Guatemala: Resisting the New Colonialism http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/5136

Two objectives guide the United States and transnational companies in Central America: geopolitical and military control and enormous profits from mining megaprojects. Militarism, drug-trafficking, and violence complete a picture in which the same ones always lose.-The expansion of the capitalist model is coming at us from two directions: The growth of agribusiness, above all sugar cane and African palm, and the expansion of mining, and the privatization of water that goes along with it. At the same time, the country has been turned into a drug-trafficking corridor from the south to the United States, with a huge dispute over territory on the border between Guatemala and Mexico.

All this creates a complex scenario. The old oligarchies have entered into alliances with drug traffickers and with transnationals. That annuls a state that was already weak, both in terms of citizen’s rights and in terms of security. A good part of the current violence is provoked by “guardias blancas,” as we already have 60,000 private security forces and 15,000 police. In reality, this so-called private security–legal or illegal–protects the mafias through a process of re-militarizing of the country.