Word: drugging
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Just as President Bush plans to visit Central America, the demons of corruption, drug dealing and murder there that have long been kept under wraps, either by official complicity or negligence, are beginning to attract public scrutiny. Eight brazen and grisly murders -three Salvadoran congressmen and their driver, and four Guatemalan policemen -have shaken the two countries' governments and shed light on the criminal underworld operating with impunity from inside police forces...
...crimes, the four were assassinated inside their maximum-security prison cell, left face down in a pool of blood, shot with their throats slit. Authorities and opposition politicians in Guatemala say the policemen were part of a group operating within Guatemala's security forces who were responsible for drug trafficking and death-squad style killings. The four were murdered before they could reveal the full extent of their allegedly illegal activities. "They were killed to keep the lid on Pandora's box," said El Salvador's chief of police Rodrigo Avila...
...massacring entire Mayan villages accused of supporting the rebels. Many wartime figures were never prosecuted for their offenses, and human rights groups and the U.N. have warned that former state security forces - laid off after the peace accords mandated a downsizing of the military - could be involved in the drug smuggling rings...
...Although mystery still shrouds the deaths of the three Salvadoran deputies, Berger said that "a drug-trafficking gang with ties to both countries" was responsible. On Friday, the country's top police investigator, who was in charge of the policemen accused of murdering the congressman, resigned. And it will be seen in the coming weeks if other top Guatemalan officials, including the police chief or the interior minister, will be the next...
...Saca, too, may be in hot water if it is determined that the three dead congressmen were themselves involved in drug trafficking. The murdered politicians, Eduardo D'Aubuisson, William Pichinte and Jose Ramon Gonzalez, belonged to El Salvador's ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance party, known as ARENA. All were members of the regional parliament, which has 132 members representing five of the seven Central American nations. Based in Guatemala City, the parliament, known by its Spanish acronym PARLACEN, has been mired in drug-trafficking scandals in recent years. In 2003 a Honduran member of the body was convicted of trafficking...