How strange to read this news less than two weeks after I posted here about the very same Adán Castillo and his dramatic criticism of the Guatemalan state’s impotence toward drug trafficking organizations as he announced his impending resignation. The agency Castillo led — the Antinarcotics Analysis and Investigation Service (SAIA in its Spanish initials) — was itself formed just two years ago to replace a previous anti-narcotics agency that the U.S. and Guatemalan governments found to be hopelessly infiltrated by the narco.

There is a question here of cause and effect; I see two possible conclusions to be drawn here:

1. Castillo was indeed involved somehow in trafficking, and knew he was going down. He therefore made these statements to create public sympathy for his situation and spread doubt over the soon-to-be-revealed charges against him.
2. The charges and arrest were merely retaliation against what Castillo was doing. Either the Guatemalan or U.S. government was uncomfortable with what Castillo knew and did not want him a free man if he resigned his post.

Castillo would hardly be the first to pull a tactic like that described in #1. But what if he isn’t that slimy? Maybe Castillo knew too much about drug kingpins within the Guatemalan military who were close to political figures, or who had allies within the CIA or some other U.S. agency. Or maybe someone simply didn’t like him undermining the legitimacy of the new SAIA so soon after its creation at the behest of the North Americans.

A possibility is that Castillo does indeed have some shadowy chapters in his past, but that any drug-related offenses are relatively minor compared to those of military higher-ups. If someone did have it out for this guy, all that someone needed was to find one slip-up to take him out of the game. No matter what the outcome of his trial, Castillo’s career and credibility are finished. That’s the beauty of the drug war for people with scores to settle. Want someone out of the picture? Tell the DEA he’s a narco.

But again, in this case it may very well be that Castillo’s image as a honest, disillusioned cop was a deception.

Also, Bill writes that “it might not be a surprise if the DEA found itself also locked out of a nation like Guatemala.” Though he didn’t go into it in his Texas Observer peice, here is something Smyth wrote ten years ago about conflicts between the two agencies in Guatemala. There is undoubtedly a complex web of interests and loyalties that underlies every operation there.

Either way, panic about drugs in Guatemala is in the end convenient for many people as it draws all the concern and outrage toward that newer problem, and away from the horrific crimes the same military committed during the 1980s and early 90s. The height of the Guatemalan civil war, as U.S.-backed forces battled a rural leftist movement, was arguably the closest thing we have seen to genocide in this hemisphere during the last half-century. Hundreds of thousands of civilians, mostly indigenous peasants, were killed at the hands of government forces. The Guatemalan army’s U.S. backers were well aware of these tactics, and the CIA continued funneling money to the killers any way they could. They must be thanking their lucky stars today that Guatemala has such a nasty drug problem that the war crimes seem all but forgotten.