SAN ANTONIO, Guatemala - Surrounded by green fields of potatoes, oats and corn on his small farm, Carlos Lopez recalled the decent money he was earning before last year, cultivating a different crop he referred to simply as "the plant."

The plants, ones with the bright red flowers, "are worth a lot more than these other crops," Lopez said, wearing a blue baseball hat, sitting on a plastic chair behind his two-room, mud-splattered house.

"Amapola," said Lopez, speaking the Spanish word for poppy.

[end]

The Organization of American States ended its general assembly meeting Friday without including the themes of decriminalizing or legalizing drugs in its final declaration as some countries had hoped.

Host country Guatemala, whose president has pressed for some form of legalization, had predicted the declaration would include a change in antidrug policy.

OAS Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza noted that "the issue of legalization is not in the declaration, but it certainly is an issue that can change. Some countries have legalized marijuana, so it is an issue that is up for discussion."

Two weeks ago, the OAS released a report calling for a serious discussion on legalizing marijuana.

[end]

ANTIGUA, Guatemala - Whatever noisy hints Latin America has been making about a defiant march toward legalizing marijuana, the summit meeting of Western Hemisphere foreign ministers that ended Thursday revealed how rocky that path would be - and how many nations remained reluctant to join it.

The meeting, the annual General Assembly session of the Organization of American States, followed a report by the organization that called for "flexible approaches" in drug policy and included a headline-grabbing suggestion that the legalization of marijuana be seriously discussed.

[continues 836 words]

ANTIGUA, Guatemala - Latin American countries frustrated by the United States' refusal to change its drug-war strategy are pushing the U.S. government to look at alternatives to a fight that has killed tens of thousands in a region beset by drug cartels.

Guatemalan Foreign Relations Secretary Fernando Carrera said the subject of drugs would top the agenda at the Organization of American States' General Assembly, which began its three-day session in Antigua on Tuesday evening.

"We have already reached a consensus and agreed that our final declaration will include changes to the current anti-drug model," Carrera said. "We already have some ideas on how to change drug-fighting policies."

[continues 577 words]

MADRID, (Reuters) Guatemalan President Otto Perez said yesterday he is feeling less alone in his drive to re-think the fight against drug-trafficking than a year ago, when he shocked fellow Central American leaders with a proposal to decriminalise narcotics.

Guatemala, like its neighbour Mexico, is racked by violence from drug-trafficking cartels that ship South American cocaine to the United States. A Central American nation of 15 million people, Guatemala has one of the world's highest murder rates.

[continues 614 words]

A Checkered History in Central America Complicates Efforts to Forge Closer Alliances.

VILLA NUEVA, Guatemala - Lusvin Jerez has seen, firsthand, the way the U.S. has intervened in the security affairs of his obscure corner of Central America, 1,300 miles from the Texas border. He can't get enough of it. Jerez, 43, once sold home appliances in this violent, slum-dotted city on the outskirts of Guatemala City, but he grew tired of the extortion payments to gang members. So in January, he took a government job overseeing Villa Nueva's new citywide video security system, developed with U.S. dollars and expertise, one of myriad examples of Washington's involvement to help stabilize the violenceracked region.

[continues 1134 words]

Three Central American Leaders Fail to Agree on Changing Their Laws, Possibly Including Legalization.

A conclave of Central American presidents meeting in Guatemala to discuss a major overhaul of their drug laws - including legalization or decriminalization - failed to arrive at a consensus Saturday and agreed to meet again soon in Honduras.

Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina had invited five counterparts to discuss what he described as growing frustration with Washington's anti-drug policy, which many in the region say is exacting too high a price in crime and corruption.

[continues 557 words]

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) -- Guatemala's first president with a military background in 25 years said Tuesday the drug war can't be won with arms alone, and pledged that his administration will focus on fighting hunger, which he called a security problem.

In an interview with The Associated Press one day after he promised to propose legalizing drugs in Guatemala, President Otto Perez Molina said the Central American country isn't following U.S. orders, despite American opposition to legalization.

"We are not doing what the United States says, we are doing what we have to do," said Perez, who was elected on promises of an "iron-fist" approach to rampant crime and surprised observers by proposing drug legalization.

[continues 152 words]

Los Zetas Extend Brutal Reign South, As U.S. To Offer More Antidrug Aid

SANTA ELENA, Guatemala-El Peten province, a vast stretch of wilderness in northern Guatemala known for its rainforests and stunning Mayan pyramids at Tikal, is fast becoming a stronghold for a notoriously bloodthirsty Mexican cartel.

Last month, soldiers entered a cattle ranch in El Peten to find the remains of a brutal human slaughter: Twenty-seven bodies strewn across the property and a pile of heads thrown over a fence. On a wall was a message written in blood and signed "Z200," a moniker authorities say belongs to a local wing of Mexico's Los Zetas.

[continues 1140 words]

Government Says Northern Province Has Become Overrun By Mexican Drug-Trafficking Organization

The Guatemalan government declared a state of siege Sunday in a province it said has become overrun by a Mexican drug-trafficking group, the latest sign that Mexico's powerful cartels have extended their reach into foreign lands.

The operation, which the government said would last at least a month, targets the northern province of Alta Verapaz, which officials described as a safe haven for Mexico's Los Zetas cartel.

[continues 516 words]

GUATEMALA CITY =AD For a 17-day period that ended last month, Guatemala seemed to be falling under the direct control of suspected mobsters. A lawyer leading a posse of unsavory characters became the attorney general and started dismantling the state's legal apparatus.

Central America's most populous country teetered on the edge of "going narco."

A rugged coffee-growing nation of 13.5 million people, some 40 percent of them disenfranchised Mayan Indians, Guatemala has largely been off the world's radar screen. But as U.S. anti-narcotics aid poured into Mexico and Colombia, bad guys flooded the region in between.

[continues 1264 words]

Under Pressure at Home, Traffickers Find Fertile Ground for Expansion in the Neighboring Nation.

Twice before, the anti-drug agents had gotten a tip about a load of cocaine at the hulking industrial park on this dreary stretch of highway half an hour outside Guatemala City. Twice before, a U.S. official said, they had found nothing.

On their third visit, they found a firing squad.

Gunmen unleashed a furious barrage of bullets and at least one grenade, in some cases finishing the job point-blank. When the shooting stopped that day in April, five of the 10 Guatemalan agents lay dead and a sixth was wounded.

[continues 1512 words]

GUATEMALA CITY -- It is election time in Guatemala and that means rallies and banners -- and body bags.

In the campaigning leading up to elections on Sept. 9, the authorities have reported 61 violent attacks on candidates and political activists. The death toll is 26, including seven national congressmen and numerous other office seekers.

The flurry of bullets, and the occasional machete attack, make this the bloodiest campaign season in the history of a country with a long tradition of political violence, including 36 years of civil war that ended in 1996. But what makes the bloodletting different this time is that it has been attributed to narcotics traffickers and their allies intent on infiltrating Guatemala's political system.

[continues 1374 words]

GUATEMALA CITY -- The distinguished guests from El Salvador entered this capital city with one set of police officers as bodyguards, and another set of police officers waiting to ambush them.

As they drove along mountain roads, Eduardo D'Aubuisson and his fellow legislators were entering a trap set by rogue Guatemalan officers hired by drug traffickers, officials said. The police bandits believed the Salvadorans were using their diplomatic immunity to work for rival traffickers.

The final, violent hours of D'Aubuisson's life, and the equally disturbing events of the days that followed, seem plucked from the plot of the Oscar-winning movie "The Departed," where trust is illusory and crosses and double-crosses are bloody. But that is reality in today's Central America, a region of weak institutions, where crime bosses control police death squads and organized crime is said to be more powerful than the state.

[continues 924 words]

Murder Of Politicians By Police Just Latest Indication Of Challenge

Guatemala City (AP) - Guatemala knows it is losing the battle against drug trafficking - its police, military and justice system are beholden to traffickers who use the country as a way station for Colombian drug shipments to the U.S.

In a case that has laid bare the extent of corruption in the Central American nation, FBI agents are trying to help discover who ordered the murders of three Salvadoran politicians and the Guatemalan police officers who said they were told to kill them.

[continues 741 words]

Guatemala knows it is losing the battle against drug trafficking - its police, military and justice system are beholden to traffickers who use the country as a way station for Colombian drug shipments to the U.S.

In a case that has laid bare the extent of corruption in the Central American nation, FBI agents are trying to help discover who ordered the murders of three Salvadoran politicians and the Guatemalan police officers who said they were told to kill them.

The killings and apparent cover-up has exposed the seemingly insurmountable challenges President Oscar Berger faces as he tries to regain control of a defiant and even criminal police force.

[continues 707 words]

PAVON, Guatemala - Smack dab in the middle of this tiny country was a barbed-wire-ringed, upside-down place of about a dozen or so acres where wrong was right.

The Independent Republic of Pavon, as Guatemalans came to call it, was, in reality, a prison. But there were no guards controlling it. Every last person on the troubled piece of real estate about a half-hour outside the capital, Guatemala City, was an outlaw -- from the ruling elite to the grunts who carried out their orders. Those who dared cross the most notorious convicts were sent off to a grim punishment chamber nicknamed the North Pole.

[continues 779 words]

EL SACRIFICIO, Guatemala - Huddled together aboard two vintage tanks, 40 soldiers plow through dense jungle on a four-hour journey into a little-known battlefield of the drug war. Their mission, here in Guatemala's wild north: to blow up dozens of clandestine airstrips used by planes laden with Colombian cocaine.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration estimates that 70 percent of the cocaine that ends up in the United States passes through Central America.

Guatemala's sparsely inhabited Peten region is the last stop before the drugs cross into Mexico on their way north. It is here that Guatemalan drug-trafficking organizations serve as a link between their Mexican and Colombian counterparts, unloading and splitting up tons of cocaine into smaller shipments that can be transported more easily over land.

[continues 588 words]

GUATEMALA CITY - Police found five packages of cocaine and thousands of dollars in cash in the office of Guatemala's top anti-drug cop, shortly after he was arrested in Virginia on charges of conspiring to ship cocaine into the United States.

The shocking arrests of Adan Castillo and two of his deputies by U.S. officials prompted Guatemalan President Oscar Berger on Wednesday to pledge to renew anti-trafficking programs in this Central American nation that is a key transit point for drugs heading north.

[continues 530 words]

WASHINGTON - Guatemala's top anti-drug investigators have been arrested on charges they conspired to import and distribute cocaine in the United States after being lured to America for what they thought was training on fighting drug traffickers.

A three-count indictment issued Wednesday by a federal grand jury in Washington names Adan Castillo, chief of Guatemala's special anti-drug police force, who has lamented the slow pace of progress in combating cocaine smugglers in Guatemala. Also indicted were Jorge Aguilar Garcia, Castillo's deputy, and Rubilio Orlando Palacios, another police official. They were arrested Tuesday after arriving in the United States for drug enforcement Administration training on stopping drug trafficking in ports.

[end]