BELIZE - USA NEEDS TO WATCH IT´S STEP WITH THE MILITARY OF GUATEMALA?

BELIZEANS PONDER THE REQUEST BY THE NEW MILITARY GENERAL/PRESIDENT, REQUESTING USA MILITARY AID TO HIS COUNTRY.

The request by the new President of Guatemala makes Belizeans feel very uncomfortable. The new President, a retired General was a senior member of the Intelligence Department for the military, during all the killings in Guatemala. I knew a few of those colonels personally as friends. They freely admitted that the military of THAT time was a behind the scenes government, and acted as a MILITARY MAFIA and a colonel would be a senior CAPO on New York parlance reference, which they used with me describing themselves back during that time. The policy of the MAFIA, or military of that time, was to extort money, kill suspected opponents, or kill anybody that got in the way of their activities, just like the more familiar five NY mafia families. Their relatives got the senior government jobs.

It is very worrisome that this new Guatemalan President, who would have been a CAPO back at that time, but with whatever his military rank was back then on active duty. Given that there is on the TV NEWS big stories in Latin America, about the President of Salvador visiting the site of a town massacred ( over a 1000 men, women and children by a USA financed special battalion and trained by them, brings back horrorible memories of a war now past )

BELIZE a friendly neighbor of the past few GUATEMALAN PRESIDENTS look askance in horror, that includes even the idea, BIG BROTHER in the USA is going to finance and train once again, the Guatemalan military. Drug gangs or no! We have no objection to the USA providing support in communications intercepts, cell phones, walkie talkies and such, used by DRUG GANGS in Guatemala. But anything else is going to destablize all the good work of civilian governments throughout Central America that have built their economies, their civil societies, over the last 15 years, based on a PEACE platform. GUATEMALA must find it´s own solutions to dealing with gangs. Those solutions must be financed by their own resources, meager as they are. To finance the Guatemalan military is to re-build a military mafia, behind the scenes again in Guatemala. That is our FEAR and thought. The USA needs to tread lightly here, with military aid requests. Central America do not need this, nor want this either. The PEACE and euilibrium we have found in our respective countries, has been done without the military of the past, and has been working well, and democracy has taken strong hold in Central America.

The best thing THAT EVER HAPPENED to GUATEMALA was the downsizing of the Military there. After that happened, DEMOCRACY bloomed in that country. To reverse that course, would be truly IMPERIALISTIC, as Chavez is often quoted as saying.

To choose between DRUG GANGS and an expanded MILITARY IN GUATEMALA, the DRUG GANGS are the lesser evil. If the USA wants to give military aid, do so to your local state governments in the USA, and tackle the source of ALL OUR DRUG PROBLEMS in Central America. Get rid of the drug gangs in the USA.