GUATEMALA CITY — The arrests of Guatemala’s drug czar and national police chief underscore how deeply the world’s multibillion-dollar drug industry can corrupt small countries with weak institutions — a trend the Obama administration warned Wednesday threatens global security.
As U.S.-funded wars pressure cartels in Mexico and Colombia, drug gangs are increasingly infiltrating vulnerable countries, particularly in Latin America and Africa. Drug profits total about $394 billion a year, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime — dwarfing the gross domestic products of many nations and making them easy prey for cartels.
“Violent traffickers are relocating to take advantage of these permissive environments and importing their own brand of justice,” the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s intelligence chief Anthony Placido said Wednesday in testimony before a U.S. House subcommittee.
Areas with limited or poor governance become breeding grounds for other kinds of crime, Placido added, noting that 18 of 44 designated terrorist groups also have links to the international drug trade.
Few countries exemplify the corruption more than Guatemala, where the current government’s drug czar and the national police chief were arrested Tuesday as the alleged leaders of a gang of police who stole more than 1,500 pounds of cocaine from traffickers. Nelly Bonilla and National Police Chief Baltazar Gomez were the latest in a string of top law enforcement jailed for drug-related corruption in recent years.
“That the national police chief from 2009 is in jail and now the national police chief from 2010 is also in jail is certainly not good news. It gives an idea of an institution gravely infiltrated by criminal networks and shaken by corruption,” said Carlos Castresana, the top investigator of a United Nation’s investigative commission that helped build the case against Bonilla and Gomez.
The latest embarrassment for Guatemala’s U.S.-funded drug war came only days before the arrival of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who will wind up her tour of Latin America in Guatemala on Friday.
Clinton will make clear that the Obama administration wants Latin American countries to do more to root out corruption. “A number of them are not taking strong enough stands against the erosion of the rule of law because of the pressure from drug traffickers,” Clinton told reporter.
It’s a weakness powerful criminal networks know well. Mexican cartels are under pressure in their own country, with the military and police killing or arresting three drug lords in just the past few months. They have increasingly moved their operations south of the border — turning Guatemala into a major transit country for U.S.-bound cocaine.
In Peru, the world’s No. 2 cocaine-producing country after Colombia, Mexican traffickers have bribed customs officials at airports and seaports. In Argentina, court papers say Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel has exploited its lax financial oversight and plodding judiciary to set up shell companies that import banned chemicals used to make methamphetamine.
