When Alvaro Arzu signed the Peace Accords of 1996, he had busted a criminal conspiracy in the customs system of the country, known as La Red Moreno. But Moreno was an army sergeant, who had been the chofer of an army general Ortega Menaldo, who had been placed within the customs system to monitor any possible traffic of material by the guerrilla. As a good student of the CIA, Ortega Menaldo was also in a position to "skim off the top" whatever the Army needed for "black ops" that couldn't appear in the official budget. I would suggest that this "Cold War" strategy of impunity grew into the largest drug transhippment place on the planet.

When President Arzu busted the "Red Moreno", he dismissed from the army intelligence unit a half of dozen military intelligence officers who were implicated. General Ortega Menaldo requested early retirirement. But the others, who had been cleaned out, came back with the populista government of Alfonso Portillo. And they are now "profugos" de la Justicia for the multi-millionario robo del Estado. Portillo ya ha estado extraditado de Mexico. Los dos mas del G-2 andan profugos. Y segun mis fuentes, bien protegidos.

As someone who lives in Guatemala, I find it amazing that your researcher has focused so little attention on the effect of drug transhipment in all the affairs of state in Guatemala. It is estimated by the DEA that 75% of all the coke that reaches the States is transhipped through Guatemala. That's worth a whole lot more than coffee, bananos, or sugar. The whole country is corrupted by this flow of money and drugs from the "politiqueros" up top down to the street gangs below. But those street gangs below are already organized in an international crime cartel that stretches from the States through Mexico down through Central America. Se llaman Salva Trucha y Mara 18. Wake up and smell the coffee.

Some inaccuracies:

"under the leadership of its first left-leaning president in 53 years"

No sign of any leftist policies. Instead, it's something like Thailand, with the use of populist policies in rural areas, the handing out of free food from the government (branded with Colom's UNE party logo) and stipends for the poor. Registering for these requires lots of personal data be handed over, forming a useful database of the poor and grateful for UNE to call upon at the next election. The intention, it seems, is to hopefully use the poor to defeat the aspirations of the smaller and more educated section of the country, which is concentrated in the capital. I don't think such maneouvres count as leftist at all. A prime example was Colom's radio show, which was broadcast absurdly early in the mornings, in the hope that city people wouldn't be tuning in to hear Colom propagandise his policies to the rural poor.

"The country came out of the war severely divided, not only between the wealthy and the poor, but also between the indigenous Mayan communities and the ladinos (those of mixed European and indigenous ancestry)."

This statement suggests that these divisions were caused by, or deepened by, the civil war. That's a very questionable claim, and is probably the result of not researching back far enough into Guatemala's social history. There have been massacres of the Mayans by the Spanish since the very beginning of the conquest, and the civil war was business as usual in some senses. It's arguable that the centuries of clear social divisions, in education, marriage, work, customs, clothing, housing, etc, resulted in practically no change in the relations between different social groups in Guatemala. Society here is much the same today as it was before the civil war, which is nothing to celebrate, admittedly.

"However, contrary to the claims of the Guatemalan government, this emergency is not entirely the product of unalterable weather patterns. The tenebrous political, social, and economic history of the nation, combined with poor leadership and a gross lack of accountability has directly led to the crisis."

Really good that you mention this, Colom has been bypassing the public health system, establishing parallel clinics in rural areas, with a number of negative impacts on doctors, 1) they have no resources, 2) the government trumpets that there are plenty of resources, etc, so that doctors are under siege from patients who believe they are stealing medicines, dressings, and so on, 3) an understandable slump in morale in a country where working in the public health system is a massive daily challenge.

"provoked thousands of angry members of the elite to the streets"

Whoever wrote this sentence is not Guatemalan, and perhaps has never even been to Guatemala. They certainly didn't attend the Rosenberg protests. Is this a grad student's work? I hate to break it to you, but good as a lot of this research is, there are some things you only learn on the ground.

To be generous, I could say, 'define elite', but a definition that included those doing the protesting would run counter to the general meaning of the word. Let me help. It was the middle classes who made up the bulk of the protestors against the death of Rosenberg, not the elite. Not every Ladino can be considered a member of the elite in a country that has some incredibly wealthy people at the top and a wafer-thin middle class of business owners and professionals below, people who may share a similar skin colour and a heritage, but have none of the power of the big-hitters.

But, on the whole, good to see an article on COHA about the country I live in, to gauge the accuracy and depth of the research. Definitely worth a B!