On November 4, SOA graduate General Otto Perez Molina lost the presidential election in Guatemala to centrist candidate Alvaro Colom. Perez Molina was chief of Guatemala’s G-2 military intelligence when the staff was implicated in the assassination of Judge Edgar Ramiro Elias Ogaldez. According to acclaimed Guatemalan American writer Francisco Goldman’s new book, The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?, Perez Molina was also involved in the 1998 murder of beloved Catholic Bishop Juan Gerardi, who was bludgeoned to death two days after presenting a truth commission about the country’s brutal 36-year civil war. The report cited that most of the 200,000 deaths from the war were at the hands of the Guatemalan Army. (In 2001, SOA graduate Col. Lima Estrada was convicted for the murder, along with two other army officers and a priest.)

Colom carried many rural and Maya voters to defeat the general. Mayans suffered the worst losses in the civil war.

According to an August 18 AP story, 13 high-ranking officers accused of providing security and mobilizing troops for the leader of the Norte del Valle Cartel, one of the FBI’s 10 most-wanted criminals.

Over half of the 13 military officials implicated in the drug cartel protection ring attended the U.S. Army School of the Americas and/or its successor institute, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Two were even instructors at the school, where they taught “peacekeeping operations” and “democratic sustainment” in 2003-2004.