Post: #26

Stumbled on some somber stuff about Guatemala.

In 2005 archives were found with 80 million documents relating to the 200,000 people that disappeared/were murdered during the Fascist
regime that lasted decades before that. The population's only 14 Mill. So about 1 out of 70 people were disappeared. Schoolteachers and so forth.

See below:

http://www.hrdag.org/about/guatemala-pol...ject.shtml

Something's a little off about the place. A TWO percent clearance rate for homicide?(see far below) I think in the USA it's like 50% or more. (See below link.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2004_U...arance.jpg

I've worked with the criminal justice system, and what a 2% clearance rate tells me is that there is no desire to solve the cases-- or the cops are part of it themselves.

Which means for us, DON'T get into trouble in Guatemala.

From the above piece:

"The historical information in the archive could help investigators analyze the evolution of Guatemala's police institutions and determine how civil authorities drift into extra-judicial acts of violence. Data in the archive could also help explain political patterns that continue to support a culture of impunity and may someday help heal ongoing distrust of police authorities.

Guatemala continues to suffer from a high rate of homicide, despite its relatively small population that now totals about 14 million. In 2006, the Guatemalan government established a national commission on "femicide" after coming under pressure from the U.S. Congress and human rights groups to address a series of especially horrific murders of women. According to the PDH, 2,318 women were murdered in this small country from 2002-2006, a figure that could be confirmed or challenged by further rigorous data analysis. According to press reports, only 2% of the more than 5,000 murders in Guatemala each year are solved."

Post: #27

Guatemala is definitely not safe in the long-term. Even the locals will tell you that. The government's completely corrupt and drug cartels run wild through there. Antigua and parts of Guatemala City are relatively safe though for foreigners. As long as you stay smart, you shouldn't have any problems.

Post: #28

I highly recommend this article about Guatemala, about the violence and social upheaval there:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/...fact_grann

Money grafs:

Rosenberg had frequently expressed despair over the violence that consumed Guatemala. In 2007, a joint study by the United Nations and the World Bank ranked it as the third most murderous country. Between 2000 and 2009, the number of killings rose steadily, ultimately reaching sixty-four hundred. The murder rate was nearly four times higher than Mexico’s. In 2009, fewer civilians were reported killed in the war zone of Iraq than were shot, stabbed, or beaten to death in Guatemala.

The violence can be traced to a civil war between the state and leftist rebels, a three-decade struggle that, from 1960 to 1996, was the dirtiest of Latin America’s dirty wars. More than two hundred thousand people were killed or “disappeared.” According to a U.N.-sponsored commission, at least ninety per cent of the killings were carried out by the state’s military forces or by paramilitary death squads with names like Eye for an Eye. One witness said, “What we have seen has been terrible: burned corpses; women impaled and buried, as if they were animals ready for the spit, all doubled up; and children massacred and carved up with machetes.” The state’s counter-insurgency strategy, known as “drain the sea to kill the fish,” culminated in what the commission deemed acts of genocide.

In 1996, the government reached a peace accord with the rebels, and it was supposed to mark a new era of democracy and rule of law. But amnesty was granted for even the worst crimes, leaving no one accountable. (Critics called the policy “the piñata of self-forgiveness.”) In 1998, the Guatemalan Archdiocese’s Office of Human Rights, led by Bishop Juan Gerardi, released a four-volume report, “Guatemala: Never Again,” which documented hundreds of crimes against humanity, identifying some perpetrators by name. Two days later, Gerardi was bludgeoned to death, a murder that was eventually revealed to be part of a conspiracy involving military officers.

After the peace accord, the state’s security apparatus—death squads, intelligence units, police officers, military counter-insurgency forces—did not disappear but, rather, mutated into criminal organizations. Amounting to a parallel state, these illicit networks engage in arms trafficking, money laundering, extortion, human smuggling, black-market adoptions, and kidnapping for ransom. The networks also control an exploding drug trade. Latin America’s cartels, squeezed by the governments of Colombia and Mexico, have found an ideal sanctuary in Guatemala, and most of the cocaine entering America now passes through the country. Criminal networks have infiltrated virtually every government and law-enforcement agency, and more than half the country is no longer believed to be under the control of any government at all. Citizens, deprived of justice, often form lynch mobs, or they resolve disputes, even trivial ones, by hiring assassins.

Some authorities have revived the darkest counter-insurgency tactics, rounding up undesirables and executing them. Incredibly, the death rate in Guatemala is now higher than it was for much of the civil war. And there is almost absolute impunity: ninety-seven per cent of homicides remain unsolved, the killers free to kill again. In 2007, a U.N. official declared, “Guatemala is a good place to commit a murder, because you will almost certainly get away with it.”

Post: #29

My only gripe against Costa Rica is that usually the fine women were Colombian immigrants.

Post: #30

(09-08-2011 10:09 AM)UrbanNerd Wrote:  My only gripe against Costa Rica is that usually the fine women were Colombian immigrants.

I saw and meet plenty of fine ass Ticas!