Guatemala swept by vigilante killings in crime backlash

GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) - Bodies dumped in vacant lots, shot through the head, hands and feet tied. Victims beheaded, strangled, clubbed, hacked with machetes. Torture marks. Hand-written notes pinned to corpses.

Such images, familiar during a long civil war, are part of the daily routine again in Guatemala, nine years after a peace accord ended the fighting.

The victims are often in their teens and early 20s, suspected of being gang members and targeted by vigilantes sick of Guatemala's relentlessly rising crime. A spreadsheet of death, compiled by the Casa Alianza, a child advocacy group, provides chilling reading:

Karen Michel Porras, 15, Female, Gunshots

Isaias Emanuel Maldonado, 16, Male, Single shot

Cristian Carballo, 12, Male, Head crushed

Astrid Marilu Villagran, 16, Female, Beheaded

Herber Estuardo Pop, 14, Male, Gunshots

Evelyn Maribel Valle, 15, Female, Beheaded

Jose Mauricio Gomez, 16, Male, Strangled

Aida Iracema Lopez, 17, Female, Single, shot

Julio Alexander Ortiz, 15, Male, Strangled

Obdulio Cante Estrada, 17, Male, Strangled

The list goes on for another 324 names, the 2005 toll for victims under 18 in the capital alone.

According to police statistics, 5,330 people died violent deaths in Guatemala last year, the highest number since the end of the 36-year-old civil war. In the first 20 days of this year, 304 people were murdered.

They included a young woman who was beheaded and three young men shot through the head and stuffed into the trunk of a car, hands and feet tied. Hand-written notes said, "That's for robbery" and, "This is for breaking into my house."

The country's death toll is running considerably higher than it did in the closing stages of the war, the bloodiest of the left-versus-right conflicts which tore through Central America when it was a crucible of Cold War rivalry in the 1980s.

Many of the killings in the past few years have been attributed to vigilantes, acting with impunity in pursuit of what is known here as "social cleansing."

Others are believed to be victims of gang feuds. In either case, arrests for murder are very rare.

"What is happening is that there is a lot of crime and nobody has confidence in the government's ability to provide security," said the Casa Alianza's Claudia Rivera. "Crime is out of control and the state cannot stop it. So people in neighborhoods get together to do it themselves."

Sergio Morales, Guatemala's human rights prosecutor, echoed that assessment. "The state is weak. The people have no confidence. Neither in the security forces nor in the justice system."

KILLINGS SEEN AS POSITIVE, NECESSARY

Judging from conversations with Guatemalans in the capital and the poverty-stricken highlands, extra-judicial killings are widely seen as both necessary and positive.

"When those who are killed are 'mareros' (gang members), people are pleased," said Gerardo Petzey, a 20-year-old student in the highland town of Santiago Atitlan. "Good riddance to bad people," said Antonia Flores, 26, a receptionist in the capital's upscale 10th district.

"Eliminate rabies by killing the dogs that carry the disease," said leaflets left on bodies found shot through the head near the city of Quetzaltenango.

Such sentiments evoke memories of the days when state-sponsored death squads were killing suspected guerrilla sympathizers -- mostly Mayan Indians who make up most of the country's population and almost all of the poor -- in a huge scorched-earth campaign. Comparisons between suspected communists and animals were common then.

Applause for vigilante killings is not universal and there are some expressions of concern over their consequences. "Violence begets violence," said Morales. "That is the problem."

The main target of Guatemalans who are taking the law into their own hands are members of two street gangs -- Mara 18 and Mara Salvatrucha -- whose origins date back to the Central American wars between U.S.-backed right-wing governments and left-wing guerrillas.

Tens of thousands of Salvadorans displaced by the fighting fled to the United States and settled in the Los Angeles area. Mostly poor and unskilled, many failed to find economic opportunities and banded together in gangs whose members soon gained a reputation for extreme violence.

MASS DEPORTATION FROM U.S. SPREAD GANGS

In the mid-1990s, U.S. authorities began cracking down on Latin gangs with mass deportations of people convicted of

crimes. In the process of forced repatriation, the maras spread from El Salvador to Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala and, more recently, southern Mexico.

Estimates of overall gang membership in Central America range from 60,000 to 80,000, with another 20,000 in the United States. Their activities, officials say, range from extortion and robbery to selling drugs.

Seasoned human rights experts say that no amount of force, by vigilantes, death squads, or the state, will end the violence now sweeping Guatemala (and to a lesser extent El Salvador and Honduras) as long as governments fail to address the root causes -- poverty, lack of education, lack of jobs, lack of prospects.

Development indicators by the United Nations have long placed Guatemala near the bottom of the list in Latin America. More than half the country's 12 million people live in poverty and 2.5 million in extreme poverty -- a condition an aid worker here defined as "being too poor to afford shoes and too poor to send your kid to school."

"It's easy to blame gangs for everything, it's easy to kill, it's easy to scapegoat the young," said Julio Coyoy, founder of a group set up to rehabilitate young drug addicts and gang members. "It's not so easy to create a just society with opportunities for all."

(Additional reporting by Mica Rosenberg)