Re: I know many people, and not only whites, have left SA because of the horrendous crime -- often, in fact, due to the multitudes of illegal immigrants from the rest of Africa which have swarmed into the country.
"Horrendous crime" in South Africa?!? LOL! You ain't seen nothin' yet....
Letter from Central America: A new wave of violence in Guatemala's streets
Ginger Thompson The New York Times
SUNDAY, JANUARY 1, 2006
GUATEMALA CITY There were 52 new bodies at the morgue on a recent Monday morning: 52 new chances for Guadalupe Diaz to find her son, Mario Toscano.
He was no angel, Diaz said of her son. The 20-year-old Toscano, known around the neighborhood as Chespy, was the leader of the violent Mara 18 street gang. And his mother long feared that he might wind up dead, but not that he would disappear.
Toscano has been missing since Aug. 27, Diaz said, when he was abducted at a convenience store by three gunmen. Diaz said that when neighbors tried to intervene in the kidnapping, the gunmen pulled out their weapons, identified themselves as police officers, warned the neighbors to move back, then loaded Toscano into an unmarked car and drove away.
Since then, Diaz, a maid, stops at the morgue on her way to work most every Monday. "To see them," she said of examining so many bodies, "I get chills."
A neighbor named Rosa Morales, 71, said her 15-year-old grandson, who was not a member of a gang, had been kidnapped in the same way two months ago. When asked who she thought was responsible for the attacks, she raised an evil from the past.
"The people say it's the death squads that are disappearing the people," Morales said, sobbing. "What gives them the right?"
Nearly a decade after the end of a civil war that left 200,000 people dead or missing in this country of 14 million, a new wave of violence has hit Guatemala and it looks a lot like the old one - some say worse. The Guatemalan authorities said an estimated 4,325 people had been killed in the first 10 months of 2005. That is one of the highest per capita murder rates in Latin America, and far more than the average annual killings in the last decade of this country's armed conflict.
Even in peace, governments across Central America have said violence remains the principal threat to stability. Here, as in neighboring Honduras and El Salvador, the violence comes with rape, torture, kidnappings and killings. And now, as they did during the civil war, human rights investigators have raised concerns about a clandestine "social cleansing campaign," led by rogue police officers and vigilante mobs.
This latest cycle of violence began five years ago, when street gangs with roots in Los Angeles - especially the Mara 18 and the Mara Salvatruchas, known as MS-13 - began to spread across Central America and southern Mexico, creating the same kind of havoc in poor neighborhoods here as they once did in places like Compton and Watts.
Then last year, men and boys suspected of being members of street gangs began to disappear in much the same way suspected guerrillas did during the 1980s: abducted from busy streets or ambushed in their beds, and forced into unmarked cars with tinted windows and no license plates.
Almost none of those kidnapped turn up alive. Some never turn up at all. When they do, they are often not found in one piece.
Beyond the attacks against gang members and youths suspected of being gang members, international human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have expressed concern about a disproportionate increase in the killing of women. The Guatemalan human rights ombudsman reported that from 2002 to 2004, killings of women increased by almost 57 percent, while the killings of men increased 21 percent.
The people of La Esperanza, Spanish for hope, live at the center of the storm.
"On June 16, they found a head in a bucket right there," said Elubia Velasquez, pointing toward a tortilla shop while walking along the main street of La Esperanza. "The hands were found near a light pole where you met me this morning. And farther down that way, under the bridge at Bucaro, they found the body."
Velasquez, born and reared in La Esperanza, said the neighborhood was once terrorized by the Mara 18. She said the gang members demanded so-called war taxes from all the merchants, bus drivers and delivery crews, and killed several people who refused to pay. The gang members, she said, had also raped dozens of girls, robbed countless homes and turned schoolchildren into drug addicts.
In the past year, however, she said, most of the gang members were either dead or in hiding.
The leader of the Mara 18 in Villalobos, known as El Quince, Spanish for 15, was abducted a year ago. His body was found a day later, with his hands and feet tied and with several gunshot wounds to the head, Velasquez said.
A gang member known as Gaspar had been strangled to death, other residents said.
Relatives of the victims, especially the relatives of dead gang members, said in numerous interviews that they believed that police officers and private security guards had led much of the kidnapping and killing in a secret campaign of state-sponsored "social cleansing," aimed at the young and the poor.
Interior Minister Carlos Vielmann flatly denied those accusations in an interview. Unlike the governments in Honduras and El Salvador, which adopted tough laws that made it a felony to belong to a gang, the Guatemalan government has launched a softer war against gangs that focuses on recreation and rehabilitation programs.
Vielmann said the government had also taken important steps to root out corruption in the police force by punishing dozens of officers responsible for abuses, upgrading equipment, and training and cooperating with the United States in vetting a special community policing unit that has had some success at decreasing the violence in a neighborhood with heavy gang activity, Villa Nueva.
Still, Vielmann acknowledged that corruption remained rampant among the officers of the National Civil Police. And he said he suspected that some of the secret security structures created during the civil war had become instruments of organized crime.
"I am not going to guarantee you that agents of state security forces or of private security forces have not in some moment committed an excess and killed someone," Vielmann said. "But I can tell you that this is not a policy of the state."
In a crime-plagued neighborhood called El Mezquital, people said some of the killing had brought relief.
Guadalupe del Carmen Alvarado, a resident, said that after gang members had killed a couple of merchants and bus drivers who had refused to pay war taxes, other merchants and bus drivers pooled money to hire gunmen to "eliminate the gangs."
"We don't like to see bad things happen, but to be sincere, when they started to kill the gang members, I gave thanks to God," Alvarado said.
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