Infamous Guatemalan army unit confronts new foes

POPTUN, Guatemala, Dec 13: A picture of a fierce-looking gorilla emblazoned with the words ''Welcome to Hell'' once hung over the entrance of Central America's toughest military training center, the notorious ''Kaibil'' school in Guatemala.

Now, visitors to the base in the Peten jungle are greeted by a cheery painting of a soldier holding hands with a blonde-haired girl. It says, ''The Guatemalan Kaibils, respected by their adversaries, loved by the people. Have a nice trip!'' The red-bereted fighters, who once ate dog guts as training, want to leave behind a sordid past of human rights crimes and project a new image as international peacekeepers and a front against rampant drug gangs.

Created in the 1970s to fight a counter-insurgency campaign against Guatemala's leftist guerrillas during a 36-year civil war that left over 200,000 dead, the Kaibils were infamous as one of the most brutal special forces units in Latin America.

When the war ended in 1996, the army's budget was slashed, its ranks depleted, and the highly trained combat force was left looking for a new enemy.

At about the same time, drug trafficking exploded along the porous border with Mexico, from where sophisticated and well-equipped gangs ship cocaine to the United States.

But the Kaibils cannot legally fight the dealers.

''They laugh at us,'' said Kaibil commander Colonel Eduardo Morales Alvarez, as soldiers on the base were setting up a beauty pageant for teens from the nearby town of Poptun. ''They drive past in their cars full of weapons and there's nothing I can do, because I am not authorized,'' he said.

The US Drug Enforcement Agency estimates some 75 per cent of cocaine shipped from Colombia to the United States passes through Central America, much of that via smuggler-built landing strips and roads in the lawless jungle region around Poptun.

The drug gangs are so well armed and trained that even the Kaibils, held responsible for savage rapes and mutilations of villagers in the civil war, are worried.

''To be honest, I'm scared,'' said Morales. ''These people are psychopaths, they kill each other like they kill cockroaches.'' He also has to compete with drug-traffickers who pay highly to recruit trained Kaibils.

Former Kaibil soldiers have been lured to work as assassins and run security for powerful drug lords by cash payments, sometimes ten times the average army salary, Morales said.

Beheadings of policemen and drug rivals in Mexico have been blamed on ex-Guatemalan soldiers working with the infamous ''Zetas'' brigade, a renegade unit that broke from the Mexican army to serve as the enforcement arm of the Gulf cartel.

Mexico's top organized crime prosecutor, Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos has said there could be as many as 100 Kaibils working for Mexican cartels.

"Come on, you worthless maggots," shout the trainers from megaphones as the soldiers climb up walls and tumble through barbed wire. "You all are going to plead mercy and cry like little babies after this." As harsh as the training is, it is nothing compared to how it was during the war, said Morales.

"Before it was total savagery," he said. "Now the course is much more technical." The school named after Kaibil Balam, a legendary Mayan prince said to have heroically fought Spanish invaders during the 16th century conquest, taught recruits to bite heads off live chickens.

Commanders forced troops to eat dog and snake entrails and suffer blasts of tear gas. Some would-be Kaibils died during training, by drowning, heat stroke or lethal falls.

Now, the special forces, experts in jungle warfare, are sent on UN peacekeeping operations. Earlier this year eight Kaibil soldiers were killed on a secret mission in the Congo to capture one of the leaders of Uganda's infamous Lord's Resistance Army.

A UN-backed truth commission published after the Guatemalan war said the "extreme cruelty" of the training methods was responsible for many human rights violations carried out during the army's 1980s scorched earth campaign.

Kaibil troops were blamed for the 1982 massacre in Dos Erres, a town of suspected rebel sympathizers. Soldiers entered the town disguised as guerrillas, forced locals from their houses and slaughtered them over two days.

Women and girls were raped, baby's heads were smashed against walls, children were killed with hammer blows and over 200 bodies dumped in the town's well, the commission said in its report.

Reuters