*NEWS*GUATEMALA:KIDS SNIFFING INK-TONER

[Anonymous]

Guatemala’s gruesome cleansing of the streets
Police
death squads, public lynchings and vigilante groups take a brutal toll
on the country’s teeming poor and other ‘undesirables’
GUATEMALA
CITY — It is almost noon and Dura Rosales is still asleep. She is lying
on a soiled mattress that is blocking a sidewalk on the outskirts of
town. Her right arm is wrapped around the waist of her boyfriend,
Carlos, who is asleep beside her. Her head is nestled into the back of
his neck. They have no blanket.Ms. Rosales is disturbed by a street
worker.”Cómo estás?” she asks.Ms. Rosales’s dark hair falls across her
face as she looks up. She lifts a hand to shield her eyes from the
early afternoon light. She is unimaginably small. Her yellow sweater,
jeans and white running shoes look like they’ve been worn for months.
Her fingernails are plugged with black grime. Her face is covered in
what looks like coal dust. She could be a chimneysweep from Dickensian
times.Twelve-year-old Edwin Cabrera of Guatemala City sniffs ink-toner for a cheap high that threatens to seriously damage his brain.Ms.
Rosales, 20, has lived on the street almost half of her life. Beaten by
her parents, she left home when she was 11. She has had two children,
who have been given up for adoption, and suffered a miscarriage after
being beaten up by her 17-year-old boyfriend, the one now lying beside
her.

She is pregnant again.
Minutes after she wakes up, a
friend gives her a small rag that has been dampened with ink toner. She
puts it to her nose and inhales. The teenager who has given her the rag
is high himself. His eyes are watering. His words are slurred. He
staggers when he walks. Street workers say he has suffered brain damage
from years of sniffing toner.There are pockets of people like Ms.
Rosales all over Guatemala City. People who have called the streets
home since they were little. Many have been out here so long they are
effectively feral. It would be impossible for them to adapt to a normal
lifestyle now. Street workers say most will be dead before their 25th
birthday, just like Ms. Rosales’s teenaged brother, who she says died
on the streets at the hands of the police.No one knows how many street
children there are in Guatemala but Claudia Rivera, director of Casa
Alianza, an organization that helps children in need, estimates the
number is in the thousands.Street kids are among those considered
“undesirables” and as such have been targeted and randomly killed by
police hit squads, private security guards and members of the public.In
Guatemala, they call this “social cleansing.””I know I probably won’t
live long,” Ms. Rosales says through an interpreter, as she watches her
boyfriend sell the mattress beneath her for a few cents. “I have seen
lots of people beaten and killed on the streets by the police and
others. That’s what happens. I live for now.”According to Ms. Rivera,
there were 312 children slain from January to September of 2007. That’s
in Guatemala City alone.”Some of that was social cleansing and some of
it was just general violence,” says Ms. Rivera, over a coffee in a
local café. “But homeless children are often the target. They sometimes
have to do whatever it takes to get food and neighbours hire security
people to look after their property or stores. Rather than call the
police if a street kid is hanging around, they just shoot them. And no
one cares.”In Guatemala, social cleansing has caught the attention of
the United Nations. In a report issued last year, the UN said the
practice is reminiscent of the “selective killing” that was carried out
by the military during the 30-year civil war here that ended in 1996.
The death toll from the war is estimated to be more than 200,000, with
more than 90 per cent of the killings committed by the government.

The
UN concedes that most of the more than 6,000 homicides that occur in
Guatemala each year remain unsolved. But it has also concluded that
police and soldiers are certainly responsible for many of the arbitrary
homicides of so-called undesirables – a group that also includes gang
members, prostitutes, homosexuals and transvestites.But it is not only
police death squads carrying out random killings. It is also members of
the public.Lynchings of suspected gang members or petty thieves have
become common, especially in indigenous areas of the country. Fed up
with an inept and corrupt police force, Guatemalans are increasingly
taking the law into their own hands. It is their own form of social
cleansing.Javier Monterroso, director of the Institute of Comparative
Penal Studies, said in an interview here that there are groups now
selling social cleansing services. One such group calls itself the
Justice Angels. Its members even have business cards. The Justice
Angels work mainly at a market here called the Terminal.”The Justice
Angels will take care of anyone suspected of stealing from any of the
merchants, and by ‘take care of’ I mean kill,” Mr. Monterroso said.
“The police know what is going on but they turn a blind eye to their
activities. It saves them work.”After the killing of three Salvadoran
congressmen last year by what turned out to be four corrupt members of
the Guatemalan National Civil Police, it was reported that there are
eight squads, each with five members, within the police currently
engaged in social cleansing activities, Mr. Monterroso says.In his
report on the situation, UN envoy Philip Alston says that in a typical
social cleansing scenario, police recruit an informant, promising
amnesty from prosecution in exchange for information about the
activities and whereabouts of gang members and other criminals.”Police
will then drive to the location, typically without uniforms and in an
unmarked car, apprehend the person identified by the informant and kill
him or her at another location,” Mr. Alston writes in his report.

A
recent nationwide survey indicated Guatemalans support the concept of
social cleansing in overwhelming numbers – nearly 80 per cent.”Because
they are terrified, depressed and disenchanted with the justice system
and they think that social cleansing will help this problem,” Mr.
Monterroso says.Back on the streets, meantime, in another
neighbourhood, 12-year-old Edwin Cabrera shows off his war wound. He
was shot in the leg by someone whose house he approached in the hopes
of getting some food.”I just knocked on the door and the man pulled out
a gun and shot me in the leg,” Edwin says. He, too, is sniffing a rag
doused in ink toner. He’s been doing it since he was 9, he says. That’s
when he left home because he was being beaten.He is wearing a baseball
hat backward. His dark pants look like they’ve never been washed. But
when he smiles he has perfect white teeth that glisten in the sun.Does
he worry about being killed”Sure,” he says, sounding much older than
his age. “But what am I going to do? The street is my home.”Then he
buries his nose in the rag.

[Author]

January 11, 2008 at 1:12 PM