Guatemala minister offers to quit over drug murders
Source: Reuters
By Mica Rosenberg GUATEMALA CITY, March 7 (Reuters) - Guatemalan Interior Minister Carlos Vielmann has offered to resign, the government said on Wednesday, in a scandal over eight murders that may tie high-level officials to drug gangs. President Oscar Berger, whose government has been stained by the election-year crisis, is waiting for the outcome of a Congressional hearing before deciding whether to accept the minister's resignation letter. "The minister presented a letter yesterday putting his job at the president's disposition," Vielmann's spokesman Felix Colindres said. Opposition politicians calling for Vielmann to step down say he had knowledge of death squads inside the country's police force, which began by killing youth gang members and went on to carry out drug killings. Vielmann was questioned in Congress on Wednesday along with national police chief Erwin Sperisen and head of prisons Victor Rosales about the scandal, which broke with the Feb. 19 killings of three Salvadoran politicians and their driver. The bodies of the four men were found bullet ridden and charred on an abandoned dirt road outside the Guatemalan capital, a murder Berger said was linked to drug trafficking rings operating in Guatemala and El Salvador. Just days later, four top police detectives arrested for the murders were shot and had their throats slit in the maximum-security prison where they were being held. "These events confirm what many different sectors of civil society have been saying for years, that there are death squads operating within the police forces," opposition Congresswoman Roxana Baldetti said at the start of the session, expected to last for days. "We are on the edge of becoming a failed state," she said. Eye witnesses and human rights investigators say a group of armed men entered the prison south of the capital through the front door in an effort to keep the policemen from revealing the full extent of their illegal activity. Vielmann, Sperisen and prison officials blame gang members inside the prison for the deaths, saying they used smuggled weapons and collaborated with guards to kill the policemen. The annual U.S. State Department human rights report released on Tuesday highlighted corruption and impunity in Guatemala's security forces, citing complaints of kidnappings, rapes and murders carried out by police in 2006. U.S. President George W. Bush is due to visit Guatemala on Sunday and Monday as part of a tour of Latin America.
| AlertNet news is provided by |  |
