Enrique Degenhart tried to clean up Guatemala's immigration service. His story is part of a nation's extraordinary fight against corruption.
By: Sebastian Rotella
GUATEMALA CITY (Propublica)
- Early on the morning of Oct. 31, 2012, Enrique Degenhart Asturias
left his home in Guatemala City to drive to his gym for his daily
workout.
Tall, bespectacled, and broad-shouldered, the
44-year-old Degenhart wore sweatpants and a T-shirt. Along with his
exercise gear, he carried a .40-caliber Glock 22 pistol loaded with
high-powered ammunition.
Degenhart had reason to be on guard. He
had spent two years trying to clean up Guatemala’s immigration service.
After taking the job of director of the notoriously corrupt agency in
2010, he had beefed up internal affairs, modernized technology, and
battled criminal networks that sold fraudulent passports to African
migrants, Russian fugitives, and Colombian drug traffickers. His reforms
had won him a long list of powerful enemies — inside and outside the
government — linked to mafias.
But despite his achievements, the
new president, Otto Pérez Molina, had fired him in January, ignoring an
appeal from the U.S. Embassy to keep him in his post. Pérez Molina’s
aides had also taken away his armored car and bodyguards, breaking an
agreement to provide security to the former immigration chief. Degenhart
felt vulnerable and unsafe. In a land where roads swarm with robbers,
carjackers, and hit men on wheels, even a trip to the gym was a
potential ride into a kill zone.
At approximately 6:35 a.m.,
Degenhart’s Porsche Cayenne pulled to a stop behind two cars at an
intersection. From there, the next stage in his morning route was to
cross an overpass to the Pan-American Highway, which snakes through the
verdant hills of Guatemala City. Suddenly, he spotted something in his
rearview mirror: a green Mitsubishi Lancer. The four-door sedan
approached fast. It swerved to the right past the Cayenne into the
parking lot of a corner pharmacy and then swung back and stopped at a
hard angle, ready to cut in front of him when traffic resumed.
The
Lancer’s windows were polarized to a dark tint, like the windows of the
Cayenne and many other vehicles navigating the anarchic streets of the
capital. Degenhart could only see the thickset silhouette of the driver.
But the aggressive maneuver had startled him. So did the fact that the
left rear window lowered slightly and then slid back up quickly. His
hand dropped to the Glock in the holster by his seat.
When a
traffic officer signaled the stopped cars to advance, the Lancer forced
its way into traffic ahead of Degenhart, turning left to precede him
across the overpass. The Lancer turned left again and, instead of
accelerating down the entry ramp, slowed and began flashing its hazard
lights. As Degenhart followed warily toward the busy highway lanes, he
saw two silhouettes in the back seat of the Lancer. One appeared to turn
a baseball cap backward on his head, like a baseball catcher. Or a
sniper.
Degenhart knew that gunmen in Guatemala’s underworld
often wore brimmed caps to conceal their faces, reversing them when it
was time to pull the trigger. Degenhart drew his gun.
In Latin
American law enforcement, reformers are often outsiders: human rights
activists, academics, women. Degenhart was a different breed of
outsider. He was a private-sector technocrat who ventured into a
predatory bureaucracy, an arena in which mafias have thrived with
impunity.
Fair-haired, with the square-jawed looks of his German
and Spanish ancestors, Degenhart has an intent, solemn air that is
softened by his relaxed sense of humor. He was born in 1968 in Guatemala
City to an engineer father and a mother who worked for the U.S. Peace
Corps.
At the time, his country was embroiled in what would
become a bloody civil war, sparked by a CIA-backed coup that toppled
democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. A leftist
guerrilla movement emerged, and the ensuing hostilities continued for
more than three decades. Human rights inquiries by the United Nations
and the Catholic Church later found Guatemala’s U.S.-backed military
responsible for a campaign of deadly repression that reached genocidal
levels in the 1980s.
Although Degenhart’s family was well-off, he
did not have strong sympathies for the military or the guerrillas, he
said during an interview with Foreign Policy conducted in the United
States last year. Politically, he says, he considers himself a centrist.
“My
generation grows up in the shadow of this concept of continuous war,”
he explained. “I come from a family that was always very committed to
the idea of social equality.… None of us got involved in politics until
the return of democracy.”
Degenhart attended the prestigious
American School of Guatemala and Francisco Marroquín University. In his
final semester, he started a business with his brother (an Olympic
swimmer) in the booming regional sector of maquiladoras, or
textile-export assembly plants. Their company prospered and was later
acquired by a U.S. firm.
While Degenhart’s business career
progressed, in 1996 democracy returned to the country, heralded by free
elections and the signing of a landmark peace accord to end the civil
war, which had killed more than 200,000 people. But the long-entrenched
oligarchy retained control, and profound inequality and violence
persisted.
At that time, Degenhart was working as a Central
American marketing manager at Bimbo, a Mexico-based food products group.
During the 2000s, he changed jobs and dedicated himself to promoting
Guatemala’s two biggest soccer teams. He also founded a management
consulting company that helped businesses improve their information
technology systems.
Degenhart was content in the private sector.
But he had developed a political connection during his years in
manufacturing that would prove fateful: his friendship with Alvaro Colom
and Sandra Torres, fellow textile entrepreneurs who became a political
power couple. In 2008, Colom took office as Guatemala’s first leftist
president in decades. Like previous presidential administrations,
Colom’s government was marred by scandal. But he also oversaw the
passage of major justice reforms and appointed admired crime fighters
and independent figures to powerful posts.
In 2010, Colom’s aides
approached Degenhart with a surprising job offer: director of the
immigration service. Colom offered Degenhart the role of interventor,
which translates roughly as “inspector” or “comptroller,” a director for
the troubled agency with special emergency powers and a direct line to
the president.
There had been many interventores before Degenhart, and many did not stay long.
“They
lasted six months,” a U.S. Department of Homeland Security official
said. “It was hard to clean that place up. Either they got involved in
the corruption or they got burned out.”
In developed and
developing countries alike, border agencies hold the keys to the kingdom
for illicit enterprises of all kinds. There are few posts in which
low-paid functionaries wield more potential power over people’s lives
and the movement of goods.
Another factor in Guatemala: the toxic
legacy of decades of civil war. Military regimes had systematically
exploited the immigration and customs agencies for financial gain and
operational ease. Post-conflict mafias with roots in the military
continued the practice.
“I couldn’t tell you exactly how long the
agency had been infiltrated, but I’d think it was almost from its
creation,” Degenhart said. “There are operatives encrusted in the
structure.”
Guatemala’s immigration service was also a haven for
malfeasance thanks to the three labor unions that represented its
employees, including border guards and officials in the bureaucracy,
according to Guatemalan and foreign law enforcement officials. Union
bosses behaved like kingpins: feuding, staving off internal
investigations, developing influential political allies, and enriching
themselves with illegal activities, according to Guatemalan, U.S., and
Mexican law enforcement officials.
The U.S. Department of
Homeland Security took special interest in the affairs of the
immigration agency because of concerns about Guatemala’s dual role as an
outpost for smuggling and a source of illegal immigration. As in other
Latin American nations, DHS worked closely with the government to push
reforms and created a carefully screened unit of Guatemalan
investigators to try to fill the vacuum in the fight against smuggling
rings.
The union leaders “made so much money [that] they
controlled judges and lawyers,” a veteran investigator for a U.S. law
enforcement agency said. “They infiltrated the judicial system. It was
almost impossible to make a case against them.”
Despite the many
challenges of the interventor job, Degenhart accepted the position in
February 2010. The president wanted him to overhaul the agency’s
management and services and upgrade its technology. Degenhart felt
comfortable with those tasks. When it came to crime fighting, however,
he was a novice.
“Law enforcement was not a field in which I had ever worked,” he said. “I had no idea how complex it was going to be.”
Degenhart
reported to then-Interior Minister Carlos Menocal. Like Degenhart, he
was an outsider. A former journalist, Menocal had come to be regarded by
Guatemalans and the diplomatic community as one of Colom’s most
effective and honest cabinet ministers. In an interview, Menocal said he
worked well with the new immigration chief.
“Degenhart was the
beneficiary of a fortunate set of alliances with President Colom, with …
myself, and international cooperation,” Menocal said. “It was a strong
mix that helped make him successful. Enrique works in a direct frontal
manner against criminality.”
Degenhart’s appointment was just one
of the signs of a reform campaign underway in Guatemala. In 2007, the
government had invited a team of U.N. prosecutors to set up shop in the
capital and work with local law enforcement to build cases against
mafias that had embedded themselves in the state during the military
dictatorship — a move unprecedented in Latin America.
No one knew
it then, but Degenhart’s path would soon converge with the U.N.
crackdown. His experience gives a rare inside look at the methods and
perils of fighting corruption in Latin America.
Degenhart’s first
step in his new job was to commission a study of the immigration
service. Drawing on his business experience, he wanted a corporate-style
diagnosis of the agency’s finances, services, technology, and human
resources. The roughly 500 employees staffed border crossings and
handled visas, passports, and other procedures. Many had paramilitary
backgrounds. Degenhart learned the workforce was underpaid, neglected,
and apathetic; the agency even forced employees to purchase their own
uniforms.
They also worked in often primitive conditions. The
agency’s ancient computer system looked to Degenhart as if it could have
been disabled with a kick. At remote jungle outposts on the border with
Mexico, he met inspectors who slept on cardboard bedding in hut-like
quarters.
“We found a border station that was a little laminated
shed with three people sitting at desks,” said Javier Rivera, who served
as the deputy director of the immigration service. “Then you looked
across the border, and there was the Mexican station with a helipad and
everything. Our station was isolated and at the end of a bad dirt road.
We had to install antennas for satellite phones [and] computers.”
At
that border post and elsewhere, Degenhart’s team upgraded technology
and databases that didn’t even allow inspectors to identify border
crossers with warrants or security alerts, Rivera said.
After
just a few days on the job, Degenhart collided with the criminal
underworld. In February 2010, Guatemala hosted a world convention of
coffee growers. Two dozen supposed delegates from China arrived in
Guatemala City and then promptly disappeared. Some eventually turned up
in Mexico, where authorities arrested them. The Chinese were actually
illegal immigrants bound for the United States. They had paid smugglers
$50,000 apiece to help them pose as representatives of China’s coffee
industry. With the help of accomplices inside the Guatemalan government,
they procured fraudulent visas using an electronic system created for
the convention.
Degenhart promptly shut down that visa system,
according to U.S., Mexican and Guatemalan officials who worked with him
on the case. His agency turned away a second group of Chinese impostors
who arrived at the airport sporting tennis shoes, jeans, T-shirts, and
“little backpacks in which you couldn’t fit a suit and tie for a
convention,” he said.
Teaming up with U.S. and Mexican law
enforcement, Degenhart launched an inquiry into the smuggling scheme.
His response was a pleasant surprise to his foreign counterparts.
Mexican and U.S. law enforcement officials say they were unaccustomed to
such vigor in the immigration service.
In addition to cracking
down on smuggling, Degenhart set up a system that assigned a tracking
number to people seeking passports, visas, or other services from the
immigration agency. That simple measure drastically reduced the “margin
of corruption” by creating a documented record of each case, as well as a
timeline of the services provided, according to a Mexican law
enforcement official who worked with Degenhart and U.S. counterparts.
“It
becomes a lot harder to cut corners, sell favors,” the Mexican official
said. “I told him: ‘You realize what you’ve done, don’t you?’ He looked
at me, kind of surprised, and said, ‘Well, I come from the private
sector. Everyone should get a number, like a bank, right?’”
Around
the same time, Degenhart resolved a longtime contract dispute with the
unions, agreeing effectively to double the salaries of immigration
officers. But he warned that moneymaking on the side would not be
tolerated, according to Rivera, his deputy director.
“Tell your
people not to get into any more nonsense,” Degenhart told the labor
bosses during a meeting, according to Rivera. “Now there’s going to be a
decent, honest wage.”
Tensions with the unions escalated,
however, when Degenhart unveiled a plan to rotate 64 officers to new
assignments. Corruption depended largely on control of territory through
key positions at land, air, and sea borders and in the bureaucracy.
Union officials and their partners in crime had consolidated turf by
entrenching operatives and collecting bribes from criminal rackets and
users of the immigration system. The goal of the rotation plan was to
disrupt those networks built on graft.
Two of the three unions
accepted his plan, albeit grudgingly. But Juan Pacheco Coc, the leader
of the smallest union, resisted. He stormed into the director’s office
and threatened him, according to Degenhart.
“He objected because
he had fewer operatives [than the other unions] and they were in posts
that were probably strategic for him and were going to be removed,”
Degenhart recalled. “He said, ‘If the rotations are done, you are going
to have serious problems. You are going to have serious legal problems,
political problems, and, in case you don’t understand, even personal
problems.’”
Pacheco didn’t have a reputation for making empty
threats. He had accrued clout and wealth over decades of working the
system, according to Guatemalan, U.S., and Mexican law enforcement
officials. He had formed his breakaway union after clashing with other
bosses and survived investigations into money laundering, passport
peddling, and the smuggling of drugs, immigrants, and gasoline,
according to Guatemalan and foreign officials, as well as documents and
press reports.
Pacheco tried to block Degenhart’s anti-corruption
rotation plan in court. Meanwhile, anonymous callers threatened to kill
Degenhart. Someone slashed his tires. In response, he began driving an
armored vehicle and increased his government-assigned security detail
from six officers to 10. He also took weekly shooting lessons from an
instructor on a tactical range used by the presidential protective
service.
Before he began that training, Degenhart possessed only what he called “typical firearms knowledge” for a Guatemalan.
“You
keep a shotgun in your house in case a robber breaks in,” he said. “But
it was inherent to my new job to learn more. The danger was greater,
and I also wanted to learn more about this world.”
Still, there
were those who accused Degenhart of exaggerating the threat and of
mismanagement. In May 2010, the newspaper Siglo 21 published a report
titled “Excesos del interventor,” or “The Inspector’s Excesses.” It
questioned Degenhart’s security spending and quoted a former interior
minister who accused him of “lack of financial planning.”
Degenhart
disputes the criticism. The security measures were warranted, he said
in the interview with FP. The newspaper article, he said, was a
political assault linked to the escalating labor conflict.
Pacheco,
meanwhile, was making the rounds of influential figures and agencies,
boasting that he had proof of crimes committed by his union rivals.
“It was a fight among mafias,” said the veteran U.S. law enforcement investigator. “Pacheco was dirty, too.”
On
July 30, 2010, after weeks of trying to block the rotation of
immigration officials behind the scenes, Pacheco publicly accused his
rival labor bosses of engaging in corrupt activities such as selling
fraudulent passports. The next day, authorities found his corpse in his
home. There was no sign of forced entry. He had been bound, gagged,
tortured, beaten, and stabbed to death. The case remains unsolved.
Four
days after Pacheco’s murder, Roxana Baldetti, a powerful leader of the
legislative opposition, summoned Degenhart and the interior minister to
legislative hearings. A former Miss Guatemala contestant, she had a
flashy, combative style. She was also gearing up to run for vice
president on a ticket with Pérez Molina, a former general, and had taken
a special interest in border issues.
“When I [sat] down with my
division chiefs in the hearing room, she said, ‘Only you can stay here;
the others have to leave,’” Degenhart recalled. “At that moment, I
realized that it [was] a political lynching.”
Baldetti claimed
during those public legislative hearings and comments to the press that
Pacheco had given her information about a smuggling ring and that
Degenhart had allowed it to flourish within the immigration agency.
But
according to former Interior Minister Menocal and others, the reality
was different. They assert that Baldetti presented herself as a crusader
while concealing her connections to border mafias. Subsequent
investigations of Baldetti have lent credence to those allegations.
Degenhart remained in his post. But it was clear he had acquired powerful enemies.
“They
never found any dirt on him, and they looked for everything they
could,” the Mexican law enforcement official said. “The fact is, in that
job, either you devote yourself to stealing money or you do your work.
He did his work. He didn’t need the money. His family is wealthy. But we
were worried about him.”
Degenhart’s battles were part of a larger and longer war.
Big
or small, leftist or rightist, rich or poor, Latin American nations
struggle with a crime problem that threatens political stability and
security. There are exceptions, such as Chile, and nations such as
Colombia have made great progress. Latin American democracies are robust
when it comes to freedom of elections and the press. Yet many struggle
to consolidate the rule of law.
In Central America today,
lawlessness has hit crisis levels. The repercussions reach into the
United States, driving a surge of illegal immigration from Honduras, El
Salvador, and Guatemala, a region known as the “Northern Triangle” of
Central America. Honduras and El Salvador have among the highest
homicide rates in the world.
Although the murder rate in
Guatemala is lower than in its two neighbors, the country has long
suffered from the criminality that afflicts Latin America like a
virulent disease. Street gangs kill, extort and terrorize drivers and
riders on public transport. Cops scare citizens almost as much as
robbers. Cartels use the nation as a base to ship drugs and launder
money. Hundreds of murders committed by assassins on wheels led to a
temporary ban on motorcycle passengers. Skullduggery is frequent;
punishment is rare; and new scandals sometimes feature the protagonists
of past ones.
Yet, by the time Degenhart took office in 2010,
Guatemala had also experienced incremental progress. The chief catalyst
of these gains: an unprecedented U.N.-backed justice reform experiment
called the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala. Known
by its Spanish acronym CICIG, the multinational team of prosecutors,
investigators, and analysts was created in 2007 to fight organized crime
in government and modernize law enforcement.
Another force for
reform was Claudia Paz y Paz, a former human rights lawyer Colom
appointed as his attorney general in 2010. Paz took on drug cartels,
forged bonds with the U.N. prosecutors and the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration, and helped win the historic conviction of former
military ruler Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide in the civil war.
Degenhart
had a lower profile than the attorney general. But like Paz, he saw the
value in cultivating foreign allies, including U.S. Embassy officials.
He expanded his internal affairs team and created a much-needed
intelligence unit at the immigration agency to gather information on the
smuggling industry, vetting officials at both units with the embassy’s
help.
Degenhart also focused on what, at the time, was a U.S.
priority — illegal immigration from India via Guatemala. Security
cameras at the Guatemala City airport caught paid-off immigration
officials in uniform directing passengers from India to inspection lines
controlled by smuggling rings, according to U.S. and Guatemalan
investigators who viewed the footage. Indians with suspiciously new
Guatemalan passports showed up at the Mexican embassy in Guatemala City
to request visas, according to the Mexican law enforcement official.
Suspects in a thriving Guatemala-based network that smuggled Indians
were caught in New Delhi and at the U.S.-Mexico border, where arrests of
Indian illegal immigrants soared.
Working his contacts in the
government and diplomatic community, Degenhart pushed through a visa
requirement for Indian travelers that slashed the influx and cost the
mafias a lot of money, according to U.S. and Latin American officials.
“He
was working directly with us to combat corruption,” the DHS official
said. “He had a great working relationship with the U.S. Embassy. For
some people, that’s like treason.”
Guatemalan passports were a
prized illicit commodity. In October 2011, airport immigration officials
in Guatemala City implementing toughened screening policies detained
two Colombians leaving for Amsterdam. Investigators linked them to a
drug-related murder of four people in the capital days earlier. The duo
carried Guatemalan passports, identification cards, and birth
certificates — real documents, fake identities.
The arrest of the
suspected Colombian hit men was one in a series of cases of
international criminals carrying fraudulent Guatemalan documents. The
trend exacerbated Degenhart’s concerns about the privatized system in
which a contracted company called La Luz prepared and printed Guatemalan
passports for the immigration service. He led an internal inquiry of
the passport system and presented the results to the U.N. prosecutor,
the attorney general, and the interior minister.
Because of lax
screening, Guatemalan consulates in the United States had mistakenly
issued second passports to Guatemalans using false identities, Degenhart
found. Moreover, the inquiry revealed that La Luz had an unauthorized
connection to an external computer at an immigration consulting firm, a
worrisome vulnerability that could potentially have allowed outsiders
access to sensitive records, including the biographical and biometrical
information of Guatemalan passports, according to Degenhart, Menocal,
Paz, and other officials.
The CICIG got involved. In late October
of 2011, Guatemalan investigators backed by the U.N. prosecutor’s
office searched the passport offices run by La Luz, opening an in-depth
investigation into the systemic passport problems.
As that case
unfolded, Pérez Molina and Baldetti, his running mate, won Guatemala’s
presidential election. During the transition, U.S. diplomats met with
representatives of the incoming administration and sent a discreet
message: Attorney General Paz and Degenhart were forces for progress.
The embassy hoped the new government would retain them. The
conversations were described to FP by U.S. and Guatemalan officials
familiar with the matter.
When Pérez Molina came to power, Paz
remained in her post. But Degenhart was dismissed. And in a decision
that stunned him, officials in the new government told him he would lose
his armored vehicle and bodyguards, breaking an established tradition
to provide protective details to former law enforcement chiefs. Even
worse, the presidential transition teams had signed an accord
specifically adding the immigration director to the list of ex-officials
who would keep their security for five years, according to a copy of
that accord obtained by FP.
Degenhart’s allies, such as former
Interior Minister Menocal, blamed Vice President Baldetti, who had
quickly asserted control over the immigration and customs agencies and
who had made no secret of her hostility toward Degenhart.
“I felt totally vulnerable and exposed,” Degenhart said. “They wanted to leave me out in the cold.”
In
February 2012, Degenhart returned to his business ventures. A few
months later, the U.S. Embassy offered him a job as a part-time
consultant on Central American immigration issues, and he accepted. His
duties included monitoring the very reforms he had initiated and
collaborating with officials he knew at Immigration and Customs
Enforcement and other U.S. agencies.
In October 2012, the bosses
of two of the immigration employee unions asked to meet with Degenhart
to discuss technical aspects of the comprehensive labor accord he had
brokered with them. He had lunch with them at Pollo Campero, a popular
chicken restaurant chain in Guatemala City. Those attending the lunch
were Arnoldo de Jesús Miranda Fuentes, the secretary-general of a union
known as the SITRAMMIG; Miranda’s deputy; and Rodolfo Quiñones, the
chief of the largest union, according to Degenhart. (Union officials did
not respond to requests for comment about the meeting.)
The
conversation soon grew tense, Degenhart recalled. Old conflicts flared
as Miranda complained he’d been sidelined during the contract talks,
according to Degenhart. No explicit threats were made, but he sensed
hostility.
“I left that meeting with the idea that these people were really dangerous,” he said.
On
Oct. 31, Degenhart left his home in an upscale residential area a few
minutes after 6 a.m. He was headed for his gym, which was located in a
small shopping center next to the Pan-American Highway.
It was a
nice day. His family had planned a Halloween party with friends that
evening. He was looking forward to the festivities — and his daily
exercise session.
“That was the only part of my day that didn’t change,” he said. “Otherwise, I changed up my routine for security.”
Security
cameras captured his blue Cayenne crossing through the lot of a corner
pharmacy and stopping behind two southbound vehicles waiting to proceed
to the Pan-American Highway entry ramp.
In the video, a
Mitsubishi Lancer emerges from a highway exit ramp behind Degenhart,
moving at a healthy clip. The Lancer catches up to Degenhart’s Cayenne,
maneuvers around it into the parking lot driveway, and swings into
position at a near-right angle to his front bumper. He says he
immediately sensed trouble.
“All my alarms were going off,” he said. “The way they positioned themselves — that is a shooting angle.”
The
vehicles waited at the intersection for about 40 seconds. When traffic
resumed, the Lancer pulled in front of the Cayenne, and the two vehicles
turned left and then left again. The Lancer activated its hazard lights
and slowed, easing to the left as if inviting Degenhart to pass on the
right.
Degenhart kept his distance. Fearing a trap, he drew his
gun as the two vehicles descended the entry ramp, according to his
account. His heart was pounding. His eyes searched for signs of
aggression.
As the vehicles merged into highway traffic, the
right rear passenger window of the Lancer lowered. A hand emerged,
holding a Glock 19.
The volley of bullets shredded Degenhart’s
side window, hitting him twice in the chest, once in the chin, four
times in the left arm, and once each in the right bicep and wrist. He
shot back wildly, getting off roughly 16 rounds, first from his side
window and then through the windshield as the Lancer pulled away.
Degenhart
remembers the thunder of the gunshots, the crunch of bullets breaking
glass, the gunpowder spraying like sand into his eyes, nose, mouth, and
hair. He’d turned in profile — as he’d been trained — making his body
into a smaller target and using his left arm to shield himself. Blood
spurted everywhere.
“In my mind, I went into a dark room. I said:
‘I died.’ I said to God: ‘Please, I have to go back to protect my wife
and children,’” he recalled. “I went to the other side. And I came
back.”
A different camera on the shoulder of the busy highway
captured blurry images of the gunfight from a distance. The footage
shows the two vehicles rounding a curve into view, the Lancer on the
left and ahead of the Cayenne. Frightened drivers stop behind them. The
Cayenne stops. Glass and smoke spray up as Degenhart’s final shots
pierce his own windshield. The Lancer speeds away past the camera; what
appears to be a man’s arm is visible in the open rear window.
Degenhart
tried to call for help, but his hand was too bloody for the touch
screen on his iPhone. He managed to use a BlackBerry to call his wife,
telling her he had been badly wounded in a shooting and was going to the
hospital. His left arm hung uselessly at his side. He started driving
one-handed, peering through the bullet-riddled windshield, the Cayenne
weaving among lanes.
Fifteen minutes later, he pulled into the entrance of a medical clinic.
“I
get out, I grab my arm, and go running into the building asking for
help. I tell the nurse, ‘Please stabilize me because I am bleeding to
death,’” he recalled. He collapsed into a wheelchair and passed out.
An
ambulance transferred him to a hospital, which soon filled with
visitors: former Interior Minister Menocal, former President Colom, U.S.
and Mexican diplomats. U.S. law enforcement agents responded quickly.
They regarded the attack on a close ally as a potential threat to
embassy personnel, the DHS official said.
Degenhart would survive, albeit with a nearly pulverized left elbow.
“God saved my life,” he said. “I could have very easily died that day because of the number of impacts and where they hit me.”
He suffered through three nights of pain, fear, and hallucinations in the hospital.
“One
night, I woke up at three in the morning in the hospital bed, and I
said to the security officer: ‘Give me your gun, give me your gun. The
assassins are coming to kill me again, and I’m going to be ready for
them.’”
There have been numerous car-to-car ambushes of law
enforcement chiefs and other government officials in Latin America. They
rarely have a happy ending. What saved Degenhart?
“Alertness,”
he said. “Always being vigilant, looking around, monitoring your
surroundings. And also the repetition of having trained with the
firearm. Muscle memory.”
The response from the government was
minimal. Senior officials did not visit the hospital or express much
concern, according to Guatemalan and foreign officials.
“When you
leave government, you feel exposed,” Menocal said. “That’s why I made a
statement expressing solidarity with him. But there was no response
from the government.”
Two weeks after the shooting, still groggy
from medication, Degenhart met with Guatemalan investigators to give a
statement and turn over his gun as evidence in the case. Two days later,
U.S. officials in armored vehicles took him to the airport, and he
boarded a plane for the United States.
Civilians in the
Guatemalan attorney general’s office, with quiet assistance from the
U.S. Embassy, conducted the investigation into the attack on Degenhart.
Their work was diligent but limited in scope, according to Guatemalan
and U.S. law enforcement officials involved in the case.
The
investigators viewed hours of footage obtained from roadside cameras
located at the intersection and the highway where the incident took
place. The Lancer’s license plates were not visible in the videos. Using
a list of license plates on cars parked at the gym obtained from a
security guard, investigators identified a Lancer whose occupants went
into the shopping center very early that morning and, the guard said,
drove off in a hurry just before the shooting. Investigators believed
the gunmen had initially planned to ambush Degenhart at the gym and then
decided to intercept him en route, perhaps using a spotter with a
telephone to track his movements.
About two months after the
shooting, the Guatemalan and U.S. investigators tracked down the car’s
owner and another suspect in a semirural zone known for violence, hired
gunslingers, and kidnapping gangs. One of the suspects admitted he had
driven past the ambush scene on the day of the shooting. Both men had
alibis for the crucial hours, however, as well as clean records. The car
showed no signs of bullet impacts. The case, in other words, was weak.
Strangely,
though, the Guatemalan prosecutors neglected a seemingly obvious line
of inquiry: Degenhart’s conflicts with the unions and the passport
company over the fraudulent passport racket.
In an interview,
auxiliary prosecutor Maritza Sagastume Bojórquez said she refrained from
pursuing that angle after learning the CICIG was investigating the
passport fraud ring already. The U.N. anti-corruption prosecutors,
however, didn’t examine the shooting, according to CICIG and Guatemalan
officials. Sagastume said her requests about the U.N. probe’s possible
relevance to her case went unanswered. The investigation by the attorney
general’s office into the attack on Degenhart hit a dead end.
Sagastume
decided to close the case in September 2013. She said her heavy
workload played a role in making that decision. Moreover, she wasn’t
convinced the shooting was premeditated.
“I had the impression that he and the other car got into a dispute,” she said during the interview last year.
Degenhart
disagrees. He believes it was an ambush timed to send a macabre
gangster-style message: Halloween is the eve of the Day of the Dead, the
holiday during which Latin Americans honor the departed. He suspects
that the mafias he clashed with during his tenure, such as those
connected to the passport racket, retaliated against him. But he finds
it hard to believe his assailants did not have orders or approval from
his enemies in power. At minimum, he blames the Pérez Molina
administration for leaving him vulnerable to an attack.
“It was
convenient for them to remove my security and leave a door open so
anyone could eventually attack me and kill me,” he said.
Guatemalan
and U.S. law enforcement officials interviewed for this story have
similar suspicions. Degenhart’s former boss, Menocal, has no doubt he
was targeted. Menocal said in the interview last year that he believes
CICIG should examine the shooting.
“This attack is related to
achievements when he was director of the immigration service,” the
former interior minister said. “He is a victim of the impunity that
still exists in Guatemala.”
By early 2014, Degenhart had immersed
himself in a new life in the United States. A surgeon had repaired his
left arm. His psychological wounds had healed. He watched from afar as
his country underwent increasingly rapid change.
In January 2014,
Attorney General Paz and the current U.N. prosecutor, Iván Velásquez
Gómez, announced the findings of a major investigation into the
immigration service. Police arrested three dozen people, most of them
employees of the immigration agency, on charges of running a ring that
sold passports and smuggling services to Indians, Chinese, Pakistanis,
Russians, and more. The alleged ringleader was Miranda — the same union
chief who had argued with Degenhart at lunch only days before the
ambush.
The investigation had also resulted in the arrest four
months earlier of a former manager of La Luz, the passport firm with
which Degenhart had clashed, according to the CICIG. Another employee of
that company was arrested and convicted, according to the CICIG.
Soon,
the U.N. prosecutor’s office gained momentum on another border-related
case. It was known as La Línea, a massive investigation of the
scandal-plagued customs agency. Tens of thousands of phone intercepts
mapped out a vast high-level scheme to avoid import duties by paying
bribes. In April 2015, prosecutors indicted 20 suspects, including a top
aide to Vice President Baldetti. Baldetti resigned.
When
investigators searched her home last August, Baldetti took refuge in a
hospital. A team of police led by Juan Francisco Sandoval, a Guatemalan
anti-corruption prosecutor, arrived at the hospital. Baldetti mistook
the bespectacled 33-year-old for a doctor.
“I said, ‘No, I’m not a
doctor. I’m a prosecutor,’” Sandoval recalled in an interview. “And the
police officer read the arrest warrant.”
Outside the hospital, citizens set off firecrackers to celebrate the arrest of the former vice president.
In
September, U.N. and Guatemalan prosecutors set their sights even
higher: They arrested the president. Investigators say La Línea was part
of a giant money machine built by Baldetti and Pérez Molina. The duo’s
fall was hastened by months of unprecedented protest marches by ordinary
Guatemalans who were fed up with the regime.
“The image of
President Pérez Molina, a former general, in court submitting to the
power of a judge exhibits dramatic change,” said former Attorney General
Paz in an interview.
The former president and vice president have pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial.
Latin
American and U.S. leaders, such as Vice President Joe Biden, have
hailed the work of CICIG and are pushing for the Guatemalan justice
reform model to be reproduced elsewhere. Just last fall, the
Organization of American States announced the creation of an
anti-impunity commission in Honduras.
Degenhart is proud to have played a role in Guatemala’s evolution. His experiences had convinced him true change was possible.
“There
is a perception that all the employees in the immigration service are
corrupt,” he said. “I think it’s a minority of employees who are
involved in acts of corruption. Most of them don’t want to be involved.”
While
in the United States, Degenhart continued to work as a consultant for
the U.S. government on immigration issues in Central America. And he
gave tactical presentations about the gunfight in Guatemala to U.S.
federal trainees.
The reforms in Guatemala brought down many of his enemies. Still, his case remains unsolved; no one has been charged.
In
October, newcomer Jimmy Morales won the presidency on a wave of voter
disgust with traditional politics. Although President Morales ran on an
anti-corruption platform and promised to support the U.N. prosecutor,
critics worry that his political movement includes military veterans
from the country’s dark past.
Degenhart shares those concerns.
But he said the new government has also taken encouraging steps,
appointing reform-minded law enforcement officials whom he respects. The
danger appears to be receding, he said.
In May, for the first
time since his hurried departure in 2012, he returned home to Guatemala.
He will be working there as a regional consultant on immigration issues
for the U.S. government.
“I want to contribute to positive change in my country,” he said in a recent phone conversation.
Meanwhile, he gives thanks every day. For him, Oct. 31 is no longer just Halloween.
“It’s my second birthday,” he said.
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