Welcome to America: Texas Police Sniper Guns Down Immigrants From Helicopter

Information Liberation

Remember a few months ago how a DEA helicopter was used to gun down two pregnant women and tw o 14-yr-old boys in Honduras because they were "suspected" of being drug dealers? Well, those same tactics are now being used in America. After being pulled over for having a suspect "covered truck bed," a vehicle which fled from Texas game wardens was shot at by Texas "Department of Public Safety" agents with a sniper rifle from a helicopter. While the police claim they were intending to disable the car, they instead killed two passengers, and sent another to the hospital. No drugs were found, and the DPS says their shooting was "within policy." My San Antonio reports: LA JOYA — Skid marks and a patch of dried blood in the gravel of a desolate country road were about the only signs left Friday of a deadly pursuit that happened here. Two men from Guatemala died Thursday when a Department of Public Safety helicopter opened fire on a red pickup suspected of smuggling immigrants. A third person was hospitalized and six were arrested in the latest in a string of smuggling attempts that turned deadly while packed vehicles flee from state or federal authorities. Texas Department of Public Safety spokesman Tom Vinger said the chase began when Texas Parks and Wildlife game wardens attempted to pull over the truck they thought was carrying drugs. When the driver didn't stop, the wardens called DPS for assistance.

“During the pursuit, the vehicle appeared to have a typical ‘covered' drug load in the bed of the truck,” Vinger said. “DPS aircraft joined the pursuit of the suspected drug lord, which was traveling at reckless speeds, endangering the public. A DPS trooper discharged his firearm from the helicopter to disable the vehicle.”

No drugs were found in the truck.

During interviews at a Border Patrol facility, survivors told consular officials that the men died from gunfire, and that their cover was flimsy and blowing off, enough so that the trooper in the helicopter could see them.

Vinger said the officer who discharged his weapon was placed on administrative leave.

[...]The policy warns that when shooting at a vehicle “there may be a risk of harm to occupants of the suspect vehicle who may not be involved, or involved to a lesser extent, with the actions of the suspect creating the threat.”

Use of force expert Geoffrey Alpert, a professor at the University of South Carolina who has studied pursuits at police departments across the country, said he'd “never heard of” law enforcement agencies allowing officers to shoot at vehicles from helicopters.

“There's a trend to restrict officers from shooting at vehicles at all,” Alpert said. “It's not an efficient or effective policy to let officers shoot from vehicles, and certainly not from a helicopter.”

[...]“We can't give up swaths of land to organized thugs and criminals,” DPS Director McCraw said recently. Indeed, we can't "give up huge swaths of land to organized thugs and criminals," that's why we need to shut these out of control police and border patrol down immediately.
_
Chris runs the website InformationLiberation.com, you can read more of his writings here. Follow infolib on twitter here.

Marines vs. Zetas: U.S. Hunts Drug Cartels in Guatemala

Wired
Robert Beckhusen

A U.S. Marine during a jungle patrol exercise in Guatemala on 
Sept. 12, 2010. While the Marines have helped train Guatemalan troops
 to hunt for drug traffickers in the past, the service is now 
expanding into chasing traffickers directly.

The war on drugs just got a whole lot more warlike. Two hundred U.S. Marines have entered Guatemala, on a mission to chase local operatives of the murderous Zeta drug cartel.

The Marines are now encamped after having deployed to Guatemala earlier this month, and have just “kicked off” their share of Operation Martillo, or Hammer. That operation began earlier in January, and is much larger than just the Marine contingent and involves the Navy, Coast Guard, and federal agents working with the Guatemalans to block drug shipment routes.

It’s a big shift for U.S. forces in the region. For years, the Pentagon has sent troops to Guatemala, but these missions have been pretty limited to exercising “soft power” — training local soldiers, building roads and schools. Operation Martillo is something quite different.

The news comes as two U.S. agents wounded in an attack in Mexico last week were discovered to be likely working for the CIA. The attack appears to be a case of mistaken identity after the agents fled from a Federal Police checkpoint, thinking the plain-clothed Mexican cops were cartel members. Police, seeing the agents’ bulletproof SUV flee their checkpoint, presumably thought the same thing, followed them and shot up their car. The agents have now been discovered as likely working for the CIA, as one of the wounded agents’ false identity was linked to a post office box in Virginia previously tied to CIA rendition flights.

The Marines’ share of the operation involves chasing drug traffickers with UH-1N Huey helicopters. The Marine contingent has four of the choppers, and the Marines are carrying weapons. “It’s not every day that you have 200-some Marines going to a country in Central and South America aside from conducting training exercises,” Staff Sgt. Earnest Barnes, the public affairs chief for Marine Corps Forces South, tells Danger Room. Prior to the Marines’ deployment, there were only a “handful” of Marines in the country, Barnes says.

However, the Marines can’t technically use their guns except in self-defense, and Barnes wouldn’t say whether they’re authorized to pursue drug traffickers on the ground. The description of what they’re doing, however, suggests that they probably can’t. Instead, they’ll be looking out for suspicious boats — including crude narco-submarines — and then radio the Guatemalans, who do the work seizing their drugs and arresting cartel members. That could be on rivers, or along Guatemala’s two coastlines, reports the Marine Corps Times.

“Overall the Marines are there to provide aerial detection and monitoring, and aerial surveillance, and so the appropriate authorities can do their job, whether it being Guatemalan military or some other form of law enforcement agency or authority to perform their duties,” Barnes says. Among the force are pilots and communication teams, as well as combat engineers to build landing sites.

On the other hand, just because the Marines may not be officially authorized to stop drug traffickers — instead only spot them — doesn’t mean they won’t be drawn into a conflict. The drug war is messy and involves going after criminal groups that don’t for the most part wear uniforms or identify themselves as cartel members. Nor is it true to say the U.S. isn’t already involved in a shooting war in Guatemala, with potentially ill consequences.

On the night of May 11, Honduran troops along with Drug Enforcement Administration agents allegedly killed two civilians — possibly four according to local accounts — including a pregnant woman. According to a report released this month by the Center for Economic Policy and Research, Honduran troops and U.S. agents seized a boat on a river containing cocaine near the town of Ahuas, when another boat — containing civilians — rammed into the first boat in the darkness. DEA agents and Honduran troops circling in a helicopter then fired on the second boat (.pdf). The U.S. has denied that any of its agents took part.

The DEA isn’t a military organization, but what the Ahuas shootings represented was a military approach to the drug war gone bad. A case of mistaken identity, sure, as the mayor of Ahuas said following the shootings. But it also reflects a danger of stopping drugs at the point of a gun.

The Ahuas shooting “demonstrates the risks of flooding foreign countries with armed representatives of the U.S. government, to fight an enemy that is largely indistinguishable from the civilian population on unknown terrain,” wrote Patrick Corcoran of InSight, a Latin America crime monitor. ”The Ahuas shooting may not have been inevitable, but as Americans take a more hands-on role, such scandals are likely to be repeated,” he wrote.

On the other hand, as Mexico’s drug violence worsened, cartels like the Zetas began spilling over Mexico’s southern border. Guatemala is now a base for the Zetas, who use the country’s remote northern region shipment route for narcotics and weapons. In February, Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina said his country is “not doing what the United States says, we are doing what we have to do” — in other words, decriminalize drugs. But Molina has also emphasized cracking down on the cartels in a mano dura, or “iron fist,” approach to crime.

Now, on the contrary, the U.S. hasn’t gone anywhere close to suggesting drugs be decriminalized. Gen. Douglas Fraser, the head of U.S. forces in South and Central America, said last year to the House Armed Sevices Committee that “the violence continues to increase in Central America, and that’s where and why we are focusing there.”

That’s where the Marines come in. And as far as the Zetas go, the U.S. hasn’t directly confronted them with troops. Mexico City will absolutely not allow it. Guatemala is different, which means the distance between the gun barrels of a militarized cartel, and that of the U.S. military, could start to get much shorter.

Marine Corps Creates Law Enforcement Battalions

Global Research

Julie Watson

The Marine Corps has created its first law enforcement battalions - a lean, specialized force of military police officers that it hopes can quickly deploy worldwide to help investigate crimes from terrorism to drug trafficking and train fledgling security forces in allied nations.

The Corps activated three such battalions last month. Each is made up of roughly 500 military police officers and dozens of dogs. The Marine Corps has had police battalions off and on since World War II but they were primarily focused on providing security, such as accompanying fuel convoys or guarding generals on visits to dangerous areas, said Maj. Jan Durham, commander of the 1st Law Enforcement Battalion at Camp Pendleton.

The idea behind the law enforcement battalions is to consolidate the military police and capitalize on their investigative skills and police training, he said. The new additions come as every branch in the military is trying to show its flexibility and resourcefulness amid defense cuts.

Marines have been increasingly taking on the role of a street cop along with their combat duties over the past decade in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they have been in charge of training both countries' security forces. Those skills now can be used as a permanent part of the Marine Corps, Durham said.

The war on terror has also taught troops the importance of learning how to gather intelligence, secure evidence and assist local authorities in building cases to take down criminal networks. Troops have gotten better at combing raid sites for clues to help them track insurgents.

They also have changed their approach, realizing that marching into towns to show force alienates communities. Instead, they are being taught to fan out with interpreters to strike up conversations with truck drivers, money exchangers, cellphone sellers and others. The rapport building can net valuable information that could even alert troops about potential attacks.

But no group of Marines is better at that kind of work than the Corps' military police, who graduate from academies just like civilian cops, Durham said. He said the image of military police patrolling base to ticket Marines for speeding or drinking has limited their use in the Corps. He hopes the creation of the battalions will change that, although analysts say only the future will tell whether the move is more than just a rebranding of what already existed within the Corps.

The battalions will be capable of helping control civil disturbances, handling detainees, carrying out forensic work, and using biometrics to identify suspects. Durham said they could assist local authorities in allied countries in securing crime scenes and building cases so criminals end up behind bars and not back out on the streets because of mistakes.

"Over the past 11 years of combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, some lessons learned painfully, there has been a growing appreciation and a demand for, on the part of the warfighter, the unique skills and capabilities that MPs bring to the fight," Durham said. "We do enforce traffic laws and we do write reports and tickets, and that's good, but we do so much more than that."

Durham said the Marine Corps plans to show off its new battalions in Miami later this month at a conference put on by the Southern Command and that is expected to be attended by government officials from Central American countries, such as Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Belize.

Defense analyst Loren Thompson said the battalions make sense given the nature of today's global threats, which include powerful drug cartels and other criminal gangs that often mix with religious and political extremists, who use the profits to buy their weaponry.

"This is a smart idea because the biggest single problem the Marines have in dealing with low-intensity types of threats is that they basically are trained to kill people," he said. "It's good for the Marines to have skills that allow them to contain threats without creating casualties."

Gary Solis, a former Marine Corps prosecutor and judge who teaches law of war at Georgetown University, said Marines have already been doing this kind of work for years but now that it has been made more formal by the creation of the battalions, it could raise a host of questions, especially on the use of force. The law of war allows for fighters to use deadly force as a first resort, while police officers use it as a last resort.

If Marines are sent in to do law enforcement but are attacked, will they go back to being warfighters? And if so, what are the implications? Solis asked.

"Am I a Marine or a cop? Can I be both?" he said. "Cops apply human rights law and Marines apply the law of war. Now that it's blended, it makes it tougher for the young men and women who have to make the decision as to when deadly force is not appropriate."

Durham said that military police understand that better than any Marine since they are trained in both.

"They are very comfortable with the escalation of force," he said. "MPs get that. It's fundamental to what we do."

'War on drugs' has failed, say Latin American leaders

Guardian
Jamie Doward

Watershed summit will admit that prohibition has failed, and call for more nuanced and liberalised tactics

Guatemala's president Otto Perez Molina believes a new
approach to Latin America's war on drugs is urgently needed.

A historic meeting of Latin America's leaders, to be attended by Barack Obama, will hear serving heads of state admit that the war on drugs has been a failure and that alternatives to prohibition must now be found.

The Summit of the Americas, to be held in Cartagena, Colombia is being seen by foreign policy experts as a watershed moment in the redrafting of global drugs policy in favour of a more nuanced and liberalised approach.

Otto Pérez Molina, the president of Guatemala, who as former head of his country's military intelligence service experienced the power of drug cartels at close hand, is pushing his fellow Latin American leaders to use the summit to endorse a new regional security plan that would see an end to prohibition. In the Observer, Pérez Molina writes: "The prohibition paradigm that inspires mainstream global drug policy today is based on a false premise: that global drug markets can be eradicated."

Pérez Molina concedes that moving beyond prohibition is problematic. "To suggest liberalisation – allowing consumption, production and trafficking of drugs without any restriction whatsoever – would be, in my opinion, profoundly irresponsible. Even more, it is an absurd proposition. If we accept regulations for alcoholic drinks and tobacco consumption and production, why should we allow drugs to be consumed and produced without any restrictions?
"
He insists, however, that prohibition has failed and an alternative system must be found. "Our proposal as the Guatemalan government is to abandon any ideological consideration regarding drug policy (whether prohibition or liberalisation) and to foster a global intergovernmental dialogue based on a realistic approach to drug regulation. Drug consumption, production and trafficking should be subject to global regulations, which means that drug consumption and production should be legalised, but within certain limits and conditions."

The decision by Pérez Molina to speak out is seen as highly significant and not without political risk. Polls suggest the vast majority of Guatemalans oppose decriminalisation, but Pérez Molina's comments are seen by many as helping to usher in a new era of debate. They will be studied closely by foreign policy experts who detect that Latin American leaders are shifting their stance on prohibition following decades of drugs wars that have left hundreds of thousands dead.

'Palestine bid faces new barrier at UN'

Editor's Note:  The 'mini moves' begin.
PressTV

The Palestinian statehood bid at the UN might suffer as new temporary members to the body are obedient to the United States, a UN analyst says.

"This election won't help the Palestinian cause," UN analyst at Century Foundation Jeff Laurenti was quoted as saying by Businessweek on Saturday.

"Guatemala will be in favor of everything Palestinian until the Americans tell them otherwise. They can be persuaded to abstain," he added.

On Friday, Pakistan, Morocco, Togo and Guatemala were elected to the 15-nation UN Security Council for 2012 and 2013.

The new states replaced Lebanon, Nigeria, Gabon and Brazil.

The previous members had been expected to support the Palestinian statehood bid at the UN Security Council.

Lakotah: The Next Chapter

Republic of Lakotah

Russel Means

Two weeks ago, I went to New York with a delegation from the Republic of Lakotah, to utilize the annual meeting of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII, May 16-27). The primary purpose of the trip was to utilize past and present allies in the indigenous struggle to aid us in visiting a small, select group of other Nation’s Missions and their Ambassadors to the United Nation to discuss the international character of treaties between my people, the Lakota, and the United States of America.
In 1851 and 1868, the Lakotah, Dakota, Nakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho nations had militarily defeated the United States, and the United States had requested peace. Our nations agreed to peace at a treaty negotiation at Fort Laramie. The treaties were international instruments between two independent nations, unambiguous and unequivocal in defining the territories of the indigenous nations involved—it covered an area the size of the contemporary country of Guatemala.

Since the time of the signing of the treaty, the Lakotah have insisted that the United States respect its obligations under the treaties. Our insistence has even taken us to the United States Supreme Court. Now, how ridiculous is that, for us to go to the violator of the treaties, expecting that same violator to force itself to live up to its own laws. How can we allow an international contract dispute to be decided by the Violator?

Over the past century, one thing has become clear—the United States wanted to take its benefit from the treaties, and it never intended to abide by the other essential treaty provisions. OK, we get it. The US certainly is not going to begin to respect the treaties today.

There are some who say, “Well, if we don’t have our treaty, we have nothing.” To them, I say, “Look around you. You already have nothing! You experience the worst poverty, the worst health, the worst environmental problems, the worst of everything, plus they have stolen your territory, your freedom, and your self-respect. Wake up! What you wave around in the name of ‘sovereignty’ is no longer a treaty, it is a broken contract!”

Let’s be clear, if the US decides that it is not going to abide by the treaties (and it has done so repeatedly), then there must be consequences for that decision—just like if you sell me your car, but I do not pay you the money for your car. I don’t get to keep the car just because I have grown accustomed to driving it. Neither does the US get to keep our territory just because it allowed its citizens to invade and occupy our homeland, build homes and businesses, and steal wealth and resources from our homeland.

Article 37 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (PDF document) directly addresses this point:

Indigenous peoples have the right to the recognition, observance and enforcement of treaties, agreements and other constructive arrangements concluded with States or their successors and to have States honor and respect such treaties, agreements and other constructive arrangements. Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as diminishing or eliminating the rights of indigenous peoples contained in treaties, agreements and other constructive arrangements.

Our treaties are international instruments, and require enforcement. If the US is not going to honor its obligations then international law is clear about an equitable remedy for that breach. Under the established international legal principle of inadimplanti non est adimplendum (“one has no need to respect his obligation if the counter-party has not respected his own”), if one party to a treaty consistently refuses to abide by the treaty, then the parties have to return to their original positions before the treaty was signed.

When I first came to New York in 1975 to help establish the UN office of the International Indian Treaty Council, we were in the midst of an indigenous revolution. (Two years before, we had liberated our community of Wounded Knee, indigenous peoples were on the move.) By 1977, we had kicked open the doors of the UN, and demanded our seat at the table of nations. In my recent visit to the UN, I was dismayed and saddened by what has happened since that time.

In the years since 1977, that revolution that we began has become bogged down in bureaucracy and procedure that divert and sidetrack our right to be free. Countries like the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand trot out their sell-out “Natives” like puppets to mouth the ongoing genocidal policy of those countries. The original indigenous revolutionaries have been replaced by “technicians” who accept crumbs from the invaders who continue to seek to destroy us.

People in the throes of genocide are given five minutes to tell their story, with no recourse—it’s just on to the next speaker. It is time to renew the teachings of our ancestors.

We need a renewal of the international indigenous revolution, one that does not ask permission from the invaders of our homelands, one that recalls the original message of our ancestors never to surrender, one that advances our natural right to be free and independent peoples, with international personality and dignity and respect. The Republic of Lakotah is not waiting. We have renewed our strategies with other freedom-loving indigenous peoples, with countries like Bolivia who understand and support our aspirations, and with international civil society. We now encourage a new generation of indigenous young people to shake off their cynicism, put their talents to work, and take their place in history by writing the next chapter with us in the international indigenous revolution.

Russell Means, Oglala/Iynktowan, is Chief Facilitator, Republic of Lakotah (republicoflakotah.com), and author of the autobiography Where White Men Fear to Tread.

Ghosts of Guatemala’s Past

New York Times

By STEPHEN SCHLESINGE

IN 1954, the American government committed one of the most reprehensible acts in its history when it authorized the C.I.A. to overthrow the democratically elected leader of Guatemala, President Jacobo Arbenz. It did so secretly but later rationalized the coup on the ground that the country was about to fall into communist hands.

Guatemalan society has only recently recovered from the suffering that this intervention caused, including brutal military dictatorships and a genocidal civil war against its Indian population, which led to the deaths of an estimated 200,000 people. Only in the 1980s, when a peace process commenced, did democratic governance resume. But a silence about the Arbenz era continued.

Now, after 25 years of increasingly vibrant democratic rule, Guatemalans feel confident enough to honor the memory of their deposed leader by incorporating his achievements into the national school curriculum, naming a highway after him, and preparing an official biography. America should follow suit by owning up to its own ignoble deed and recognizing Arbenz as the genuine social progressive that he was.

Washington feared Arbenz because he tried to institute agrarian reforms that would hand over fallow land to dispossessed peasants, thereby creating a middle class in a country where 2 percent of the population owned 72 percent of the land. Unfortunately for him, most of that territory belonged to the largest landowner and most powerful body in the state: the American-owned United Fruit Company. Though Arbenz was willing to compensate United Fruit for its losses, it tried to persuade Washington that Arbenz was a crypto-communist who must be ousted.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, along with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen, the C.I.A.’s director, were a receptive audience. In the cold war fervor of the times, Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers believed a strike against Arbenz would roll back communism. And the Dulleses had their own personal sympathies for United Fruit: they had done legal work for the company, and counted executives there among their close friends.

It is true that Arbenz’s supporters in the Guatemalan Legislature did include the Communist Party, but it was the smallest part of his coalition. Arbenz had also appointed a few communists to lower-level jobs in his administration. But there was no evidence that Arbenz himself was anything more than a European-style democratic socialist. And Arbenz’s land reform program was less generous to peasants than a similar venture pushed by the Reagan administration in El Salvador several decades later.

Eisenhower’s attack on Guatemala was brilliantly executed. A faux invasion force consisting of a handful of right-wing Guatemalans used fake radio broadcasts and a few bombing runs flown by American pilots to terrorize the fledgling democracy into surrender. Arbenz stepped down from the presidency and left the country. Soon afterward, a Guatemalan colonel named Carlos Castillo Armas took power and handed back United Fruit’s lands. For three decades, military strongmen ruled Guatemala.

The covert American assault destroyed any possibility that Guatemala’s fragile political and civic institutions might grow. It permanently stunted political life. And the destruction of Guatemala’s democracy also set back the cause of free elections in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras — all of which drew the lesson that Washington was more interested in unquestioning allies than democratic ones. It was only after the cold war and a United Nations-negotiated peace deal with leftist guerrillas in 1996 that genuine democracy began to take hold in Guatemala. And even since then, the cycle of violence and lawlessness unleashed by the 1954 coup has continued.

In 1998, an assassin bludgeoned to death the Catholic bishop Juan Gerardi shortly after he issued a damning report blaming the army for widespread massacres. In 2007, Guatemala had the world’s third-highest homicide rate, according to a United Nations-World Bank study. In 2009, more civilians were murdered in Guatemala than were killed in the war zones of Iraq.

Washington took the first step toward making amends when President Bill Clinton visited Guatemala in 1999 and offered a vague apology for America’s support of violent and repressive forces there. This year is an opportunity for Washington to fully own up to its shameful role in destabilizing Guatemala and honor Arbenz for having the courage to lead one of Central America’s first democracies — and send a signal that America has learned to stop placing its ideological concerns and business interests ahead of its ideals.

Stephen Schlesinger, a fellow at the Century Foundation, is a co-author of “Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala.”

How The Global Food System Is Failing

Free Internet Press
Intellpuke

Domingo Tamupsis works on a Guatemalan sugar plantation for a company that exports bioethanol to fill the fuel tanks of U.S. cars. He has a job as a harvester, six days a week, 10 to 12 hours a day, in a country that is a major producer of food for global markets. His settlement in the fertile Pacific coastal area is surrounded by industrial farms, but he earns so little that his family can't afford to eat every day. Some days he survives his shift of hard physical labor on nothing but the mangoes that drop from trees by the roadside.

His wife, Marina, is 23-years-old, but is so slight she might be mistaken for a young teenager. She has two daughters, Yeimi aged six and Jessica aged two. Jessica is the size of the average European one-year-old, her distended stomach a sign of chronic malnutrition. When she tries to smile, hollow creases form in her cheeks, betraying her semi-permanent state of hunger.

Last year, Marina gave birth in the eighth month of pregnancy to a stillborn child. She had been ill and hungry throughout, but then felt severe pains one day while making a breakfast of a small corn tortilla for Domingo before he went out to work. She carried on, knowing that if they miss a day on the plantation the men often get fired.

When she finally reached the nearest medical help, a hospital a 45-minute bus ride away, staff told her the baby was dead. They operated and returned the baby's body to her, but she and Domingo had no money for the return bus fare. A compassionate doctor gave them the price of a fare, and a friend in town lent the money for a coffin. So it was that their third child, Marvin Orlando, a brother for their two little girls, came home to be buried.

Guatemala is a prime example, according to a new report by Oxfam, of how the global food system is failing. It predicts that the average price of staple foods will double by 2030.  "Spiraling food prices, climate chaos, rising demand on top of a collapsing resource base, and markets rigged against the many in favour of the few" are taking us into a new era of crisis in which more and more people are going hungry, the charity warns.

Its new research predicts that the international prices of key staples will more than double in the next 20 years, raising "the prospect of a wholesale reversal in human development". The world's poorest people spend up to 80% of their income on food and will be hit the hardest. The global food system is broken and its power structures must be overhauled, it says.

Developing countries like Guatemala are on the front-line of the crisis. Half of all its children aged under five are malnourished, one the highest rates of malnutrition in the world – yet it has food in abundance. It is the fifth largest exporter globally of sugar, of coffee, and of bananas. Its rural areas are witnessing a palm oil rush as international traders seek to cash in on demand for biofuels created by U.S. and E.U. mandates and subsidies.

Despite being a leading agroexporter, half of Guatemala's population of 14 million live in extreme poverty on less than $2 a day, and the indicators are getting worse. The money to be made from the food chain here, as in most poor countries, has been captured by elites and transnational corporations, leaving half the population excluded.

No Way Out

Domingo Tamupsis can see no way out of his dilemma. "The money I make is not enough to feed us," he says. "We feed the children first because the girls cry so much when they are hungry, but it's not enough and I think that's why they get ill and don't thrive. I don't know where to get more money: I can't work any harder and I can't steal because they shoot you if you steal." If he had a little land, he would grow food to support the family, but the promised government redistribution of unproductive land that drew him to the area never took place.

"The food is here," Oxfam's country director, Aida Pesquera, says, "but the main problem is distribution. Land is concentrated in very few hands. The big companies pay very little tax. Labor conditions on plantations are appalling. It's a classic case of how a very productive country with high rates of exclusion, especially among the indigenous population, cannot feed its own people."

The economic policies favored by the international financial institutions in the last decades have here, as in so many developing countries, weakened food security.

In the 1980s, a structural adjustment program imposed by the IMF on the debt-laden nation resulted in the slashing of technical assistance provided by the Ministry of Agriculture to small farmers. Guatemala, which had been self-sufficient in grain, was encouraged to pursue growth through agricultural exports. Local production of staples declined.

Although the government disputes it, Oxfam believes that Cafta, the free trade agreement between the U.S. and central American states approved in 2005, has undermined local farmers further, as subsidized U.S. grains have poured in. (Industrialized countries, including the U.S. and the E.U., subsidize their farmers to the tune of $252 billion a year, making it impossible for small farmers in developing countries to compete.)

The result is that Guatemala is now dependent on imports of staple foods, mostly from the U.S.  and at the mercy of increasingly volatile food prices internationally. The average poor rural family here spend 80% of their income on food, so when world prices go up dramatically, they simply can't afford to eat. When the food price spike occurred in 2008, the price of corn locally was 240% higher than the year before.

The government is now distributing food rations to around 90,000 desperate families. The program is led by Sandra Torres, who has neatly sidestepped the law that bars spouses of presidents from standing to succeed them, by divorcing her husband, President Alvaro Colom.  Critics say money for the handout is being diverted from other vital government services, and that what is needed is fundamental structural reform.

Over two-thirds of productive land is in the hands of 2% to 3% of the population. The current social democratic government drafted legislation to promote rural development, including some land reallocation, but it was blocked by the congress after fierce lobbying from agribusiness, which makes substantial donations to political parties and members of congress. Land reform is a subject freighted with a violent history in Guatemala.

Major Exporters

When the leftwing President Jacobo Arbenz was elected in 1950, he began a program of expropriating unused lands owned by major exporters. These included a large chunk of territory owned by the American United Fruit Company. Arbenz said compensation for the land would be based on valuations calculated from the companies' declared taxable profits. UFCo countered that this was a fraction of what they were really worth. Arbenz was labelled a communist and Soviet sympathizer by President Eisenhower, who, with much urging from UFCo, authorized the CIA to sponsor a "liberation army". The army invaded in 1954 and led a coup against Arbenz. A return to repressive rule followed, and marked the beginning of decades of agrarian conflict and civil war.

The minster of agriculture today, Juan Alfonso de León García, is not optimistic that serious land reform can now be achieved. "Agriculture is the engine of our economy, but we have to recognize that Guatemala has a very complicated agricultural structure that is very unequal. We have big owners who have the best land, and the majority have a very small percentage of the fertile land," he explains.

"Food security is a serious problem for us. We have to talk about land distribution, but it's not easy. In the 1950s, we tried to have agricultural reform but that promoted the fall of the government and marked the beginning of armed conflict that lasted 36 years."

However, he still hopes some land that is not being used can be acquired for reallocation to smallholders. Meanwhile, his government has increased technical assistance for small farmers to help improve yields. The theory of the agroexport model of development is that growth stimulated by increased foreign revenues will trickle down to the rest of the population. But most of the profits made from Guatemalan resources have so far gone untaxed. Total tax revenue amounts to less than 12% of GDP (roughly less than half that of rich countries).

As De León García explains: "We have very low rates of taxation, and we cannot even determine whether the agroexporters pay even that. But it's not just big business that avoids tax here, all taxpayers do."

The global food system in the last two decades has seen a dramatic flight of capital, as transnationals make use of offshore subsidiaries to minimize the tax they pay both in the countries where they produce food and in the countries where they sell it. To take one example, U.N. trade data, analyzed by Christian Aid, also shows that Guatemala received an average export price of just $0.18 per kilo for its bananas. By the time those bananas had reached their destination of importing countries, the average price of the same bananas was $0.46, suggesting various costs are added offshore by trans-nationals trading with their own subsidiaries in other jurisdictions. Christian Aid estimates more than $50 million a year may have been lost by Guatemala as a result in 2006 and 2007.

Low Minimum Wage

In theory, agroexport-led growth also benefits the rural poor by enabling them to move from marginal subsistence farming to becoming waged labor, but in Guatemala the minimum wage is so low it does not meet the most basic needs. The pattern is repeated in many developing countries that depend on agricultural exports. Labor relations in Guatemala are also characterized by extreme repression and violence.

Earlier this month, Idar Hernández Godoy, one of the secretaries of Sitrabi, the banana workers' union, was shot several times by unknown assailants on a motorbike while on his way to local union headquarters in the Atlantic region.

His death brings to five the number of banana union leaders assassinated since 2007. Trying to organize workers or demand better conditions is likely to result in death threats. Luis Fuentes, Guatemalan representative of the Danish food workers' union 3F, describes typical conditions on the plantations – whether banana, sugar or palm – as "inhuman". He too has received many death threats. In the sugar sector, unions were effectively dismantled in the 1970s, when leaders were persecuted and assassinated.

All the transnational companies and national producers in the country say they respect labor rights, respect the environment and have corporate social responsibility policies in place to tackle any abuses. However, the Guardian interviewed several current and former plantation workers from each of the sugar, palm and banana sectors this month. Many were afraid to speak out, and said it was only safe to do so on guarantee of anonymity. A consistent account emerged: many were working day to day with no proper contract. Most reported being set impossible targets by middle managers and then given warnings or having pay deducted if they failed to meet them.

Many were working with highly toxic agrochemicals, often without protective clothing, including paraquat, which is banned in Europe. Several reported chronic health problems from chemical exposure. They also reported workers being bitten by poisonous snakes in the palm plantations.

They typically earned 1,500 ($190) to 1,800 quetzales a month, whereas the National Statistics Institute, a Guatemalan government organization, has calculated that a minimum of 4,100 quetzales a month is needed to feed the average family.

Without exception, they said that joining a union would be a sackable offenze that would lead to blacklisting. Even where top management has tried to put in place contracts or better conditions, usually under pressure from outside buyers, they said the managers in the field abuse workers. When auditors arrive, they are told what to say and given protective clothing for the day. Persistent allegations also emerged of a new phenomenon, of workers being given or taking stimulant drugs to help them through the pain of the punishing shifts.

Those who have land supplement their exhausting work with growing their own food. Those without are often driven into illegal migration to the U.S. The week of our visit, two U.S.-bound tractor-trailers packed full of illegal migrants were stopped by the Mexican border authorities. The 513 men on board were half dead from suffocation. Most of them were Guatemalan. One of them told reporters: "We have no choice, there is not enough food for us at home."

Intellpuke: You can read this article by Guardian special correspondent and author Felicity Lawrence, reporting from Guatemala City, Guatemala, in context here: www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/may/31/global-food-crisis-guatemala-system-failure

US infected Guatemalans with syphilis in 1940s, Wellesley professor finds

Boston.com

A Wellesley College professor has discovered that the US government in the 1940s infected Guatemalans with sexually transmitted diseases in an experiment conducted without the knowledge of the 1,500 men and women -- some of them patients in a mental hospital.

Professor Susan M. Reverby, who has written extensively about the infamous Tuskegee Study in the United States, uncovered documents detailing the Guatemalan experiments while researching the Tuskegee episode and shared her discovery with US government officials.

During a news briefing early this afternoon, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said President Barack Obama plans to call the Guatemalan leader personally today and apologize.

"This is tragic, and the United States by all means apologizes to all those who were impacted by this," Gibbs said.

In a joint statement, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius denounced the experiments, apologized, and pledged to never repeat the mistakes of the past.

"Although these events occurred more than 64 years ago, we are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health," the secretaries said in the statement. "We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize to all individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices."

The US government has asked the Institute of Medicine, an independent agency that conducts health investigations for Congress, to conduct a review of the experiments, which happened from 1946 to 1948.

Separately, a presidential commission on bioethics will charter an international panel of specialists to explore the current state of medical research on humans around the world and ensure that the atrocities of the past cannot recur.

Top US government officials last night contacted Guatemala's president, Álvaro Colom Caballeros, and its ambassador to Washington. Clinton called Colom "to express her personal outrage and deep regret that such reprehensible research could occur," Arturo Valenzuela, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, said during a press briefing.

Any decision about making reparations -- financial or otherwise -- will await the outcome of the two study panels, officials said.

In a synopsis of a report scheduled to appear in January's Journal of Policy History, Reverby writes that the US Public Health Service embarked on the Guatemalan experiments even as it continued the long-condemned work in Tuskegee, where men with syphilis were left untreated so that researchers could follow the progression of the disease. The Guatemala experiments were conducted against the backdrop of great excitement among doctors about the emergence of antibiotics, and researchers -- engaging in practices now regarded as deeply unethical -- schemed to expose vulnerable subjects to further their understanding of the new drugs and STDs.

Reverby writes that US physicians selected men in a Guatemalan penitentiary and army barracks as well as men and women in a mental hospital for the study. Initially, the researchers used prostitutes to attempt to infect the prisoners. When that approach largely failed, the doctors then "did direct inoculations made from syphilis bacteria poured onto the men's penises or on forearms and faces that were slightly abraded."

The researchers, whose work was underwritten by the National Institutes of Health and sanctioned by the surgeon general at the time, wanted to know whether penicillin could prevent -- not just cure -- syphilis. They also hoped their experiments would lead to better blood tests and dosing strategies for antibiotics.

In one of the statements released this morning, US government officials said that most -- although not all -- of the unwitting subjects were treated. In addition to syphilis, the government statement says that the subjects were exposed to two other STDs, gonorrhea and chancroid. At least one person died, the statement said, although it is unclear whether the death was caused by the experiments or another health problem.

Until Reverby discovered the documents describing the experiment, they had sat secreted away at the University of Pittsburgh among the other papers of the researcher in charge of the Guatemala project.

Dr. Francis Collins, director of the NIH, said in a telephone press briefing today that the experiment "represents an appalling example from a dark chapter in the history of medicine."