GUATEMALA CITY -- Guatemala is manufacturing bullets and other military equipment to fight leftist rebels and hopes to achieve weapons self-sufficiency without U.S. military aid, an army spokesman said.
Col. Edgar Djalma Dominguez, a spokesman for the Guatemalan army, said the government is making bullets and rifle parts and assembling armored personnel carriers.
'When the United States cut off our aid, we were forced to look for solutions, so we began by making bullets and rifle parts,' said Dominguez.
Guatemala has received no formal U.S. military aid since 1977 when the government refused to submit to human rights certification, a condition set by the Carter administration.
'Poverty encourages ingenuity,' Dominguez said. 'In Vietnam, the guerrillas made mortars out of bamboo.'
Last January, the Reagan administration authorized $6.36 million in sales of helicopter parts and other 'non-lethal' military equipment, but the delivery has been delayed. Guatemala has requested $2 million worth of parts, and officials maintain they will be delivered in January.
Dominguez said the army is manufacturing mortars and 70 percent of the parts needed to manufacture Israeli-designed Galil rifles.
'If we can make the rifles, we will try grenade launchers,' he said. 'Little by little, we think we can achieve some degree of arms self-sufficiency.'
Dominguez declined to say how long the government had been manufacturing the 5.56 caliber bullets used for the Galils or where the munitions factory was located.
The Information and Analysis Service of Guatemala, a leftist news organization known by its Spanish acronym SIAG, said the Guatemalan government began to produce ammunition in May at a factory in Coban, located 60 miles north of Guatemala City.
A SIAG communique released in Mexico City said factory workers were also assembling military vehicles and would begin to produce bazookas and grenade launchers.
The Guatemalan army is fighting in the rugged highlands against leftist guerrillas who have reportedly increased their activity in recent months.
Dominguez announced last week that Guatemala had begun to assemble its own armored personnel carriers, using U.S.-manufactured chassis and diesel motors. The Guatemalan government has also asked the United States to release a shipment of 12,000 World War I rifles it says were purchased from Israel to train soldiers.
The rifles, valued at $600,000, were aboard the Israeli-registered cargo ship New Orleans when they were seized last Thursday in Florida.
