Drug insurgency effects Guatamala election

NY Times:

It is election time in Guatemala and that means rallies and banners — and body bags.

In the campaigning leading up to elections on Sept. 9, the authorities have reported 61 violent attacks on candidates and political activists. The death toll is 26, including seven national congressmen and numerous other office seekers.

The flurry of bullets, and the occasional machete attack, make this the bloodiest campaign season in the history of a country with a long tradition of political violence, including 36 years of civil war that ended in 1996. But what makes the bloodletting different this time is that it has been attributed to narcotics traffickers and their allies intent on infiltrating Guatemala’s political system.

So dangerous is campaigning that Álvaro Colom, the leading presidential candidate, flies in a helicopter to avoid being ambushed and travels with a physician with extensive experience in bullet wounds. He is careful what he eats, lest someone poison it. “I hate to say this, but it’s more violent now than during the war,” he said.

It is not only South America’s drug-producing countries that are at risk these days from the impact of the drug trade, or even of becoming narcostates. More and more, corrosive effects are being felt in the countries where the drugs transit, like Guatemala, Mexico and Haiti, as competition grows, in effect, to set up toll roads on the drug routes to the United States.

Somewhere between 60 and 90 percent of the South American cocaine that enters the United States now comes through Central America, American officials say, pulling rising levels of political instability, violence and corruption in its wake.

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The drug insurgency is impacted just about every country south of our border and we need a more comprehensive approach to dealing with it and these countries need to join us in dealing with it or they will become narco terror states where the rule of law will be replaced by corruption and where "justice" must be purchased.