Jungle of drugs, murder, landing strips and laboratories

SEMUY II: Bullet holes scar a wall in the only school in Semuy II, a remote village in north-eastern Guatemala where three soldiers were shot dead early last month as they searched for jungle landing strips used by drug traffickers.

In the village school’s classrooms, books and open notebooks gathered dust on the desks, while on a board, the fateful date of the shootings was written in red ink: “September 3”.

President Jimmy Morales said the soldiers were killed by villagers protecting a drug shipment. In response, the government gave the army temporary emergency powers over a vast swathe of surrounding territory, leading to some startling discoveries.

Searches uncovered coca plantations and cocaine laboratories, including in Semuy II’s municipality of El Estor, suggesting drug gangs have been operating freely in an area better known for its natural beauty, mining and African palm.

“We’ve found landing strips, some of them clandestine. There are some strips that are legal, but there’s evidence of planes landing with illicit goods,” General Luis Alberto Morales, deputy head of the presidential general staff, told Reuters.

Images provided by the government of the army’s discoveries show what appears to be a well-built laboratory, which Morales said could produce up to half a tonne of cocaine a day. He said the government had discovered 1.5 million coca plants along with the labs, estimating a street value of $800 million (R12bn).

While Andean plantations vary widely in density of plants per hectare, it would be hard to fit so many plants on the apparently small areas of land so far discovered by the soldiers in the wake of the killings. Only last year, Guatemala discovered a small field of coca for the first time.

However, the discovery of sophisticated laboratories fits with recent trends of Colombian gangs exporting half-processed cocaine to finish the product in countries with less strict policing, said Hernando Bernal, an official from the UN drugs and crime agency’s illicit crop monitoring program. The US embassy in Guatemala declined to comment.

The events of last month are murky. Around noon, a patrol of nine soldiers with weapons at the ready tried to cross the village of Semuy II, the first time military officials had been seen in years, locals and authorities agree. Authorities say the villagers ambushed the soldiers and shot three of them behind the school. Villagers say soldiers sparked a dispute and fired off rounds into the air, and then armed locals opened fire on the soldiers.

Speaking in the hills behind the village where he farms cocoa, community leader Vicente Perez, 43, denied the government’s accusation that the villagers were growing drugs and protecting traffickers.

According to Edgar Caal, a marine who survived the attack, more than a hundred locals waited with shotguns, machetes, sticks and stones, and before attacking issued the patrol a warning.

“We ran for our lives,” the young marine said from a hospital bed while the camera took in other injured comrades with scars on their hands, wrists and backs.