By Bernd Debusmann, Special Correspondent Thu Jan 12, 11:24 AM ET
GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) - Even by the brazen standards of the international drug trade, it was a brazen heist: almost half a ton of cocaine stolen from a guarded police compound, in the middle of the capital, by men in police uniforms carrying AK-47 assault rifles.
The men, 15 of them, overwhelmed and shackled two police guards at the entrance and another two inside. They walked up to a tractor-trailer packed floor to ceiling with cocaine confiscated in a series of anti-narcotics raids. As they wrenched off the trailer's padlocks, two sport utility vehicles and a pickup rolled up to the compound.
The men began transferring 1-kg (2.2-pound) bricks of cocaine from the trailer to their vehicles. They worked at an unhurried pace, according to a police timeline of the incident: It took them the better part of two hours to shift 475 kgs (1,050 pounds) of cocaine, valued at around $6.2 million.
Conducted with military precision on the last day of 2005, the heist explains why there are warnings that Guatemala is turning into a "narco state," a country whose institutions are controlled by drug traffickers.
The New Year's eve raid, which could serve as a case study of the state's vulnerabilities, came six weeks after Guatemala's drug czar, Adan Castillo, and his most senior assistants were arrested in Washington on suspicion of having conspired to ship billions of dollars worth of cocaine into the United States.
According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), most of the cocaine destined for the United States now moves from South American producer nations -- Colombia, Peru, Bolivia -- through Central America.
Guatemala shares a porous border with Mexico, the last stage of the smuggling pipeline to the United States, and the DEA estimates that up to 75 percent of all U.S.-bound cocaine flows through Guatemala.
"This (raid) looks like the narcos giving the finger to the (Guatemalan) state," said a diplomat who monitors anti-narcotics efforts. "What comes next will be a good indication where things are going."
What came next were a flurry of recriminations, renewed calls for a purge of police ranks, the launch of several investigations and comparisons with Colombia in the 1980s.
At the height of the power of Colombia's now defunct Medellin and Cali cartels, they openly challenged the state, had thousands of government officials and judges on their payroll, owned newspapers, founded political parties, had seats in parliament and at one point even offered to pay off Colombia's foreign debt.
INDECENT PROPOSALS
In the aftermath of the cocaine theft, Interior Minister Carlos Vielmann, who has frequently drawn parallels between Guatemala now and Colombia then, told reporters he had been approached a few months ago with "indecent proposals" on behalf of drug traffickers.
The deal they envisioned: Let anti-drug units make more drug seizures to convey the impression that the government is gaining control over the traffic. In return, the government would turn a blind eye to other shipments.
Up to eight different drug trafficking organizations are thought to operate in Guatemala, including Mexico's powerful Juarez cartel, and it was not clear on whose behalf the offer was made. The intermediary, according to an interior ministry communique, was Adan Castillo, now awaiting trial in Washington.
Attorney General Juan Luis Florida announced investigations into possible links between drug cartels and two government agencies charged with combating drug trafficking and organized crime.
In addition, the New Year's eve raid triggered investigations into why the compound was lightly guarded and why the cocaine, confiscated in November, was not burned within 20 days as prescribed by law.
Immediately after the raid, the four policemen who had been on guard duty were arrested on suspicion of collusion with the thieves in what looked like an inside job. A judge ordered their release the following day, saying there was no evidence that they had been involved.
The saga prompted many Guatemalans to wonder what had happened to plans, announced after the drug czar's arrest in November, to dismantle the Anti-Narcotics Analysis and Information Service (SAIA), and replace it with a new unit resistant to the huge bribes drug traffickers can pay corrupt policemen.
Flagged as an elite unit of incorruptible agents, SAIA was formed in October 2002 to replace the Department of Anti-Narcotics Operations (DOAN). That organization was disbanded -- after the robbery of 604 kgs (1,330 pounds) of cocaine from a police warehouse caused a scandal reminiscent of the present case.
At the time, DEA officials testifying to a congressional hearing in Washington said that Guatemalan judges, prosecutors and police took bribes from drug traffickers as a matter of routine.
FIRED POLICEMEN JOIN CRIMINAL RANKS
Drug experts say that disbanding corrupt anti-drug units plays well politically but can have adverse practical consequences: Those purged from the police ranks, unemployable for honest work, tend to join the criminal organizations who bribed them in the first place.
This is a problem shared by most countries which produce illegal drugs or serve as trans-shipment platforms. But Guatemala appears to be even more vulnerable than its Central American neighbors to the forces which weaken a state.
On an index of failed and failing states compiled last year by the Fund for Peace, a Washington-based research institute, and Foreign Policy magazine, Guatemala ranked 31st on the list of states in danger of collapse, way above its neighbors Honduras and
El Salvador.
Asked to comment on that ranking, Guatemala's ambassador to the Organization of American States, Francisco Villagran de Leon, said none of his country's political leaders had been able to carry through reforms to strengthen the institutions. "Organized crime is mounting an assault on the state and its organizations," he said.
While the hunt for the stolen cocaine went on, police reported casualties in the incident: Two large rats found dead in the trailer after having gnawed through a drug packet. They died of a cocaine overdose.
(Additional reporting by Mica Rosenberg)
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