, if I
stop reprimand me, If I retreat kill me."

"This is all contrary to the peace accords and underlines the failure
to come good on compromises related to the military training system,"
said the report, which specifically mentioned the battle cry.
 
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