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Guatelama City -- By 9:30 a.m., the streets are jammed. People hang out the doors of the old red buses that rumble along the main thoroughfares. Vendors are setting up shop on their usual corners, as shotgun-toting security guards take up position in front of everything from banks to run-down shoe stores.
Gustavo Veliz is at the wheel of a beige, 2005 Toyota Tacoma, a shiny pickup that stands out among the vehicles from decades past that crowd the streets of Guatemala's impoverished capital. It is owned by his employer, an armoured-car company called Transporte de Valores y Servicios (TVS).
Mr. Veliz turns down 13th Street, one of the busiest in the downtown core, and is making his way past the yellow and white colonial façade of what used to be the medical faculty of San Carlos University. Now, it is a high school ringed by a black wrought-iron fence. Students sit under the cool canopy of the property's pine trees.
Juan Garcia is opening the flaps of the cart he uses to transport the goods he has sold for years at the corner of 13th Street and 2nd Avenue – Viceroy, Payasos and Marlboro cigarettes, bags of water, cookies, gum, Tampico Citrus Punch. Mr. Garcia is hanging the last bags of tortilla chips when the morning din is pierced by what sounds to him like firecrackers.
The traffic light at the corner is green for those travelling along 13th and for a few minutes the cars keep moving. But then they begin to stop, and Mr. Garcia sees a beige pickup about 20 metres away from where he is standing. Its passenger window has been shot out and there is a body on the pavement beside it. A pool of blood is forming around the head.
Soon police arrive and cordon off the area. The media take up position behind yellow police tape. Television cameramen and newspaper photographers start taking pictures of the dead man. He is wearing brown cowboy boots and blue jeans. His bulky beige jacket is hiked up, exposing his lower back.
Onlookers gather. Cars start honking. Word circulates that there is another body inside the truck.
An old man stands on the corner, watching the police search for bullet casings. He is wearing a white cowboy hat and his chestnut skin looks well lived in.
“This is what we do in Guatemala,” he says in Spanish to no one in particular. “We kill one another.”
Then he walks on.
THE CRISIS
They do kill one another in Guatemala, at a staggering pace. Over the past four years, the number of people found dead in the streets or hung from trees or pulled from ditches has climbed to mind-numbing levels.
In 2002, before the violence began to escalate, roughly 2,900 people were killed. Last year, the total reached 6,033, although international observers believe that it could be as high as 8,000 (the National Civil Police doesn't count people who are injured in an attack but die later in hospital). Canada, with a little less than three times Guatemala's population of 13 million, had only 605 homicides in 2006.
According to statistics kept by the United Nations, there were 1.85 homicides in Canada last year for every 100,000 people. The U.S. figure was 5.7, while Russia, considered one of the more dangerous countries in the world, recorded 20. Guatemala's was almost 21/2 times that: an estimated 47 per 100,000 people.
Every day on the streets of this city of 1.2 million, citizens are robbed at gunpoint. It happens while they sit in their cars, and while they ride the bus. Already this year, 76 Guatemalan bus drivers have been killed for their cash boxes. The crime wave is so bad that virtually every business in the city has armed guards, some mere teenagers, who now outnumber the police 3 to 1.
The sense of danger is tangible. Many cars have tinted windows to deflect the attention of would-be robbers. Foreigners, even those staying in safe neighbourhoods, are warned not to walk alone, especially at night. After dark, shots ring out outside the best international hotels.
