GUATEMALA CITY — The United States lacks concrete policies to properly document and address alleged abuses of its military donations in Central America, according to a new government report, fueling considerations that potential abuses will continue to go unchecked.
Between the U. S. Departments of State and DefenseThe U. S. , the U. S. The U. S. provided more than $66 million in security assistance to Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras from 2017 to 2021.
There have been allegations of misuse of devices in Guatemala, but gaps in policies for recording, tracking and investigating them, according to a report by the U. S. Government Accountability Office. The U. S. Department of Health (GAO) released Wednesday.
“It’s incredibly vital that agencies keep a record of the allegations they’ve investigated,” said Chelsa Kenney, director of foreign affairs for GAO, a nonpartisan watchdog that works for Congress.
First, the State and Defense Departments told the GAO that they had only investigated one allegation of abuse in Guatemala in 2018, recorded in their tracking spreadsheets.
However, the GAO’s review of the documents found that departments had reviewed at least five complaints and that the Defense Department had taken action uncovered in a trend of repeated abuses, Kenney said.
“Without recording those allegations, [the defense departments] and the state had a mistaken picture of what happened in the afterlife and that could be the reaction of the agencies if the considerations resurfaced in the future,” he told Al Jazeera.
The findings came just three weeks after the U. S. Department of Defense had made the U. S. Department of Defense. U. S. Navy to Donate 95 Cars to Guatemalan Army for Use in Border Security Efforts Despite Misuse of U. S. Armored Jeeps. U. S. donations to Guatemala’s Department of the Interior for interagency use in border regions.
“This donation, which comes in the context of this new report, is very worrying,” said Iduvina Hernández, director of the Association for the Study of Security in Democracy, a Guatemalan nongovernmental organization.
“It turns out that basic human rights issues in Guatemala are not of interest to the U. S. Department of Defense. “
The GAO report tested the U. S. reaction. Five incidents of misuse reported between 2018 and 2021 involving some of the 220 U. S. Department of Defense jeeps involved five U. S. Department of Defense jeeps. He traveled to Guatemala between 2013 and 2018.
The most prominent case occurred on August 31, 2018, when then-President Jimmy Morales announced that Guatemala would renew the mandate of the CICIG, a UN-backed commission against impunity.
On the same day, US-supplied jeeps were used in the capital, outside the CICIG offices and the US embassy. “The U. S. government saw this as an act of intimidation, according to [Defense Department] officials,” the GAO said. in its report.
In 2019, the Department of Defense of the EE. UU. no will provide more apparatus or education to the Guatemalan interagency special forces involved in this incident. This policy is still in effect.
Due to human rights and rule of law considerations in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, the U. S. Congress is in the process of being held in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. The U. S. has banned aid to the 3 countries of the Foreign Military Financing Program, the main military aid program, for the past two years. The State Department continues to provide security assistance.
The cars donated to the Guatemalan military last month and the jeeps provided in the past, however, were provided through a segment of the National Defense Authorization Act than through the foreign military’s investment program.
Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, a U. S. -based nonprofitThe U. S. Department of Human Rights in the Americas said the Defense Ministry has a “shadow program” to circumvent human rights and surveillance conditions.
“This is my concern,” he told Al Jazeera.
“To assist an army like Guatemala’s, which has such a long history of human rights abuses and such a long history of literally endemic corruption, and not to have figured out a way around this bureaucratic vacuum that prevents them from tracking how it’s misused, is quite shocking.
The U. S. Department of State The U. S. Food and Drug Administration accepted the GAO’s advice that end-use violation tracking guidelines, which are being developed lately, define how to record and track suspected incidents of misuse of U. S. -supplied equipment. U. S.
“The State Department takes its duty very seriously when it comes to tracking the use of devices provided across the United States, to ensure that they are used for lawful and appropriate purposes,” a State Department spokesperson told Al Jazeera, noting that the branch will standardize and its procedures for tracking reports of such violations.
The GAO report included 4 concrete recommendations for the Ministry of Defense, which agreed with two of the 4 in its official response, included in the report.
“Our report highlights some considerations about [the Department of Defense’s] overall surveillance and abuse response program,” Kenney said.
“By law, the program aims to provide moderate assurance that the apparatus is only used for its intended purpose, but we have not noticed that they have structures in position to do so thoroughly,” he said.
The Department of Defense “agrees with the GAO’s advice to compare our end-use tracking program with the fact that it provides moderate assurance, to the extent possible, that U. S. aircraft are only used for their intended purposes through recipient countries,” the Defense Department spokesman said. Lt. Col. Devin T Robinson told Al Jazeera.
Meanwhile, activists and human rights analysts fear that the new cars donated last month will only be used to combat smuggling and trafficking.
The Guatemalan military has periodically intervened with police and migration agencies along Guatemala’s southern border with Honduras in operations to prevent the transit of migrants and asylum seekers who do meet access requirements.
“We have an irresponsible technique on the part of the United States by making those donations without additional oversight,” Hernandez said. “The newly released report highlights this technique and limited possibilities for monitoring and evaluation. “