Guatemala Metropolis – The US lacks concrete insurance policies to correctly doc and tackle alleged misuse of its army tools donations in Central America, a brand new authorities report has discovered, fuelling considerations that potential abuses will proceed to go unchecked.
Between the US Departments of Protection and State, the US supplied greater than $66m in safety help to Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras from 2017 via 2021.
There have been a number of allegations of kit misuse in Guatemala however gaps in insurance policies to document, observe and examine them, based on a US Authorities Accountability Workplace (GAO) report launched on Wednesday.
“It’s extremely vital that companies keep a document of the allegations they’ve reviewed,” mentioned Chelsa Kenney, director of worldwide affairs at GAO, a non-partisan watchdog company that works for Congress.
The Departments of State and Protection each initially instructed GAO that they had solely reviewed one allegation of misuse in Guatemala in 2018, recorded of their monitoring spreadsheets.
Nevertheless, in GAO’s overview of paperwork, it discovered the departments had regarded into no less than 5 allegations and that the Division of Protection did take motion primarily based on a sample of repeated misuse, mentioned Kenney.
“With out recording these allegations, [the Departments of Defense] and State had an inaccurate image of what occurred up to now and that may have an effect on how the companies would reply if considerations had been to come up once more sooner or later,” she instructed Al Jazeera.
The findings got here simply three weeks after the US Division of Protection donated 95 autos to the Guatemalan military to be used in border safety efforts regardless of previous misuse of US armoured jeeps donated to the Guatemalan Ministry of the Inside for inter-agency use in border areas.
“This donation, which comes up within the context of this new report, is extremely worrisome,” mentioned Iduvina Hernandez, director of the Affiliation for the Examine of Safety in Democracy, a Guatemalan non-governmental group.
“Evidently elementary points associated to human rights in Guatemala will not be of curiosity to the US Division of Protection.”
Allegations of misuse
The GAO report examined the US response to 5 reported incidents of misuse between 2018 and 2021 involving among the 220 jeeps that the US Division of Protection supplied to Guatemala between 2013 and 2018.
Probably the most distinguished case was on August 31, 2018, when then-President Jimmy Morales introduced that Guatemala wouldn’t renew the mandate of CICIG, a UN-backed anti-impunity fee.
That very same day, US-provided jeeps had been used within the capital exterior the CICIG workplaces and the US Embassy. “The US authorities seen this as an act of intimidation, based on [Department of Defense] officers,” the GAO famous in its report.
In 2019, the US Division of Protection determined to not present any extra tools or coaching to the Guatemalan inter-agency process forces concerned in that incident. That coverage remains to be in impact.
On account of considerations associated to human rights and the rule of regulation in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, the US Congress has prohibited help to the three international locations underneath the Overseas Navy Financing programme, the first army help programme, for the previous two years. The Division of State nonetheless offers safety help.
The autos donated to the Guatemalan military final month and the jeeps supplied up to now, nonetheless, had been supplied via a bit of the Nationwide Protection Authorization Act slightly than the Overseas Navy Financing programme.
Adam Isacson, director for defence oversight on the Washington Workplace on Latin America, a US-based non-profit centered on human rights within the Americas, mentioned that “parallel programme” permits the Division of Protection to bypass human rights and monitoring situations.
“That’s my principal concern,” he instructed Al Jazeera.
“Aiding a army like Guatemala’s, which has such an enormous historical past of human rights violations and such an enormous historical past of actually endemic corruption, and never having give you a strategy to get round this bureaucratic doughnut gap that retains them from truly preserving observe of the way it’s misused – it’s fairly surprising.”
Suggestions
The US Division of State agreed with GAO’s advice that it guarantee end-use violation monitoring pointers, that are at present underneath improvement, define the best way to document and observe alleged incidents of US-provided tools misuse.
“The Division of State takes its duty very critically in relation to monitoring using US-provided tools, to make sure it’s getting used for authorized and applicable functions,” a Division of State spokesperson instructed Al Jazeera, noting the division will standardise and bolster its procedures for monitoring stories of such violations.
The GAO report additionally included 4 concrete suggestions for the Division of Protection, which agreed with two of the 4 in its official response, included within the report.
“Our report highlights some vital considerations about [the Department of Defense’s] general programme for monitoring and responding to misuse,” mentioned Kenney.
“By regulation, the programme is meant to offer an inexpensive assurance that tools is barely used for supposed functions, however we didn’t see that they’ve constructions in place to essentially do that completely,” she mentioned.
The Division of Protection “agrees with the GAO advice to judge our end-use monitoring program to make sure it offers affordable assurance, to the extent practicable, that US tools is barely used for its supposed functions by recipient international locations”, Division of Protection spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Devin T Robinson, instructed Al Jazeera.
Within the meantime, human rights activists and analysts have considerations that the brand new autos donated final month is not going to simply be used to fight contraband and trafficking.
The Guatemalan army has been periodically concerned alongside police and immigration companies alongside Guatemala’s southern border with Honduras in operations to halt the transit of migrants and asylum seekers who don’t meet entry necessities.
“We’re seeing that there’s an irresponsible strategy from the US in making these donations with out better supervision,” mentioned Hernandez. “The report that was simply launched highlights that strategy and the restricted prospects of supervision and analysis.”