Before he resigned in exasperation from his job as the top prosecutor of the international anti-corruption commission in Guatemala last month, Carlos Castresana liked to compare the country to an obstinate hospital patient. "The patient refuses to take the medicine that is recommended," he recently told a reporter. "And a patient who does not take the medicine dies."
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Guatemala definitely needs to take its pills. But now that the good doctor is on his way out, the country's condition looks more dire than ever. Castresana, the internationally appointed Spanish magistrate who presided over the U.N.-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), was perhaps the country's lone hope amid the wave of organized crime and corruption that is quickly inundating Central America's latest nascent narco-state. As he steps down and hands the reins to his newly appointed successor, the Costa Rican Francisco Dall'Anese, Guatemala's halting progress at combating those ills risks disappearing with him. Indeed, his sudden departure must feel like a victory for those who want Guatemala to remain "a paradise for criminals," as the International Crisis Group recently called the country.
Just how bad is it? Last month, Guatemala's president, Alvaro Colom Caballeros, welcomed the courts' removal of the newly elected attorney general for his alleged ties to criminal groups that, among other nefarious activities, sold adopted babies on the black market. Days earlier, four severed heads were placed in strategic locations in Guatemala City with messages pinned to them warning of a similar fate for the minister of the interior and director of prisons. This was the drug gangs' way of firing back against a recent tightening of regulations in Guatemala's jails. And, in the midst of the chaos, the Constitutional Court approved the extradition to the United States of a former president accused of embezzling millions in public funds. Just another day in Guatemala.
The country's descent has been a long spiral, but the pace has accelerated in recent years. The government signed a peace accord with leftist rebels in 1996, ending a 36-year old civil war. But as Mexico and Colombia cracked down on their own drug trafficking problems, the criminals sought new refuge, and Guatemala fit the bill: a weak government, a strategic location, and a bureaucracy whose allegiance came cheap.
Today, Guatemala is overrun with Mexican narcotraficantes and increasingly brazen street gangs. Other organized criminal networks traffic in not only babies, but also weapons, passports, timber, and immigrants. Close to 96 percent of those crimes go unpunished, in part because there's no long arm of the law -- criminal influence reaches the highest levels. The country's small security forces, meanwhile, are poorly trained and paid, especially when matched against drug traffickers bristling with sophisticated weapons and tactics.
Into this abyss stepped CICIG, which was proposed by the United Nations in 2006. With the approval of Guatemalan officials, the investigators got to work in 2007. (The international community foots the bill, about half of which is paid by the United States.) For the last three years, local prosecutors worked side-by-side with international prosecutors, all of whom have subpoena powers, the ability to order an arrest, and the authority to try cases.
At the top of the commission was Castresana, the so-called doctor -- a moniker he gave himself, preferring it to other nicknames given to him in the press such as the "modern-day Elliot Ness" and "Supercop." Among his many bona fides, Castresana was a co-author of the 1998 indictment against Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator. When he arrived in 2007, Guatemalans could dare to hope that their new savior could end the drug lords' reign of impunity. "The horizon is open, with its promises, challenges, and threats," wrote the Guatemalan paper El Periodico at the time. "Among the many demands, ideological concerns, and real enemies, the CICIG looks for light to move forward."
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