{"id":16085,"date":"2021-06-08T11:42:09","date_gmt":"2021-06-08T15:42:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=16085"},"modified":"2026-01-26T19:25:50","modified_gmt":"2026-01-27T00:25:50","slug":"guatemala-human-rights-ravaged-by-u-s-drug-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2021\/06\/08\/guatemala-human-rights-ravaged-by-u-s-drug-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Guatemala Human Rights Ravaged by U.S. Drug War"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mises Institute, June 8, 2021<\/h3>\n

Guatemala: The Human Rights Nightmare That Is the US Drug War<\/a><\/h2>\n
by <\/span>James Bovard<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
\n

Vice President Kamala Harris visited Guatemala earlier this week to bestow millions of dollars in new foreign aid on that government. The Biden administration is pretending that giving more US tax dollars<\/a> to Central American governments will miraculously reduce the surge of illegal immigrants that Biden\u2019s appointees are welcoming in Arizona, Texas, and elsewhere. The purpose of Harris\u2019s trip and the new handouts is not to solve that problem but simply to make the Biden administration appear to give a damn about the issue.<\/p>\n

In her official statements during the visit, Harris included no admission of how the US drug war has been a pox on Guatemala. Her silence was no surprise considering Joe Biden\u2019s nearly half century of fanaticism for that pointless crusade.<\/p>\n

I learned about the wreckage of US drug policies when I visited Guatemala in 1992. I had been writing articles bashing drug prohibition for almost a decade at that point. But before that trip, I had only vague notions of the ravages being inflicted on hapless foreigners.<\/p>\n

I went to Guatemala to give a couple speeches on the follies of protectionist trade policy, spurred by the publication the previous year of my book\u00a0The Fair Trade Fraud<\/a><\/em> (St. Martin\u2019s Press). I was hosted by the president of Francisco Marroqu\u00edn University, Manuel Ayau, a genial yet fearless fighter for free markets. I didn\u2019t realize until I arrived that Ayau had recently been the presidential candidate of the \u201cparty of organized violence\u201d and was on several left-wing \u201cdeath lists.\u201d Guatemala had shortages of almost everything except political assassinations. Ayau, a compact dynamo, was hepped up because he\u2019d just gotten a laser sighting attachment for his Clint Eastwood\/Dirty Harry caliber .44 Magnum. As his chauffeur-bodyguard drove us around the capital city, Ayau trained that red dot on all sorts of targets. I was happy I was sitting behind him.<\/p>\n

Guatemala was a struggling Third World\u00a0nation striving to overcome decades of genocide and civil strife. Unfortunately, it was also increasingly victimized by chemical warfare. To blight any suspected marijuana or poppy plants, the US government was dousing broad swaths of Guatemala with toxins to preemptively destroy anything growing below. The year before I visited, a group of Guatemalan beekeepers sued the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), claiming that the spraying had destroyed half of their industry. Herbicides had contaminated local drinking water and many residents had required hospitalization after exposure to the chemicals. A Guatemalan human rights commission asserted that the spraying had destroyed so many farmers\u2019 corn and bean crops that serious food shortages could result.<\/p>\n

US policymakers presumed that the solution was to further militarize the drug war. After farmers began shooting at the planes, the US government sent in Black Hawk helicopter gunships to accompany the crop dusters and suppress peasant revolts. I called the US embassy to ask about the controversy and was told that the complaints came from \u201cilliterate Indians\u201d and were nothing but \u201cdrug war disinformation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Outside of Guatemala City, I met farmers and small businessmen and pumped them for information on the US drug war. A manager of a large farm in central Guatemala told me that many of his shipments of yucca cane to Europe were rejected because they arrived in Rotterdam and were rotting as a result of DEA\u2019s drug spraying. Another farmer bewailed how his harvests exported to the United States were routinely destroyed during Customs Service searches for illicit drugs (he never received compensation even though no drugs were found). A Guatemalan banker told me that the DEA was involved in shooting down or forcing crash landings of small planes suspected of carrying drugs. A prominent Guatemalan politician told me, “If you criticize the Drug Enforcement Agency, you might lose your visa” and be banned from visiting the US. Guatemalans were outraged when the US ambassador revoked the visa of a Guatemalan judge who refused to vigorously prosecute an alleged drug smuggler.<\/p>\n

After I returned to Washington, I hounded drug policy activists, human rights groups, and environmentalists to learn more about the US drug war run amok south of the border. A Peace Corps volunteer who had spent eighteen months working with Guatemalan farmers told me that the pilots were spraying much more toxic concentrations than the US embassy admitted. No wonder crops were dying.<\/p>\n

I flogged the Guatemalan debacle in a Washington Times<\/em><\/a> op-ed: \u201cU.S. anti-drug activities are wrecking the environment, terrorizing the people<\/a>, and subverting the market economies that the United States loves to champion.\u201d US antidrug money was pouring into the coffers of a military perennially notorious for committing genocide against the Mayans and other minorities. I observed: \u201cGiving the Guatemalan army more weapons to fight marijuana growers is like giving bazookas to the Mafia to combat jaywalking in New York City<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The piece also highlighted the imperious behavior of US government agents throughout Central America: \u201cDEA agents have often behaved acted as if the drug war gives them a right to impose martial law on foreign nations. In Bolivia, DEA agents have donned black masks and gone out and destroyed newly paved roads in the jungle in order to prevent drug traffickers from utilizing them. In Mexico, Guatemala, and elsewhere, DEA agents have kidnapped those accused of drug crimes and taken them to the United States.\u201d The article concluded: \u201cExporting our drug war to Guatemala and other Latin American nations is Yankee Imperialism at its worst<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n

My article enraged DEA chief Robert Bonner. \u201cColumnist Sprays Tons of Misinformation over Your Pages\u201d was the\u00a0headline the Washington Times <\/em>used for his response to my piece. Bonner claimed that I had done \u201ca great disservice to your readers<\/a>\u201d\u00a0and declared: \u201cWe certainly are not behaving as if the \u2018drug war gives us the right to impose martial law on foreign nations,\u2019 as Mr. Bovard contends.\u201d (Bonner became a top Homeland Security honcho after 9\/11.) Bonner insisted that the herbicide the DEA was using\u2014Roundup\u2014was practically harmless unless adults were consuming ten ounces per day. Since that time, Roundup has been recognized as a carcinogen and more than twenty\u00a0nations have restricted<\/a> or banned its use.<\/p>\n

Bonner\u2019s denials did not deter the DEA from wreaking havoc throughout Central America in the following decades. But US policy \u201chad no impact on the amount of drugs\u201d shipped from Guatemala to the US, the General Accounting Office concluded the following year. Guatemala has \u201cbecome the transshipment point for more than 75 percent of the cocaine smuggled into the United States,\u201d the Boston Globe<\/em> reported in 2005. Massive US aid for the Guatemalan military became a propellant for drug smuggling, which became spearheaded by top generals and elite special forces units.<\/p>\n

It would be na\u00efve to expect the Biden administration to embrace any solution to a problem that involves decreasing US government power. But giving more money to Central American regimes will do nothing to compensate farmers, businessmen, and others still victimized by the US war on drugs. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Americans will continue to ignore the carnage that is inflicted abroad in their name.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
Author:James Bovard<\/a><\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

James Bovard is the author of ten books, including 2012\u2019s Public Policy Hooligan<\/em>, and 2006\u2019s Attention Deficit Democracy<\/em>. He has written for the New York Times<\/em>, Wall Street Journal<\/em>, Playboy<\/em>, Washington Post<\/em>, and many other publications.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mises Institute, June 8, 2021 Guatemala: The Human Rights Nightmare That Is the US Drug War by James Bovard Vice President Kamala Harris visited Guatemala earlier this week to bestow millions of dollars in new foreign aid on that government. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16085"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16085\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16087,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16085\/revisions\/16087"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}