Guatemala activists under attack -UN-backed report

By Mica Rosenberg

GUATEMALA CITY, June 28 (Reuters) - Attacks on human rights defenders, labor leaders and environmental activists are on the rise in Guatemala and police are behind some of the threats and killings, a United Nations-backed report said on Thursday.

Death threats, break-ins, abductions and murders of activists more than doubled between 2004 and 2006, said a report by the Guatemalan Institute of Comparative Legal Studies, which was presented by the United Nations.

The institute, which has received numerous death threats for investigating Guatemala's criminal justice system, said 278 attacks were recorded last year, up from 224 in 2005 and 127 in 2004.

"These attacks should not be considered as isolated incidents but as a clear pattern of intimidation," said Anders Kompass, Guatemala representative for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The report said more than 20 activists have been killed since 2004 during the government of pro-business President Oscar Berger, whose four-year term ends this year.

The attacks recall violence during the country's 36-year-long civil war between 1960 and 1996, in which close to a quarter of a million people were killed or went missing, said Claudia Paz, one of the authors of the report.

Groups probing abuses carried out by the military during the war have been receiving death threats since the Guatemalan government signed peace accords with leftist guerrillas in 1996.

But now organizations that denounce abuses by corrupt policemen and multinational companies are being targeted as well, said Paz.

Since the end of the war, crime rates have skyrocketed in Guatemala, a major trafficking corridor for illegal drugs, and violent youth street gangs pose a major security threat. Police and vigilante groups have often taken the law into their own hands, in some cases killing suspected gang members.

Human rights groups that investigate those vigilante crimes are among those most at risk of being attacked.

"Police have been involved in extrajudicial executions and organizations like ours have documented these cases. That makes us vulnerable," said Paz.

In January, armed men kidnapped a member of Paz's institute as he left work. They held him captive for several hours and threatened to decapitate his colleagues if they continued their investigations, she said.