Guatemala

U.S. Involvement

American administrations have been deeply involved in the Guatemalan drug war since the Reagan administration, when President Reagan courted the right-wing factions in the government. As the American drug war accelerated toward the end of the Reagan era, American aircraft sprayed the Guatemalan countryside with herbicides to kill off coca and marijuana crops. This killed off significant amounts of harmless crops that were critically necessary to subsistence farmers, while allegedly poisoning much of the local population.

The drug war in Guatemala was until 2003 delegated to the Department of Anti-Narcotics Operations [Page 341](DOAN), a special anti-narcotics task force. Only months after increasing its budget for training and equipment, the Guatemalan government was forced to dissolve DOAN when it was discovered that members of the department were implicated in everything from extra-judicial executions to accepting bribes to stealing and re-selling more than twice as many narcotics as were declared in official seizures. The U.S. State Department assisted with the financing of a new counternarcotics unit, the Guatemalan Anti-Narcotics Police (SAIA), almost immediately, and the State Department's International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement bureau oversaw the training of 400 new agents. Two years later, in 2005, three of SAIA's administrators were arrested on conspiracy charges for trafficking cocaine to the United States. Those arrested included Adan Castillo Lopez, the chief of SAIA and the highest-ranking anti-narcotics official in the country.

Growing desperate, Guatemala suspended some of the rights guaranteed in its constitution in settlements along the Mexican border during a campaign to eliminate the local opium crops and their traffickers. Police arrived in the middle of the night in the summer of 2006 and announced a two-week suspension of the rights of public assembly, to bear arms, and to be protected from unwarranted searches, while the police raided one house after another in search of evidence, and destroyed what crops they could find in the countryside.

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