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Oil More than 170 bus drivers killed by Guatemalan gangs this year
December 22, 2009 Edition 2
GUATEMALA CITY: Bus driver Mynor Gonzalez ignored the threats: "200 quetzales a week, or we'll kill you."
He knew drivers who didn't pay the roughly $24 (R182) "protection" fee had been murdered, but always on other routes. He knew his job, once considered secure and well-paying for Guatemala's poor, had become deadly.
Then it happened on his route. The gangs used his friend, driver Miguel Angel Chacon, 34, to show they meant business.
"He saw them approaching the bus, so he jammed on the brakes and started running toward the back," said Gonzalez, 30. "They shot him twice in the back, right there in the aisle in front of all the passengers."
Gunmen have killed more than 170 bus drivers this year to scare them and transportation companies into paying extortion fees that fuel the country's multimillion-dollar organised crime network.
It is a small number of deaths given Guatemala's roughly 6 200 murders a year - a homicide rate that puts the Central American country among the world's 10 most dangerous, according to United Nations crime studies. But the public execution of bus drivers, often witnessed by as many as 50 passengers, adds a new level of brutality to an already terrorised nation.
There is no viable public transit in Guatemala City outside of the 8 000 buses that carry about a million people daily in this capital of three million. Passengers have no choice but to ride. - Sapa-AP
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