Guatemala's land grab and massacre. I meet activist, land evictee and massacre survivor Carlos Chen in front of the Catholic Church in the town of Rabinal. A solid man in his late-50s, Carlos shakes my hand gently and suggests we go to his village to discuss filming plans for the following day. While walking along a dusty side street we pass a small museum dedicated to the local Maya Achi culture. Poking my head inside one of the rooms a shiver runs down my spine. Staring at me are the portraits of hundreds of people murdered during Guatemala's civil war. Two entire walls are stacked with images of those massacred in Rio Negro, a community that refused to leave their land to make way for the Chixoy hydroelectric dam. The photographs are taken from government-issued ID cards, and the paper is cracked and yellowing.
Many of the faces are young and innocent-looking. Carlos points to a row of photos and lists the family members shown: wife, brother, aunt, uncle. Pacux The dam The mountains ringing the reservoir are majestic. We have to find new solutions to Latin America's drugs nightmare | Otto Pérez Molina | Comment is free | The Observer. Twenty years ago, I became head of intelligence services in the Guatemalan army.
In this capacity, I had to co-ordinate operations with several United States and Latin American agencies dealing with the fight against drug trafficking. In those years, this was already a challenging and complex task. However, Guatemala's security forces had the capacity to deal with the problem, intercepting drug convoys and arresting drug lords. Probably the most important victory on this front was our sophisticated and discreet intelligence operation that led to the arrest of a prominent Mexican drug lord, who was subsequently sent to Mexico for trial.
None the less, the drug lord stayed in jail only eight years, managing to escape from a high-security prison, something that in itself shows the corrupting tentacles of drug trafficking. Today, this capo is listed among the 10 richest men in Mexico, and one of the richest and most influential men on Earth according to Forbes magazine. An End to the War on Drugs? by Alma Guillermoprieto.
As a normally pro-forma gathering of hemispheric leaders gets under way in Cartagena, Colombia, this weekend, Latin America could instead be approaching its declaration of independence from the United States. For the first time, the region might come out against a US policy. The change in what seemed to be an immovable subservience has come gradually, but the immediate cause is drugs, and the surprising agent is Otto Pérez Molina, retired general, former intelligence chief, graduate of the Pentagon’s School of Americas, and now the new president of Guatemala.
Pérez Molina is no stranger to the War on Drugs. He campaigned for president promising to bring out the country’s dreaded Kaibil Army special forces against the drug trade; Guatemalan voters, judging crime and insecurity to be their greatest concern, elected him in November. It shouldn’t have been. In fairness, the Guatemalan president’s announcement surprised just about everyone outside his immediate circle. Rodrigo Rosenberg’s Murder in Guatemala. Rodrigo Rosenberg knew that he was about to die. It wasn’t because he was approaching old age—he was only forty-eight. Nor had he been diagnosed with a fatal illness; an avid bike rider, he was in perfect health. Rather, Rosenberg, a highly respected corporate attorney in Guatemala, was certain that he was going to be assassinated. Before he began, in the spring of 2009, to prophesy his own murder, there was little to suggest that he might meet a violent end.
Rosenberg, who had four children, was an affectionate father. The head of his own flourishing practice, he had a reputation as an indefatigable and charismatic lawyer who had a gift for leading other people where he wanted them to go. Rosenberg had been born into Guatemala’s oligarchy—a term that still applies to the semi-feudal Central American nation, where more than half of its fourteen million people, many of them Mayan, live in severe poverty.
Human experiments: First, do harm. Image Slideshow EVOLVING ETHICS Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) were a prime concern for health officials in the 1940s, and many medical studies — including the US experiments in Guatemala — used methods that would be considered unethical today. Although standards improved over the decades, clinical researchers continued to push the boundaries of acceptable science.Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues 1941 A 12-month-old baby in California is deliberately infected with herpes as part of an experiment. One editor objects to publishing the work, but it appears in 1942 in the Journal of Pediatrics.R. J. 2010 Historian Susan Reverby exposes the abuses of Cutler’s Guatemalan experiments, prompting US President Barack Obama to apologize to Guatemala and launch an investigation, which finds that the “experiments involved unconscionable violations of ethics”.Wellesley College The injections came without warning or explanation.
The war against syphilis Never again.