Government News: Top Stories

Guatemala: Massacre work of Mexico drug gang Zetas
by Moises Castillo

The Associated Press Translate This Article
16 May 2011

SAN BENITO, Guatemala (AP) - The day worker lay wounded, playing dead as the killers....[murdered] other victims. A pregnant woman was let go when her children started to cry. But 27 others in one of Guatemala's largest postwar massacres were slaughtered, their bodies...left...across the green pasture of an isolated cattle ranch in the northern border province of Peten.

Guatemalan authorities on Monday blamed the weekend of violence on the Mexican drug cartel, the Zetas, which has set up shop in Guatemala and brought its terror tactics to the rural indigenous area along the Mexican border.

'I don't know how I survived,' the 23-year-old man told The Associated Press from the hospital, adding that he was too afraid to flee the Saturday night attack because the heavily armed men said they would return. Authorities asked that he not be named for security reasons.

The police finally came Sunday morning, but the violence continued Monday in nearby areas of Peten, a jungle-covered, strategic drug-trafficking region with a murder rate double the national average and far higher than the most violent parts of Mexico.

President Alvaro Colom, who toured the massacre site Monday, said as many as 40 to 50 armed commandos stormed the remote ranch on a one-lane dirt road about 19 miles (30 kilometers) from the nearest paved highway. They are believed to be part of a group called 'Z 200.'

'I totally condemn this,' Colom said. 'This is a barbarity. We will get them even if they're hiding in their lair. We will get them.'

Two men were killed and one suspect in the massacre was taken into custody after a confrontation with police Monday morning, while grenades were tossed at a home and business in a town near San Benito, where the bodies were taken for identification.

Authorities blamed the Zetas for all the attacks, which included the killing of the brother of a slain Guatemalan drug capo on Saturday.

Investigators are looking into ties between the ranch owner, Otto Salguero, and drug trafficking, Colom said. A message written in blood on one of the ranch building's walls said the killers were looking for Salguero, whose whereabouts is not known. Colom said he owns four ranches and hundreds of head of cattle.

But none of the victims had ties to drug cartels, authorities said. Rather they were innocent ranch workers and their families caught up in an increasingly bloody war mirroring the Zetas quest for territory in Mexico. Two women and two children were among the dead. The injured survivor said he had been working at the ranch for about a month.

The Zetas are blamed for two recent mass killings in Mexico as well, 183 bodies found in mass graves last month and a massacre of 72 migrants last August, both in the state of Tamaulipas bordering Texas.

Mexican drug cartels now operate virtually uninhibited in Central America. U.S.-supported crackdowns in Mexico and Colombia have only pushed traffickers into a region where corruption is rampant, borders lack even minimal immigration control and local gangs provide a ready-made infrastructure for organized crime.

The Guatemalan government recently ended a two-month siege near Peten in the neighboring mountainous state of Alta Verapaz, also a prime corridor for smuggling drugs from Honduras to Mexico, where Zetas roamed the streets with assault rifles and armored vehicles and even controlled when people could leave their homes.

Colom said on Monday he would not call a state of siege in Peten, at least for the time being.

Law enforcement officials have said that Zetas control at least three other provinces in Guatemala and as much as half of country's territory.

Peten has been a strategic drug-trafficking zone with jungle landing strips used by several cartels, according to the 2010 U.N. World Drug Report.

Both the Zetas and Mexico's Sinaloa cartel have interests in Peten and may be competing for territory, the report says.

The province has one of the highest murder rates in Guatemala, 98 per 100,000 people in 2009.

Authorities blamed the Zetas for the murder Saturday of Haroldo Leon, the brother of alleged Guatemalan drug boss Juan Jose 'Juancho' Leon.

'Juancho' himself was killed in 2008 in an ambush that Guatemalan authorities also blame on the Zetas, who began controlling cocaine trafficking in the Alta Verapaz region in 2008 after killing 'Juancho' Leon.

Copyright © 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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