(2 of 2)
The CIA's Guatemala station in the early 1990s always had a reputation for aggressive and hard-drinking case officers who ignored not only the human-rights abuses of Guatemalan officers on the agency's payroll but also the directives of U.S. diplomats in the embassy there. At times the station could even be independent of its own agency. TIME has learned that last year the CIA's inspector general dispatched a team to Guatemala to investigate allegations that the agency's station chief failed to pass along warnings of an assassination plot that was eventually carried out--unsuccessfully--against a local official. The CIA refused to comment on the investigation or its results. The station chief was ordered back to Washington in January.
Meanwhile, the furor in Washington is unsettling Guatemalans, who fear that the army, already racked by internal divisions and under fire for having the hemisphere's worst human-rights record, will lash out because of the disclosures. Officers angered by pressure on the army to reform may have set off a series of explosions near the Guatemala City airport on March 26. "Right now anything is possible--a coup, an assassination attempt on the President or Defense Minister," warned a political analyst close to the military. Washington may have emerged from the cold war, but in Guatemala, military violence and a meddling CIA are still the way of life.
--With reporting by Elaine Shannon/Washington and Trish O'Kane/ Guatemala City