War on drugs has unequal impact on black Americans

The following are a series of revealing articles on the connection between the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras and the smuggling of illegal drugs, particularly cocaine. They are among the first exposés about Contra drug smuggling published in the United States. They were written by journalist Gary Webb for the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 under the series title “The Dark Alliance.” The articles, which alleged a connection between the Contras, the CIA and drug trafficking, quickly roused a strong reaction throughout the U.S. and triggered a smear campaign. Webb’s career was destroyed shortly after these articles were published by right-wing Reaganite journalists in support of the Contras.

The following copies were obtained from the website of the Seattle Times, since the San Jose Mercury News where they first appeared has removed the entire Gary Webb series from their web site.

— Espresso Stalinist

Contra case illustrates the discrepancy: Nicaraguan goes free; L.A. dealer faces life

Published: Aug. 20, 1996

BY GARY WEBB
Mercury News Staff Writer

FOR THE LAST YEAR and a half, the U.S. Department of Justice has been trying to explain why nearly everyone convicted in California’s federal courts of ”crack” cocaine trafficking is black.

Critics, who include some federal court judges, say it looks like the Justice Department is targeting crack dealers by race, which would be a violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Federal prosecutors, however, say there’s a simple, if unpleasant, reason for the lopsided statistics: Most crack dealers are black.

”Socio-economic factors led certain ethnic and racial groups to be particularly involved with the distribution of certain drugs,” the Justice Department argued in a case in Los Angeles last year, ”and blacks were particularly involved in the Los Angeles area crack trade.”

But why — of all the ethnic and racial groups in California to pick from — crack planted its deadly roots in L.A.’s black neighborhoods is something only Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes can say for sure.

Danilo Blandon, a yearlong Mercury News investigation found, is the Johnny Appleseed of crack in California — the Crips’ and Bloods’ first direct-connect to the cocaine cartels of Colombia. The tons of cut-rate cocaine he brought into black L.A. during the 1980s and early 1990s became millions of rocks of crack, which spawned new crack markets wherever they landed.

On a tape made by the Drug Enforcement Administration in July 1990, Blandon casually explained the flood of cocaine that coursed through the streets of South-Central Los Angeles during the previous decade.

‘‘These people have been working with me 10 years,” Blandon said. ”I’ve sold them about 2,000 or 4,000 (kilos). I don’t know. I don’t remember how many.”

”It ain’t that Japanese guy you were talking about, is it?” asked DEA informant John Arman, who was wearing a hidden transmitter.

”No, it’s not him,” Blandon insisted. ”These … these are the black people.”

Arman gasped. ”Black?!”

”Yeah,” Blandon said. ”They control L.A. The people (black cocaine dealers) that control L.A.”

U.S. has paid Blandon more than $166,000

But unlike the thousands of young blacks now serving long federal prison sentences for selling mere handfuls of the drug, Blandon is a free man today. He has a spacious new home in Nicaragua and a business exporting precious woods, courtesy of the U.S. government, which has paid him more than $166,000 over the past 18 months, records show — for his help in the war on drugs.

That turn of events both amuses and angers ”Freeway Rick” Ross, L.A.’s premier crack wholesaler during much of the 1980s and Danilo Blandon’s biggest customer.

”They say I sold dope everywhere but, man, I know he done sold 10 times more dope than me,” Ross said with a laugh during a recent interview.

Nothing epitomizes the drug war’s uneven impact on black Americans more clearly than the intertwined lives of Ricky Donnell Ross, a high school dropout, and his suave cocaine supplier, Danilo Blandon, who has a master’s degree in marketing and was one of the top civilian leaders in California of an anti-communist guerrilla army formed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Called the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense (FDN), it became known to most Americans as the Contras.

In recent court testimony, Blandon, who began dealing cocaine in South-Central L.A. in 1982, swore that the first kilo of cocaine he sold in California was to raise money for the CIA’s army, which was trying on a shoestring to unseat Nicaragua’s new socialist Sandinista government.

After Blandon crossed paths with Ross, a South-Central teen-ager who had the gang connections and street smarts necessary to move the army’s cocaine, a veritable blizzard engulfed the ghettos.

Former Los Angeles Police narcotics detective Stephen W. Polak said he was working the streets of South-Central in the mid-1980s when he and his partners began seeing more cocaine than ever before.

”A lot of detectives, a lot of cops, were saying, hey, these blacks, no longer are we just seeing gram dealers. These guys are doing ounces; they were doing keys,” Polak recalled. But he said the reports were pooh-poohed by higher-ups who couldn’t believe black neighborhoods could afford the amount of cocaine the street cops claimed to be seeing.

”Major Violators (the LAPD’s elite anti-drug unit) was saying, basically, ahh, South-Central, how much could they be dealing?” said Polak, a 21-year LAPD veteran. ”Well, they (black dealers) went virtually untouched for a long time.”

It wasn’t until January 1987 — when crack markets were popping up in major cities all over the U.S. — that law enforcement brass decided to confront L.A.’s crack problem head-on. They formed the Freeway Rick Task Force, a cadre of veteran drug agents whose sole mission was to put Rick Ross out of business. Polak was a charter member.

”We just dedicated seven days a week to him. We were just on him at every move,” Polak said.

Ross, as usual, was quick to spot a trend. He moved to Cincinnati and quietly settled into a home in the woodsy Republican suburbs on the east side of town.

”I called it cooling out, trying to back away from the game,” Ross said. ”I had enough money.”

His longtime supplier, Blandon, reached an identical conclusion around the same time. A massive police raid on his cocaine operation in late 1986 nearly gave his wife a nervous breakdown, he testified recently, and by the summer of 1987 he was safely ensconced in Miami, with $1.6 million in cash.

Some of his drug profits, records show, were invested in a string of rental car and export businesses in Miami, often in partnership with an exiled Nicaraguan judge named Jose Macario Estrada. Like Blandon, the judge also worked for the CIA’s army, helping FDN soldiers and their families obtain visas and work papers in the United States. Estrada said he knew nothing of Blandon’s drug dealings at the time.

Blandon invested in four-star steak house

Blandon also bought into a swank steak-and-lobster restaurant called La Parrilla, which became a popular hangout for FDN leaders and supporters. The Miami Herald called it the ”best Nicaraguan restaurant in Dade County” and gave it a four-star rating, its highest.

But neither Ross nor Blandon stayed ”retired” for long.

A manic deal-maker, Ross found Cincinnati’s virgin crack market too seductive to ignore. When he left Los Angeles, the price of a kilo was around $12,000. In the Queen City, Ross chuckled, ”keys was selling for $50,000. It was like when I first started.”

Plunging back in, the crack tycoon cornered the Cincinnati market using the same low-price, high-volume strategy — and the same Nicaraguan drug connections — he’d used in L.A. Soon, he was selling crack as far away as Cleveland, Indianapolis, Dayton and St. Louis.

”There’s no doubt in my mind crack in Cincinnati can be traced to Ross,” police officer Robert Enoch told a Cincinnati newspaper three years ago.

But Ross’ reign in the Midwest was short-lived. In 1988, one of his loads ran into a drug-sniffing dog at a New Mexico bus station and drug agents eventually connected it to Ross. He pleaded guilty to crack trafficking charges and received a mandatory 10-year prison sentence, which he began serving in 1990.

In sunny Miami, Blandon’s retirement plans also had gone awry. His 24-city rental car business collapsed in 1989 and later went into bankruptcy. To make money, he testified, he came to the Bay Area and began brokering cocaine again, buying and selling from the same Nicaraguan dealers he’d known from his days with the FDN. In 1990 and 1991, he testified, he sold about 425 kilos of cocaine in Northern California — $10.5 million worth at wholesale prices.

But unlike before, when he was selling cocaine for the Contras, Blandon was constantly dogged by the police.

Twice in six months he was detained, first by Customs agents while taking $117,000 in money orders to Tijuana to pay a supplier, and then by the LAPD in the act of paying one of his Colombian suppliers more than $350,000.

The second time, after police found $14,000 in cash and a small quantity of cocaine in his pocket, he was arrested. But the U.S. Justice Department — saying a prosecution would disrupt an active investigation — persuaded the cops to drop their money laundering case.

Soon after that, Blandon and his wife, Chepita, were called down to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service office in San Diego on a pretense and scooped up by DEA agents, on charges of conspiracy to distribute cocaine. They were jailed without bond as dangers to the community and several other Nicaraguans were also arrested.

Blandon’s prosecutor, L.J. O’Neale, told a federal judge that Blandon had sold so much cocaine in the United States his mandatory prison sentence was ”off the scale.”

Then Blandon ”just vanished,” said Juanita Brooks, a San Diego attorney who represented one of Blandon’s co-defendants. ”All of a sudden his wife was out of jail and he was out of the case.”

The reasons were contained in a secret Justice Department memorandum filed in San Diego federal court in late 1993.

Prosecutor found Blandon ‘extraordinarily valuable’

Blandon, prosecutor O’Neale wrote, had become ”extraordinarily valuable in major DEA investigations of Class I drug traffickers.” And even though probation officers were recommending a life sentence and a $4 million fine, O’Neale said the government would be satisfied if Blandon got 48 months and no fine. Motion granted.

Less than a year later, records show, O’Neale was back with another idea: Why not just let Blandon go? After all, he wrote the judge, Blandon had a federal job waiting.

O’Neale, saying that Blandon ”has almost unlimited potential to assist the United States,” said the government wanted ”to enlist Mr. Blandon as a full-time, paid informant after his release from prison.”

And since it would be hard to do that job with parole officers snooping around, O’Neale added, the government wanted him turned loose without any supervision. Motion granted. O’Neale declined to comment.

After only 28 months in custody, most of it spent with federal agents who debriefed him for ”hundreds of hours,” he said, Blandon walked out of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego, was given a green card and began working on his first assignment: setting up his old friend ”Freeway Rick” for a sting operation.

Targeted for a sting while sitting in prison

Records show Ross was still behind bars, awaiting parole, when San Diego DEA agents targeted him for a ”reverse” sting — one in which government agents provide the drugs and the target provides the cash. The sting’s author, DEA agent Chuck Jones, has testified that he had no evidence Ross was dealing drugs from his prison cell, where he’d spent the past four years.

But during his incarceration Ross did something that, in the end, may have been even more foolhardy: He testified against Los Angeles police officers, as a witness for the U.S. government.

Soon after Ross went to prison for the Cincinnati bust, federal prosecutors from Los Angeles came to see him, dangling a tantalizing offer. A massive scandal was sweeping the L.A. County sheriff’s elite narcotics squads, and among the dozens of detectives fired or indicted for allegedly beating suspects, stealing drug money and planting evidence were members of the old Freeway Rick Task Force.

If Ross would testify about his experiences, he was told, it could help him get out of jail.

In 1991, he took the stand against his old nemesis, LAPD detective Steve Polak, who eventually pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of excessive use of force and retired. But the deal Ross got from federal prosecutors for testifying — five years off his sentence and an agreement that his remaining drug profits would not be seized — galled many.

”Ross will fall again someday,” Polak bitterly told a Los Angeles Times reporter in late 1994.

By then, the trip wires were already strung.

Within days of Ross’ parole in October 1994, he and Blandon were back in touch and their conversation quickly turned to cocaine. It was almost like old times, except that Ross was now hauling trash for a living. He was also behind on his mortgage payments for an old theater he owned in South-Central, which he was trying to turn into a youth academy.

According to tapes Blandon made of some of their discussions, Ross repeatedly told Blandon that he was broke and couldn’t afford to finance a drug deal. But Ross did agree to help his old mentor, who was also pleading poverty, find someone else to buy the 100 kilos of cocaine Blandon claimed he had.

Drug-laden vehicle was a trap for Ross

On March 2, 1995, in a shopping center parking lot in National City, near San Diego, Ross poked his head inside a cocaine-laden Chevy Blazer and the place exploded with police.

Ross jumped into a friend’s pickup and zoomed off ”looking for a wall that I could crash myself into,” he said. ”I just wanted to die.” He was captured after the truck careened into a hedgerow and has been held in jail without bond since then.

Ross’ arrest netted Blandon $45,500 in government rewards and expenses, records show. On the strength of Blandon’s testimony, Ross and two other men were convicted of cocaine conspiracy charges in San Diego last March — conspiring to sell the DEA’s cocaine. Sentencing is set for Aug. 23. Ross is facing a life sentence without the possibility of parole. The other men are looking at 10- to 20- year sentences.

Acquaintances say Blandon, who refused repeated interview requests, is a common sight these days in Managua’s better restaurants, drinking with friends and telling of his ”escape” from U.S. authorities.

According to his Miami lawyer, Blandon spends most of his time shuttling between San Diego and Managua, trying to recover Nicaraguan properties he left behind in 1979, when the socialists seized power and sent him running to the United States.

Additional reporting for this series in Nicaragua and Costa Rica was done by Managua journalist Georg Hodel. Research assistance at the Nicaraguan Supreme Court was performed by journalist Leonore Delgado.

Source

Drug expert: ‘Crack’ born in San Francisco Bay Area in ’74

The following are a series of revealing articles on the connection between the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras and the smuggling of illegal drugs, particularly cocaine. They are among the first exposés about Contra drug smuggling published in the United States. They were written by journalist Gary Webb for the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 under the series title “The Dark Alliance.” The articles, which alleged a connection between the Contras, the CIA and drug trafficking, quickly roused a strong reaction throughout the U.S. and triggered a smear campaign. Webb’s career was destroyed shortly after these articles were published by right-wing Reaganite journalists in support of the Contras.

The following copies were obtained from the website of the Seattle Times, since the San Jose Mercury News where they first appeared has removed the entire Gary Webb series from their web site.

— Espresso Stalinist

It was a failed attempt to copy something else

Published: Aug. 19, 1996

BY GARY WEBB

Mercury News Staff Writer

THOUGH MIAMI AND LOS ANGELES are commonly regarded as the twin cradles of ”crack” cocaine, the first government-financed study of cocaine smoking concluded that it was actually born here, in the San Francisco Bay Area, in January 1974.

After comedian Richard Pryor nearly immolated himself during a cocaine-smoking binge in 1980, the National Institute on Drug Abuse hired UCLA drug expert Ronald K. Siegel to look into the then-unfamiliar practice. Siegel, the first scientist to document crack’s use in the United States, traced the smoking habit back to 1930, when Colombians first started it.

Translation problem

But what was being smoked south of the border — a paste-like substance called basé (bah-SAY) — was very different from what Californians were putting in their pipes, Siegel found, even though they called it the same thing: free base.

Basé was a crude, toxics-laden precursor to cocaine powder. On the other hand, free base (which later became known as crack or rock), was cocaine powder that had been reverse-engineered to make it smokable. When Bay Area dealers tried recreating the drug they’d seen in South America, Siegel learned, they’d screwed up.

”When they looked it up in the Merck Manual, they saw cocaine base and thought, well, yeah, this is it,” Siegel, a nationally known drug researcher, said in an interview. ”They mispronounced it, misunderstood the Spanish, and thought (basé) was cocaine base.”

Unintentional success

The base described in the organic chemistry handbook was cocaine powder separated from its salts, a process easily done with boiling water and baking soda. It was an immediate, if unintentional, hit.

”They were wowed by it,” Siegel said. ”They thought they were smoking basé. They were not. They were smoking something nobody on the planet had ever smoked before.”

Using the sales records of several major drug paraphernalia companies, Siegel correlated crack’s public appearance with the appearance of base-making kits and glass pipes for smoking it. The sales records zeroed in on the Bay Area.

Study never published

”We were able to show to our satisfaction that they were directly responsible for distributing the habit throughout the United States. Wherever they were selling their kits, that’s where we started getting the clinical reports,” Siegel said. ”It all started in Northern California.”

His groundbreaking study was never published by the government, purportedly for budgetary reasons. Siegel, who said he grew concerned that the information would not be made available to other researchers, published it himself in an obscure medical journal in late 1982.

TUESDAY: The impact of the crack epidemic on the black community, and why justice hasn’t been for all.

Source

Drug agent thought she was onto something big

The following are a series of revealing articles on the connection between the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras and the smuggling of illegal drugs, particularly cocaine. They are among the first exposés about Contra drug smuggling published in the United States. They were written by journalist Gary Webb for the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 under the series title “The Dark Alliance.” The articles, which alleged a connection between the Contras, the CIA and drug trafficking, quickly roused a strong reaction throughout the U.S. and triggered a smear campaign. Webb’s career was destroyed shortly after these articles were published by right-wing Reaganite journalists in support of the Contras.

The following copies were obtained from the website of the Seattle Times, since the San Jose Mercury News where they first appeared has removed the entire Gary Webb series from their web site.

— Espresso Stalinist

Meneses’ trail was getting warm when her superiors took her off the case

Published: Aug. 19, 1996

BY GARY WEBB
Mercury News Staff Writer

On a November afternoon in 1981, San Francisco DEA agent Sandra Smith inadvertently uncovered the first direct link between cocaine and the secret army the Central Intelligence Agency was assembling to overthrow the government of Nicaragua.

Smith, one of the first female Drug Enforcement Administration agents in the Bay Area, was investigating rumors that a cocaine ring run by Norwin Meneses was bringing drugs into California and, for some reason, sending weapons down to Central America.

It was, she said, ”the only (case) that I ever worked, in all the time I worked there, that I thought was really big.”

She had good reason to be excited. Federal agents had amassed a thick file on Meneses, running across his tracks in New Orleans and Los Angeles, a 1981 DEA affidavit said. As far back as 1978, it said, agents knew Meneses was bringing multi-kilo quantities of cocaine into the United States — huge amounts by the standards of the day.

Smith staked out San Francisco International Airport and tailed two of Meneses’ Southern California dealers to a house at 8 Bellevue Ave. in Daly City.

Investigation terminated

Because Smith’s investigation was terminated shortly afterward, she never learned who lived in that house. But two years later, its owner would become involved in one of the more curious incidents in the annals of the war on drugs.

His name was Carlos Augusto Cabezas, and, like Norwin Meneses, he’d been on the losing side of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. Then 37, Cabezas held degrees in law and accounting and ran the foreign division of the Bank of America in Managua. During the war, he was a pilot for the Guardia, the army of U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza.

Yet by February 1983, Cabezas was in jail in San Francisco, accused by the FBI of being part of a drug ring that brought more than $100 million worth of cocaine into the country aboard Colombian freighters. Police cracked the case when they nabbed frogmen swimming ashore at Pier 96 near Hunters Point with 400 pounds of cocaine. At the time, it was the largest cocaine seizure in California history, and 35 people were ultimately arrested.

Though Meneses was never charged, court records said there was ”a direct and ongoing connection between the Meneses organization and Carlos Cabezas.”

Bay Area papers treated the case like any big drug bust — a front-page headline and a picture of the dope. But the Nicaraguan press saw something else entirely.

Managua press saw the story

”Somoza supporters involved in drug trafficking,” is how the Feb. 20, 1983, edition of Barricada, a pro-Sandinista daily in Managua, headlined its story. Citing unnamed Nicaraguan government sources, the story said that among the group arrested ”there were many who are linked to the ex-Guardia group of Somoza supporters in San Francisco, and through this link in the cocaine trafficking, they were giving economic support to the Contra revolution.”

The first inkling here that the Frogman Case was something extraordinary came in June 1984, when the attorney for the cocaine ring’s alleged leader, Julio Zavala, asked the government to return money seized from Zavala’s apartment the morning of his arrest.

Along with an assortment of arms, drugs, passports and catalogs for machine guns and silencers, agents found $36,800 in cash. Federal prosecutors declared it was drug money and said they would use it as evidence at Zavala’s trial.

But Zavala insisted the cash wasn’t from drugs; he said the money had been given to him by the Contra army to buy supplies in the United States. To prove it, two exiled Contra leaders wrote the court and swore that the money seized from the cocaine dealer was ”for the reinstatement of democracy in Nicaragua.”

Those letters were hurriedly sealed after prosecutors invoked the Classified Information Procedures Act, a law designed to keep national security secrets from leaking out during trials.

The money is returned

Soon, U.S. Attorney Joseph P. Russoniello decided he really didn’t need the money as evidence. Nor did he want it forfeited to the government, which is standard procedure in drug cases. Instead, on Oct. 2, 1984, the Justice Department gave Zavala the money back.

But that wasn’t the end of the issue.

A few weeks later, at Zavala’s trial, Carlos Cabezas took the stand as a government witness against his old boss and exposed additional details of the Frogman ring’s ties to the CIA’s army.

Cabezas said Zavala, who was convicted of the drug charges, had sent him to Costa Rica in late 1981 to pick up two kilos of cocaine from a man named Horacio Pereira, an exiled Nicaraguan businessman, and bring the cocaine back to San Francisco. But when he got there, Pereira had changed his mind and wouldn’t hand over the dope because he’d heard Zavala was drinking heavily.

Cabezas said Pereira didn’t want someone unreliable handling the money because he ”was helping the Contra revolution in Nicaragua.”

Cabezas said he agreed to be responsible for the Contras’ cocaine profits and said Pereira eventually sold him a total of 12 kilos, worth at that time about $600,000 wholesale.

Pereira, a business associate of Norwin Meneses, was later convicted on drug charges in Costa Rica. Secret tapes made during that investigation revealed he was in frequent contact with Contra commanders. In addition, a 1982 FBI report — which wasn’t made public until 1988 — identified him and two other Contra leaders as the cocaine suppliers for the Frogman ring. Pereira was ”chopped into tiny bits” a few years ago as a result of a drug debt, according to Meneses.

Why DEA agent Smith’s investigation of Meneses — which predated the FBI’s Frogman bust by two years — was halted is not clear. Smith said her superiors didn’t share her enthusiasm for the case and she was sent off to investigate motorcycle gangs in Oakland.

”I’m not so sure the DEA management took (my investigation) seriously enough to allow me the time and the assistance I would have needed,” she said.

When she quit in 1984, Smith asked her fellow DEA agents if they wanted the intelligence files she’d collected on Meneses in case ”anyone might be interested in picking up where I left off,” she recalled.

”No one was. So I had a lot of notes that I had made that, just for lack of doing anything else (with them), I just shredded. No one was interested.”

TUESDAY: The impact of the crack epidemic on the black community, and why justice hasn’t been for all.

Source

Shadowy origins of ‘crack’ epidemic

The following are a series of revealing articles on the connection between the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras and the smuggling of illegal drugs, particularly cocaine. They are among the first exposés about Contra drug smuggling published in the United States. They were written by journalist Gary Webb for the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 under the series title “The Dark Alliance.” The articles, which alleged a connection between the Contras, the CIA and drug trafficking, quickly roused a strong reaction throughout the U.S. and triggered a smear campaign. Webb’s career was destroyed shortly after these articles were published by right-wing Reaganite journalists in support of the Contras.

The following copies were obtained from the website of the Seattle Times, since the San Jose Mercury News where they first appeared has removed the entire Gary Webb series from their web site.

— Espresso Stalinist

Role of CIA-linked agents a well-protected secret until now

Published: Aug. 19, 1996

BY GARY WEBB
Mercury News Staff Writer

IF THEY’D BEEN IN a more respectable line of work, Norwin Meneses, Danilo Blandon and ”Freeway Rick” Ross would have been hailed as geniuses of marketing.

This odd trio — a smuggler, a bureaucrat and a driven ghetto teen-ager — made fortunes creating the first mass market in America for a product so hellishly desirable that consumers will literally kill to get it: ”crack” cocaine.

Federal lawmen will tell you plenty about Rick Ross, mostly about the evils he visited upon black neighborhoods by spreading the crack plague in Los Angeles and cities as far east as Cincinnati. On Aug. 23, they hope, Freeway Rick will be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

But those same officials won’t say a word about the two men who turned Rick Ross into L.A’s first king of crack, the men who, for at least five years, supplied him with enough Colombian cocaine to help spawn crack markets in major cities nationwide. Their critical role in the country’s crack explosion, a Mercury News investigation found, has been a strictly guarded secret — until now.

To understand how crack came to curse black America, you have to go into the volcanic hills overlooking Managua, the capital of the Republic of Nicaragua.

During June 1979, those hills teemed with triumphant guerrillas called Sandinistas — Cuban- assisted revolutionaries who had just pulled off one of the biggest military upsets in Central American history. In a bloody civil war, they’d destroyed the U.S.-trained army of Nicaragua’s dictator, Anastasio Somoza. The final assault on Somoza’s downtown bunker was expected any day.

In the dictator’s doomed capital, a minor member of Somoza’s government decided to skip the war’s obvious ending. On June 19, Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes gathered his wife and young daughter, slipped through the encircling rebels and flew into exile in California.

Blandon, the then 29-year-old son of a wealthy slumlord, left a life of privilege and luxury behind. Educated at the finest private schools in Latin America, he had earned a master’s degree in marketing and had become the head of a $27 million program financed by the U.S. government. As Nicaragua’s director of wholesale markets, it had been his job to create an American-style agricultural system.

Today, Danilo Blandon is a well-paid and highly trusted operative for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Federal officials say he is one of the DEA’s top informants in Latin America, collecting intelligence on Colombian and Mexican drug lords and setting up stings.

In March, he was the DEA’s star witness at a drug trial in San Diego, where, for the first time, he testified publicly about his strange interlude between government jobs — the years he sold cocaine to the street gangs of black Los Angeles.

Dealer says patriotism for Nicaragua was motive

A stocky man with salt-and-pepper hair, a trim mustache and a distinguished bearing, Blandon swore that he didn’t plan on becoming a dope dealer when he landed in the United States with $100 in his pocket, seeking political asylum. He did it, he insisted, out of patriotism.

When duty called in late 1981, he was working as a car salesman in East Los Angeles. In his spare time, he said, he and a few fellow exiles were working to rebuild Somoza’s defeated army, the Nicaraguan national guard, in hopes of one day returning to Managua in triumph.

Like his friends, Blandon nursed a keen hatred of the Sandinistas, who had confiscated the Blandon family’s cattle ranches and sprawling urban slums. His wife’s politically prominent family — the Murillos, whose patriarch was Managua’s mayor in the 1960s — lost its immense fortune as well.

”Because of the horror stories and persecution suffered by his family and countrymen, Blandon said he decided to assist his countrymen in fighting the tyranny of the (Sandinista) regime,” stated a 1992 report from the U.S. Probation and Parole Department. ”He decided that because he was an adept businessman, he could assist his countrymen through monetary means.”

But the rallies and cocktail parties the exiles hosted raised little money. ”At this point, he became committed to raising money for humanitarian and political reasons via illegal activity (cocaine trafficking for profit),” said the heavily censored report, which surfaced during the March trial.

That venture began, Blandon testified, with a phone call from a wealthy friend in Miami named Donald Barrios, an old college classmate. Corporate records show Barrios was a business partner of one of the ex-dictator’s top military aides: Maj. Gen. Gustavo ”The Tiger” Medina, a steely eyed counterinsurgency expert and the former supply boss of Somoza’s army.

Blandon said his college chum, who also was working in the resistance movement, dispatched him to Los Angeles International Airport to pick up another exile, Juan Norwin Meneses Cantarero. Though their families were related, Blandon said, he’d never met Meneses — a wiry, excitable man with a bad toupee — until that day.

”I picked him up, and he started telling me that we had to (raise) some money and to send to Honduras,” Blandon testified. He said he flew with Meneses to a camp there and met one of his new companion’s old friends, Col. Enrique Bermudez.

Bermudez — who’d been Somoza’s Washington liaison to the American military — was hired by the Central Intelligence Agency in mid-1980 to pull together the remnants of Somoza’s vanquished national guard, records show. In August 1981, Bermudez’s efforts were unveiled at a news conference as the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense (FDN) — in English, the Nicaraguan Democratic Force. It was the largest and best-organized of the handful of guerrilla groups Americans would know as the Contras.

Bermudez was the FDN’s military chief and, according to congressional records and newspaper reports, received regular CIA paychecks for a decade, payments that stopped shortly before his still-unsolved slaying in Managua in 1991

Reagan’s secret order not enough to fund Contras

White House records show that shortly before Blandon’s meeting with Bermudez, President Reagan had given the CIA the green light to begin covert paramilitary operations against the Sandinista government. But Reagan’s secret Dec. 1, 1981, order permitted the spy agency to spend only $19.9 million on the project, an amount CIA officials acknowledged was not nearly enough to field a credible fighting force.

After meeting with Bermudez, Blandon testified, he and Meneses ”started raising money for the Contra revolution.” ”There is a saying that the ends justify the means,” Blandon testified. ”And that’s what Mr. Bermudez told us in Honduras, OK?”

While Blandon says Bermudez didn’t know cocaine would be the fund-raising device they used, the presence of the mysterious Mr. Meneses strongly suggests otherwise.

Norwin Meneses, known in Nicaraguan newspapers as ”Rey de la Droga” (King of Drugs), was then under active investigation by the DEA and the FBI for smuggling cocaine into the United States, records show.

And Bermudez was very familiar with the influential Meneses family. He had served under two Meneses brothers, Fermin and Edmundo, who were generals in Somoza’s army. Somoza himself spoke at the 1978 funeral of Edmundo Meneses, who was slain by leftists shortly after his appointment as Nicaragua’s ambassador to Guatemala, hailing him as an anti-communist martyr.

A violent death — someone else’s — had also made brother Norwin famous in his homeland. In 1977 he was accused of ordering the assassination of Nicaragua’s chief of Customs, who was gunned down in the midst of an investigation into an international stolen car ring allegedly run by Norwin Meneses.

Though the customs boss accused Meneses on his deathbed of hiring his killer, Nicaraguan newspapers reported that the Managua police, then commanded by Edmundo Meneses, cleared Norwin of any involvement.

Despite that incident and a stack of law enforcement reports describing him as a major drug trafficker, Norwin Meneses was welcomed into the United States in July 1979 as a political refugee and given a visa and a work permit. He settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, and for the next six years supervised the importation of thousands of kilos of cocaine into California.

It arrived in all kinds of containers: false-bottomed shoes, Colombian freighters, cars with hidden compartments, luggage from Miami. Once here, it disappeared into a series of houses and nondescript storefront businesses scattered from Hayward to San Jose, Pacifica to Burlingame, Daly City to Oakland.

And, like Blandon, Meneses went to work for the CIA’s army.

At the meeting with Bermudez, Meneses said in a recent interview, the Contra commander put him in charge of ”intelligence and security” for the FDN in California.

”Nobody (from California) would join the Contra forces down there without my knowledge and approval,” he said proudly. Blandon, he said, was assigned to raise money in Los Angeles.

Blandon testified that Meneses took him back to San Francisco and, over two days, schooled him in the cocaine trade.

Meneses declined to discuss any cocaine dealings he may have had, other than to deny that he ever ”transferred benefits from my business to the FDN. Business is business.”

Lessons over, Blandon said, Meneses gave him two kilograms of cocaine (roughly 4 pounds), the names of two customers and a one-way ticket to Los Angeles.

”Meneses was pushing me every week,” he testified. ”It took me about three months, four months to sell those two keys because I didn’t know what to do. … In those days, two keys was too heavy.”

At the time, cocaine was so costly that few besides rock stars and studio executives could afford it. One study of actual cocaine prices paid by DEA agents put it at $5,200 an ounce.

But Blandon wasn’t peddling the FDN’s cocaine in Beverly Hills or Malibu. To find customers, he and several other Nicaraguan exiles working with him headed for the vast, untapped markets of L.A.’s black ghettos.

Uncanny timing made marketing strategy work

Blandon’s marketing strategy, selling the world’s most expensive street drug in some of California’s poorest neighborhoods, might seem baffling, but in retrospect, his timing was uncanny. He and his compatriots arrived in South-Central L.A. right when street-level drug users were figuring out how to make cocaine affordable: by changing the pricey white powder into powerful little nuggets that could be smoked — crack.

Crack turned the cocaine world on its head. Cocaine smokers got an explosive high unmatched by 10 times as much snorted powder. And since only a tiny amount was needed for that rush, cocaine no longer had to be sold in large, expensive quantities. Anyone with $20 could get wasted.

It was a ”substance that is tailor-made to addict people,” Dr. Robert Byck, a Yale University cocaine expert, said during congressional testimony in 1986. ”It is as though (McDonald’s founder) Ray Kroc had invented the opium den.”

Crack’s Kroc was a disillusioned 19-year-old named Ricky Donnell Ross, who, at the dawn of the 1980s, found himself adrift on the streets of South-Central Los Angeles.

A talented tennis player for Dorsey High School, Ross had recently seen his dream of a college scholarship evaporate when his coach discovered he could neither read nor write.

At the end of tennis season, Ross quit high school and wound up at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, a vocational community college where, ironically, he learned to bind books. But a bookbinding career was the last thing Ross had in mind. L.A. Trade-Tech had a tennis team, and Ross was still hoping his skills with the racquet would get his dreams back on track.

”He was a very good player,” recalled Pete Brown, his former coach at L.A. Trade-Tech. ”I’d say he was probably my No. 3 guy on the team at the time.”

To pay his bills, however, Ross picked up a different racket: stolen car parts. In late 1979, he was arrested for stealing a car and had to quit the trade while the charges were pending.

‘Freeway Rick’ hears about popularity of jet-set drug

During this forced hiatus, Ross said, a friend home on Christmas break from San Jose State University told him about the soaring popularity of a jet-set drug called cocaine, which Ross had only vaguely heard about. In the impoverished neighborhoods of South-Central, it was virtually non-existent. Most street cops, in fact, had never seen any because cocaine was then a parlor drug of the wealthy and the trendy.

Ross’ friend — a college football player — told him ”cocaine was going to be the new thing, that everybody was doing it.” Intrigued, Ross set off to find out more.

Through a cocaine-using auto upholstery teacher Ross knew, he met a Nicaraguan named Henry Corrales, who began selling Ross and his best friend, Ollie ”Big Loc” Newell, small amounts of remarkably inexpensive cocaine.

Thanks to a network of friends in South-Central and Compton, including many members of various Crips gangs, Ross and Newell steadily built up clientele. With each sale, Ross reinvested his hefty profits in more cocaine.

Eventually, Corrales introduced Ross and Newell to his supplier, Danilo Blandon. And then business really picked up.

”At first, we was just going to do it until we made $5,000,” Ross said. ”We made that so fast we said, no, we’ll quit when we make $20,000. Then we was going to quit when we saved enough to buy a house …”

Ross would eventually own millions of dollars’ worth of real estate across Southern California, including houses, motels, a theater and several other businesses. (His nickname, ”Freeway Rick,” came from the fact that he owned properties near the Harbor Freeway in Los Angeles.)

Within a year, Ross’ drug operation grew to dominate inner-city Los Angeles, and many of the biggest dealers in town were his customers. When crack hit L.A.’s streets hard in late 1983, Ross already had the infrastructure in place to corner a huge chunk of the burgeoning market.

$2 million worth of crack moved in a single day

It was not uncommon, he said, to move $2 million or $3 million worth of crack in one day.

”Our biggest problem had got to be counting the money,” Ross said. ”We got to the point where it was like, man, we don’t want to count no more money.”

Nicaraguan cocaine dealer Jacinto Torres, another former supplier of Ross and a sometime- partner of Blandon, told drug agents in a 1992 interview that after a slow start, ”Blandon’s cocaine business dramatically increased. … Norwin Meneses, Blandon’s supplier as of 1983 and 1984, routinely flew quantities of 200 to 400 kilograms from Miami to the West Coast.”

Leroy ”Chico” Brown, an ex-crack dealer from Compton who dealt with Ross, told the Mercury News of visiting one of Ross’ five cookhouses, where Blandon’s powder was turned into crack, and finding huge steel vats of cocaine bubbling atop restaurant-size gas ranges.

”They were stirring these big pots with those things you use in canoes,” Brown said with amazement. ”You know — oars.”

Blandon told the DEA last year that he was selling Ross up to 100 kilos of cocaine a week, which was then ”rocked up” and distributed ”to the major gangs in the area, specifically the “Crips’ and the “Bloods,”’ the DEA report said.

At wholesale prices, that’s roughly $65 million to $130 million worth of cocaine every year, depending on the going price of a kilo.

“He was one of the main distributors down here,” said former Los Angeles Police Department narcotics detective Steve Polak, who was part of the Freeway Rick Task Force, which was set up in 1987 to put Ross out of business. “And his poison, there’s no telling how many tens of thousands of people he touched. He’s responsible for a major cancer that still hasn’t stopped spreading.”

But Ross is the first to admit that being in the right place at the right time had almost nothing to do with his amazing success. Other L.A. dealers, he noted, were selling crack long before he started.

What he had, and they didn’t, was Danilo Blandon, a friend with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of high-grade cocaine and an expert’s knowledge of how to market it.

”I’m not saying I wouldn’t have been a dope dealer without Danilo,” Ross stressed. ”But I wouldn’t have been Freeway Rick.”

The secret to his success, Ross said, was Blandon’s cocaine prices. ”It was unreal. We were just wiping out everybody.”

That alone, Ross said, allowed him to sew up the Los Angeles market and move on. In city after city, local dealers either bought from Ross or got left behind.

”It didn’t make no difference to Rick what anyone else was selling it for. Rick would just go in and undercut him $10,000 a key,” Chico Brown said. ”Say some dude was selling for 30. Boom — Rick would go in and sell it for 20. If he was selling for 20, Rick would sell for 10. Sometimes, he be giving (it) away.”

Before long, Blandon was giving Ross hundreds of kilos of cocaine on consignment — sell now, pay later — a strategy that dramatically accelerated the expansion of Ross’ crack empire, even beyond California’s borders.

Ross said he never discovered how Blandon was able to get cocaine so cheaply. ”I just figured he knew the people, you know what I’m saying? He was plugged.”

But Freeway Rick had no idea just how ”plugged” his erudite cocaine broker was. He didn’t know about Norwin Meneses, or the CIA, or the Salvadoran air force planes that allegedly were flying the cocaine into an air base in Texas.

And he wouldn’t find out about it for another 10 years.

TUESDAY: The impact of the crack epidemic on the black community, and why justice hasn’t been for all.

Source

Testimony links U.S. to drugs-guns trade

 The following are a series of revealing articles on the connection between the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras and the smuggling of illegal drugs, particularly cocaine. They are among the first exposés about Contra drug smuggling published in the United States. They were written by journalist Gary Webb for the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 under the series title “The Dark Alliance.” The articles, which alleged a connection between the Contras, the CIA and drug trafficking, quickly roused a strong reaction throughout the U.S. and triggered a smear campaign. Webb’s career was destroyed shortly after these articles were published by right-wing Reaganite journalists in support of the Contras.

The following copies were obtained from the website of the Seattle Times, since the San Jose Mercury News where they first appeared has removed the entire Gary Webb series from their web site.

— Espresso Stalinist

Dealers got their ‘own little arsenal’

Published: Aug. 18, 1996

BY GARY WEBB
Mercury News Staff Writer

DANILO BLANDON WAS a full- service drug dealer. In addition to the tons of inexpensive cocaine he provided his clients, he also sold them assault weapons and sophisticated communications gear, including hidden microphone detectors to sniff out undercover cops.

“We had our own little arsenal,” recalled Rick Ross, who was Los Angeles’ biggest “crack” cocaine dealer in the mid-1980s. “Once he tried to sell (my partner) a grenade launcher. I said, “Man, what … do we need with a grenade launcher?’.”

Blandon testified in March that his source for such accouterments — which included Uzi submachine guns and Colt AR-15 assault rifles was an ex-Laguna Beach burglary detective named Ronald J. Lister. Lister and his partners sometimes showed up at meetings of Contra supporters in Los Angeles to demonstrate machine guns, Blandon said.

Lister, 50, claimed he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to federal officials and FBI documents. He later worked as an informant for the DEA and the FBI, records and interviews revealed.

In late 1986, as part of Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh’s Iran-Contra investigation, FBI agents investigating the Iran-Contra scandal interviewed Lister’s former real estate agent, who told of Lister’s paying cash for a $340,000 house in Mission Viejo. When the Realtor asked Lister where the money came from, Lister replied that he was raising funds for the Contras, an activity he described as “CIA-approved.”

Christopher Moore, an L.A. attorney who once worked as an office assistant for Lister’s company, Mundy Security Group, said Lister sent him to El Salvador in June 1982 to “baby-sit” a U.S. government contract the company had to install a security system for a Salvadoran air force base.

Spoke of CIA protection

Lister often spoke of “being protected by the CIA,” Moore said in an interview. “I didn’t know whether to believe him or not.”

One thing is certain: There is considerable evidence that El Salvador’s air force was deeply involved with cocaine flights, the Contras and Blandon’s cocaine supplier, Norwin Meneses.

Pilot admits role

Meneses said one of his oldest friends is a former Contra pilot named Marcos Aguado, a Nicaraguan who works for the Salvadoran air force high command.

Aguado was identified in 1987 congressional testimony as a CIA agent who helped the Contras get weapons, airplanes and money from a major Colombian drug trafficker named George Morales. Aguado admitted his role in that deal in a videotaped deposition taken by a U.S. Senate subcommittee that year.

His name also turned up in a deposition taken by the congressional Iran-Contra committees that same year. Robert W. Owen, a courier for Lt. Col. Oliver North, testified he knew Aguado as a Contra pilot and said there was “concern” about his being involved with drug trafficking.

While flying for the Contras, Aguado was stationed at Ilopango Air Base near El Salvador’s capital of San Salvador.

Agent’s reports ignored

In 1985, the DEA agent assigned to El Salvador — Celerino Castillo III — began picking up reports that cocaine was being flown to the United States out of hangars 4 and 5 at Ilopango as part of a Contra-related covert operation. Castillo said he soon confirmed what his informants were telling him.

Starting in January 1986, Castillo began documenting the cocaine flights — listing pilot names, tail numbers, dates and flight plans — and sent them to DEA headquarters.

The only response he got, Castillo wrote in his 1994 memoirs, was an internal DEA investigation of him. He took a disability retirement from the agency in 1991.

“Basically, the bottom line is it was a covert operation and they (DEA officials) were covering it up,” Castillo said in an interview. “You can’t get any simpler than that. It was a coverup.” DEA officials would not respond to those statements. A Freedom of Information Act request for Castillo’s reports is still pending. Lister, who pleaded guilty to federal cocaine charges in 1991 and is serving a prison sentence in Phoenix, did not respond to several requests for an interview. Aguado could not be reached for comment.

MONDAY: How the drug ring worked, and how crack was “born” in the Bay Area. Plus, the story of how the U.S. government gave back $36,000 seized from a drug dealer after he claimed the money belonged to the Contras.

Source

Engels on the Dialectics of Nature

“Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forest to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. . . . Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature–but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.”

 – The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, 1876

Party of Labor of Iran (Toufan): The Criminal, Inhumane, Warmongering, and Illegal Sanctions on Iran

On Monday January 23, 2012, the foreign ministers of the imperialist European Union countries decided in Brussels to extend the economic sanctions on Iran by putting sanctions on Central Bank of Iran and by freezing the assets of the Iranian people in Europe. In order to inflict a heavy damage on the economy of Iran, they decided to place an embargo on the export of the Iranian oil to Europe.

To impose economic blockades on and to cause hunger in Iran are acts that are internationally illegal and are crimes against humanity. Imperialists want to impose their sinister, plundering, and domineering intentions on Iran and on their “axis of evils” by creating another Iraq and a second Gaza Strip. By punishing Iran, the imperialist countries want to teach a lesson to Non-Allied countries and to those who do not submit to their dictates.

In the past, the imperialists try to justify their crimes by passing illegal resolutions in the UN Security Council. But they imposed sanctions against Iran today without any UN authorization. The sanctions are plots by a gang of international plunderer against a UN-member state and are against the UN Charter. The US and EU sanctions against Iran lack any legal basis on the international arena. The US imposes on countries of the world the decisions made in the US Congress and pretends that the decisions are made by the international community. The illegal and bullying actions against Iran show the hegemonic and despotic nature of the US imperialism.

While the foreign minister of Russia, Sergei Lawrow, stated that the “unilateral actions are useless”, he added that there was no reason to make any decision in addition to collective decision by the UN Security Council. The deputy foreign minister of the racist government of Israel, Danny Ajalon, claimed in a press interview that “These sanctions have reduced the threat of war”. Coming out of the meeting that made warmongering and threatening decisions on Iran, Ms. Catherine Ashton who is in charge of the EU international relations and the foreign minister of Sweden Mr. Carl Bidlt claimed that the basis of their work was to appeal to diplomacy and negotiation!

The imperialist powers clearly lie when they claim that they recognize the legal and indisputable right of Iran to enrich uranium. The fact is that they have monopoly in producing nuclear energy. The recognition of Iran’s right to produce nuclear energy is to break the imperialist monopoly. In a deceptive psychological war, the major powers warn the world about Iran’s nuclear bomb, but they have not disclosed any document to show the existence of this bomb. German foreign minister Guido Weserwelle shamelessly said that “We cannot accept Iran developing nuclear weapons” and that “This is not a security problem for region only but it will disrupt the world security”. Wow! The non-existence Iranian nuclear bomb disrupts the security of the entire globe but many hundred known or secret warheads in the hands of American, British, French, and Israeli warmongers are nor dangerous for the world security! Apparently, there are good and bad atomic bombs! The arguments given by the representatives of the imperialist powers are fierce, threatening, and sickening.

The history of economic sanctions shows that the ordinary people of the countries on which the sanction were imposed suffered the most by the sanctions. In Iran, the inflation is rapidly rising, shortage of medicine and medical equipments is already felt, and particularly the patients with heart problems are under attack because the companies making the equipments are under the US sanctions and cannot export their products to Iran. This is not a concern for the imperialist powers. It is not important to the US President Obama and his Iranian allies if millions of people are slaughtered in the war. Also, the sanctions on Iran give an excuse to the authority of the Islamic Republic to increase the suppression of the anti-imperialist and democratic forces in Iran.

The imperialist powers think that if their sanctions cause widespread hunger in Iran, then the people will rise up and install a Western puppet regime. This is a miscalculation because the history of the Iran shows that Iranian people have always rejected submission to any forces allied to foreign imperialist powers. The Iranian masses have no feeling except disgust and hate towards sellout, spies, and for those who carry out terrorist operations in Iran.

The fact is that the imperialists’ actions against Iran are not for eliminating the Iranian nuclear bomb. Such a bomb does not exist. Iran holds a key geo-political position in the Middle East region and is the center of entangled world contradictions. To control Iran is to control an entire strategic region with enormous energy resources that the US desire to plunder for decades. Strait of Hormuz is a valve for export of oil to four corners of the globe. The US imperialists wish to have control over this oil valve. The presence of the US forces in the region is a danger for the world security and is a threat particularly to the security of the Middle East. The propaganda about Iranian atomic bomb, the bomb that does not exist, is justification for aggression on Iran and for domination of the region, and Islamic Republic’s capitulation to imperialists’ demands will not change the imperialists’ nature of following their domineering goals.

The Party of Labour of Iran (Toufan) believes that the economic sanctions on Iran act against the masses and are inhumane. We take the imperialists, particularly the US imperialists, responsible for the suffering and misery these sanctions will cause. The sanctions on Iran are illegal, warmongering, and unjustifiable. Our Party strongly condemns the imperialist sanctions, embargoes, and threats against the Iranian masses. We believe that every progressive, human-loving, and patriotic Iranian must take stand against the sanctions and against the imperialist-Zionist warmongering threats, and must draw a sharp line to separate enemies from the people.

The regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran is a reactionary and Mafia-style capitalist regime. The regime of Iran has lost all its legitimacy, and the overwhelming majority of the Iranian masses are disgusted by the regime. The task of overthrowing this criminal regime is on the shoulders of the Iranian masses. The regime change by the imperialist invading forces will be for the purpose of colonizing the country and looting the resources of the nation. The imperialist powers have never supported and will never support the freedom-loving and democratic forces anywhere in the world. Their talks about freedom and human rights are nothing but smokescreens for their criminal actions, and Iraq, Libya, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan … are testimonies to this. Hypocrisy is written on their foreheads.

The Party of Labour of Iran (Toufan)

January 23, 2012.

Source

 

Lenin on Opportunism

“The opportunist, by his very nature, tends to avoid a definite and final solution of a question; he is always seeking for alternatives; he writhes like an eel between mutually exclusive points of view; he tries to ‘be in agreement’ with all sides, but expresses his disagreements in amendments, doubts, pious and innocent wishes, etc. etc.”

 – One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, 1904

“In the past, before the war, opportunism was often looked upon as a legitimate, though ‘deviationist’ and ‘extremist,’ component of the Social-Democratic Party. The war has shown the impossibility of this in the future. Opportunism has ‘matured,’ and is now playing to the full its role as emissary of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement. Unity with the opportunists has become sheer hypocrisy, exemplified by the German Social-Democratic Party.

On every important occasion (e.g., the August 4 vote), the opportunists present an ultimatum, to which they give effect through their numerous links with the bourgeoisie, their majority on the executives of the trade unions, etc. Today unity with the opportunists actually means subordinating the working class to their ‘own’ national bourgeoisie, and an alliance with the latter for the purpose of oppressing other nations and of fighting for dominant-nation privileges; it means splitting the revolutionary proletariat of all countries.”

 – Socialism and War, 1915

Video in Spanish: El enigma de Corea del Norte (The Enigma of North Korea)

Enver Hoxha: On Palestine, Zionism and Arab Liberation

WEDNESDAY
JULY 29, 1970

We Have Sympathy & Respect for the Arab People of Palestine

A delegation of «Al-Fatah», Movement for the National Liberation of Palestine, is coming to our country these days for an official visit. Yasser Arafat personally asked our embassy in Cairo for permission to send a delegation.

We have sympathy and respect for the Arab people of Palestine, because they are a brave people who are suffering. At the moment they are the only Arab people who are fighting all round the borders of Israel, while some Arab leaders, from those of Egypt to those of Lebanon, are merely talking, holding conferences, preparing… for compromises, etc.

The Palestinians, expelled from their land by the British colonialist government and from UNO in favour of Israel, are living in tents, in great hardship, in camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere. The latest Israeli aggression increased the number of Palestinian refugees, so the only road of salvation left to them was that of the partisan war. And they began it, attacking the Israeli aggressors from outside, from Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, and from inside, in the territory occupied by Israel.

Thus, thanks to the struggle of the Palestinians, the Palestinian question has become an important national and international issue, which both the friends and the enemies of the Palestinian people are compelled to bear in mind and cannot fail to take into account.

Despite its nationalist tendencies, the «Al-Fatah» organization is progressive and democratic and the biggest and most powerful organization which, at the moment, has a correct line of struggle for the liberation of Palestine and the defeat of the anti-Arab, annexationist policy of the state of Israel, concocted by international Zionism and supported by the imperialists. This organization is not against the masses of the Jewish population whom, in its program, it accepts as citizens of the new Arab state of Palestine.

However, although the representatives of the feudal bourgeois cliques ruling in some Arab countries pose as pro the Palestinians’ struggle, they do not look kindly on this movement of resistance and, since they are unable to liquidate it, want to have it under control.

The resistance of the Palestinians has become a serious political and military obstacle, which these cliques are obliged to take into account. The King of Jordan, an agent of the British and the Americans, has made two or three attempts to liquidate the Palestinian partisans, who are stronger than this sold-out king. At these dangerous moments for the Palestinian guerrillas they ought to fight him to the end, to unite with the people of Jordan, in order to continue the war against Israel and American imperialism.

The Soviets and the Americans are making the law in the Middle East. The Egyptian leadership has fallen completely under the influence of the Soviets. Hussein of Jordan is a dyed-in-the-wool traitor, the Syrians are posing as somewhat «concerned», while the Lebanese trim their sails to the wind.

Nasser agreed in general to discuss the «Rogers Plan», which means to enter into negotiations and compromises and, in the end, «to make the peace» so greatly desired by Israel, in favour of that country and its American patron and in disfavour of the Arab peoples, especially the Palestinian people, against whom the savage attacks of the gendarmes of the ruling cliques sold out to foreigners, will commence later. With the signing of the «peace» the Soviets will turn this into a «colossal victory» for themselves. They will try to remain in Egypt and to dominate it. There is the danger that the Egyptian ports may become the ports of the Soviet Mediterranean fleet which emerged from the Black Sea. From the Mediterranean the Soviet revisionists intend to extend their colonies in Africa «in peaceful ways», in order to cross the seas and reach India. This is how they dream of achieving the empire of Alexander the Great, by conquering the peoples through the threat of arms from land and sea, through rubles and through their demagogy of a falsified socialism.

The «Soviet-American peace» in the Middle East will be a defeat for all the Arab peoples and an especially great obstacle for the Palestinian people. This kind of «peace» is a victory for the Soviet-American imperialists in general and for Israel in particular.

What will happen with the Palestinian people will be what happened with the Albanian people before the First World War. As is known, at that time large parts of Albania were divided by the imperialists of Europe among Serbia, Montenegro and Greece. And after they had thoroughly dismembered our Homeland at the Conference of London and through secret treaties, the Tzar’s Minister, Sazonov, in order to satisfy the appetite of Prince Nikola of Montenegro demanded that the city of Shkodra be handed over to the latter. On this occasion, one of the other wolves, the representative of French imperialism, said something which went down in history: «Sazonov wants to set fire to Europe to fry an omelette for Montenegro».

The enemies of the Arab peoples, the American imperialists and Soviet revisionists, will act and speak in a similar way when it comes to the question of the territorial rights of the heroic Palestinian people.

Only the armed struggle through to victory settles accounts with the wolves who attack peoples.

From “Reflections on the Middle East”

Green female Revolutionary Guards will “honour the memory of martyr Muammar Gaddafi”

Rough translation by I.A Libya

The Female green resistance, “the Alzafa al Akhdar brigade (from the Revolutionary Guards) are ready and prepared to fight in honour of the Martyr Gaddafi who is still alive in our hearts. We are prepared to carry out missions to cleanse the country of the enemy. We have already undertaken certain missions and will continue in our struggle … Greetings to all resistence from east to west, north and south who are struggling until we are all free … We are approaching “

Source

On the Ukrainian Famine “Genocide” Myth: The Years of Hunger

Picture claims to be from "Holodomor" in 1933.

In reality, it is a picture from the famine of 1921-1923 during the civil war.

The original photo is from 1922 and was used in the“Exhibition of American humanitarian aid to Russia during the Soviet Famine of 1921-1923″. 

The following article was written by Kaan Kangal, a Turkish Communist in response to David Myrple’s Op-ed in the Kiev post. The Ukrainian famine, a tragic event as it is, has been hijacked by the anti-communist right as a calculated act of disinformation.

Despite the lack of evidence for the “man-made” causes of the famine, anti-communist forces still hold on to the image of deliberately starved people. The author who for a long while had trumpeted the anti-communist horn on this issue has recently recanted his original claims of the famine being a man-made catastrophe, this author is Robert Conquest; R.W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft have interacted with Conquest and note that he no longer considers the famine “deliberate”. (“Debate: Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932-33: A Reply to Ellman”, in Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 58, No. 4, June 2006, pp.625-633. [note on conquest (p. 629]). Yet despite the fact that the author of The Harvest of Sorrow, the creator of the infamous term “terror-famine” has now recanted his original work due to the mountains of evidence portraying it otherwise; the anti-communist right cannot let up on its claims.

Lies and Confessions of David Marple about Holodomor

By Kaan Kangal

Kiev Post published an article by anticommunist Prof. David Marples about “Ukrainian genocide” in 26.12.2008. [1]

The article by Marples is full of anticommunist lies and it does NOT reflect the reality of history in Ukraine in the Stalin time period. Here is the review of this falsifying article:

Lie no.1: “Genocide or not, Stalin starved millions to death (…)”: Marple seems not to understood the question of genocide, because his statement defines Stalin´s kulak and collectivization policy as “genocide”. This is the typical anticommunist false interpretation of Ukrainian famine and falsification of the reality. There is no evidence that Stalin starved millions to death.

Lie no.2: “ (…) and Soviet regime concealed for 54 years.”: There is no evidence for genocide and there are only contra-evidences for it. If the Soviet regime covered something up in this story, then it was the famine. But we get no evidence on cover-up-story of Soviets from Marple.

Lie no.3: “Highly politicized Holodomor doesn’t hide the fact that ethnic Ukrainian dimension was present.”: The so called “holodomor” does not reflect anything in reality. There is NO single evidence for an ethnic liquidation of Ukrainian nation in any sense in Stalin time period in Ukraine.

Lie no.4: “Ukrainian president Victor Yushchenko has issued a bill that would make it a criminal offense to deny that the famine was genocide.” Pro-fascist anticommunist politicians like Yushchenko has problems with genocide deniers because they have NO evidence for genocide, they did and do NOT study the real history, but they are making political propaganda using the falsified story of Ukrainian famine. Why should denying genocide be a criminal offense? It is not real. The real criminal offense is falsifying the famine reality and using this fake for political interests.

Lie no.5: “After 75 years, we know much about this tragedy,”: you now NOTHING about the famine reality.

Lie no.6: “maintains that he targeted the Soviet peasantry as a whole.” It was not the case. Stalin leadership wanted to collectivize the agrarian economy and it did NOT took Soviet peasantry as “a whole” liquidation target. Stalin leadership did NOT killed and did NOT plan to kill any peasant as person, but they wanted to liquidate the kulak as CLASS.

Lie no. 7: “Thus they deny an ethnic dimension.” They do not deny ethnic dimension, they deny pro-fascist falsification propaganda of Ukrainian nationalists. There was NOT ethnic dimension of kulak policy, there was only a class dimension of it. You do NOT want to see another fact: Most of real Ukrainians in Ukraine were peasants. That´s why you think you can use Ukraine peasant question to slander Soviets.

Lie no. 8: “When the grain ran out, Molotov demanded that the commissions take all food from the villages, which were stripped bare as though a plague of locusts had descended on them.”: Molotov did not order to take “all” food from villages. The harvest was collected in state reserves and collective farm workers were paid for that and they got extra food from warehouses.

Lie no.9: “Whether or not this catastrophe was premeditated”: Which catastrophe? Famine was NOT premeditated and you already confessed that there is no evidence for genocide.

Lie no.10: “Stalin, Molotov and other Soviet leaders deliberately starved their own people.” The Stalin leadership was maybe the only people who really wanted to prevent and who cared about the mass starvation in Ukraine. There is a LOT of evidence that they acted against it and fought against anticommunist sabotage, but there is NO evidence, that they just ignored the famine.

Lie no.11: “concealed this atrocity from the outside world.”: You falsify the reality and conclude it wrong.

Confession no.1: “Highly politicized Holodomor doesn’t hide the fact that ethnic Ukrainian dimension was present.”: It is true that the so called “holodomor” is highly politicized, because the neoliberal, nationalist and anticommunist Ukrainian policy lies on “genocide” fakes and falsifications. Anticommunist and pro-fascist Ukrainian immigrants in Canada and USA and other anti-Soviet pro-CIA historians lied and still lie about Ukrainian famine. There is NOT any single evidence for genocide.

Confession no.2: “A majority of Western scholars — at least judging from published articles and books — denies that Stalin’s intention was to kill Ukrainians (…)”: This is truth. The target of Stalin leadership was NOT killing and liquidation of Ukrainian people (real Ukrainians in Ukraine were MOSTLY peasants in 1930s.) Robert Conquest, Douglas Tottle, Grover Furr, Arch Getty and Marc Tauger denies this falsification propaganda of genocide. Even anticommunist James Mice confessed that lots of visual materials on famine in 1930s are FAKE.

Confession no.3: “We may never know how many died of starvation in 1932-33.”, but you make the propaganda of genocide.

Confession no. 4: “Added to these volatile elements, the Soviet regime began rapidly to collectivize farms starting in 1929.”: This information let us to see that there is no connection between genocide and collectivization. There had been famines before, like at the beginning and in the middle of 1920s although there had been no collectivization in that time.

Confession no.5: “Stalin’s goal was “to liquidate the kulaks (rich peasants) as a class.” And this means liquidating NOT the Soviet peasants as a “whole”.

Confession no.6: “and we may never find a “smoking gun’’”, because there is no evidence.

Notice no.1: “Many governments, including those of Canada and the United States, have recognized the famine as an act of genocide by Stalin’s regime against Ukrainians.”: These are nationalist, neo-liberalist and anticommunist states. They slander the reality to get power in politics against socialist movement of workers. It is for us -for the critical reader- not relevant WHO recognized the famine as genocide, but WHY they recognized.

Notice no.2: “However, Yushchenko has made the Holodomor the central event in the history of modern Ukraine.”: Because he has to convince people that he is no connection to mafia and that the works for “people”. He knows nothing about communism and history and he is also not interested in it.

Notice no.3: “Many so designated destroyed their livestock rather than give it up to the new collective farms. The countryside became a war zone in which millions were dispossessed, with many deported to Siberia or the Far North.” Stalin was in error in gaining the support of peasants and he knew very well that peasants would react to forced collectivization with resistance.

Notice no.4: “Peasants could not travel to towns or cross borders to obtain food after 1932”: Because they were making anticommunist and anti-collectivization propaganda. Many of them were nationalists, fascists, and from other right-wing views. Many of them were against Bolsheviks, fundamentally. And many of them did not believe in future success of Soviet power. Stalin leadership was in error to gain the support of peasants.

Notice no.5: “Many prominent figures – including George Bernard Shaw, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb – reported that this ravaged land was in fact a Communist utopia.”: We do not need any anticommunist slander, but evidence and facts.

Notice no.6: “The link between the Ukrainian famine and external events is clear.” It is very clear for us, but not for you.

Notice no.7: “Ukrainian nationalists, Poles, Hitler and Stalin’s chief enemy, Leon Trotsky, all feature in Stalin’s correspondence and party documents as threats to Soviet security.” Which “documents” and which “correspondence” are you talking about? Maybe about this: There are a lot of evidence for connections and correspondences between German, Polish, Ukrainian fascists and Trotsky.

Stop Killer Coke!

Carlos Castaño and members of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a right-wing Colombian paramilitary group.

Death squads have assassinated eight trade union leaders in Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia. The Stop Killer Coke campaign holds the beverage giant responsible.

MADELEINE BARAN

This article is from the November/December 2003 issue of Dollars & Sense magazine.

On the morning of December 5, 1996, two members of a paramilitary gang drove a motorcycle to the Carepa Coca-Cola bottling plant in northern Colombia. They fired 10 shots at worker and union activist Isidro Segundo Gil, killing him. Luis Adolso Cardona, a fellow worker, witnessed the assassination. “I was working and I heard the gun shots and then I saw Isidro Gil falling,” he said in a recent interview. “I ran, but when I got there Isidro was already dead.”

A few hours later, paramilitary officials detained Cardona, but he escaped, fleeing to the police office, where he received protection. Around midnight that night, the paramilitaries looted the local union office and set it on fire. “There was nothing left. Only the walls,” said Cardona. The paramilitary group returned to the plant the next week, lined up the 60 unionized workers, and ordered them to sign a prepared letter of resignation from the union. Everyone did. Two months later, all the workers—including those who had never belonged to the union—were fired.

Gil, 27, had worked at the plant for eight years. His wife, Alcira Gil, protested her husband’s killing and demanded reparations from Coca-Cola. She was killed by paramilitaries in 2000, leaving their two daughters orphaned. A Colombian judge later dropped the charges against Gil’s alleged killers.

Paramilitaries, violent right-wing forces composed of professional soldiers and common thugs, maintain bases at several Coca-Cola bottling facilities in Colombia, allegedly to protect the bottlers from left-wing militants who might target the plants as symbols of globalization.

Activists say at least eight union activists have been killed by paramilitaries at Colombian Coca-Cola facilities since 1989. And plaintiffs in a recent series of lawsuits hold Coca-Cola and two of its bottlers responsible for the violence, alleging “systematic intimidation, kidnapping, detention, and murder of trade unionists in Colombia, South America at the hands of paramilitaries working as agents of corporations doing business in that country.”

The murders of Coke bottling workers are part of a larger pattern of antiunion violence in Colombia. Since 1986, over 3,800 trade unionists have been murdered in the country, making it the most dangerous place to organize in the world. Three out of every five people killed worldwide for trade union activities are from Colombia.

Suing Coke and its Bottlers

The Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF) and the United Steel Workers of America filed four lawsuits in Federal District Court in July 2001 on behalf of Sinaltrainal (a union representing food and beverage workers in Colombia), five individuals who have been tortured or unlawfully detained for union activities, and the estate of murdered union activist Isidro Gil. The plaintiffs contend Coca-Cola bottlers “contracted with or otherwise directed paramilitary security forces that utilized extreme violence and murdered, tortured, unlawfully detained, or otherwise silenced trade union leaders.”

In addition to demanding that Coca-Cola take responsibility for the murder of Colombian union activists, the plaintiffs are asking for compensatory and punitive damages, which by some estimates could range from $50 million to $6 billion.

Coca-Cola’s legal defense “is not that the murder and terrorism of trade unionists did not occur,” according to an ILRF press release. The company argues that it cannot be held liable in a U.S. federal court for events outside the United States. “Coca-Cola also argues that it does not ‘own,’ and therefore does not control, the bottling plants in Colombia.”

In late March, a judge dismissed Coca-Cola from the lawsuits—on grounds that the firm does not have control over the labor practices of its bottlers—but allowed the case against the bottlers to go forward. A request for an appeal is pending.

According to Daniel Kovalik, assistant general counsel for the United Steelworkers of America and co-counsel for the plaintiffs: “In the short run, [the court decision] means that we can’t proceed against Coke, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that in the long run. I am absolutely confident that we’ll win the appeal.”

Kovalik maintains that Coca-Cola is liable for its bottlers’ actions. For one thing, the 20 Colombia bottlers are deeply entwined in Coke’s core economic activities. Coca-Cola provides syrup to the bottlers, who mix, bottle, package, and ship the drinks to wholesalers and retailers throughout Colombia. The bottlers are integral to the beverage giant’s operations in the country.

Moreover, Coca-Cola and its bottlers have deep financial links. In May, Coca-Cola FEMSA, a bottling company, acquired Pan American Beverages, Latin America’s largest bottler and a defendant in the case. In the year before it was acquired, sales of Coca-Cola represented 89% of Pan American’s $2.35 billion net sales. The acquisition made Mexico-based Coca-Cola FEMSA the largest Coca-Cola bottler in Latin America. The Coca-Cola Company owns a 30% equity stake in Coca-Cola FEMSA, according to the bottling company, and several of its executives also work for Coke.

The plaintiffs are now considering whether to add Coca-Cola FEMSA as a defendant in the lawsuits. If they do, Coca-Cola will be put in the uncomfortable position of trying to prove that Coca-Cola FEMSA and the Coca-Cola Company—despite their shared name, shared executives, and Coke’s part-ownership of FEMSA—are completely independent from one another.

Coca-Cola did not return calls for comment, but has stated in the past that Pan American Beverages was an independent company. More recently, Coca-Cola has denied allegations that its bottlers tolerate or assist in acts of violence against union activists. In a statement released in July, Coca-Cola said the allegations are “nothing more than a shameless effort to generate publicity using the name of our Company, its trademark and brands.”

Kovalik argues that the corporation’s communications with shareholders contradict these public statements and suggest that the firm in fact can, and should, investigate and put a stop to the killings. He plans to submit Coca-Cola documents as legal evidence, including a letter to a shareholder that reads: “We require that everyone within the Coca-Cola system abide by the laws and regulations of the countries in which they do business. We demand integrity and honesty in business at the Coca-Cola Company.…”

“They can’t be able to profit from these bottlers and say that they don’t have control over these situations,” says Kovalik.

Taking Down a Corporate Giant

The Stop Killer Coke campaign may prove to be the biggest test yet of the corporate campaign model pioneered by labor consultant Ray Rogers (see “Ray Rogers’ Corporate Campaign Strategy”). As the public face of the ILRF lawsuits, the Stop Killer Coke campaign aims to put public pressure on Coca-Cola to acknowledge its role in the killings and to persuade the company to stop collaborating with violent paramilitary organizations.

It’s one part of a massive coalition gearing up for a multi-front attack on Coca-Cola. The anti-Coke effort, launched by the lawsuits against Coca-Cola and its bottlers, has grown to include the Stop Killer Coke campaign, consumer and student groups, and labor organizations like the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO. These various groups share the same primary goal: to damage the soft-drink giant’s reputation in order to force the company to acknowledge its role in the Colombian killings. With the launch of the Stop Killer Coke campaign this summer, the movement is picking up momentum.

Rogers plans to expand the campaign far beyond the plaintiffs’ allegations to encompass “at least a dozen issues” including the lack of health care for Coca-Cola workers in Africa; the corporation’s water use in India, which causes groundwater destruction; and more. He has spent the last several months researching Coke’s corporate structure and intricate financial dealings.

Rogers often refers to his strategic style as “divide and conquer” because it aims to isolate companies from investors, creditors, politicians, and consumers. In the most successful corporate campaigns, the target corporation’s relationship with the business world breaks down, as other companies, banks, and executives decide that the benefits of the business relationship are not worth the risk of being the target of a high-profile campaign. Eventually, the company, isolated and weak, caves in to the campaign’s demands in order to end the media blitz and restore its position in the business world.

“A corporation is really nothing more than a coalition of individual and institutional economic and political interests, some more vital and vulnerable than others, that can be challenged and attacked, divided and conquered,” Rogers said. “I know enough now to know exactly where the Achilles heel of Coca-Cola is. I’m so confident about where we’re going with this thing.”

That Achilles heel appears to be Coke’s relationship with SunTrust Bank, its main creditor. Many of Coca-Cola’s top shareholders own significant amounts of SunTrust stock, and their boards overlap—three current or former Coke CEOs sit on SunTrust’s board of directors and two current or former SunTrust CEOs sit on Coke’s board. “In almost 30 years of studying corporate structures, I have never seen a more intimate or incestuous relationship,” said Rogers.

Rogers plans to expose the relations between SunTrust and Coca-Cola, then use information on Coke’s human rights and environmental practices to drive SunTrust into a financial and public relations disaster. If the plan works, investors will lose confidence in SunTrust; key executives will resign rather than face negative media attention; and unions, progressive groups, and consumers will close their accounts. Given the deep ties between the two companies, whatever hurts SunTrust will hurt Coke. Backed into such a position, Coca-Cola would be forced to acknowledge and end its ties to paramilitaries in order to stabilize its main creditor and regain investor and consumer confidence.

The campaign faces an uphill battle. Coca-Cola has virtually unlimited resources to fight lawsuits and conduct its own media blitz. Also, Coca-Cola, like most major companies, now has years of experience fighting high-profile consumer campaigns. The beverage giant has a truly global reach, producing over 300 brands in more than 200 countries, with more than 70% of its income coming from outside the United States. If the campaign hopes to damage Coca-Cola financially, it will have to attract international support.

Despite these serious obstacles, Rogers is optimistic. “We’re going to move very quickly on this thing,” he said. “I think they’re going to find themselves involved in something that they’re going to find a total nightmare.” Terry Collingsworth, executive director of the ILRF, is also confident. “Ray’s like the classic pit bull,” he said. “Once he bites into you, he won’t let go. Ray’s not going to walk away from this until he’s won.”

The battle is already heating up, with activists in Latin America, Turkey, Ireland, and Australia leading anti-Coke campaigns with Stop Killer Coke materials. Student organizations like United Students Against Sweatshops are starting campaigns to ban Coke from campuses. University College Dublin, Ireland’s largest university, voted recently to remove all Coca-Cola products from the campus. Meanwhile, Bard College in New York has decided against renewing Coke’s contract with the school when it expires in May. At Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, students staged a “Coke dump,” spilling soda into the streets to call attention to the plight of Colombian union activists. Union involvement is also growing. United Auto Workers Local 22 in Detroit, recently ordered 4,000 “Coke Float” flyers, which explain the campaign. The union will hand them out to workers as they leave their plant.

In the meantime, violence against union activists in Colombia continues. On September 10, 2003, David Jose Carranza Calle, the 15-year-old son of Sinaltrainal’s national director, was kidnapped by paramilitaries. According to Sinaltrainal, four masked men forced the younger Carranza into a truck and tortured him, asking for the whereabouts of his father. At the same time, his father, Limberto Carranza, received a phone call from an unidentified individual who said, “Unionist son of a bitch, we are going to break you. And if you won’t break, we will attack your home.” The kidnappers freed Carranza Calle over three hours later. But unionists in Colombian bottling plants, including Coca-Cola facilities, are far from safe.

Source

Georgi Dimitrov in Nazi Court

From Dimitrov vs. Göbbels – Minutes of Speech before the Court:

“I admit that my tone is hard and grim. The struggle of my life has always been hard and grim. My tone is frank and open. I am used to calling a spade a spade. I am no lawyer appearing before this Court in the mere way of his profession.

I am defending myself, an accused Communist.

I am defending my political honour, my honour as a revolutionary.

I am defending my Communist ideology, my ideals.

I am defending the content and significance of my whole life.

For these reasons every word which I say in this Court is a part of me, each phrase is the expression of my deep indignation against the unjust accusation, against the putting of this anti-Communist crime, the burning of the Reichstag, to the account of the Communists.”

Obituary: Jonas Savimbi, UNITA’s local boy

Jonas Savimbi: Spent most of his adult life as a guerrilla leader. Savimbi was said to run Unita's territory as a personal fiefdom

By Chris Simpson
Former BBC correspondent in Angola

Jonas Savimbi founded his Unita movement in March 1966 in Muangai, in Angola’s eastern province, Moxico.

According to Unita’s own official history, 200 delegates, including dozens of local chiefs, attended.

Muangai supposedly marked the beginning of Savimbi’s career as a guerrilla leader.

Thirty-six years later his corpse was put on display at Lucusse, just 100 kilometres (60 miles) east of Muangai.

Quixotic

Savimbi has died a pariah.

Over the past decade his Unita movement has become increasingly isolated, accused of perpetuating a bloody civil war for its own interests and exposed to international sanctions as a consequence.

Unita’s deteriorating image owed much to Savimbi’s autocratic and quixotic style of leadership.

White House visit

But in his heyday, Savimbi had a formidable selection of allies and acolytes.

Fighting against an Angolan Government which deployed thousands of Cuban troops and enjoyed strong support from the former Soviet Union, Unita’s cause was taken up by apartheid South Africa and by the United States under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush senior.

In 1986 Mr Reagan welcomed Savimbi to the White House and talked of Unita winning “a victory that electrifies the world and brings great sympathy and assistance from other nations to those struggling for freedom”.

African leaders, like Felix Houphouet-Boigny of Ivory Coast and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire were open supporters, other presidents cultivated strong diplomatic and commercial ties right until the end.

Savimbi assiduously courted western journalists as well as politicians, presenting his bush headquarters in Jamba in the far south-eastern corner of Angola as the centre of a huge struggle against communism.

Some visitors returned deeply impressed by Savimbi’s leadership qualities and the dedication of his cadres, others hinted at a much darker regime, dismissing Savimbi as a power-hungry propagandist.

Modest beginnings

Jonas Savimbi was born and raised in the province of Bie, a lush, green region of rolling hills and small rivers, now once again devastated by war.

Savimbi made much of his roots in Angola’s Central Highlands. The station-master’s son – whose childhood home can still be found near the town of Andulo – always presented himself as a local boy made good, and later as the region’s representative, champion and leader.

Savimbi’s life breaks into several chapters, with much of the detail still in dispute and many questions unanswered. It was always wise to address him as “Doctor”.

But the PhD in question, supposedly from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, was probably never awarded. Unita’s own official biography of Savimbi claims he spent two years as a medical student in Portugal, but abandoned his studies to engage in the anti-colonial struggle.

‘Fictitious campaigns’

Savimbi formed Unita after failing to find common ground with other nationalist movements, notably the Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA).

Savimbi’s critics say Unita’s military campaigns against the Portuguese regime were fictitious and later published documents linking Savimbi to Portuguese intelligence, suggesting he was a paid informer.

Savimbi’s first chance of power came with the end of Portuguese colonialism. But though promised a share in a transitional government Unita lost out as full-blown civil war broke out.

Despite the backing of South Africa and the United States, Unita was unable to compete with the Cuban troops and Soviet firepower put at the disposal of the MPLA.

A new government was proclaimed in Luanda, while Unita retreated deep into the interior.

Savimbi, once a self-proclaimed Maoist, described Unita as having embarked on its own “long march” at this point, recovering slowly from defeat and betrayal to rediscover itself as a movement, drawing on the courage of a few dozen survivors.

Peace

But Unita’s survival owed much to its alliance with South Africa, which remained at war with Angola for much of the next 15 years, and to the US.

With the ending of the Cold War and the steady erosion of apartheid, southern Africa became less of a battle-ground and there was an opportunity for peace.

Savimbi and Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos signed a peace agreement in Bicesse in Portugal in May 1991, paving the way for elections 16 months later.

Savimbi returned to the capital, Luanda, for the first time in 15 years and began campaigning for the presidency.

Thousands dead

As the news broke of his own and Unita’s election defeat, Savimbi refused to accept the results and flew to Huambo, Angola’s second city.

The UN, backed by Russia, Portugal and the United States, tried to keep the peace, but in vain.

The conflict which followed was infinitely worse than anything which had gone before, with thousands of civilians perishing.

Savimbi was widely blamed for the catastrophe, particularly after he scuppered a six-week round of peace talks in Ivory Coast in 1993.

But while the UN imposed oil and arms embargoes on Unita and President Bill Clinton formally recognised the government in Luanda, Savimbi laughed off international condemnation, establishing his capital in Huambo.

Unita’s military fortunes dipped as the government reorganised, clawing back territory.

Facing military humiliation, Unita signed a UN-brokered peace deal in Lusaka in November 1994. Savimbi was not there in person, his absence showing a distaste for compromise.

Once again, the UN was mandated to keep the peace, this time with 7,000 troops. Unita agreed to demobilise its forces. National reconciliation became the key objective.

Damning critiques

The peace process limped on for close to four years, marked by endless delays and recriminations.

But despite the offer of the vice-presidency, along with a new house in Luanda, Savimbi remained in the Central Highlands and Angola drifted back to war.

By the end, Savimbi had lost much of his lustre.

Most of the obituaries have been predictably damning. Some of the harshest criticism has come from those who once knew and admired Savimbi, but have since admitted they were duped by his charisma into overlooking serious character flaws.

A former backer in Washington once conceded ruefully: “Savimbi is probably the most brilliant man I’ve ever met, but he’s also dangerous, even psychotic”.

Source

Factoid: the Nazis Invented Fanta Soda

From “Fanta” Wiki:

Fanta (pronounced [faːnta]) is a global brand of fruit-flavored carbonated soft drinks from the Coca-Cola Company. There are over 90 flavors worldwide. The drink debuted in Germany in 1941 and originally sold only in Europe.[1]

[....]

Fanta originated when it became illegal to import Coca-Cola into Germany during World War II due to a trade embargo.[2] To circumvent this, Max Keith, the man in charge of Coca-Cola Deutschland during the Second World War, decided to create a new product for the German market, using only ingredients available in Germany at the time,[2] including whey and pomace – the “leftovers of leftovers”, as Keith later recalled.[3] The name was the result of a brief brainstorming session, which started with Keith exhorting his team to “use their imagination” (“Fantasie” in German), to which one of his salesmen, Joe Knipp, immediately retorted “Fanta!”[3]

Source

The original Fanta was a Nazi product. When Pearl Harbor ended the flow of Coca-Cola syrup to German bottlers, German Coca-Cola chief Max Keith—who sported a tiny Hitler-style mustache and celebrated the Führer’s 50th birthday at company conventions—formulated an alternative. He blended together an ever-changing combination of dregs, like leftovers from cheese production, the fibrous remains of apples that had been pressed for cider, and whatever surplus fruit he could acquire from Italy. He sweetened the soft drink with saccharin and named it Fanta, after the German word for fantasy or imagination. It sold well, especially once food became scarce and buyers began using Fanta as a soup base. When the international parent company reunited with its German branch after the war, it discontinued Fanta.

Ten years later, Coca-Cola faced a crisis. Pepsi had started introducing different beverage flavors in the 1950s, but other than the Fanta anomaly, Coke had only ever sold one product (in either 6.5-ounce glass bottles or from the fountain). To better compete, the company revived the Fanta name in 1955 and marketed the new orange recipe across Europe. It soon expanded Fanta to Africa, Asia, and Latin America and added many new flavors to the Fanta portfolio, but it never pushed the product enthusiastically in the United States.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2010/08/why_do_foreigners_like_fanta_so_much.html

America’s ‘crack’ plague has roots in Nicaragua war

The following are a series of revealing articles on the connection between the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras and the smuggling of illegal drugs, particularly cocaine. They are among the first exposés about Contra drug smuggling published in the United States. They were written by journalist Gary Webb for the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 under the series title “The Dark Alliance.” The articles, which alleged a connection between the Contras, the CIA and drug trafficking, quickly roused a strong reaction throughout the U.S. and triggered a smear campaign. Webb’s career was destroyed shortly after these articles were published by right-wing Reaganite journalists in support of the Contras.

The following copies were obtained from the website of the Seattle Times, since the San Jose Mercury News where they first appeared has removed the entire Gary Webb series from their web site.

— Espresso Stalinist 

Colombia-San Francisco Bay Area drug pipeline helped finance CIA-backed Contras

Aug. 18, 1996

BY GARY WEBB
Mercury News Staff Writer

FOR THE BETTER PART of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found.

This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the “crack” capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.’s gangs to buy automatic weapons.

It is one of the most bizarre alliances in modern history: the union of a U.S.-backed army attempting to overthrow a revolutionary socialist government and the Uzi-toting “gangstas” of Compton and South-Central Los Angeles.

The army’s financiers — who met with CIA agents both before and during the time they were selling the drugs in L.A. — delivered cut-rate cocaine to the gangs through a young South-Central crack dealer named Ricky Donnell Ross.

Unaware of his suppliers’ military and political connections, “Freeway Rick” — a dope dealer of mythic proportions in the L.A. drug world — turned the cocaine powder into crack and wholesaled it to gangs across the country.

The cash Ross paid for the cocaine, court records show, was then used to buy weapons and equipment for a guerrilla army named the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense (Nicaraguan Democratic Force) or FDN, the largest of several anti-communist commonly called the Contras.

While the FDN’s war is barely a memory today, black America is still dealing with its poisonous side effects. Urban neighborhoods are grappling with legions of homeless crack addicts. Thousands of young black men are serving long prison sentences for selling cocaine — a drug that was virtually unobtainable in black neighborhoods before members of the CIA’s army started bringing it into South-Central in the 1980s at bargain-basement prices.

And the L.A. gangs, which used their enormous cocaine profits to arm themselves and spread crack across the country, are still thriving, turning entire blocks of major cities into occasional war zones.

“There is a saying that the ends justify the means,” former FDN leader and drug dealer Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes testified during a recent cocaine trafficking trial in San Diego. “And that’s what Mr. Bermudez (the CIA agent who commanded the FDN) told us in Honduras, OK? So we started raising money for the Contra revolution.”

Recently declassified reports, federal court testimony, undercover tapes, court records here and abroad and hundreds of hours of interviews over the past 12 months leave no doubt that Blandon was no ordinary drug dealer.

Shortly before Blandon — who had been the drug ring’s Southern California distributor — took the stand in San Diego as a witness for the U.S. Department of Justice, federal prosecutors obtained a court order preventing defense lawyers from delving into his ties to the CIA.

Blandon, one of the FDN’s founders in California, “will admit that he was a large-scale dealer in cocaine, and there is no additional benefit to any defendant to inquire as to the Central Intelligence Agency,” Assistant U.S. Attorney L.J. O’Neale argued in his motion shortly before Ross’ trial on cocaine trafficking charges in March.

The most Blandon would say in court about who called the shots when he sold cocaine for the FDN was that “we received orders from the — from other people.”

The 5,000-man FDN, records show, was created in mid-1981 when the CIA combined several existing groups of anti-communist exiles into a unified force it hoped would topple the new socialist government of Nicaragua.

From 1982 to 1988, the FDN — run by both American and Nicaraguan CIA agents — waged a losing war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, the Cuban-supported socialists who’d overthrown U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979.

Blandon, who began working for the FDN’s drug operation in late 1981, testified that the drug ring sold almost a ton of cocaine in the United States that year — $54 million worth at prevailing wholesale prices. It was not clear how much of the money found its way back to the CIA’s army, but Blandon testified that “whatever we were running in L.A., the profit was going to the Contra revolution.”

At the time of that testimony, Blandon was a full-time informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration, a job the U.S. Department of Justice got him after releasing him from prison in 1994.

Though Blandon admitted to crimes that have sent others away for life, the Justice Department turned him loose on unsupervised probation after only 28 months behind bars and has paid him more than $166,000 since, court records show.

“He has been extraordinarily helpful,” federal prosecutor O’Neale told Blandon’s judge in a plea for the trafficker’s release in 1994. Though O’Neale once described Blandon to a grand jury as “the biggest Nicaraguan cocaine dealer in the United States,” the prosecutor would not discuss him with the Mercury News.

A known dealer since ’74 has stayed out of U.S. jails

Blandon’s boss in the FDN’s cocaine operation, Juan Norwin Meneses Cantarero, has never spent a day in a U.S. prison, even though the federal government has been aware of his cocaine dealings since at least 1974, records show.

Meneses — who ran the drug ring from his homes in the San Francisco Bay Area — is listed in the DEA’s computers as a major international drug smuggler and was implicated in 45 separate federal investigations. Yet he and his cocaine-dealing relatives lived quite openly in the Bay Area for years, buying homes in Pacifica and Burlingame, along with bars, restaurants, car lots and factories in San Francisco, Hayward and Oakland.

“I even drove my own cars, registered in my name,” Meneses said during a recent interview in Nicaragua.

Meneses’ organization was “the target of unsuccessful investigative attempts for many years,” prosecutor O’Neale acknowledged in a 1994 affidavit. But records and interviews revealed that a number of those probes were stymied not by the elusive Meneses but by agencies of the U.S. government.

Agents from four organizations — the DEA, U.S. Customs, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the California Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement — have complained that investigations were hampered by the CIA or unnamed “national security” interests.

1988 investigation hit a wall of secrecy

One 1988 investigation by a U.S. Senate subcommittee ran into a wall of official secrecy at the Justice Department.

In that case, congressional records show, Senate investigators were trying to determine why the U.S. attorney in San Francisco, Joseph Russoniello, had given $36,000 back to a Nicaraguan cocaine dealer arrested by the FBI.

The money was returned, court records show, after two Contra leaders sent letters to the court swearing that the drug dealer had been given the cash to buy weapons for guerrillas. Russoniello said it was cheaper to give the money back than to disprove that claim.

“The Justice Department flipped out to prevent us from getting access to people, records — finding anything out about it,” recalled Jack Blum, former chief counsel to the Senate subcommittee that investigated allegations of Contra cocaine trafficking. “It was one of the most frustrating exercises that I can ever recall.”

It wasn’t until 1989, a few months after the Contra-Sandinista war ended and five years after Meneses moved from the Peninsula to a ranch in Costa Rica, that the U.S. government took action against him — sort of.

Federal prosecutors in San Francisco charged Meneses with conspiracy to distribute one kilo of cocaine in 1984, a year in which he was working publicly with the FDN.

In San Francisco photo, Meneses seen with CIA operative

Meneses’ work was so public, in fact, that he posed for a picture in June 1984 in a kitchen of a San Francisco home with the FDN’s political boss, Adolfo Calero, a longtime CIA operative who became the public face of the Contras in the United States.

According to the indictment, Meneses was in the midst of his alleged cocaine conspiracy at the time the picture was taken.

But the indictment was quickly locked away in the vaults of the San Francisco federal courthouse, where it remains today inexplicably secret for more than seven years. Meneses was never arrested.

Reporters found a copy of the secret indictment in Nicaragua, along with a federal arrest warrant issued Feb. 8, 1989. Records show the no-bail warrant was never entered into the national law enforcement database called NCIC, which police use to track down fugitives. The former federal prosecutor who indicted him, Eric Swenson, declined to be interviewed.

After Nicaraguan police arrested Meneses on cocaine charges in Managua in 1991, his judge expressed astonishment that the infamous smuggler went unmolested by American drug agents during his years in the United States.

“How do you explain the fact that Norwin Meneses, implicated since 1974 in the trafficking of drugs … has not been detained in the United States, a country in which he has lived, entered and departed many times since 1974?” Judge Martha Quezada asked during a pretrial hearing.

“Well, that question needs to be asked to the authorities of the United States,” replied Roger Mayorga, then chief of Nicaragua’s anti-drug agency.

U.S. officials amazed Meneses remained free

His seeming invulnerability amazed American authorities as well.

A Customs agent who investigated Meneses in 1980 before transferring elsewhere said he was reassigned to San Francisco seven years later “and I was sitting in some meetings and here’s Meneses’ name again. And I can remember thinking, “Holy cow, is this guy still around?’.”

Blandon led an equally charmed life. For at least five years he brokered massive amounts of cocaine to the black gangs of Los Angeles without being arrested. But his luck changed overnight.

On Oct. 27, 1986, agents from the FBI, the IRS, local police and the Los Angeles County sheriff fanned out across Southern California and raided more than a dozen locations connected to Blandon’s cocaine operation. Blandon and his wife, along with numerous Nicaraguan associates, were arrested on drug and weapons charges.

The search warrant affidavit reveals that local drug agents knew plenty about Blandon’s involvement with cocaine and the CIA’s army nearly 10 years ago.

“Danilo Blandon is in charge of a sophisticated cocaine smuggling and distribution organization operating in Southern California,” L.A. County sheriff’s Sgt. Tom Gordon said in the 1986 affidavit. “The monies gained from the sales of cocaine are transported to Florida and laundered through Orlando Murillo, who is a high-ranking officer of a chain of banks in Florida named Government Securities Corporation. From this bank the monies are filtered to the Contra rebels to buy arms in the war in Nicaragua.”

Corporate records show that Murillo — a Nicaraguan banker and relative of Blandon’s wife — was a vice-president of Government Securities Corporation in Coral Gables, a large brokerage firm that collapsed in 1987 amid allegations of fraud. Murillo did not respond to an interview request.

Despite their intimate knowledge of Blandon’s operations, the police raids were a spectacular failure. Every location had been cleaned of anything remotely incriminating. No one was ever prosecuted.

Ron Spear, a spokesman for Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block, said Blandon somehow knew that he was under police surveillance. Others thought so, too.

“The cops always believed that investigation had been compromised by the CIA,” Los Angeles federal public defender Barbara O’Connor said in a recent interview. O’Connor knew of the raids because she later defended the raids’ leader, Sgt. Gordon, against federal charges of police corruption. Gordon, convicted of tax evasion, declined to be interviewed.

Lawyer suggests aid was at root of problem

FBI records show that soon after the raids, Blandon’s defense attorney, Bradley Brunon, called the sheriff’s department to suggest that his client’s troubles stemmed from a most unlikely source: a recent congressional vote authorizing $100 million in military aid to the CIA’s Contra army.

According to a December 1986 FBI Teletype, Brunon told the officers that the “CIA winked at this sort of thing. … (Brunon) indicated that now that U.S. Congress had voted funds for the Nicaraguan Contra movement, U.S. government now appears to be turning against organizations like this.”

That FBI report, part of the files of former Iran-Contra Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, was made public only last year, when it was released by the National Archives at the Mercury News’ request.

Blandon has also implied that his cocaine sales were, for a time, CIA-approved. He told a San Francisco federal grand jury in 1994 that once the FDN began receiving American taxpayer dollars, the CIA no longer needed his kind of help.

“When Mr. Reagan get in the power, we start receiving a lot of money,” Blandon testified. “And the people that was in charge, it was the CIA, so they didn’t want to raise any (drug) money because they have, they had the money that they wanted.”

“From the government?” asked Assistant U.S. Attorney David Hall.

“Yes,” for the Contra revolution,” Blandon said. “So we started — you know, the ambitious person — we started doing business by ourselves.”

Asked about that, prosecutor Hall said, “I don’t know what to tell you. The CIA won’t tell me anything.”

None of the government agencies known to have been involved with Meneses and Blandon over the years would provide the Mercury News with any information about them.

A Freedom of Information Act request filed with the CIA was denied on national security grounds. FOIA requests filed with the DEA were denied on privacy grounds. Requests filed months ago with the FBI, the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service have produced nothing so far.

None of the DEA officials known to have worked with the two men would talk to a reporter. Questions submitted to the DEA’s public affairs office in Washington were never answered, despite repeated requests.

Blandon’s lawyer, Brunon, said in an interview that his client never told him directly that he was selling cocaine for the CIA, but the prominent Los Angeles defense attorney drew his own conclusions from the “atmosphere of CIA and clandestine activities” that surrounded Blandon and his Nicaraguan friends.

“Was he involved with the CIA? Probably. Was he involved with drugs? Most definitely,” Brunon said. “Were those two things involved with each other? They’ve never said that, obviously. They’ve never admitted that. But I don’t know where these guys get these big aircraft …”

That very topic arose during the sensational 1992 cocaine trafficking trial of Meneses after Meneses was arrested in Nicaragua in connection with a staggering 750-kilo shipment of cocaine. His chief accuser was his friend Enrique Miranda, a relative and former Nicaraguan military intelligence officer who had been Meneses’ emissary to the cocaine cartel of Bogota, Colombia. Miranda pleaded guilty to drug charges and agreed to cooperate in exchange for a seven-year sentence.

In a long, handwritten statement he read to Meneses’ jury, Miranda revealed the deepest secrets of the Meneses drug ring, earning his old boss a 30-year prison sentence in the process.

“He (Norwin) and his brother Luis Enrique had financed the Contra revolution with the benefits of the cocaine they sold,” Miranda wrote. “This operation, as Norwin told me, was executed with the collaboration of high-ranking Salvadoran military personnel. They met with officials of the Salvadoran air force, who flew (planes) to Colombia and then left for the U.S., bound for an Air Force base in Texas, as he told me.”

Meneses — who has close personal and business ties to a Salvadoran air force commander and former CIA agent named Marcos Aguado — declined to discuss Miranda’s statements during an interview at a prison outside Managua in January. He is scheduled to be paroled this summer, after nearly five years in custody.

U.S. General Accounting Office records confirm that El Salvador’s air force was supplying the CIA’s Nicaraguan guerrillas with aircraft and flight support services throughout the mid-1980s.

Miranda did not name the Air Force base in Texas where the FDN’s cocaine was purportedly flown. The same day the Mercury News requested official permission to interview Miranda, he disappeared.

While out on a routine weekend furlough, Miranda failed to return to the Nicaraguan jail where he’d been living since 1992. Though his jailers, who described him as a model prisoner, claimed Miranda had escaped, they didn’t call the police until a Mercury News correspondent showed up and discovered he was gone.

He has not been seen in nearly a year.

MONDAY: How the drug ring worked, and how crack was “born” in the San Francisco Bay Area. Plus, the story of how the U.S. government gave back $36,000 seized from a drug dealer after he claimed the money belonged to the Contras.

Source 

Affidafit shows CIA knew of contra drug ring

The following are a series of revealing articles on the connection between the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras and the smuggling of illegal drugs, particularly cocaine. They are among the first exposés about Contra drug smuggling published in the United States. They were written by journalist Gary Webb for the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 under the series title “The Dark Alliance.” The articles, which alleged a connection between the Contras, the CIA and drug trafficking, quickly roused a strong reaction throughout the U.S. and triggered a smear campaign. Webb’s career was destroyed shortly after these articles were published by right-wing Reaganite journalists in support of the Contras.

The following copies were obtained from the website of the Seattle Times, since the San Jose Mercury News where they first appeared has removed the entire Gary Webb series from their web site.

— Espresso Stalinist 

Oct. 3, 1996

by Gary Webb and Pamela Kramer
Knight-Ridder Newspapers

LOS ANGELES – During the early 1980s, federal and local narcotics agents knew that a massive drug ring operated by Nicaraguan contra rebels was selling large amounts of cocaine “mainly to blacks living in the South Central Los Angeles area,” according to a search-warrant affidavit obtained by the San Jose Mercury News.

The Oct. 23, 1986, affidavit identifies former Nicaraguan government official Danilo Blandon as “the highest-ranking member of this organization” and describes a sprawling drug operation involving more than 100 Nicaraguan contra sympathizers.

The affidavit of Thomas Gordon, a former Los Angeles County sheriff’s narcotics detective, is the first independent corroboration that the contra army – the Nicaraguan Democratic Force – was dealing “crack” cocaine to gangs in Los Angeles’ black neighborhoods. Known by its Spanish initials, the FDN was an anti-communist commando group formed and run by the CIA during the 1980s.

Gordon’s sworn statement says that both the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI had informants inside the Blandon drug ring for several years before sheriff’s deputies raided it Oct. 27, 1986. Gordon’s affidavit is based on police interviews with those informants and one of the DEA agents who was investigating Blandon.

Twice during the past year, Ron Spear, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department spokesman, told the Mercury News that his department had no records of the 1986 raids and denied having a copy of Gordon’s search-warrant affidavit.

The Mercury News obtained the entire search-warrant affidavit this week. Sheriff Sherman Block’s office did not respond yesterday to written questions about the affidavit.

A recent Mercury News series revealed how Blandon’s operation, which sold thousands of kilos of cocaine to black Los Angeles drug dealers, created the first mass market for crack in America during the early 1980s and helped fuel a crack explosion that is still reverberating through black communities. Both the CIA and the Justice Department have denied government involvement.

But according to a legal motion filed in a 1990 case involving a deputy who helped execute the search warrants, one of the suspects involved in the raid identified himself as a CIA agent and asked police to call CIA headquarters in Virginia to confirm his identity. The motion, filed by Los Angeles defense attorney Harlan Braun on behalf of Deputy Daniel Garner, said the narcotics detectives allowed the man to make the call but then carted away numerous documents purportedly linking the U.S. government to cocaine trafficking and money-laundering efforts on behalf of the contras.

The motion said CIA agents appeared at the sheriff’s department within 48 hours of the raid and removed the seized files from the evidence room. But Braun said detectives secretly copied 10 pages before the documents were spirited away. Braun attempted to introduce them in the 1990 criminal trial to force the federal government to back off the case. Braun was hit with a gag order, the documents were put under seal and Garner was convicted of corruption charges.

Internal sheriff’s department records of the raid “mysteriously disappeared” around the same time the seized files were taken, Braun’s motion said. That claim was buttressed in an interview this week by an officer involved in the raid.

The officer, who requested anonymity, said the alleged CIA agent was Ronald Lister, a former Laguna Beach police detective who worked with Blandon in the drug ring. The 1986 search-warrant affidavit identifies Lister’s home in Laguna Beach as one of the places searched. It says Lister was involved in transporting drug money to Miami and was Blandon’s partner in a security company. The company, according to a former employee, was doing work at a Salvadoran military air base in the early 1980s. Lister pleaded guilty to cocaine trafficking in 1991.

Cocaine sentences weighted against blacks

The following are a series of revealing articles on the connection between the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras and the smuggling of illegal drugs, particularly cocaine. They are among the first exposés about Contra drug smuggling published in the United States. They were written by journalist Gary Webb for the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 under the series title “The Dark Alliance.” The articles, which alleged a connection between the Contras, the CIA and drug trafficking, quickly roused a strong reaction throughout the U.S. and triggered a smear campaign. Webb’s career was destroyed shortly after these articles were published by right-wing Reaganite journalists in support of the Contras.

The following copies were obtained from the website of the Seattle Times, since the San Jose Mercury News where they first appeared has removed the entire Gary Webb series from their web site.

— Espresso Stalinist

Aug 23, 1996

by Gary Webb
San Jose Mercury News

When it comes to cocaine, it isn’t just a suspicion that the war on drugs is hammering blacks harder than whites. According to the U.S. Justice Department, it’s a fact.

The “main reason” cocaine sentences for blacks are longer than for whites, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in 1993, is that 83 percent of the people being sent to prison for “crack” trafficking are black “and the average sentence imposed for crack trafficking was twice as long as for trafficking in powdered cocaine.”

Even though crack and powder cocaine are the same drug, you have to sell more than six pounds of powder before you face the same jail time as someone who sells one ounce of crack – a 100-to-1 ratio.

That logic has eluded Dr. Robert Byck, a Yale University drug expert, from the moment he discovered the 100-to-1 ratio may have been his inadvertent doing.

In 1986, at the height of an election-year hysteria over crack, Byck was summoned before a U.S. Senate committee to tell what he knew about cocaine smoking.

Byck, a renowned scientist who edited and published Sigmund Freud’s cocaine papers, had been studying crack smoking in South America for nearly 10 years, with growing alarm.

Sen. Lawton Chiles, a Florida Democrat (and now that state’s governor), was pushing for tougher crack laws, and he asked Byck about testimony he had given previously that “some experts” believed crack was 50 times more addictive than powder cocaine. Byck acknowledged some people believed that.

Despite the speculative nature of the figure, Byck said, the addictive factor of 50 was “doubled by people who wanted to get tough on cocaine” and then, for reasons he still finds incomprehensible, turned into a measurement of weight.

The resultant 100-to-1 (powder-vs.-crack) weight ratio, Byck said, was “a fabrication by whoever wrote the law, but not reality. . . . You can’t make a number.”

Recently, the U.S. Sentencing Commission – a panel of experts created by Congress to be its unbiased adviser in these matters – tried and failed to find a better reason to explain why powder dealers must sell 100 times more cocaine before they get the same mandatory sentence as crack dealers.

The “absence of comprehensive data substantiating this legislative policy is troublesome,” it reported last year.

In 1993, cocaine smokers got an average sentence of nearly three years. People who snorted cocaine powder received a little over three months. Nearly all of the long sentences went to blacks, the commission found.

Justice Department researchers estimated that if crack and powder sentences were made equal, “the black-white difference . . . would not only evaporate but would slightly reverse.”

Based on such findings, the commission recommended in May 1995 that the cocaine-sentencing laws be equalized, calling the 100-to-1 ratio “a primary cause of the growing disparity between sentences for black and white federal defendants.”

Apparently fearful of being seen as soft on drugs, Congress voted overwhelmingly last year to keep the crack laws the same. On Oct. 30, President Clinton signed the bill rejecting the commission’s recommendations.

Drug king free, but black aide sits in jail

The following are a series of revealing articles on the connection between the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras and the smuggling of illegal drugs, particularly cocaine. They are among the first exposés about Contra drug smuggling published in the United States. They were written by journalist Gary Webb for the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 under the series title “The Dark Alliance.” The articles, which alleged a connection between the Contras, the CIA and drug trafficking, quickly roused a strong reaction throughout the U.S. and triggered a smear campaign. Webb’s career was destroyed shortly after these articles were published by right-wing Reaganite journalists in support of the Contras.

The following copies were obtained from the website of the Seattle Times, since the San Jose Mercury News where they first appeared has removed the entire Gary Webb series from their web site.

— Espresso Stalinist

Aug 23, 1996

How cheap cocaine became the scourge of the inner city

by Gary Webb
San Jose Mercury News

For the past 1 1/2 years, the U.S. Department of Justice has been trying to explain why nearly everyone convicted in California’s federal courts of “crack” cocaine trafficking is black.

Critics, including some federal-court judges, say it looks like the Justice Department is targeting crack dealers by race, which would be a violation of the Constitution.

Federal prosecutors, however, say there’s a simple, if unpleasant, reason for the lopsided statistics: Most crack dealers are black.

But why – of all the ethnic and racial groups in California to pick from – crack planted its deadly roots in L.A.’s black neighborhoods is something Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes may be able to answer.

Blandon is the Johnny Appleseed of crack in California – the Crips’ and Bloods’ first direct connect to the cocaine cartels of Colombia. The tons of cut-rate cocaine he brought into black L.A. during the 1980s and early 1990s became millions of rocks of crack, which spawned new markets wherever they landed.

On a tape made by the Drug Enforcement Administration in July 1990, Blandon casually explained the flood of cocaine that coursed through the streets of South-Central Los Angeles during the previous decade.

“These people have been working with me 10 years,” Blandon said. “I’ve sold them about 2,000 or 4,000 (kilos). I don’t know. I don’t remember how many.”

“It ain’t that Japanese guy you were talking about, is it?” asked DEA informant John Arman, who was wearing a hidden transmitter.

“No, it’s not him,” Blandon insisted. “These . . . these are the black people.”

Arman gasped. “Black?!”

“Yeah,” Blandon said. “They control L.A. The people (black cocaine dealers) that control L.A.”

But unlike the thousands of young blacks now serving long federal prison sentences for selling mere handfuls of the drug, Blandon is a free man today. He has a spacious new home in Nicaragua and a business exporting precious woods, courtesy of the U.S. government, which has paid him more than $166,000 over the past 18 months, records show – for his help in the war on drugs.

That turn of events both amuses and angers “Freeway Rick” Ross, L.A.’s premier crack wholesaler during much of the 1980s and Blandon’s biggest customer.

“They say I sold dope everywhere, but, man, I know he done sold 10 times more dope than me,” Ross said during a recent interview.

Nothing epitomizes the drug war’s uneven impact on black Americans more clearly than the intertwined lives of Ricky Donnell Ross, a high-school dropout, and his suave cocaine supplier, Blandon, who has a master’s degree in marketing and was one of the top civilian leaders in California of an anti-communist guerrilla army formed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Called the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense (FDN), it became known to most Americans as the contras.

In recent court testimony, Blandon, who began dealing cocaine in South-Central L.A. in 1982, swore that the first kilo of cocaine he sold in California was to raise money for the CIA’s army, which was trying on a shoestring to unseat Nicaragua’s new socialist Sandinista government.

After Blandon crossed paths with Ross, a South-Central teenager with gang connections and street smarts necessary to move the army’s cocaine, a blizzard engulfed the ghettos.

Former Los Angeles police narcotics detective Stephen Polak said he was working the streets of South-Central in the mid-1980s when he and his partners began seeing more cocaine than ever before.

“A lot of detectives, a lot of cops, were saying, `hey, these blacks, no longer are we just seeing gram dealers. These guys are doing ounces; they were doing keys,’ ” Polak recalled. But he said the reports were disregarded by higher-ups who couldn’t believe black neighborhoods could afford the amount of cocaine the street cops claimed to be seeing.

“Major Violators (the LAPD’s elite anti-drug unit) was saying, basically, `ahh, South-Central, how much could they be dealing?’ ” said Polak. “Well, they (black dealers) went virtually untouched for a long time.”

It wasn’t until January 1987 – when crack markets were popping up in major cities all over the nation – that law-enforcement brass decided to confront L.A.’s crack problem head-on. They formed the Freeway Rick Task Force, a cadre of veteran drug agents whose sole mission was to put Rick Ross out of business. Polak was a charter member.

“We just dedicated seven days a week to him. We were just on him at every move,” Polak said.

Ross, as usual, was quick to spot a trend. He moved to Cincinnati and quietly settled into a woodsy, suburban home.

“I called it cooling out, trying to back away from the game,” Ross said. “I had enough money.”

His longtime supplier, Blandon, reached the same conclusion about the same time. He moved to Miami with $1.6 million in cash and invested in several businesses.

But neither Ross nor Blandon stayed “retired” for long.

A manic deal-maker, Ross found Cincinnati’s virgin crack market too seductive to ignore.

Plunging back in, the crack tycoon cornered the Cincinnati market using the same low-price, high-volume strategy – and the same Nicaraguan drug connections – he’d used in L.A. Soon, he also was selling crack in Cleveland, Indianapolis, Dayton and St. Louis.

“There’s no doubt in my mind crack in Cincinnati can be traced to Ross,” police officer Robert Enoch told a Cincinnati newspaper three years ago.

But Ross’ reign in the Midwest was short-lived. In 1988, one of his loads ran into a drug-sniffing dog at a New Mexico bus station, and drug agents eventually connected it to Ross. He pleaded guilty to crack trafficking charges and received a mandatory 10-year prison sentence, which he began serving in 1990.

In Miami, Blandon’s retirement plans also had gone awry as his business ventures collapsed.

He returned to the San Francisco Bay Area and began brokering cocaine again, buying and selling from the Nicaraguan dealers he’d known in his days with the FDN. In 1990 and 1991, he testified, he sold about 425 kilos of cocaine in Northern California – $10.5 million worth at wholesale prices.

But unlike before, when he was selling cocaine for the contras, Blandon was constantly dogged by the police.

Twice in six months he was detained, first by Customs agents while taking $117,000 in money orders to Tijuana to pay a supplier, and then by the LAPD when he was in the act of paying one of his Colombian suppliers more than $350,000.

The second time, after police found $14,000 in cash and a small quantity of cocaine in his pocket, he was arrested. But the U.S. Justice Department – saying a prosecution would disrupt an active investigation – persuaded the police to drop their money-laundering case.

Soon after that, Blandon and his wife, Chepita, were arrested by DEA agents on charges of conspiracy to distribute cocaine. They were jailed without bond as dangers to the community, and several other Nicaraguans also were arrested.

The prosecutor, L.J. O’Neale, told a federal judge that Blandon had sold so much cocaine in the United States his mandatory prison sentence was “off the scale.”

Then Blandon “just vanished,” said Juanita Brooks, a San Diego attorney who represented one of Blandon’s co-defendants. “All of a sudden his wife was out of jail and he was out of the case.”

The reasons were contained in a secret Justice Department memorandum filed in San Diego federal court in late 1993.

Blandon, prosecutor O’Neale wrote, had become “valuable in major DEA investigations of Class I drug traffickers.” And even though probation officers were recommending a life sentence and a $4 million fine, O’Neale said the government would be satisfied if Blandon got 48 months and no fine. Motion granted.

Less than a year later, records show, O’Neale was back with another idea: Why not just let Blandon go? After all, he wrote the judge, Blandon had a federal job waiting.

O’Neale, saying that Blandon “has almost unlimited potential to assist the United States,” said the government wanted “to enlist Mr. Blandon as a full-time, paid informant after his release from prison.”

After only 28 months in custody, most of it spent with federal agents who debriefed him for “hundreds of hours,” he said, Blandon walked out of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego, was given a green card and began working on his first assignment: setting up his old friend, “Freeway Rick,” for a sting.

Records show Ross was still behind bars, awaiting parole, when San Diego DEA agents targeted him.

Soon after Ross went to prison for the Cincinnati bust, federal prosecutors offered him a deal. His term would be shortened by five years in return for testimony in a federal case against Los Angeles County Sheriff’s detectives that included members of the old Freeway Rick Task Force.

Within days of Ross’ parole in October 1994, he and Blandon were back in touch, and their conversation quickly turned to cocaine.

According to tapes Blandon made of some of their discussions, Ross repeatedly told Blandon that he was broke and couldn’t afford to finance a drug deal. But Ross did agree to help his old mentor, who was also pleading poverty, find someone else to buy the 100 kilos of cocaine Blandon claimed he had.

On March 2, 1995, in a shopping-center parking lot in National City, near San Diego, Ross poked his head inside a cocaine-laden Chevy Blazer, and the place exploded with police.

Ross jumped into a friend’s pickup and zoomed off “looking for a wall that I could crash myself into,” he said. “I just wanted to die.” He was captured after the truck careened into a hedgerow. He has been held in jail without bond since then.

Ross’ arrest netted Blandon $45,500 in government rewards and expenses, records show. On the strength of Blandon’s testimony, Ross and two other men were convicted of cocaine-conspiracy charges in San Diego last March – conspiring to sell the DEA’s cocaine. Sentencing was set for today. Ross is facing a life sentence without the possibility of parole. The other men are looking at 10- to 20-year sentences.

Acquaintances say Blandon, who refused repeated interview requests, is a common sight these days in Managua’s better restaurants, drinking with friends and telling of his “escape” from U.S. authorities.

According to his Miami lawyer, Blandon spends most of his time shuttling between San Diego and Managua, trying to recover Nicaraguan properties seized in 1979, when the Sandinistas took power.

Crack was born during 1974 in S.F. Bay Area

The following are a series of revealing articles on the connection between the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras and the smuggling of illegal drugs, particularly cocaine. They are among the first exposés about Contra drug smuggling published in the United States. They were written by journalist Gary Webb for the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 under the series title “The Dark Alliance.” The articles, which alleged a connection between the Contras, the CIA and drug trafficking, quickly roused a strong reaction throughout the U.S. and triggered a smear campaign. Webb’s career was destroyed shortly after these articles were published by right-wing Reaganite journalists in support of the Contras.

The following copies were obtained from the website of the Seattle Times, since the San Jose Mercury News where they first appeared has removed the entire Gary Webb series from their web site.

— Espresso Stalinist

Aug 22, 1996

by Gary Webb
San Jose Mercury News

Though Miami and Los Angeles are commonly regarded as the twin cradles of crack, the first government-financed study of cocaine smoking concluded that it was actually born in the Bay Area in January 1974.

After comedian Richard Pryor nearly immolated himself during a cocaine-smoking binge in 1980, the National Institute on Drug Abuse hired UCLA drug expert Ronald Siegel to look into the then-unfamiliar practice.

Siegel, the first scientist to document crack’s use in the United States, traced the smoking habit back to 1930, when Colombians first started it.

But what was being smoked south of the border – a paste-like substance called BASE (bah-SAY) – was very different from what Californians were putting in their pipes, Siegel found, even though they called it the same thing: free base.

BASE was a crude, toxics-laden precursor to cocaine powder. On the other hand, free base (which later became known as crack or rock) was cocaine powder that had been reverse-engineered to make it smokable.

When San Francisco Bay Area dealers tried recreating the drug they’d seen in South America, Siegel learned, they’d screwed up.

“When they looked it up in the Merck Manual, they saw cocaine base and thought, well, yeah, this is it,” Siegel, a nationally known drug researcher, said. “They mispronounced it, misunderstood the Spanish, and thought (BASE) was cocaine base.”

The base described in the organic-chemistry handbook was cocaine powder separated from its salts, a process easily done with boiling water and baking soda.

It was an immediate, if unintentional, hit.

“They were wowed by it,” Siegel said. “They thought they were smoking BASE. They were not. They were smoking something nobody on the planet had ever smoked before.”

Using the sales records of several major drug-paraphernalia companies, Siegel correlated crack’s public appearance with the appearance of base-making kits and glass pipes for smoking it. The sales records zeroed in on the Bay Area.

“We were able to show to our satisfaction that they were directly responsible for distributing the habit throughout the United States,” Siegel said.

“Wherever they were selling their kits, that’s where we started getting the clinical reports. It all started in Northern California.”

His groundbreaking study was never published by the government, purportedly for budgetary reasons.

Siegel, who said he grew concerned that the information would not be made available to other researchers, published it himself in an obscure medical journal in late 1982.

Trio created mass market in U.S. for crack cocaine

The following are a series of revealing articles on the connection between the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras and the smuggling of illegal drugs, particularly cocaine. They are among the first exposés about Contra drug smuggling published in the United States. They were written by journalist Gary Webb for the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 under the series title “The Dark Alliance.” The articles, which alleged a connection between the Contras, the CIA and drug trafficking, quickly roused a strong reaction throughout the U.S. and triggered a smear campaign. Webb’s career was destroyed shortly after these articles were published by right-wing Reaganite journalists in support of the Contras.

The following copies were obtained from the website of the Seattle Times, since the San Jose Mercury News where they first appeared has removed the entire Gary Webb series from their web site.

— Espresso Stalinist

Aug 22, 1996

by Gary Webb
San Jose Mercury News

If they’d been in a more respectable line of work, Norwin Meneses, Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes and “Freeway Rick” Ross would have been hailed as geniuses of marketing.

This odd trio – a smuggler, a bureaucrat and a ghetto teenager – made fortunes creating the first mass market in America for a product so hellishly desirable that consumers will literally kill to get it: “crack” cocaine.

Federal lawmen will tell you plenty about Rick Ross, mostly about the evils he visited upon black neighborhoods by spreading the crack plague in Los Angeles and cities as far east as Cincinnati. Tomorrow, they hope, Freeway Rick will be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

But those same officials won’t say a word about the two men who turned Rick Ross into L.A.’s first king of crack, the men who, for at least five years, supplied him with enough Colombian cocaine to help spawn crack markets in major cities nationwide. Their critical role in the country’s crack explosion has been a strictly guarded secret.

To understand how crack came to curse black America, you have to go into the volcanic hills overlooking Managua, the capital of the Republic of Nicaragua.

Biggest military upset

During June 1979, those hills teemed with triumphant guerrillas called Sandinistas – Cuban-assisted revolutionaries who had just pulled off one of the biggest military upsets in Central American history. In a bloody civil war, they’d destroyed the U.S.-trained army of Nicaragua’s dictator, Anastasio Somoza.

In the dictator’s doomed capital, a minor member of Somoza’s government decided to skip the war’s obvious ending. On June 19, Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes gathered his wife and young daughter and flew into exile in California.

Today, Blandon is a well-paid and highly trusted operative for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Federal officials say he is one of the DEA’s top informants in Latin America, collecting intelligence on Colombian and Mexican drug lords and setting up stings.

In March, he was the DEA’s star witness at a drug trial in San Diego, where, for the first time, he testified publicly about his strange interlude between government jobs: the years he sold cocaine to the street gangs of black Los Angeles.

Blandon swore that he didn’t plan on becoming a dope dealer when he landed in the United States with $100 in his pocket, seeking political asylum. He did it, he insisted, out of patriotism.

When duty called in late 1981, he was working as a car salesman in East Los Angeles. In his spare time, he said, he and a few fellow exiles were working to rebuild Somoza’s defeated army, the Nicaraguan national guard, in hopes of one day returning to Managua in triumph.

But the rallies and cocktail parties the exiles hosted raised little money. “At this point, he became committed to raising money for humanitarian and political reasons via illegal activity (cocaine trafficking for profit),” said a heavily censored parole report, which surfaced during the March trial.

That venture began, Blandon testified, with a phone call from a wealthy college friend in Miami.

Blandon said his college chum, who also was working in the resistance movement, dispatched him to Los Angeles International Airport to pick up another exile, Juan Norwin Meneses Cantarero. Though their families were related, Blandon said, he’d never met Meneses until that day.

“I picked him up, and he started telling me that we had to (raise) some money and to send to Honduras,” Blandon testified. He said he flew with Meneses to a camp there and met one of his new companion’s old friends, Col. Enrique Bermudez.

Bermudez – who’d been Somoza’s Washington liaison to the American military – was hired by the Central Intelligence Agency in mid-1980 to pull together the remnants of Somoza’s vanquished national guard, records show. In August 1981, Bermudez’s efforts were unveiled at a news conference as the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense (FDN) – in English, the Nicaraguan Democratic Force. It was the largest and best-organized of the handful of guerrilla groups known as the contras.

Bermudez was the FDN’s military chief and, according to congressional records and newspaper reports, received regular CIA paychecks for a decade, payments that stopped shortly before his still-unsolved slaying in Managua in 1991.

Reagan OKs covert operations

White House records show that shortly before Blandon’s meeting with Bermudez, President Reagan had given the CIA the green light to begin covert paramilitary operations against the Sandinista government. But Reagan’s secret Dec. 1, 1981, order permitted the spy agency to spend only $19.9 million on the project, an amount CIA officials acknowledged was not nearly enough to field a credible fighting force.

After meeting with Bermudez, Blandon testified, he and Meneses “started raising money for the contra revolution.”

While Blandon says Bermudez didn’t know cocaine would be the fund-raising device they used, the presence of the mysterious Mr. Meneses strongly suggests otherwise.

Norwin Meneses, known in Nicaraguan newspapers as “Rey de la Droga” (King of Drugs), was then under active investigation by the DEA and the FBI for smuggling cocaine into the United States, records show.

And Bermudez was very familiar with the influential Meneses family. He had served under two Meneses brothers, Fermin and Edmundo, who were generals in Somoza’s army.

Despite a stack of law-enforcement reports describing him as a major drug trafficker, Norwin Meneses was welcomed into the United States in July 1979 as a political refugee and given a visa and a work permit. He settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, and for the next six years supervised the importation of thousands of kilos of cocaine into California.

At the meeting with Bermudez, Meneses said in a recent interview, the contra commander put him in charge of “intelligence and security” for the FDN in California.

Blandon, he said, was assigned to raise money in Los Angeles.

Blandon said Meneses gave him two kilograms of cocaine (roughly 4 1/2 pounds) and sent him to Los Angeles.

“Meneses was pushing me every week,” he testified. “It took me about three months, four months to sell those two keys because I didn’t know what to do. . . .”

To find customers, Blandon and several other Nicaraguan exiles working with him headed for the vast, untapped markets of L.A.’s black ghettos.

Blandon’s marketing strategy, selling the world’s most expensive street drug in some of California’s poorest neighborhoods, might seem baffling, but in retrospect, his timing was uncanny. He and his compatriots arrived in South-Central L.A. right when street-level drug users were figuring out how to make cocaine affordable: by changing the pricey white powder into powerful little nuggets that could be smoked – crack.

Emergence of crack

Crack turned the cocaine world on its head. Cocaine smokers got an explosive high unmatched by 10 times as much snorted powder. And since only a tiny amount was needed for that rush, cocaine no longer had to be sold in large, expensive quantities. Anyone with $20 could get wasted.

It was a “substance that is tailor-made to addict people,” Dr. Robert Byck, a Yale University cocaine expert, said during congressional testimony in 1986. “It is as though (McDonald’s founder) Ray Kroc had invented the opium den.”

Crack’s Kroc was a disillusioned 19-year-old named Ricky Donnell Ross, who, at the dawn of the 1980s, found himself adrift on the streets of South-Central Los Angeles.

A talented tennis player for Dorsey High School, Ross had recently seen his dream of a college scholarship evaporate when his coach discovered he could neither read nor write.

A friend of Ross’ – a college football player home at Christmas from San Jose State University – told him “cocaine was going to be the new thing, that everybody was doing it.” Intrigued, Ross set off to find out more.

Through a cocaine-using auto-upholstery teacher Ross knew, he met a Nicaraguan named Henry Corrales, who began selling Ross and a friend , Ollie “Big Loc” Newell, small amounts of remarkably inexpensive cocaine.

Thanks to a network of friends in South-Central L.A. and Compton, including many members of various Crips gangs, the pair steadily built up clientele. With each sale, Ross reinvested his hefty profits in more cocaine.

Eventually, Corrales introduced Ross and Newell to his supplier, Blandon. And then business really picked up.

“At first, we was just going to do it until we made $5,000,” Ross said. “We made that so fast we said, no, we’ll quit when we make $20,000. Then we was going to quit when we saved enough to buy a house . . .”

Ross would eventually own millions of dollars’ worth of real estate across Southern California, including houses, motels, a theater and several other businesses. (His nickname, “Freeway Rick,” came from the fact that he owned properties near the Harbor Freeway in Los Angeles.)

Within a year, Ross’ drug operation grew to dominate inner-city Los Angeles, and many of the biggest dealers in town were his customers. When crack hit L.A.’s streets hard in late 1983, Ross already had the infrastructure in place to corner a huge chunk of the burgeoning market.

It was not uncommon, he said, to move $2 million or $3 million worth of crack in one day.

“Our biggest problem had got to be counting the money,” Ross said. “We got to the point where it was like, man, we don’t want to count no more money.”

Nicaraguan cocaine dealer Jacinto Torres, another former supplier of Ross and a sometime-partner of Blandon, told drug agents in a 1992 interview that after a slow start, “Blandon’s cocaine business dramatically increased. . . . Norwin Meneses, Blandon’s supplier as of 1983 and 1984, routinely flew quantities of 200 to 400 kilograms from Miami to the West Coast.”

Blandon told the DEA last year that he was selling Ross up to 100 kilos of cocaine a week, which was then “rocked up” and distributed “to the major gangs in the area, specifically the Crips and the Bloods,” the DEA report said.

At wholesale prices, that’s roughly $65 million to $130 million worth of cocaine every year, depending on the going price of a kilo.

“He was one of the main distributors down here,” said former Los Angeles Police Department narcotics detective Steve Polak, who was part of the Freeway Rick Task Force, which was set up in 1987 to put Ross out of business. “And his poison, there’s no telling how many tens of thousands of people he touched. He’s responsible for a major cancer that still hasn’t stopped spreading.”

But Ross is the first to admit that being in the right place at the right time had almost nothing to do with his amazing success. Other L.A. dealers, he noted, were selling crack long before he started.

What he had, and they didn’t, was Blandon, a friend with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of high-grade cocaine and an expert’s knowledge of how to market it.

“I’m not saying I wouldn’t have been a dope dealer without Danilo,” Ross stressed. “But I wouldn’t have been Freeway Rick.”

The secret to his success, Ross said, was Blandon’s cocaine prices. “It was unreal. We were just wiping out everybody.”

“It didn’t make no difference to Rick what anyone else was selling it for. Rick would just go in and undercut him $10,000 a key,” Chico Brown said. “Say some dude was selling for 30. Boom – Rick would go in and sell it for 20. If he was selling for 20, Rick would sell for 10. Sometimes, he be giving (it) away.”

Ross said he never discovered how Blandon was able to get cocaine so cheaply. “I just figured he knew the people, you know what I’m saying? He was plugged.”

But Freeway Rick had no idea just how “plugged” his erudite cocaine broker was. He didn’t know about Meneses, or the CIA, or the Salvadoran air-force planes that allegedly were flying the cocaine into an air base in Texas.

And he wouldn’t find out about it for another 10 years.

Salvador air force linked to cocaine flights, Nicaraguan contras, drug dealer’s supplier

The following are a series of revealing articles on the connection between the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras and the smuggling of illegal drugs, particularly cocaine. They are among the first exposés about Contra drug smuggling published in the United States. They were written by journalist Gary Webb for the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 under the series title “The Dark Alliance.” The articles, which alleged a connection between the Contras, the CIA and drug trafficking, quickly roused a strong reaction throughout the U.S. and triggered a smear campaign. Webb’s career was destroyed shortly after these articles were published by right-wing Reaganite journalists in support of the Contras.

The following copies were obtained from the website of the Seattle Times, since the San Jose Mercury News where they first appeared has removed the entire Gary Webb series from their web site.

— Espresso Stalinist

Aug 22, 1996

by Gary Webb
San Jose Mercury News

One thing is certain: There is considerable evidence that El Salvador’s air force was deeply involved with cocaine flights, the contras and drug dealer Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes’ cocaine supplier, Norwin Meneses.

Meneses said one of his oldest friends is a former contra pilot named Marcos Aguado, a Nicaraguan who works for the Salvadoran air-force high command.

Aguado was identified in 1987 congressional testimony as a CIA agent who helped the contras get weapons, airplanes and money from a major Colombian drug trafficker named George Morales. Aguado admitted his role in that deal in a videotaped deposition taken by a U.S. Senate subcommittee that year.

His name also turned up in a deposition taken by the congressional Iran-contra committees that same year. Robert Owen, a courier for Lt. Col. Oliver North, testified he knew Aguado as a contra pilot and said there was “concern” about his being involved with drug trafficking.

While flying for the contras, Aguado was stationed at Ilopango Air Base near El Salvador’s capital.

In 1985, the DEA agent assigned to El Salvador – Celerino Castillo III – began picking up reports that cocaine was being flown to the United States out of hangars 4 and 5 at Ilopango as part of a contra-related covert operation. Castillo said he soon confirmed what his informants were telling him.

Starting in January 1986, Castillo began documenting the cocaine flights – listing pilot names, tail numbers, dates and flight plans – and sent them to DEA headquarters.

The only response he got, Castillo wrote in his 1994 memoirs, was an internal DEA investigation of him. He took a disability retirement from the agency in 1991.

“Basically, the bottom line is it was a covert operation and they (DEA officials) were covering it up,” Castillo said in an interview. “You can’t get any simpler than that. It was a cover-up.”

Source

Nicaraguan Contras Backed by the U.S. & C.I.A. Introduced Crack Cocaine to America’s Inner Cities In The 1980s

The following are a series of revealing articles on the connection between the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras and the smuggling of illegal drugs, particularly cocaine. They are among the first exposés about Contra drug smuggling published in the United States. They were written by journalist Gary Webb for the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 under the series title “The Dark Alliance.” The articles, which alleged a connection between the Contras, the CIA and drug trafficking, quickly roused a strong reaction throughout the U.S. and triggered a smear campaign. Webb’s career was destroyed shortly after these articles were published by right-wing Reaganite journalists in support of the Contras.

The following copies were obtained from the website of the Seattle Times, since the San Jose Mercury News where they first appeared has removed the entire Gary Webb series from their web site.

— Espresso Stalinist

Aug 22, 1996

Cocaine pipeline financed rebels

Evidence points to CIA knowing of high-volume drug network

by Gary Webb
San Jose Mercury News

For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to an arm of the contra guerrillas of Nicaragua run by the Central Intelligence Agency, the San Jose Mercury News has found.

This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the “crack” capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America – and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.’s gangs to buy weapons.

It is one of the most bizarre alliances in modern history: the union of a U.S.-backed army attempting to overthrow a revolutionary socialist government and the “gangstas” of Compton and South-Central Los Angeles.

The army’s financiers – who met with CIA agents before and during the time they were selling the drugs in L.A. – delivered cut-rate cocaine to the gangs through a young South-Central crack dealer named Ricky Donnell Ross.

Unaware of his suppliers’ military and political connections, “Freeway Rick” turned the cocaine powder into crack and wholesaled it to gangs across the country.

Drug cash for the contras

Court records show the cash was then used to buy equipment for a guerrilla army named the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense (Nicaraguan Democratic Force) or FDN, the largest of several anti-communist groups commonly called the contras.

While the FDN’s war is barely a memory today, black America is still dealing with its poisonous side effects. Urban neighborhoods are grappling with legions of homeless crack addicts. Thousands of young black men are serving long prison sentences for selling cocaine – a drug that was virtually unobtainable in black neighborhoods before members of the CIA’s army brought it into South-Central in the 1980s at bargain-basement prices.

And the L.A. gangs, which used their enormous cocaine profits to arm themselves and spread crack across the country, are still thriving.

“There is a saying that the ends justify the means,” former FDN leader and drug dealer Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes testified during a recent cocaine-trafficking trial in San Diego. “And that’s what Mr. Bermudez (the CIA agent who commanded the FDN) told us in Honduras, OK? So we started raising money for the contra revolution.”

Recently declassified reports, federal court testimony, undercover tapes, court records here and abroad and hundreds of hours of interviews over the past 12 months leave no doubt that Blandon was no ordinary drug dealer.

Shortly before Blandon – who had been the drug ring’s Southern California distributor – took the stand in San Diego as a witness for the U.S. Department of Justice, federal prosecutors obtained a court order preventing defense lawyers from delving into his ties to the CIA.

Blandon, one of the FDN’s founders in California, “will admit that he was a large-scale dealer in cocaine, and there is no additional benefit to any defendant to inquire as to the Central Intelligence Agency,” Assistant U.S. Attorney L.J. O’Neale argued in his motion shortly before Ross’ trial on cocaine-trafficking charges in March.

The 5,000-man FDN, records show, was created in mid-1981 when the CIA combined several existing groups of anti-communist exiles into a unified force it hoped would topple the new socialist government of Nicaragua.

Waged a losing war

From 1982 to 1988, the FDN – run by both American and Nicaraguan CIA agents – waged a losing war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, the Cuban-supported socialists who’d overthrown U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979.

Blandon, who began working for the FDN’s drug operation in late 1981, testified that the drug ring sold almost a ton of cocaine in the United States that year – $54 million worth at prevailing wholesale prices. It was not clear how much of the money found its way back to the CIA’s army, but Blandon testified that “whatever we were running in L.A., the profit was going for the contra revolution.”

At the time of that testimony, Blandon was a full-time informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration, a job the U.S. Department of Justice got him after releasing him from prison in 1994.

Though Blandon admitted to crimes that have sent others away for life, the Justice Department turned him loose on unsupervised probation after only 28 months behind bars and has paid him more than $166,000 since, court records show.

“He has been extraordinarily helpful,” federal prosecutor O’Neale told Blandon’s judge in a plea for the trafficker’s release in 1994. Though O’Neale once described Blandon to a grand jury as “the biggest Nicaraguan cocaine dealer in the United States,” the prosecutor would not discuss him with the Mercury News.

Blandon’s boss in the FDN’s cocaine operation, Juan Norwin Meneses Cantarero, has never spent a day in a U.S. prison, even though the federal government has been aware of his cocaine dealings since at least 1974, records show.

Meneses – who ran the drug ring from his homes in the Bay Area – is listed in the DEA’s computers as a major international drug smuggler and was implicated in 45 separate federal investigations. Yet he and his cocaine-dealing relatives lived quite openly in the Bay Area for years, buying homes, bars, restaurants, car lots and factories.

“I even drove my own cars, registered in my name,” Meneses said during a recent interview in Nicaragua.

Meneses’ organization was “the target of unsuccessful investigative attempts for many years,” O’Neale acknowledged in a 1994 affidavit. But records and interviews revealed that a number of those probes were stymied not by the elusive Meneses but by agencies of the U.S. government.

CIA hampered probes

Agents from four organizations – the DEA, U.S. Customs, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the California Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement – have complained that investigations were hampered by the CIA or unnamed “national-security” interests.

One 1988 investigation by a U.S. Senate subcommittee ran into a wall of official secrecy at the Justice Department.

In that case, congressional records show, Senate investigators were trying to determine why the U.S. attorney in San Francisco, Joseph Russoniello, had given $36,000 back to a Nicaraguan cocaine dealer arrested by the FBI.

The money was returned, court records show, after two contra leaders sent letters to the court swearing that the drug dealer had been given the cash to buy weapons for guerrillas.

After Nicaraguan police arrested Meneses on cocaine charges in Managua in 1991, his judge expressed astonishment that the infamous smuggler went unmolested by American drug agents during his years in the United States.

His seeming invulnerability amazed American authorities as well.

A Customs agent who investigated Meneses in 1980 before transferring elsewhere said he was reassigned to San Francisco seven years later “and I was sitting in some meetings and here’s Meneses’ name again. And I can remember thinking, `Holy cow, is this guy still around?’ “

Blandon led an equally charmed life. For at least five years he brokered massive amounts of cocaine to the black gangs of Los Angeles without being arrested. But his luck changed overnight.

On Oct. 27, 1986, agents from the FBI, the IRS, local police and the Los Angeles County sheriff fanned out across Southern California and raided more than a dozen locations connected to Blandon’s cocaine operation. Blandon and his wife, along with numerous Nicaraguan associates, were arrested on drug and weapons charges.

The search-warrant affidavit reveals that local drug agents knew plenty about Blandon’s involvement with cocaine and the CIA’s army nearly 10 years ago.

“Danilo Blandon is in charge of a sophisticated cocaine smuggling and distribution organization operating in Southern California,” L.A. County sheriff’s Sgt. Tom Gordon said in the 1986 affidavit. “The monies gained from the sales of cocaine are transported to Florida and laundered through Orlando Murillo, who is a high-ranking officer of a chain of banks in Florida named Government Securities Corporation. From this bank the monies are filtered to the contra rebels to buy arms in the war in Nicaragua.”

Raids a spectacular failure

Despite their intimate knowledge of Blandon’s operations, the police raids were a spectacular failure. Every location had been cleaned of anything remotely incriminating. No one was ever prosecuted.

Ron Spear, a spokesman for Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block, said Blandon somehow knew that he was under police surveillance.

FBI records show that soon after the raids, Blandon’s defense attorney, Bradley Brunon, called the sheriff’s department to suggest that his client’s troubles stemmed from a most unlikely source: a recent congressional vote authorizing $100 million in military aid to the contras.

According to a December 1986 FBI teletype, Brunon told the officers that the “CIA winked at this sort of thing. . . . (Brunon) indicated that now that U.S. Congress had voted funds for the Nicaraguan contra movement, U.S. government now appears to be turning against organizations like this.”

That FBI report, part of the files of former Iran-contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, was made public only last year, when it was released by the National Archives at the San Jose Mercury News’ request.

Blandon has also implied that his cocaine sales were, for a time, CIA-approved. He told a San Francisco federal grand jury in 1994 that once the FDN began receiving American taxpayer dollars, the CIA no longer needed his kind of help.

None of the government agencies known to have been involved with Meneses and Blandon would provide the Mercury News with any information about them, despite Freedom of Information Act requests.

Blandon’s lawyer, Brunon, said in an interview that his client never told him directly that he was selling cocaine for the CIA, but the prominent Los Angeles defense attorney drew his own conclusions from the “atmosphere of CIA and clandestine activities” that surrounded Blandon and his Nicaraguan friends.

“Was he involved with the CIA? Probably. Was he involved with drugs? Most definitely,” Brunon said. “Were those two things involved with each other? They’ve never said that, obviously. They’ve never admitted that. But I don’t know where these guys get these big aircraft.”

That very topic arose during the sensational 1992 cocaine-trafficking trial of Meneses after he was arrested in Nicaragua in connection with a staggering 750-kilo shipment of cocaine. His chief accuser was his friend Enrique Miranda, a relative and former Nicaraguan military intelligence officer who had been Meneses’ emissary to the cocaine cartel of Bogota, Colombia. Miranda pleaded guilty to drug charges and agreed to cooperate in exchange for a seven-year sentence.

In a long, handwritten statement he read to Meneses’ jury, Miranda revealed the deepest secrets of the Meneses drug ring, earning his old boss a 30-year prison sentence in the process.

“He (Norwin) and his brother Luis Enrique had financed the contra revolution with the benefits of the cocaine they sold,” Miranda wrote. “This operation, as Norwin told me, was executed with the collaboration of high-ranking Salvadoran military personnel. They met with officials of the Salvadoran air force, who flew (planes) to Colombia and then left for the U.S., bound for an Air Force base in Texas, as he told me.”

Meneses – who has close personal and business ties to a Salvadoran air-force commander and former CIA agent named Marcos Aguado – declined to discuss Miranda’s statements during an interview at a prison outside Managua in January. He is scheduled to be paroled this summer, after nearly five years in custody.

U.S. General Accounting Office records confirm that El Salvador’s air force was supplying the CIA’s Nicaraguan guerrillas with aircraft and flight support services throughout the mid-1980s.

The same day the Mercury News requested official permission to interview Miranda, he disappeared.

While out on a routine weekend furlough, Miranda failed to return to the Nicaraguan jail where he’d been living since 1992. Though his jailers, who described him as a model prisoner, claimed Miranda had escaped, they didn’t call the police until a Mercury News correspondent showed up and discovered he was gone.

He has not been seen in nearly a year.

Source 

International Relations from a Different Country: AU Professors Share Their Story

By Erin Lockwood

According to AU professor Dr. Elizabeth Cohn, Ronald Reagan’s presidential legacy has been whitewashed. This is not a reactionary political slogan; it is a conviction born of her work as founder and director of the Central American Historical Institute from 1982 to 1988 — the height of the Reagan Administration’s covert support for anti-government “contras” in Nicaragua.

During that same time, AU professor and Distinguished Diplomat-in-Residence Anthony Quainton was serving as the US Ambassador to Nicaragua — a position that eventually forced him to confront his own misalignment with the Reagan Administration’s priorities and strategy in Central America.

Students of the social sciences are likely familiar with the maxim, “where you stand depends on where you sit,” a reminder that context matters in understandings of political and historical phenomena. I spoke to Cohn and Quainton to hear their stories, which illustrate this principle in the case of US involvement in Nicaragua.

Cohn was 25 years old in 1982, when the Jesuits of Central America asked her to found and direct the Central American Historical Institute, a progressive think tank headquartered at Georgetown University. The Jesuits — active in liberation theology movements such as the Sandinista National Liberation Front’s 1979 revolutionary overthrow of the Somoza dynasty — wanted Cohn to take the lead in providing accurate, non-governmental information about Nicaragua to US policymakers, activists, journalists and academics. Soon, researchers in Nicaragua were sending telex messages to Cohn in DC, which she then compiled into reports and mailed out to a list of subscribers.

Cohn notes that even though Central America was the foreign policy issue of the 1980s, it was difficult to get accurate, in-depth information about conditions on the ground, especially if it contradicted the official position of the Reagan Administration.

The Central American Historical Institute quickly became a leading source of reporting and analysis on Nicaragua, surpassing Cohn’s own expectations of her organization’s influence. She recalls being surprised to learn that one of her reports had appeared as “Exhibit J” when Nicaragua sued the US in the World Court in 1984 for illegally putting naval mines in Nicaraguan harbors.

For Quainton, too, the media played a memorable role in his tenure as US Ambassador to Nicaragua. He remembers his initial arrival in Nicaragua after his appointment under Reagan, stepping off the plane at Sandino International Airport in Managua on March 15, 1982 and being met with a barrage of media cameras and microphones. One reporter asked him to comment on the state of emergency that had been declared in Nicaragua while he was in transit.

Unbeknownst to Quainton, CIA-backed Nicaraguan rebels had blown up two major bridges during his flight there. “I was completely blindsided,” he recalls. “Our relationship with the Sandinistas pretty much went downhill every day from there.”

As evidence, Quainton points to the framed political cartoons from Nicaraguan newspapers on the wall of his office in the School of International Service, caricatures of him with Sandinista leaders. Quainton remembers Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega as “aloof” and “hard to know.”

“Ortega is not,” Quainton says with diplomatic understatement, “a very nice man.”

Cartoons of a different kind illustrate one reason for the tense diplomatic relations, according to Cohn. In 1984, a member of the advocacy group Witness for Peace approached her with a comic book-style “Freedom Fighter’s Manual,” which encouraged Nicaraguans to sabotage the Sandinista government by cutting power lines, throwing Molotov cocktails at police stations, damaging automobiles and stealing government food supplies. An Associated Press reporter confirmed that it had been published by the CIA for the rebel group. Over 85 newspapers picked up the story and severely undermined the credibility of the Reagan Administration’s official position that the US did not seek to overthrow Ortega. Investigations into the first manual revealed another CIA manual, this one advocating assassination.

After the publication of the comic book story and Reagan’s landslide re-election, the political climate changed. “It became a lot more difficult to challenge the administration,” Cohn says. And challenging the administration became the goal of her organization. “I wouldn’t say the information we provided was neutral. Things were so politicized,” she recalls, “it was important to provide information that was more accurate, less one-sided. I saw myself as an honest broker, a patriot.”

Meanwhile, Quainton too was beginning to understand the stubbornness of the White House’s position on Nicaragua. Strongly influenced by CIA Director William Casey’s preference for regime change, Reagan’s position, according to Quainton, amounted to: “As soon as Ortega goes, we’ll talk.”

Quainton said, “They figured — correctly — that I was somewhat more sympathetic than Washington.” This was partly due to the State Department’s general preference for negotiation, and partly due to what Cohn jokingly refers to as the “Sandal-istas” — American groups, often religious, that traveled to Nicaragua to demonstrate in opposition to the poorly concealed US support for the contras. Quainton recalls these groups as being “very outspoken, very emotional.”

Despite perceptions by such visitors that Quainton was too much of a hard-liner, by 1983 it was clear that he and Reagan were not “on the same wavelength.” Quainton had been contacted by a senior White House official, who told him to report more bad news about the Sandinistas. “I can’t do that. We report all the news,” he replied. In October, a bipartisan commission on Central America, led by Henry Kissinger, visited Nicaragua on a fact-finding mission, culminating in what Quainton calls “a disastrous day for diplomacy.” After asking Quainton if he had to “shake hands with that son-of-a-bitch,” Kissinger went into a meeting with Ortega in a foul mood, and, after listening to Ortega deliver a long diatribe against the US, walked out of the room without saying a word.

Having been pressed repeatedly by the commission on whether Reagan agreed with the State Department’s attempts to negotiate with Ortega, Quainton was not entirely surprised to receive a call from the Deputy Secretary of State a few months later announcing that the president was going to make some changes in Nicaragua. Six months after learning he had lost the president’s confidence, Quainton left Nicaragua and became the ambassador to Kuwait. Being given another appointment after being fired is unusual in the State Department. “More typically, when you leave, you’re done,” Quainton said. But Secretary of State George Shultz argued that Quainton had done nothing wrong and did not deserve to be punished. In Quainton’s words, it was a matter of Reagan “looking for a different style of ambassador, someone who was going to be much more hard-line.”

Despite traveling to Nicaragua a dozen times between 1982 and 1988, Cohn does not recall ever meeting Quainton there, though they are now friendly colleagues, both teaching in SIS. The Central American Historical Institute was not very interested in the official US position that they would have gotten from the embassy, she recalls dryly, noting that their research interests lay more in the direction of the border regions with Honduras where the contras were based. She is still angry about Reagan’s covert and, she argues, impeachable support for the Nicaraguan contras.

Quainton is more sanguine. He says his experience in Nicaragua didn’t change his perception of representing US interests abroad. In his subsequent ambassadorships to Kuwait and Peru, there was much less of a gap between public opinion and White House policy. No cheerleader for either Ortega’s government or the US backing of the contras, throughout his time in Nicaragua Quainton remained dedicated to making sure both the good and bad aspects of the Sandinista governance made it back to the States.

A commitment to communicating the nuanced truth guided both Quainton’s and Cohn’s experiences in Nicaragua. Far from being content to toe the Reagan Administration’s line — and despite considerable pressure to do so — each sought to present the complexity of the situation to the US government and the public. The experiences of these AU professors remind us to be critical of official policies and the way they are remembered and to be sensitive to the context and source of information.

Photo by Colin Crane.

Source 

1986: The Iran-Contra Affair

Oliver North mugshot

Nicaraguan Contras being trained by U.S. troops at a Honduran base

Chomsky’s brief account of the US selling arms to Iran via Israel in order to fund far-right paramilitary contras in Nicaragua.

The major elements of the Iran/contra story were well known long before the 1986 exposures, apart from one fact: that the sale of arms to Iran via Israel and the illegal contra war run out of Colonel Oliver North’s White House office were connected.

The shipment of arms to Iran through Israel didn’t begin in 1985, when the congressional inquiry and the special prosecutor pick up the story. It began almost immediately after the fall of the Shah in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. By 1982, it was public knowledge that Israel was providing a large part of the arms for Iran – you could read it on the front page of the New York Times.

In February 1982, the main Israeli figures whose names later appeared in the Iran/contra hearings appeared on BBC television and described how they had helped organise an arms flow to the new Ayatollah Khomeini regime. In October 1982, the Israeli ambassador to the US stated publicly that Israel was sending arms to the Khomeini regime “with the cooperation of the United States… at almost the highest level.” The high Israeli officials involved also gave the reasons: to establish links with elements of the military in Iran who might overthrow the regime, restoring the arrangements that prevailed under the Shah — standard operating procedure.

As for the contra war, the basic facts of the illegal North-CIA operations were known by 1985 (over a year before the story broke, when a US supply plane was shot down and a US agent, Eugene Hasenfus, was captured). The media simply chose to look the other way.

So what finally generated the Iran/contra scandal? A moment came when it was just impossible to suppress it any longer. When Hasenfus was shot down in Nicaragua while flying arms to the contras for the CIA, and the Lebanese press reported that the US National Security Adviser was handing out Bibles and chocolate cakes in Teheran, the story just couldn’t be kept under wraps. After that, the connection between the two well-known stories emerged.

From What Uncle Sam Really Wants, by Noam Chomsky.

Source

1970-1987: The contra war in Nicaragua

Noam Chomsky’s account of the US-backed “contra” counter-insurgency in Nicaragua against the left-wing government.

It wasn’t just the events in El Salvador that were ignored by the mainstream US media during the 1970s. In the ten years prior to the overthrow of the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979, US television – all networks – devoted exactly one hour to Nicaragua, and that was entirely on the Managua earthquake of 1972.

From 1960 through 1978, the New York Times had three editorials on Nicaragua. It’s not that nothing was happening there – it’s just that whatever was happening was unremarkable. Nicaragua was of no concern at all, as long as Somoza’s tyrannical rule wasn’t challenged.

When his rule was challenged, by the [popular, left-wing] Sandinistas in the late 1970s, the US first tried to institute what was called “Somocismo [Somoza-ism] without Somoza” – that is, the whole corrupt system intact, but with somebody else at the top. That didn’t work, so President Carter tried to maintain Somoza’s National Guard as a base for US power.

The National Guard had always been remarkably brutal and sadistic. By June 1979, it was carrying out massive atrocities in the war against the Sandinistas, bombing residential neighbourhoods in Managua, killing tens of thousands of people. At that point, the US ambassador sent a cable to the White House saying it would be “ill-advised” to tell the Guard to call off the bombing, because that might interfere with the policy of keeping them in power and the Sandinistas out.

Our ambassador to the Organisation of American States also spoke in favour of “Somocismo without Somoza,” but the OAS rejected the suggestion flat out. A few days later, Somoza flew off to Miami with what was left of the Nicaraguan national treasury, and the Guard collapsed.

The Carter administration flew Guard commanders out of the country in planes with Red Cross markings (a war crime), and began to reconstitute the Guard on Nicaragua’s borders. They also used Argentina as a proxy. (At that time, Argentina was under the rule of neo-Nazi generals, but they took a little time off from torturing and murdering their own population to help re-establish the Guard – soon to be renamed the contras, or “freedom fighters.”)

Ronald Reagan used them to launch a large-scale terrorist war against Nicaragua, combined with economic warfare that was even more lethal. We also intimidated other countries so they wouldn’t send aid either.

And yet, despite astronomical levels of military support, the United States failed to create a viable military force in Nicaragua. That’s quite remarkable, if you think about it. No real guerrillas anywhere in the world have ever had resources even remotely like what the United States gave the contras. You could probably start a guerrilla insurgency in mountain regions of the US with comparable funding.

Why did the US go to such lengths in Nicaragua? The international development organisation Oxfam explained the real reasons, stating that, from its experience of working in 76 developing countries, “Nicaragua was…exceptional in the strength of that government’s commitment…to improving the condition of the people and encouraging their active participation in the development process.”

Of the four Central American countries where Oxfam had a significant presence (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua), only in Nicaragua was there a substantial effort to address inequities in land ownership and to extend health, educational and agricultural services to poor peasant families.

Other agencies told a similar story. In the early 1980s, the World Bank called its projects “extraordinarily successful in Nicaragua in some sectors, better than anywhere else in the world.” In 1983, The Inter-American Development Bank concluded that “Nicaragua has made noteworthy progress in the social sector, which is laying the basis for long-term socio-economic development.”

The success of the Sandinista reforms terrified US planners. They were aware that – as José Figueres, the father of Costa Rican democracy, put it – “for the first time, Nicaragua has a government that cares for its people.” (Although Figueres was the leading democratic figure in Central America for forty years, his unacceptable insights into the real world were completely censored from the US media.)

The hatred that was elicited by the Sandinistas for trying to direct resources to the poor (and even succeeding at it) was truly wondrous to behold. Just about all US policymakers shared it, and it reached virtual frenzy.

Back in 1981, a State Department insider boasted that we would “turn Nicaragua into the Albania of Central America” – that is, poor, isolated and politically radical – so that the Sandinista dream of creating a new, more exemplary political model for Latin America would be in ruins.

George Shultz called the Sandinistas a “cancer, right here on our land mass,” that has to be destroyed. At the other end of the political spectrum, leading Senate liberal Alan Cranston said that if it turned out not to be possible to destroy the Sandinistas, then we’d just have to let them “fester in [their] own juices.”

So the US launched a three-fold attack against Nicaragua. First, we exerted extreme pressure to compel the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank to terminate all projects and assistance.

Second, we launched the contra war along with an illegal economic war to terminate what Oxfam rightly called “the threat of a good example.” The contras’ vicious terrorist attacks against “soft targets” under US orders did help, along with the boycott, to end any hope of economic development and social reform. US terror ensured that Nicaragua couldn’t demobilise its army and divert its pitifully poor and limited resources to reconstructing the ruins that were left by the US-backed dictators and Reaganite crimes. The contras were even funded by the US selling arms to Iran, in what became known as the Iran-Contra Affair.

One of the most respected Central America correspondents, Julia Preston (who was then working for the Boston Globe), reported that “Administration officials said they are content to see the contras debilitate the Sandinistas by forcing them to divert scarce resources toward the war and away from social programs.” That’s crucial, since the social programs were at the heart of the good example that might have infected other countries in the region and eroded the American system of [much higher-grade] exploitation and robbery.

We even refused to send disaster relief. After the 1972 earthquake, the US sent an enormous amount of aid to Nicaragua, most of which was stolen by our buddy Somoza. In October 1988, an even worse natural disaster struck Nicaragua – Hurricane Joan. We didn’t send a penny for that, because if we had, it would probably have gotten to the people, not just into the pockets of some rich thug. We also pressured our allies to send very little aid.

This devastating hurricane, with its welcome prospects of mass starvation and long-term ecological damage, reinforced our efforts. We wanted Nicaraguans to starve so we could accuse the Sandinistas of economic mismanagement. Because they weren’t under our control, Nicaraguans had to suffer and die.

Third, we used diplomatic fakery to crush Nicaragua. As Tony Avirgan wrote in the Costa Rican journal Mesoamerica, “the Sandinistas fell for a scam perpetrated by Costa Rican president Oscar Arias and the other Central American Presidents, which cost them the February [1990] elections.”

For Nicaragua, the peace plan of August 1987 was a good deal, Avrigan wrote: they would move the scheduled national elections forward by a few months and allow international observation, as they had in 1984, “in exchange for having the contras demobilised and the war brought to an end….” The Nicaraguan government did what it was required to do under the peace plan, but no one else paid the slightest attention to it.

Arias, the White House and Congress never had the slightest intention of implementing any aspect of the plan. The US virtually tripled CIA supply flights to the contras. Within a couple of months the peace plan was totally dead.

As the election campaign opened, the US made it clear that the embargo that was strangling the country and the contra terror would continue if the Sandinistas won the election. You have to be some kind of Nazi or unreconstructed Stalinist to regard an election conducted under such conditions as free and fair – and south of the border, few succumbed to such delusions.

If anything like that were ever done by our enemies… I leave the media reaction to your imagination. The amazing part of it was that the Sandinistas still got 40% of the vote, while New York Times headlines proclaimed that Americans were “United in Joy” over this “Victory for US Fair Play.”

US achievements in Central America in the past fifteen years are a major tragedy, not just because of the appalling human cost, but because a decade ago there were prospects for real progress towards meaningful democracy and meeting human needs, with early successes in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua.

These efforts might have worked and might have taught useful lessons to others plagued with similar problems – which, of course, was exactly what US planners feared. The threat has been successfully aborted, perhaps forever.

From What Uncle Sam Really Wants, by Noam Chomsky.

Source

CIA admits it overlooked Contras’ links to drugs

CNN
November 3, 1998

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The CIA overlooked or ignored reports that the Nicaragua Contra rebels financed their fight to oust the communist Sandinistas through the sale of drugs in the United States, according to an internal CIA report.

Fredrick Hitz, the now-retired CIA inspector-general who supervised the report, admitted that monitoring of the Contras was lax.

“We fell down on accountability…. There was a great deal of sloppiness and poor guidance in those days out of Washington,” Hitz said.

Field offices described criminal activities

The 450-page report, issued by the CIA last month, for the first time reveals information sent to the CIA by its field operatives about the activities of the Contra groups during the 1980s.

One cable sent to the CIA from a field office described a “trial run” of a drug route from Honduras to Miami in July 1981 to benefit the Nicaraguan Revolutionary Democratic Alliance (ADREN).

An earlier cable cited in the report said the rebel group felt it was being “forced to stoop to criminal activities in order to feed and clothe their cadre.”

The report also cited the use of a Honduran businessman, Alan Hyde, for logistical support to the Contras, despite Hyde’s identification in a 1984 U.S. Defense Department report as “a businessman making much money dealing in ‘white gold,’ i.e., cocaine.”

DEA discouraged from investigating

The report details cases where the CIA dissuaded other federal agencies, notably the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), from probing the activities of Contra groups and their contractors. In one instance, the CIA discouraged the DEA from examining Oliver North’s efforts to evade legal restrictions on Contra aid through a secret supply operation in El Salvador, according to the report.

The report is the second released by the agency in response to a series of articles that appeared in the San Jose Mercury News in the summer of 1996. Those articles accused the CIA of forming an alliance with drug dealers and Contra groups to introduce crack cocaine into south-central Los Angeles during the 1980s.

While the inspector-general’s report contradicts the CIA’s previous claims that it had little information on the Contras and drug-running activities, it offers no evidence supporting the newspaper’s allegations.

Reporter Jonathan Aiken contributed to this report.

Source 

Contra Remains Found at Honduran Base

The Associated Press
August 28, 2001

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) — Forensic experts found the remains of three people at a former air base near the Honduras-Nicaragua border that was used as a training ground for U.S.-backed Contra rebels.

The discovery was made late Monday after six hours of digging at the El Aguacate air base, where the federal prosecutor’s office expects to find the remains of 80 of 185 leftists the army killed between 1979 and 1990.

The United States built the base in 1984 as a training center for the Contras, who were fighting the leftist Sandinista regime in neighboring Nicaragua during the 1980s. The base is located near the border of the two countries, about 80 miles east of Tegucigalpa.

It was turned over to the Honduran military before being abandoned in 1994.

Human rights groups say at least some of the 185 people officially listed as missing during the Honduran government campaign against leftists were tortured and buried at the base.

Among the missing were two U.S. citizens: Jesuit priest-turned-guerrilla James Carney and former Green Beret David Valle Cruz.

Carney, then 53, was expelled from Honduras on allegations that he encouraged a peasant revolt against the military government. He quit the Jesuits a few months before he was captured.

Authorities said they would not be able to confirm the victims’ identities until they had conducted laboratory analyses of the remains.

Family members of a late Contra fighter, Francisco Javier Guzman Davila, say one of the bodies is his. Guzman died when his plane was forced down by Sandinistas, said his brother, Dennis Manuel, who also fought with the Contras.

Found with the second set of remains was a glass jar and a paper with what appeared to be the victim’s name written on it, said attorney general spokesman Melvin Duarte. Duarte did not release the name. He said the victim is believed to have died in a Contra-operated hospital at El Aguacate.

A third set of remains was found buried in two sacks. Prosecutors believe the victim was killed at a different location, then dismembered and buried at the air base site.

Digging began Monday and is expected to continue for 20 more days.

Laboratory tests will be conducted for 10 days after that.

Source

The Contras: A Sorry Sight Despite 4 Years of U.S. Help

December 12, 1986
By Joseph C. Harsch

This has turned into the week in world affairs that took Honduran troops, ferried to the fighting front in United States Army helicopters, to rescue the main force of the Nicaraguan contra rebels from Nicaraguan troops. So low has the contras’ fighting ability fallen that they could not defend themselves in their base camps some 10 miles inside the Honduran border. For several months now, the Sandinistas have been able to keep the contras hemmed into their camps, preventing the contras from taking offensive action inside Nicaragua itself.

The Reagan administration has been feeding, arming, and training the contras both overtly and covertly for more than four years. In theory, the time has long since passed when the contras should have been able to move inside Nicaragua and set up a permanent base from which they could hope to overthrow the Sandinista government, as Fidel Castro once did to the Batista regime in Cuba.

But since last March, the main fighting between the contras and the Sandinistas has been largely on the Honduran side of the border with the Sandinistas substantially on the offensive.

Last weekend was not the first time that Washington has had to come to the rescue of the contras. In March, the Sandinistas made a serious attack on the contra camps in southern Honduras. The Sandinista troops involved in the attack were estimated at between 800 and 1,500. While there are supposed to be at least 7,000 contras in Honduras, the Reagan administration nevertheless pressed the Honduran government to send its own troops into the area, which it did – reluctantly.

This time, there is as yet no reliable estimate of the strength of the Sandinista forces in the recent fighting, in an area now called “New Nicaragua,” from the number of Nicaraguan refugees and contras in the area. The number of Honduran troops ferried in US helicopters in last weekend’s rescue operation is estimated at 1,200.

By this weekend, the Sandinistas are expected to have largely withdrawn from Las Vegas Salient, an area of Honduras jutting into Nicaragua, where the skirmishing has been going on.

The two governments – Honduran and Nicaraguan – have engaged in lively conversations with each other.

One result is that the Honduran government has pressed the Reagan administration to get the contras out of Honduras. The Hondurans say they have an absolute promise that this will be done by April 1987 at the latest.

US officials in Honduras and Washington make it sound more like a desirable goal than a hard promise. However, there seems to be at least a tentative schedule for moving the contras out of Honduras and into Nicaragua.

There is a reason for selecting April as the target date.

In February, the contras are scheduled to receive the second installment of the $100 million in military and humanitarian aid that the US Congress approved in October.

This would, in theory, give the contras three months in which to try to fight their way inside Nicaragua and let the Hondurans get back to a life of neutrality.

But the contra operation is already well behind schedule. As usual in such operations, the planning of the counterrevolutionary operation is based on the assumption that the population inside the target country is yearning for liberation and will rise at the appropriate moment to join in the battle against their local oppressers.

This was the expectation in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. The rising up never happened.

This has been the expectation for Nicaragua. In four years of opportunities the rising has not happened. The contras have made many excursions into the country. But they have never been able to find enough local popular support to make it possible for them to stay there.

Meanwhile, the Sandinista Army has grown steadily in numbers, weaponry, and military skill. They are definitely on the offensive now.

During most of the time since the tide of battle turned in favor of the Sandinistas in March, the Honduran government of President Jos’e Azcona Hoyo has tried to ignore the fact that Nicaraguan soldiers are operating inside Honduran territory.

Honduras moved troops into the border region last March only after urging by the US government. This last weekend, it was US action which spurred Honduras to allow some of its troops to be sent toward the border into Nicaragua. But this did not lead to serious fighting between Honduran and Nicaraguan troops.

The Nicaraguans more or less backed away.

Honduran tolerance for Nicaraguan soldiers inside Honduras is based on international law and custom. It is the legal responsibility of any government to prevent hostile action being launched from within its borders against any other country.

The Hondurans, who recognize the Nicaraguan government of Daniel Ortega Saavedra, should under international law and custom, prevent the contras operating against Nicaragua from Honduran bases.

It is generally recognized that if and when a government is incapable of preventing damage being done another country from inside its own borders then the other country is entitled to intrude against its enemy.

In 1916, a Mexican guerrilla, usually called a “bandit” at the time, named Francisco Villa raided the US border town of El Paso.

President Woodrow Wilson ordered a US military expedition into Mexico in pursuit of Francisco Villa.

Villa was never caught, but his raids across the border did cease.

Meanwhile, John J. Pershing, who commanded the cavalry column during its sortie into Mexico, achieved fame and campaign experience. It led to his appointment to command US forces in France in World War II.

A current example is the frequent presence of Israeli troops in southern Lebanon. This is based on the fact that the government of Lebanon is, in fact, incapable of preventing the Palestine Liberation Organization and other anti-Israeli groups from mounting military operations against Israel from inside Lebanon.

Honduras is now trying to do what it should under international law: prevent further contra action from its own territory against Nicaragua. But all it can do is urge the US to get the contras out. It can do no more without risking its large US subsidy, which includes arms and military training.

It remains to be seen whether the contras will ever leave Honduras for Nicaragua. The support they will receive from the US is in doubt now because of recent disclosures related to the US-Iran arms dealings. Expert observers are of the opinion that the time has long since gone when the Nicaraguan contras could hope to achieve a revolution on their own without the help of large US forces in combat.

The chances are that we are close now to the collapse of the contra operation.

Source