What do the Oxec hydroelectric project have in common with the Israeli presence in Guatemala? In whose hands is the private security of that project? Does that security go beyond providing a service of that nature or is it more complex until it reaches intelligence and counterinsurgency tasks? These are some questions that are sought to answer in this Special Report. They arise from public information of the participation of at least two (2) companies with Israeli origins in the Oxec project: SBI INTERNATIONAL HOLDINGS AG (Guatemala Branch), with commercial name Solel Boneh; and GU-IS Corporation, SA From their Legal Representatives, their connections and political history derive extensive power relations that are part of the marks left by Israel's participation in Guatemala, particularly during the bloodiest years of the civil war.
By Luis Solano
Source: Solel Boneh site on the internet. http://solelboneh.com/web/
The axis of all that gear is the Argentine-Israeli Hugo Rodolfo Roitman Braier, also known by the name Ury or Uri Roitman. The businesses linked to the military intelligence services, private security and their links with the Embassy of Israel in Guatemala, have been pillars to consolidate in the business world and private security, and contracts with the State.
The case of corruption known as "Lago de Amatitlán" was the one that catapulted the name of Hugo Roitman, as it brought to light its close links with the Patriot Party (PP) that took him to large businesses during the administration of General Otto Pérez Molina .
The Oxec hydroelectric project
The Oxec hydroelectric project is a complex of two plants under construction and another in studies, located on the Cahabón river, in the municipality of the same name, department of Alta Verapaz: Oxec I, Oxec II and Oxec III. It is owned by the companies Oxec, SA, Oxeca II, SA and Oxec III, SA, registered in Guatemala between 2011 and 2016. All three belong to the Energy Resources Capital Corp (ERCC) group, which is registered in Panama.
Three of the managers whose names stand out in the Oxec societies registered in Guatemala: Luis Arnoldo Calderón Chavarría and José Ernesto Batres González;and in Panama, Carlos José Alfredo González Asturias.
The Spanish group Cobra participates in the Oxec hydroelectric project, fully involved in the construction of the Renace projects of the Multi Inversiones Corporation. Another company involved in the construction is the Israelite Solel Boneh. The Oxec projects add almost 100 MW of generation. ERCC controls several hydroelectric projects in Alta Verapaz, including the Hidroeléctrica Visión de Águila, on the Sonte farm, municipality of Cobán on the Sachichaj River; the Oxec, Oxec II and Oxec III projects, in Cahabón as already mentioned; Raaxhá, also in Cobán on the Icbolay River; and El Tamarindo, in Baja Verapaz, a hydroelectric project better known as Sisimite on the Motagua River, owned by Generadora Nacional (GENASA).
The president of ERCC is Carlos José Alfredo González Asturias, an agro-export entrepreneur who is linked to the agribusiness of ornamental plants and one of the founders of the former Export Bank (BANEX), merged with Banco G & T Continental in 2007. It is one of the main partners of the ceramic company Samboro, founded by the neoliberal ideologue Manuel Ayau Cordón - now deceased - and currently directed by his son Manuel Ayau García.
One of the private security companies known to provide services to the Oxec project is Grupo de Asistencia de Seguridad Privada, SA (GASP), whose Legal Representative is the captain of the Army, Leif Kinle and García González, based in Cobán, Alta Verapaz. . It was constituted in 2016 and by the date it seems that it was exclusively to provide security service to the project. Garcia Gonzalez belongs to the Promotion 119 of the Polytechnic School and was promoted to Captain First of Infantry in 2004, year in which several promoted to Captain went to retirement during the government of Óscar Berger Perdomo and the Great National Alliance (GANA), and when there was a marked reduction of the Army under the then Presidential Commissioner of Defense and Security, retired General Otto Pérez Molina.
Hugo Roitman at Oxec
When the Oxec corporations were being formed, another company also emerged that has all the signs of having been created to operate directly for these companies. It is GU-IS Corporation, SA, constituted on February 12, 2014 according to the Commercial Registry, by the lawyer Emilio Augusto Cruz Lorenzana. His Legal Representative and Sole Administrator is Hugo Rodolfo Roitman Braier, Argentine-Israeli whose career in Guatemala has been fundamentally in the world of military intelligence and private security.
Next to Roitman Braier also appears the Israelite Roi Yaacov, with the position of General Manager. Yaacov was Consul at the Israeli Embassy in Guatemala between 2009 and 2012, and when GU-IS Corporation was established in 2014, he was already residing in Israel and working for Jethro LTD, an Israeli technology supply company.
Roitman Braier is known for the Lago Amatitlán,('Agua Majica'), case, deals with the anomalous adjudication that was made with the Israeli company M.Tarcic Engineering Limited to perform the sanitation of Lake Amatitlán with "magic water" for a cost of Q.137.8 million. Tarcic Engineering Limited is owned by the also Argentine-Israelite and engineer Mario Salomon Tarcic or Mario Sholmo Tarcic.
The address provided by GU-IS Corporation is the same one that Mario Tarcic gives as a residence in Guatemala, while the physical address provided by M. Tarcic Engineering Limited in Guatemala is the same as private security companies linked to Roitman Braier.
The former Vice President of the Republic, Roxana Baldetti, said that the Ambassador of Israel in Guatemala, Moshe Bachar, was the one who recommended the company M. Tarcic Engineering Ltd., to provide the formula to clean the Lake of Amatitlan in nine months.
The connection with Oxec does not seem like a coincidence, since Roitman Braier was an advisor to the Solel Boneh company that is in charge of the construction in Oxec, and is one of the big contractors of the State in construction projects, contracts that between 2005 and 2017 add Q.2.2 billions. Solel Boneh International (SBI) was authorized to operate in Guatemala in 1980. At the end of that year, the then military government of the deceased general, Fernando Romeo Lucas García, through the National Housing Bank (BANVI), granted him the construction contract for the 3,456 apartments complex of multi-family buildings Nimajuyú (Gran Cerro, in Kaqchikel), which was financed by the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (BCIE) through a loan of US $ 35 million.
SBI arrived in the country in the framework of the counterinsurgency war, in which Israel played a fundamental role in military training, Army equipment, arms supply and transportation, development of military technology, agricultural advice and in the development of a model of colonization in the FTN. As a preliminary conclusion, Roitman Braier is an expression of an Israeli historical operating pattern in the use of front companies for covert operations. As one US military adviser explained to analyst Jon Lee Anderson: "Israelis always operate through front companies," in reference to covert military and intelligence activities in companies that legally perform totally different activities.
From Pérez Molina, Roitman Braier and Israel in the Lucas dictatorship
A common thread is the dual nationality of Roitman Braier and Tarcic. Born of Jewish families in Argentina, they will later be trained militarily in Israel where they will swell the ranks of military intelligence structures. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the presence of Argentine and Israeli military advisers was common. The civil war involved them in counterinsurgency and repression. It is not strange then, that Roitman arrived in Guatemala at the end of 1979, and that one of his first contacts was Otto Pérez Molina.
Pérez Molina had a military formation as well as his close associates linked to the horizontal and generational structure known as "El Sindicato" - made up of officers who belonged to or came from the same military promotion - in the so-called School of Israel; contrary to what happened with their opposites, "La Cofradía", another vertical structure with a guild and intergenerational character made up of intelligence officers from the D2, G2 and S2 that were formed in the School of Taiwan.
The arrival of Roitman Braier in Guatemala occurred at the end of 1979, following the kidnapping of Jorge Raúl García-Granados de Garay. He was one of the Argentine-Israelite advisers who negotiated his release, which occurred in January 1980 after the payment of a millionaire ransom in the jungles of Guatemala, according to the newspaper El Gráfico and disappeared, estimated at US $ 4.5 million.
In the government of Lucas García, the Director of the Guatemalan Institute of Tourism (INGUAT) was Álvaro Arzú Irigoyen, current mayor of the capital and then married to Silvia García Granados de Garay, sister of the kidnapped. After the coup d'état against Lucas García in March 1982, that family withdrew its investments to Venezuela where it consolidated a powerful sugar mill through AGROINSA.
Roitman Braier actually arrived accompanying the Argentine-Israeli colonel Leonardo Sergio Gleser Rubin, better known as Leo Gleser, who was in charge of the negotiation and was one of the two negotiators who flew in the helicopter to a border area of Petén with Mexico, where they delivered the money to guerrillas of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP), responsible for the kidnapping. For that case, Gleser had as main contact the then Chief of the EMP, General Héctor Ismael Montalván Batres, military intelligence unit known as "El Archivo", where Pérez Molina was also prominent.
Leo Gleser, according to an extensive interview by Israel's newspaper, Haaretz, was trained militarily in the Israel Defense Forces. He arrived in Guatemala in 1979 contracted by agents of the Israel Security Agency, better known as Shin Bet, at the request of Israeli arms dealer Shaul Eisenberg, a friend of the García-Granados family and who was interested in the family's hydroelectric business.
After concluding the kidnapping, Gleser became a security adviser for the García-Granados family and was also an advisor in the National Electrification Institute (INDE), activities that he carried out between 1980 and 1982. In 1982 he decided to found his service company in Israel of security, arms trade and military training called International Security and Defense Systems (ISDS), and registered in Guatemala under the same name.
With Gleser and ISDS, Hugo Roitman Braier also continued to provide security services to the García-Granados family, which included the current Mayor of the capital Álvaro Arzú Irigoyen, and who in 1982 had been elected to that position with the then civic committee National Advanced Plan ( PAN), which was frustrated with the coup d'état that overthrew Lucas García that same year.
In 1984, when ISDS is registered in the Mercantile Registry of Guatemala, the names of the executives will be highlighted: Hugo Roitman Braier as Sole Administrator and the Israeli Daniel Salomon Azar Mesri, as Chairman of the Board of Directors. But in the constitutive act, in charge of the lawyer Emilio Augusto Cruz Lorenzana, appears as Legal Representative, Óscar Augusto Díaz Urquizú, who during the government of Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo (1986-1990) and the Guatemalan Christian Democracy (DCG), was Director of the Treasury Guard and who was indirectly involved in the White Panel Case, a case related to human rights violations that included the disappearance of 11 people between 1987 and 1988.
Roitman Braier and his business connections
The name of Hugo Roitman Braier reappeared during the government of Álvaro Arzú Irigoyen and the Partido de Avanzada Nacional (PAN), when he founded the company TSS División Aérea, SA, located at 3 Calle 3-42, zone 8, Ciudad San Cristóbal. This address is the same as that provided by M. Tarcic Engineering Ltd., the company that was in charge of the failed project to "clean" Lake Amatitlan.
The company TSS División Aérea was established in 1997 to provide aviation security to the company Tikal Jets Airlines, founded in 1992. The property of this airline belonged to two powerful businessmen: José (Joe) Habie Nigris, of Israeli roots, and José Antonio Arzú Irigoyén, the first owner of the textile factory Liztex and the Tikal Futura hotel, and the second hotel entrepreneur and brother of the former President of the Republic, Álvaro Arzú Irigoyen.
Habie Nigris was the son of the textile entrepreneur Alberto Habie Mishaan, killed by the guerrilla of the then Revolutionary Organization of the People in Arms (ORPA) in 1980, when he chaired the Coordinating Committee of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial and Financial Associations (CACIF).
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