Pubdate: Wed, 9 Jul 2008
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Page: Front Page, First Column
Copyright: 2008 Los Angeles Times
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/bc7El3Yo
Website: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Column One

MACAWS ABOVE, OUTLAWS BELOW

Drug Traffickers, Illegal Tree Cutters, Migrant Smugglers -- It's the 
Law of the Jungle in Guatemala's Peten.

EL NARANJO, GUATEMALA -- Here in the Wild West of the Central 
American isthmus, tough hombres like "the Bald Guys" make mahogany 
trees disappear in the middle of the night. Here, "cattle ranch" 
cowboys wrangle cocaine that falls from the sky.

This is the Peten, for centuries a thinly populated frontier where 
jaguars ruled an unspoiled natural kingdom and the rainbow-colored 
scarlet macaw flew unmolested over towering Maya temples.

Now the jungle region is a lawless no man's land, prized by smugglers 
for its proximity to the lightly guarded border with Mexico and for 
the swamps and dense forest undergrowth that give them an advantage 
over the ragtag forces of law and order. It's a place where the 
immigration police have no guns, the park rangers have neither radios 
nor automobiles, and the Guatemalan air force can't see or chase the 
"kamikaze" cocaine-smuggling pilots.

Drug trafficking is the most profitable activity here, with the Peten 
serving as a key way station in a vast air-and-land route from 
Colombian coca fields to U.S. consumers. But many other illicit 
enterprises thrive too.

A recent journey to the Peten involved encounters with good guys and 
bad, including an undercover army colonel on a motorcycle and a 
happy-go-lucky migrant smuggler who feared no one.

Every working day, young boatman Juan Izquierdo ferries small groups 
of illegal immigrants into Mexico along the San Pedro River, one of 
several busy smuggling routes along the Mexico-Guatemala frontier.

Izquierdo helps his passengers avoid a nearby Mexican border post, 
their first serious obstacle on the long journey from Honduras, El 
Salvador and other Central American countries to the United States.

He charges them about $5 each, though for some reason a tourist like 
me must pay eight times as much for a round trip.

"Couldn't this get you in trouble?" I ask Izquierdo.

"No, nothing ever happens," he says with a slightly perplexed look 
that suggests no one has asked him that question before.

Izquierdo, in fact, has little to fear. The officers staffing the 
nearest Guatemalan immigration office, in the river port of El 
Naranjo, have no guns, no boats and just one vehicle. The post 
consists of a teetering shack overlooking the river.

Immigration agent Manuel Salguero points out a passing boat that 
appears to be ferrying immigrants and says, "To tell you the truth, 
all we do is watch them go by."

Even if they wanted to arrest the smugglers, they'd face one big 
obstacle: They have no holding cells.

Staff and equipment shortages are endemic to every law enforcement 
and military agency operating in the region, officials say. An 
overstretched army brigade of about 700 soldiers covers an area the 
size of Belgium. Guatemala's air force owns two helicopters and no 
tactical radar capable of detecting low-flying aircraft.

Last month, in response to the growing sense of lawlessness in the 
border regions, the Guatemalan government announced that it would 
dispatch 500 more federal police officers and soldiers to the Peten 
and other areas along the Mexican frontier later this year.

Large chunks of the Peten are ostensibly protected as national parks 
and nature reserves.

"The wood poachers have satellite telephones, and we don't even have 
two-way radios," says Claudia Mariela Lopez, regional director of the 
National Protected Areas Commission, which oversees the reserves.

Lopez has invited me to tour her domain, several hundred square miles 
of jungle, savanna and swamp intersected by unpaved roads. Her 
driver, a park ranger supervisor, manages to hit speeds of about 50 
mph on scary, gravelly tracks, but never puts on his seat belt.

Our caravan includes the army colonel on the motorcycle, at least one 
other officer and a squad of soldiers with machine guns riding in the 
back of a pickup. The soldiers are there to protect the colonel, who 
is in disguise. He doesn't want the local criminals to realize a 
high-ranking officer is on an "intelligence mission" in their 
territory, so he wears jeans, sunglasses and a bandanna over his head.

Often, we stop when the road is overgrown with vines and tree 
branches, forcing our driver to hack open a path with a machete. When 
we arrive at the few ranger stations in the reserve, we encounter the 
sad sight of park rangers short on just about everything.

Guatemala's park rangers often go hungry for lack of food at their 
remote outposts.

"So, you don't have any supplies," Lopez says at one stop, a 
collection of hammocks underneath a precarious roof of rough-cut tree 
branches. The rangers have run out of beans, though they do have a 
few live chickens around.

"They didn't come this week, no, " one ranger answers.

Back in the capital, Guatemala City, 200 miles to the south, security 
officials think of the Peten as a vast "aerodrome" where planes of 
various sizes land on grassy fields carved out of the ancient forest 
by drug traffickers posing as cattle ranchers.

"The plane comes in, and they pick up the fences of the pasture and 
in an instant they have a landing strip," says a security analyst and 
former military official who speaks on condition of anonymity for 
fear of antagonizing Guatemala's powerful drug lords.

The planes unload in about 10 minutes, and get topped off with 
aviation fuel carried in pickup trucks, the analyst said.

About 40 clandestine strips and airfields are in operation in the 
Peten at any given moment, says a Guatemalan security official who 
asks not to be named because he is not authorized to speak publicly. 
The strips vary in length from 2,500 feet to about 4,500 feet.

"Those pilots come in low over the jungle, and we can't see them 
because our radar is blind under 400 meters," or about 1,300 feet, 
the official says. "They're real kamikazes."

To help fight the drug trade, the U.S. government lent Guatemala four 
helicopters in March as part of a $21-million aid package. A senior 
Guatemalan official said the helicopters are being flown by U.S. 
pilots because the Guatemalans lack the necessary training.

Drug traffickers have acquired thousands of acres in the region for 
their airstrips and transport operations, intimidating and buying out 
local farmers and communities, officials say.

North of Flores, the Peten capital, a criminal band known as Los 
Pelones, the Bald Guys, holds sway, according to federal and local 
officials. Unpaved roads run through here, among smoldering trees and 
brush set aflame by farmers. We enter a village where, the rangers 
inform me, the Bald Guys operate an illegal airstrip.

"There's no way to oppose them," one official says. "The only way you 
can come in here is with heavy weapons."

Soon we see two men on a motorcycle riding in the opposite direction. 
One of the men has a chain saw slung over his back. A park ranger 
tries calling one of the checkpoints down the road to alert the 
rangers there, but there is no cellphone service in that part of the 
jungle. And he has no radio.

The targets of the poachers are exotic woods in the jungle, 
especially the umbrella-shaped mahogany trees that rise from the 
landscape. Mahogany lumber brings the poachers a small bonanza -- the 
wood is prized for furniture and guitars. They cut roads in the 
jungle to skirt the ranger posts on the highways, then load up 
several trees on flatbed trucks for the journey to sawmills outside the region.

Marlon Hernandez, a ranger supervisor, says he was attacked this year 
by a mob of 200 people in the town of San Andres, north of Flores, 
when he and other rangers tried to arrest wood poachers.

"They would have killed us, but we ran away," Hernandez says. A 
prosecutor with the country's environmental crimes unit was wounded 
by gunfire during the attack. "We spent four hours in the mountains, hiding."

As we travel through the jungle, Hernandez lifts his shirt to reveal 
a revolver tucked into his pants. "It was thanks to this that I got 
away," he says.

But the money wood poachers make is small compared with the drug trade.

"The amounts of money they deal with are so large they can buy any 
politician, any judge, official or police officer," says Yuri Melini 
of the Center for Legal, Environmental and Social Action in Guatemala City.

Organized crime groups have bought the loyalty of large numbers of 
poor farmers who take over broad swaths of jungle as squatters, 
Melini says. The squatters present themselves as needy migrants from 
other regions of this overpopulated country and offer the drug 
dealers cover and protection.

These "narco cattle ranches" and "narco communities" have spread in 
ostensibly protected regions of the Peten, Melini says, wreaking 
havoc on an environment normally lush with towering canopies of 
trees, spider monkeys, river turtles and countless other flora and fauna.

The "farmers" level the mahogany and tropical cedar trees with power 
saws, and then set fire to the underbrush. Low-lying grasses quickly 
grow in the blackened soil, providing pasture for cattle and horses 
and flat landing strips for overloaded Cessnas.

The combined effects of deforestation and poaching have reduced the 
scarlet macaw population to just a few hundred; the bird's stunning 
plumage can fetch thousands of dollars on the black market.

But if such enterprises seem too dangerous, there is always migrant 
smuggling, a safer, if less lucrative, line of employment.

The seven passengers on Izquierdo's skiff look frightened as they 
cross into Mexico. All residents of the Honduran city of San Pedro 
Sula, they say they're headed for the United States and that they 
believe a Mexican freight train provides migrants with a free ride of 
500 miles or more.

I tell them that the train is no longer running. Some of them turn to 
me with a look of despair, but a younger man in the back says 
defiantly: "I heard they started running again."

No matter. They plan to make their journey on foot, mostly, paying 
locals to escort them around the Mexican immigration checkpoints ahead.

"If we don't catch that [smuggler's] truck, we'll be walking for a 
week," one of the men shouts over the roar of the engine as the boat 
speeds westward.

Moments later, they are stepping onto a Mexican riverbank, leaving 
the verdant Peten behind them.

Izquierdo's boat pushes back into the water with me as his only 
passenger on the short return journey to Guatemala. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake