Teflon President? Noose Tightens Around Uribe as Former Death Squad Leaders Spill the Beans

Last month's capture of Colombian drug lord Daniel "El Loco" Barrera by Venezuelan police was hailed as a "victory" in the "War on Drugs."

Barrera, accused of smuggling some 900 tons of cocaine into Europe and the U.S. throughout his infamous career, was described by Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, who announced the arrest on national television, as "the last of the great capos."

But what of the "capo" who enjoyed high office, is wined and dined by U.S. corporations and conservative think-tanks, owns vast tracks of land, is a "visiting scholar" at a prominent American university (Georgetown) and now sits on the Board of Directors of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation?

When will they be brought to ground?

A Family Affair

To clarify the questions above, one need look no further than the kid-gloves approach taken by the media when it comes to former Colombian President, the U.S. "Presidential Medal of Freedom" recipient Álvaro Uribe.

Accused by human rights organizations over his role in the forced disappearance of thousands of Colombians during two terms in office (2002-2010), Uribe may still land in the dock as a result of ongoing investigations by Colombia's Supreme Court into official corruption, drug trafficking and mass murder.

Recent arrests by Colombian authorities and revelations by the president's former allies however, are beginning to draw a circle around Uribe and the U.S. secret state in some of the hemisphere's worst human rights abuses of previous decades.

As the net tightens, members of the president's own family are sharply focused in the cross-hairs of investigators. Back in June, Antifascist Calling reported on the arrest of Ana Maria Uribe Cifuentes and her mother, Dolly Cifuentes Villa on drug trafficking and money laundering charges. The U.S Treasury Department froze their assets last year.

Accused by the Justice Department of having trafficked some 30 tons of cocaine into the U.S. as business partners of Sinaloa Cartel boss Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, the women, members of the Cifuentes Villa crime family led by Dolly's brother, Jorge Milton Cifuentes Villa, are prominent members of Colombia's jet-setting narco-bourgeoisie.

According to the Justice Department, the investigation revealed that "the Cifuentes Villa drug trafficking organization was using sophisticated drug trafficking routes to distribute multi-ton cocaine loads from Colombia through Central America, for ultimate distribution in Mexico and the United States." In 2009, some 8.3 tons of cocaine which the family were attempting to export to Mexico were seized by law enforcement officials in Ecuador.

Federal prosecutors charged that the Cifuentes Villa family owns or controls 15 companies operating in Colombia, Mexico and Ecuador involved in a variety of ventures that supported their narcotrafficking enterprise.

Among the firms targeted were Linea Aerea Pueblos Amazonicos S.A.S., a newly-created airline operating in eastern Colombia, Red Mundial Inmobiliaria, S.A. de C.V., a real estate company located near Mexico City, along with Gestores del Ecuador Gestorum S.A., a consulting firm located in Quito, Ecuador.

It is also worth noting that the Cifuentes Villa organization, as the Center of Public Integrity reported, have also profited from illegal mining operations that traffic rare-earth minerals destined for the world market.

Accordingly, the Cifuentes Villa clan employed the same smuggling routes that trafficked cocaine to move precious metallic ores such as coltan and tungsten, used by the communications industry and weapons manufacturers, onto the international market. When the Treasury Department placed family members onto its drug kingpin list they identified their mining fronts as "a money-laundering operation in support of a cocaine-smuggling enterprise."

While U.S. media were mesmerized by the extradition of Sandra Ávila Beltrán, whom the press had dubbed "La Reina del Pacífico" (The Queen of the Pacific), over her lavish lifestyle and family ties to legendary Mexican drug lord Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, onetime godfather of the Guadalajara Cartel, Uribe's relatives inexplicably "disappeared" from "court records and authorities were unable to pinpoint the pair's whereabouts," Colombia Reports informed us.

Imagine that.

For his part, the former president denied allegations leveled against his brother Jaime, who died in 2001, and claimed that unnamed "criminals," who conducted "business" from his brother's car phone had cloned it. He also "denied any knowledge of his brother's relationship with Cifuentes or the existence of his niece, despite a birth certificate that was uncovered proving Jaime Uribe was her father," Colombia Reports averred.

What Uribe continues to gloss over however, is the inconvenient fact that brother Jaime had been arrested and interrogated by the Colombian Army after investigators recorded calls \made from his phone to none other than Pablo Escobar, the Nuevo Arco Iris political research center in Bogotá disclosed.

Among the unanswered questions surrounding these recent arrests, investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker wondered: "Did Álvaro Uribe okay the loading of 3.6 tons of cocaine at an airport he controlled in Rio Negro Colombia onto a 'former' CIA Gulfstream (N987SA) jet from St. Petersburg Florida that crashed in the Yucatan in 2007?"

That fateful crash eventually led to the deferred prosecution agreement between the U.S. federal government and Wachovia Bank, fined $160 million for laundering some $378 billion for Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel, "business associates" of the Cifuentes Villa clan.

More pointedly Hopsicker asked: "Why did two successive U.S. Administrations lavish billions of dollars to stop drug trafficking on a President of Colombia who was himself involved in the drug trade?"

As the investigative net is drawn around the family of the former president, another Uribe brother, Santiago, "is facing a criminal investigation for the alleged founding and leading of a paramilitary group," Colombia Reports disclosed.

Investigations into that group, the notorious death squad the 12 Apostles, again surfaced when The Washington Post revealed that a former police chief, Juan Carlos Meneses, charged that Santiago "led a fearsome paramilitary group in the 1990s ... that killed petty thieves, guerrilla sympathizers and suspected subversives."

Meneses, who fled to Venezuela with his family, disclosed that the "group's hit men trained at La Carolina, where the Uribe family ran an agro-business in the early 1990s." For services rendered, Meneses told the Post "he received a monthly payment of about $2,000 delivered by Santiago Uribe."

The former police official said he came forward "because associates in the security services warned him he would soon be killed for knowing too much."

"The revelations," according to the Post, "threaten to renew a criminal investigation against Santiago Uribe and raise new questions about the president's past in a region where private militias funded with drug-trafficking proceeds and supported by cattlemen wreaked havoc in the 1990s. The disclosures could prove uncomfortable to the United States, which has long seen Uribe as a trusted caretaker of American money in the fight against armed groups and the cocaine trade."

"Uncomfortable" perhaps, but not surprising given the U.S. track record in support of drug-trafficking death squads, especially those which advanced corporate America's geopolitical interests throughout Latin America.

"Meneses," the Post averred, "is the first close collaborator of the 12 Apostles to speak publicly about the group's inner workings. His declarations are also the most extensive recounting by a security services official of how Colombia's militarized police and its army worked in tandem with death squads in one community--a model that investigators of the paramilitary movement say was duplicated nationwide."

For his part, the former president accused human rights' activists who have leveled charges against his family "of being guerrilla stooges who disseminate false accusations against his government."

However, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, who was present when Meneses recounted his story during a taped interview in Buenos Aires, told the Post that the former police chief "'incriminates himself and also the brother of the president who managed the paramilitary group, but also President Uribe'."

Interestingly enough, Uribe's appointment to News Corp's board came while the former president is under investigation for illegally wiretapping human rights activists, journalists, Supreme Court justices and opposition politicians.

His former chief of staff is currently in jail awaiting trial on criminal wiretapping charges and his former secret police chief, Maria Pilar Hurtado, fled Colombia and sought asylum in Panama before similar charges could be filed against her.

And with two more senators now under investigation for suspected ties to paramilitary death squads Colombia Reports averred, Uribe's teflon armor is slowly being chipped away.

Parapolitical Scandal

If, as Voltaire once said, "the history of the great events of this world are scarcely more than the history of crime," what of the powerful actors who have looted entire nations and did so while serving the interests of their imperialist overlords?

Dubbed the "parapolitical scandal" by Colombian media, the investigation was set in motion when leftist opposition politician, Clara López Obregón, formally denounced and provided evidence in 2005 to the Supreme Court of links between drug trafficking organizations, the military/intelligence apparatus, right-wing death squads and members of Congress, including prominent officials of Álvaro Uribe's then-governing coalition.

That investigation gathered steam when a laptop was seized by authorities in 2006 from Rodrigo Tovar Pupo, alias Jorge 40, a leader of the Northern Bloc of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC).

The origins of the AUC can be traced to the take-down of the Medellín Cartel and murder of "cocaine king" Pablo Escobar by rival drug organizations, principally the Cali Cartel run by the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, who were provided logistical support and firepower by the CIA and U.S. Delta Force commandos to eliminate the competition.

An umbrella group comprised of far-right militants and drug capos aligned with Colombia's ruling class, the AUC and splinter groups such as the Águilas Negras, or Black Eagles, and the Ejército Revolucionario Popular Antiterrorista Colombiano (Popular Revolutionary Anti-Terrorist Army of Colombia, ERPAC), derive the bulk of their income from drug trafficking as they wage war against the leftist Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC), trade unionists and land reform activists.

Readers will recall that during the 1980s both the Medellín and Cali cartels were given a leg up by the Reagan administration's CIA as funds derived from the drug trade were diverted to the Nicaraguan Contras as part of the administration's anti-Communist crusade in Central America.

In fact, as the Agency was forced to admit in the wake of "suicided" journalist Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" investigation, the CIA and Reagan's Justice Department agreed to a Memorandum of Understanding that handed their dope-dealing Contra assets get-out-of-jail-free cards.

As political fallout from the latest "War on Drugs" scandal--the "gun walking" Fast and Furious affair that put thousands of high-powered weapons into the hands of cartel killers in Mexico--hovers like a radioactive cloud over the Justice Department, the old watchword of the 1980s, "drugs in, guns out," is all the more timely.

And like the Contras, the AUC were more than simply an enforcement arm of Colombia's narco-elites; they served as an unofficial though deadly instrument, to preserve the status quo. For Washington policy makers, this meant continued access by U.S. petroleum corporations, mining and agro-business interests to Colombia's vast wealth. If thousands of tons of cocaine entered the United States as the price for stamping out "leftist subversion," then so be it.

Along with incriminating evidence that linked Tovar's gang to 550 murders, it later emerged that Tovar was a close political associate of Jorge Noguera, the former head of DAS, the Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (Administrative Department of Security), the Colombian equivalent of the CIA.

Noguera's links to Tovar came to light when his deputy, Rafael García Torres, DAS's former chief of Information Technologies, was arrested and charged by Supreme Court investigators of accepting bribes from right-wing sicarios (assassins) and drug traffickers in exchange for erasing their criminal histories, along with those of the Cifuentes Villa clan, from the state intelligence database.

In his testimony, García charged that Noguera, a Uribe crony, collaborated with Tovar's Northern Bloc in a coordinated move by the AUC to support local, regional and national candidates for office who supported their hardline against the left.

More recently, the not-so-hidden hand of the United States emerged.

The Washington Post reported that "American cash, equipment and training, supplied to elite units of the Colombian intelligence service over the past decade to help smash cocaine-trafficking rings, were used to carry out spying operations and smear campaigns against Supreme Court justices, Uribe's political opponents and civil society groups."

Post reporters Karen DeYoung and Claudia J. Duque disclosed that despite billions of dollars of aid supplied by U.S. taxpayers under Plan Colombia, "the DAS under Uribe emphasized political targets over insurgents and drug lords."

In fact, Colombia prosecutors told the Post that the "Uribe government wanted to 'neutralize' the Supreme Court because its investigative magistrates were unraveling ties between presidential allies in the Colombian congress and drug-trafficking paramilitary groups."

Based on "thousands of pages of DAS documents and the testimony of nine top former DAS officials, the prosecutors say the agency was directed by the president's office to collect the banking records of magistrates, follow their families, bug their offices and analyze their court rulings."

These black operations however, were not the work of a few proverbial "bad apples" but were a direct result of projects designed by the CIA.

"Some of those charged or under investigation have described the importance of U.S. intelligence resources and guidance," the Post disclosed, "and say they regularly briefed embassy 'liaison' officials on their intelligence-gathering activities."

"'We were organized through the American Embassy,' said William Romero, who ran the DAS's network of informants and oversaw infiltration of the Supreme Court. Like many of the top DAS officials in jail or facing charges, he received CIA training. Some were given scholarships to complete coursework on intelligence-gathering at American universities."

As with the previous Clinton and Bush regimes, the Obama administration vociferously denies any knowledge of corrupt practices by Colombian officials and in fact, "anti-drug" programs such as Plan Colombia "are viewed as so successful that it has become a model for strategy in Afghanistan," the Post reported.

By 2012 however, some 139 members of Congress were under investigation; five governors and 32 lawmakers, including President Uribe's cousin, Mario Uribe Escobar, a former President of Congress, were convicted of paramilitary ties and subsequently jailed.

In late August, former Colombian senator Jorge Visbal, a Uribe ally, "was charged with the promoting and financing of paramilitary groups, held responsible for tens of thousands of human rights violations," Colombia Reports disclosed.

"Former AUC leader Salvatore Mancuso testified before Colombian prosecutors that Visbal had an 'identical ideology' to the extreme-right paramilitaries and, on behalf of the cattle ranchers, brought 'information and suggestions' to meetings with paramilitary leaders to secure the expansion of paramilitary power in the north of Colombia."

Mancuso, who took over the AUC when Israeli-trained narcotrafficker and death-squad führer Carlos Castaño "disappeared" in 2004, said during recent court proceedings that Uribe was aware that the organization supported his campaign for president in 2002 "economically and logistically," according to Colombia Reports.

Prior to his arrest, the human rights organization Equipo Nizkor reported that Mancuso, the son of Italian immigrants, along with being an AUC "godfather," was also a member of the 'Ndrangheta, "the powerful Calabrian mafia which according to Italian police, exceeds the Sicilian Cosa Nostra in both strength and size."

In fact, when Italian anti-Mafia prosecutor Nicola Gratteri flew to Bogotá to investigate the 'Ndrangheta's Colombian drugs network, Gratteri was told by Mancuso he had spied on him the entire time.

"I was in the center of Bogotá, with lots of security protecting me. I didn't know that all the armored cars that I could see around my hotel belonged to Mancuso," Gratteri told The Daily Beast. "He told me his protection consisted of 600 men! Not even the U.S. President has such an escort. Can you imagine how much money he had?"

Mancuso claimed Uribe was aware of the AUC's backing. "There were previous meetings with members of Álvaro Uribe's campaign, including those delegates that asked us to decrease military operations because it was affecting the campaign and image of the candidate," Mancuso said.

During those same proceedings, another former AUC leader, Jorge Ivan Laverde, alias "El Iguano," said that "no evidence exists of these financial transactions because the groups burned all of their paramilitary records before they demobilized."

Rather conveniently, one might say.

"According to El Iguano," Colombia Reports disclosed, "the support of the ex-president all began when the righthand man of AUC creator Carlos Castaño called all groups to give them the order that they must support the Uribe campaign and spend money where necessary."

The former president denounced these claims and said he would launch "a criminal complaint against the former paramilitary for libel."

However, former Congressman Miguel Alfonso de la Espriella, who was part of Uribe's coalition government and later sentenced for ties to the AUC, told prosecutors in September that Uribe "knew he was receiving support from paramilitary groups during his 2002 election campaign," Colombia Reports disclosed last month.

The now-disgraced politician said that Uribe "never objected" to meeting with the AUC-backed politicians, but "simply maintained a prudent silence."

In a recent interview, de la Espriella told El Espectador that the AUC had donated some $134 thousand to Uribe's 2002 presidential campaign.

The former senator told the paper that Mancuso said "our participation in the self defense forces was to seek a deal with his [Uribe's] government. He [Uribe] did not explicitly reject this possibility or the support. What he did say was that we wait and if he got elected we would talk again."

More recently, Uribe's jailed ex-security chief, Mauricio Santoyo Velasco, accused of illegally ordering driftnet surveillance over electronic communications and the forced disappearance of human rights workers in Medellín, "is willing to officially testify against his old boss and other senior officials," according to Colombia Reports.

Santoyo is presently jailed in the U.S. for collaborating with the AUC and "previously acknowledged accepting bribes from paramilitary members in exchange for giving them information about police operations being carried out against them."

According to "highly credible sources" cited by Colombia Reports, Santoyo "is willing to implicate the ex-president and other top officials," in exchange for a "reduced sentence."

Although U.S. prosecutors previously said that the Santoyo case was the "tip of the iceberg" and an opposition senator accused the former president of bringing "a criminal apparatus" to the presidential palace in 2002, the current director of Colombia's National Police, General José Roberto León Riaño, denied that the U.S. is investigating anyone other than Santoyo.

"Yesterday I personally interviewed the toughest prosecutor of the United States on the matter of drug trafficking, Neil MacBride, who is running the case against [retired general Mauricio] Santoyo," Colombia Reports averred. "He indicated: 'there are bad apples in every institution, Santoyo is an apple that acted on his own, but that can't affect the whole organization'."

While evidence has yet to emerge that Uribe met with Mancuso as the former AUC chief testified, ubiquitous "facts on the ground" in the form of thousands of tons of exported dope, forced "disappearances" and the mass murder of peasants and left-wing activists tell a different tale and point to official complicity amongst Colombian elites and their U.S. "drug war" sponsors.

Back to the Future: U.S. Complicity and Cover-Up

The sordid history of collaboration between Colombian elites, drug gangs, the military and right-wing death squads was known for years by U.S. secret state agencies and federal prosecutors but was covered-up in the interest of "national security."

In declassified documents published by the National Security Archive in 2004, we learned that then Senator "Álvaro Uribe Vélez of Colombia was a 'close personal friend of Pablo Escobar' who was 'dedicated to collaboration with the Medellín [drug] cartel at high government levels,' according to a 1991 intelligence report from U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) officials in Colombia."

Researcher Michael Evans revealed that the "newly-declassified report, dated 23 September 1991, is a numbered list of 'the more important Colombian narco-traffickers contracted by the Colombian narcotic cartels for security, transportation, distribution, collection and enforcement of narcotics operations'."

The former president, a "key U.S. partner in the drug war" and a major recipient of billions of dollars of taxpayer-supplied funds for Plan Colombia, "was linked to a business involved in narcotics activities in the United States" and "has worked for the Medellín cartel."

Evans disclosed that "The document is marked 'CONFIDENTIAL NOFORN WNINTEL,' indicating that its disclosure could reasonably be expected to damage national security, that its content was based on intelligence sources and methods, and that it should not be shared with foreign nationals."

One cannot help but ask: whose "national security" was threatened by the disclosure? Certainly not that of thousands of Colombian citizens murdered by drug-linked paramilitary gangsters or the hundreds of thousands of "drug war" victims incarcerated in American gulags for drug use or low-level sales.

"Uribe," the Archive informed us, was "the 82nd name on the list," and appeared "on the same page as Escobar and Fidel Castaño, who went on to form the country's major paramilitary army, a State Department-designated terrorist group now engaged in peace negotiations with the Uribe government. Written in March 1991 while Escobar was still a fugitive, the report was forwarded to Washington several months after his surrender to Colombian authorities in June 1991."

"Most of those on the list are well-known drug traffickers or assassins associated with the Medellín cartel," Evans averred. "Others listed include ex-president of Panama Manuel Noriega [and] Iran-contra arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi."

Four years later in another release of previously classified documents, the Archive revealed that "U.S. espionage operations targeting top Colombian government officials in 1993 provided key evidence linking the U.S.-Colombia task force charged with tracking down fugitive drug lord Pablo Escobar to one of Colombia's most notorious paramilitary chiefs."

"The documents," Evans wrote, "reveal that the U.S.-Colombia Medellín Task Force, known in Spanish as the Bloque de Búsqueda or 'Search Block,' was sharing intelligence information with Fidel Castaño, paramilitary leader of Los Pepes (Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar or 'People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar'), a clandestine terrorist organization that waged a bloody campaign against people and property associated with the reputed narcotics kingpin."

After Escobar's take-down, Los Pepes morphed into the AUC and led to a strategic realignment "between Colombian intelligence agencies, rival drug traffickers and disaffected former Escobar associates like Castaño, the godfather of a new generation of narcotics-fueled paramilitary forces that still plagues Colombia today."

"The collaboration between paramilitaries and government security forces evident in the Pepes episode is a direct precursor of today's 'para-political' scandal," said Evans. "The Pepes affair is the archetype for the pattern of collaboration between drug cartels, paramilitary warlords and Colombian security forces that developed over the next decade into one of the most dangerous threats to Colombian security and U.S. anti-narcotics programs. Evidence still concealed within secret U.S. intelligence files forms a critical part of that hidden history."

In this context, as Peter Dale Scott observed in Drugs, Oil, and War, "The true purpose of most of these campaigns has not been the hopeless ideal of eradication. It has been to alter market share: to target specific enemies and thus ensure that the drug traffic remains under the control of those traffickers who are allies of the Colombian state security apparatus and/or the CIA."

"Allies" like Álvaro Uribe.

In Bad Company: Mexico Arrests Three Army Generals, U.S. War for Drugs Continues

Earlier this month, the Mexican government arrested three high-ranking Army generals "including a former second in command at the Defense Ministry," The New York Times reported.

According to multiple press reports, Tomás Ángeles Dauahare, who retired in 2008, was an under secretary at the Defense Ministry during the first two years of President Felipe Calderón's "war" against some narcotrafficking cartels and had even been mentioned as a "possible choice for the top job."

The Times disclosed that in the early 1990s Ángeles "served as the defense attaché at the Mexican Embassy in Washington," a plum position with plenty of perks awarded to someone thought by his Pentagon brethren to have impeccable credentials; that is, if smoothing the way the for drugs to flow can be viewed as a bright spot on one's résumé.

The other top military men detained in Mexico City were "Brig. Gen. Roberto Dawe González, assigned to a base in Colima State, and Gen. Ricardo Escorcia Vargas, who is retired."

Reuters reported that "Dawe headed an army division in the Pacific state of Colima, which lies on a key smuggling route for drugs heading to the United States, and had also served in the violent border state of Chihuahua."

When queried at a May 18 press conference in Washington, "whether and to what extent" these officers participated in the $1.6 billion taxpayer-financed boondoggle known as the Mérida Initiative or had received American training, Pentagon spokesperson Lt. Col. Robert L. Ditchey II tersely told reporters, "We are not going to get into those specifics."

Inquiring minds can't help but wonder what does the Pentagon, or certain three-lettered secret state agencies, have to hide?

CIA-Pentagon Death Squads

Although little explored by corporate media, the CIA and Defense Department's role in escalating violence across Mexico is part of a long-standing strategy by American policy planners to deploy what the late Col. L. Fletcher Prouty called The Secret Team, "skilled professionals under the direct control of someone higher up." According to Prouty, "Team members are like lawyers and agents, they work for someone. They generally do not plan their work. They do what their client tells them to do."

In the context of the misbegotten "War on Drugs," that "client" is the U.S. government and the nexus of bent banks, crooked cops, shady airplane brokers, chemical manufacturers, and spooky defense and surveillance firms who all profit from the chaos they help sustain.

As Narco News disclosed last summer, "A small but growing proxy war is underway in Mexico pitting US-assisted assassin teams composed of elite Mexican special operations soldiers against the leadership of an emerging cadre of independent drug organizations that are far more ruthless than the old-guard Mexican 'cartels' that gave birth to them."

"These Mexican assassin teams now in the field for at least half a year, sources tell Narco News, are supported by a sophisticated US intelligence network composed of CIA and civilian US military operatives as well as covert special-forces soldiers under Pentagon command--which are helping to identify targets for the Mexican hit teams."

"So it should be no surprise," Bill Conroy wrote, "that information is now surfacing from reliable sources indicating that the US government is once again employing a long-running counter-insurgency strategy that has been pulled off the shelf and deployed in conflicts dating back to Vietnam in the 1960s, in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s, and beyond, and in more recent conflicts, such as in Iraq."

That strategy, as numerous journalists and researchers have reported, provides specialized training and heavy-weapons to neocolonial clients that the imperial Godfather believes will do their bidding. More often than not however, there are serious consequences for doing so.

As The Brownsville Herald revealed nearly a decade ago, the Zetas were the former enforcement arm of Juan García Ábrego's Gulf Cartel; then Mexico's richest and most powerful drug trafficking organization.

During the 1980s, the Gulf group negotiated an alliance with Colombia's Cali Cartel, amongst the CIA's staunchest drug-trafficking allies during the Iran-Contra period. By the 1990s, the Mexican Attorney General's Office estimated that the organization handled as much as "one-third of all cocaine shipments" into the United States from their suppliers and were worth an estimated $10 billion.

But as the Herald disclosed, the Zetas, now considered by the U.S. government to be the "most technologically advanced, sophisticated, and dangerous cartel operating in Mexico" were "once part of an elite division of the Mexican Army, the Special Air Mobile Force Group. At least one-third of this battalion's deserters was trained at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga., according to documents from the Mexican secretary of defense."

By 2010, the Zetas had broken with their former Gulf partners to become one of the most formidable, and brutal, DTOs in the area. According to published reports, the organization's core operatives include corrupt former federal, state and local police officers, renegade soldiers and ex-Kabiles, the CIA and Pentagon-trained Special Forces of the Guatemalan military, responsible for horrendous atrocities during that country's U.S.-sponsored "scorched earth" campaign against leftist guerrillas; a war which killed an estimated 250,000 people, largely at the hands of the military and right-wing death squads.

Perhaps this is one reason why the Pentagon "won't get into" the "specifics" behind the generals' recent arrests, nor will the Justice Department come clean about the "quid-pro-quo immunity deal with the US government in which they [the Sinaloa Cartel] were guaranteed protection from prosecution in exchange for providing US law enforcers and intelligence agencies with information that could be used to compromise rival Mexican cartels and their operations," as Narco News reported.

While the implications of these policies may be scandalous to the average citizen, they're part of a recurring pattern, one might even say a modus operandi reproduced ad nauseam.

More than three decades ago we learned from Danish journalist Henrik Krüger in The Great Heroin Coup, that the CIA was at the center of the "remarkable shift from Marseilles (Corsican) to Southeast Asian and Mexican (Mafia) heroin in the United States," and that the legendary take-down of the "French Connection" actually represented "a deliberate move to reconstruct and redirect the heroin trade... not to eliminate it." (emphasis added)

A similar process is underway in Mexico today as drug distribution networks battle it out for control over the multibillion dollar market flooding Europe and North America with processed cocaine from South America's fabled Crystal Triangle. In fact, the illicit trade would be nigh impossible without official complicity and corruption, on both sides of the border, and at the highest levels of what sociologist C. Wright Mills called the Power Elite.

Without batting an eye however, the Times told us that the arrest of Mexico's top "drug fighting" generals "is sure to rattle American law enforcement and military officers, who in the best of times often work warily with their Mexican counterparts, typically subjecting them to screening for any criminal ties."

Really?

Not if a U.S. Army Special Operations Forces Field Manual (FM 3-05.130), titled Unconventional Warfare, serves as a guide for the Pentagon's current strategic thinking on the conflict in Mexico. Published in 2008 by WikiLeaks, the anonymous authors informed us that:

Irregulars, or irregular forces, are individuals or groups of individuals who are not members of a regular armed force, police, or other internal security force. They are usually nonstate-sponsored and unconstrained by sovereign nation legalities and boundaries. These forces may include, but are not limited to, specific paramilitary forces, contractors, individuals, businesses, foreign political organizations, resistance or insurgent organizations, expatriates, transnational terrorism adversaries, disillusioned transnational terrorism members, black marketers, and other social or political "undesirables." (Unconventional Warfare, p. 1-3)

From this perspective such "irregular forces" sound suspiciously like today's army of professional contract killers or sicarios, who act as mercenaries for the cartels and as political enforcers for local elites.

According to carefully-crafted media fairy tales, we're to believe that unlike corrupt Federal and local police, the Army, which has deployed nearly 50,000 troops across Mexico are somehow magically immune to the global tide of corruption associated with an illicit trade worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually.

However, ubiquitous facts on the ground tell a different tale. Like their U.S. counterparts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Mexican Army stands accused of serious human rights violations. And, like marauding U.S. imperial invaders, Mexico's Army regularly carry out illegal detentions, extortion, extrajudicial killings, torture along with the "disappearance" of indigenous and left-wing activists.

Indeed, like their American and NATO counterparts in Afghanistan today, some elements within the Mexican Army have forged highly-profitable alliances with drug traffickers, especially among organized crime groups afforded "cover" by the CIA. But unlike the global godfathers in Washington however, Mexican authorities have brought criminal charges against corrupt officials.

In the Times' report we're informed that "a retired general, Juan Manuel Barragán Espinosa, was detained in February, accused of having leaked information to a drug gang. Another general, Manuel Moreno Avina, and several soldiers he commanded are on charges of murder, torture and drug trafficking in a border town in northern Mexico."

The Houston Chronicle disclosed that the "investigation of the generals reportedly was spurred by informants' testimony linked to the August 2010 arrest of Edgar Valdez Villarreal, the Laredo native known as La Barbie who served as the Beltran Leyva's top enforcer."

According to the Chronicle, "accusations of political motivation--by the generals' wives, lawyers and others--have been raised because of prosecutors' nearly two-year delay in acting on the informant's testimony and because the arrests come less than six weeks ahead of Mexico's presidential elections."

In fact, just days before being taken into custody, Ángeles "participated in a national security conference organized by supporters of presidential front-runner Enrique Peña Nieto, candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI."

But Ángeles' inconvenient arrest just weeks before contentious national elections isn't the only problem that PRI front-runner Peña Nieto has to worry about.

The Associated Press reported that Peña Nieto's one-time ally, the former governor of the violence-plagued state of Tamaulipas, Tomás Yarrington Ruvalcaba, has been accused in a civil action filed by federal prosecutors in Texas that he "'acquired millions of dollars in payments' while in public office from drug cartels 'and from various extortion or bribery schemes'."

"Yarrington," AP disclosed, "then used various front men and businesses 'to become a major real estate investor through various money laundering mechanisms,' according to documents filed in Corpus Christi."

The former governor "was also named earlier this year in the federal indictment of Antonio Peña Arguelles, who was also charged with money laundering in San Antonio. That indictment alleged that leaders of the Gulf and Zetas cartels paid millions to Institutional Revolutionary Party members, including Yarrington," AP reported.

Curiously enough however, that AP report failed to mention Yarrington's close political ties to politicians on this side of the border. Indeed, according to Digital Journal writer Lynn Herrmann, "Yarrington was at Texas Governor Rick Perry's swearing into office for his first full term in 2003. Prior to that, the Tamaulipas governor was a recipient of a Texas Senate resolution honoring him."

"Even closer was the relationship between Yarrington and President George W. Bush," Herrmann wrote, "a relationship apparently developed when junior was governor of Texas. In 2000, the Los Angeles Times quoted Bush as saying, 'Tomás is terrific, worked with him a lot'."

Now why wouldn't the AP report that?!

While one cannot dismiss that political motivations may lie behind the arrests, salient facts coloring these latest examples of drug war shenanigans again betray that this phony war is being waged not to stamp-out the grim trade but over who controls it.

Another Day, Another Bent General

The arrests were hardly precedent setting if truth be told. Indeed, the best known case of collaboration between the Army and the Cartels was that of Gen. José de Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo.

After having risen in the ranks to become a Three-Star Divisional Commander in the 1990s, Gutiérrez was appointed by the Attorney General of Mexico during the reign of President Ernesto Zedillo, currently a director of the drug-tainted financial black hole Citigroup, accused of laundering tens of millions of dollars in drug money for Raúl Salinas de Gortari, the brother of Carlos Salinas, the former president of Mexico. With powerful connections, the general became that country's top-ranking drug interdiction officer as head of the Instituto Nacional para el Combate a las Drogas (INCD).

From his perch, Gutiérrez had access to intelligence provided to the government by Mexican and U.S. secret state agencies. The treasure trove of data available to the general and his patrons included files on antidrug investigations, wiretaps on cartel leaders and informant identities.

There was just one small problem.

After receiving a tip that Gutiérrez had moved into an upscale Mexico City neighborhood in an apartment "whose rent could not be paid for with the wage received by a public servant," the Attorney General's Office opened an investigation.

It turned out that Gutiérrez had moved into palatial digs owned by a confederate of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the legendary head of the Juárez Cartel and "Lord of the Heavens." The drug lord earned that moniker because he moved vast quantities of cocaine into the U.S. aboard a fleet of airplanes purchased from bent brokers on the American side of the border. This too is a recurring pattern, as Daniel Hopsicker revealed during his investigation into the secret history of a fleet of fifty drug planes bought with hot money laundered through U.S. banks.

During the course of their investigation, Mexican authorities obtained a recording of Gutiérrez and Carrillo Fuentes which discussed payments to the General; remuneration for his role in leaving the Juárez Cartel alone, then Mexico's largest drug corporation.

In a 1997 interview with The Boston Globe, Francisco Molina, the former head of the anti-narcotics unit, said that during the change of command, "he personally handed over to Gutiérrez all of Mexico's 'most delicate' drug-fighting information."

"The files included thousands of documents on open investigations," the Globe reported, "pending operations, wire taps and voluminous material on Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the trafficker to whom Gutiérrez was linked."

That information, Molina said, "places many people at risk, and it throws into the garbage the huge amount of resources, money, and time that were spent" on operations. "It's like letting the enemy in to dig around in the files."

And with the U.S. State Department poised to expand the Mexican secret state's access to the latest in communications' intercept technologies as Antifascist Calling recently reported, the Cartels may soon have even more information at their disposal and the wherewithal to strike their adversaries with ruthless efficiency.

'Dirty Warrior' and 'Lord of the Heavens' United in the Great Beyond

It remains to be seen whether the accused military men will suffer the fate of another narco-linked Army commander, retired Gen. Mario Acosta Chaparro.

The Latin American Herald Tribune reported last month that Acosta, "who was convicted of drug-gang ties a decade ago but subsequently exonerated, has died of wounds suffered in a gunshot attack, sources with the capital's district attorney's office said."

According to McClatchy's "Mexico Unmasked" blog, the general was killed "as he descended from his chauffeured vehicle to pick up his Mercedes Benz (how many generals can afford to buy MBs?) in a suburban area of Mexico City. A guy in a motorcycle fired 3 rounds from a 9mm handgun into Acosta's head."

As Antifascist Calling reported in 2010, this was the same general who was shot and wounded in Mexico City during an alleged "robbery attempt." At the time, El Universal reported that police claimed a thief wanted to "steal the general's watch" and shot him several times in the abdomen when he resisted.

It must have been a nice watch.

But with last month's murder it appears that Acosta's past caught up with him. "In 2007," Antifascist Calling reported, "after a six-year imprisonment on charges of providing protection to late drug trafficking kingpin Amado Carrillo Fuentes ... Acosta Chaparro was released from custody after his conviction was overturned on appeal."

Freed on technicalities despite testimony by witnesses under the protection of the Mexican government, documents published by WikiLeaks revealed that the Swiss Bank Julius Baer's Cayman Islands unit hid "several million dollars" of funds controlled by Acosta and his wife, Silvia, through a firm known as Symac Investments.

WikiLeaks wondered whether Mexican authorities would "want to know whether the several millions of USD had anything to do with the allegations that Mr Chaparro, a former police chief from the Mexican state of Guerrero, stopped chasing his local drug dealers and joined them in business."

The secret-spilling web site averred: "With the assistance of Julius Baer, Mr Chaparro was able to invest several millions of USD in Symac with all the secrecy which the Caymans allowed and to draw out some $12,000 a month until he suddenly stopped it in July 1998. The following year, a particularly notorious colleague from the Mexican police became an FBI informer and offered new evidence against him."

During his 2002 trial on drug trafficking and corruption charges one of the witnesses, Gustavo Tarín Chávez testified that Acosta answered a phone call and a voice on the other end of the line said: "Son! How are you? Son!" Tarín Chávez told the court that the only person who called the general "son" was none other then Amado Carrillo Fuentes.

During that call, the late drug lord told Acosta that he had spoken with Rubén Figueroa Alcocer, the former governor of Guerrero, and that "everything was settled."

Multiple reports in the Mexican press subsequently revealed that the general had been given orders to pick up fifty AK-47 assault rifles, thirty semiautomatic pistols, twenty two-way radios and a SUV from Carrillo Fuentes and deliver them to the governor.

Talk about a high-priced errand boy!

Tarín Chávez also testified that Acosta did all the technical planning for the Juárez group and made arrangements for the arrival of Colombian aircraft loaded with cocaine and that this logistics work involved the delivery of vehicles, cash and communications' equipment to other military officers who worked for the drug lord.

Though his case was tossed out by the Mexican Supreme Court due to a "lack of evidence" (perhaps one or all of those witnesses lost their "protection" and "vanished," into an unmarked grave perhaps?), like other close U.S. allies in the "War on Drugs," Acosta had been linked to Mexico's "dirty war" against the left during the 1970s under the administration of President Luis Echeverría.

Echeverría was Interior Minister during President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz's corrupt, repressive regime. Díaz, with much encouragement from the Pentagon, State Department and the CIA, ordered the murders of hundreds of student protesters in the now-infamous Tlatelolco Plaza massacre a few days before the start of the 1968 Summer Olympics.

In 2006, investigative journalist Jefferson Morley and The National Security Archive obtained previously classified documents which revealed "CIA recruitment of agents within the upper echelons of the Mexican government between 1956 and 1969. The informants used in this secret program included President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and future President Luis Echeverría."

Those documents detailed "the relationships cultivated between senior CIA officers, such as chief of station Winston Scott, and Mexican government officials through a secret spy network code-named 'LITEMPO.' Operating out of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, Scott used the LITEMPO project to provide 'an unofficial channel for the exchange of selected sensitive political information which each government wanted the other to receive but not through public protocol exchanges'."

Scott, a strident anticommunist who saw Moscow's "hidden hand" everywhere, suspected that student protests were "a communist controlled rebellion," and argued that the movement represented "a classic example of the Communists' ability to divert a peaceful demonstration into a major riot." Never mind that radical students despised the Stalinist Communist Party of Mexico and viewed them as conservative sell-outs; for Scott and his CIA masters, the fable of an International Communist Conspiracy directed by the Kremlin had to be maintained at all costs.

"As the student protests grew larger," Morley wrote, "Scott's information from the LITEMPO agents informed Ambassador Freeman's increasingly dire cables to Washington, which noted that Díaz Ordaz and the people around him were talking tougher. The government 'implicitly accepts consequence that this will produce casualties,' the ambassador wrote. 'Leaders of student agitation have been and are being taken into custody....In other words, the [government] offensive against student disorder has opened on physical and psychological fronts'."

The rest, as they say, is history. Army units stationed around the perimeter of Tlatelolco Plaza and in the windows of adjoining buildings began to open fire on the protesters; hundreds were killed and more than fifteen hundred people were arrested, many of whom were subsequently tortured and then "disappeared."

Heroin Coups and Iran-Contra Connections

Díaz and Echeverría did more than just ignore crimes perpetrated by the drug and CIA-linked intelligence agency, the Direcciòn Federal de Seguridad, or DFS; in the wake of the massacre, they handed DFS and the Army a blank check to carry out an anti-leftist purge which claimed thousands of lives.

Analyzing the CIA's role in global drug trafficking networks, researcher Peter Dale Scott wrote: "One of the most crime-ridden CIA assets we know of is the Mexican DFS, which the US helped to create. From its foundation in the 1940s, the DFS, like other similar kryptocracies in Latin America, was deeply involved with international drug-traffickers. By the 1980s possession of a DFS card was recognized by DEA agents as a 'license to traffic'."

According to Scott, "DFS agents rode security for drug truck convoys, and used their police radios to check of signs of American police surveillance. Eventually the DFS became so identified with the criminal drug-trafficking organizations it managed and protected, that in the 1980s the DFS was (at least officially) closed down."

Though 90 at the time of this writing, Echeverría, until recently, was considered the éminence grise of Mexican politics. He continued to wield considerable power long after his presidential term ended, mostly through his influence over the "old guard" of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI, the special police and army forces stood up under his watch, along with his alleged ties to the drug cartels.

As Scott and Jonathan Marshall disclosed in Cocaine Politics, the "failure" of various anti-trafficking programs such as Operation Condor "were inevitable given the records of the two Mexican presidents" who oversaw the operation.

"Luis Echeverría, under whom the program began," Scott and Marshall wrote, "appears to have been linked to [drug trafficker and CIA asset Alberto] Sicilia Falcón through his wife, whose family members had suspected ties to the European heroin trade." And when José López Portillo "took charge in 1976," Scott and Marshall averred, he "reportedly amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in criminal profits and bought large estates in Spain with the proceeds."

As Henrik Krüger related in The Great Heroin Coup, when he was arrested in 1975, Sicilia Falcón "claimed to be an agent of the CIA, and that his drug ring had been set up on orders and with the support of the agency."

"Part of his profits," Krüger wrote, "were to go towards the purchase of weapons and ammunition for distribution throughout Central America for the destabilization of 'undesirable' governments. If true, U.S. heroin addicts were again footing the bill for clandestine paramilitary operations and anti-Communist terror campaigns."

But the former president's shady connections didn't stop there. Indeed, Echeverría's brother-in-law, Rubén Zuno Arce, was convicted in U.S. Federal District Court in California in 1992 and sentenced to life in prison for his role as a top-tier leader of Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo's Guadalajara drug cartel and for the torture-murder of U.S. DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena in 1985.

Camarena had amassed evidence that the CIA and U.S. State Department considered Gallardo "untouchable" because of the "special relationship" forged by the Agency amongst drug traffickers and the Nicaraguan Contras. Scott and Marshall disclosed that "Mexico's biggest smuggler, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, responsible for moving four tons of cocaine a month into the United States, was also 'a big supporter' of the Contras, according to his pilot Werner Lotz. Lotz told the DEA that his boss advanced him more than $150,000 to pass on to the Contras."

In an 1996 PBS interview with former DEA deep-cover specialist turned whistleblower, Michael Levine, the co-host of The Expert Witness Radio Show, Levine related that "Camarena was a DEA agent working on high level drug investigations. He was stationed in Guadalajara, Mexico and his investigations were taking him right into the Contra resupply lines, that is, the Contras trafficking in drugs with the support of the Hondurans, the Mexicans, and everybody else and Enrique was down there working this case with an informer and suddenly he's arrested in broad daylight by Mexican police. He's taken to a ranch of a top Mexican criminal and slowly tortured to death over a 24 hour period."

"And later what is... what's found is Enrique was investigating [Honduran drug lord Juan Ramón] Matta-Ballesteros and Matta-Ballesteros' partner Gallardo and Matta-Ballesteros, by the way, was on the State Department payroll... in spite of being a documented heavy drug trafficker. His airline that we knew was used to traffic drugs, was used on the US government payroll to fly these Contra resupply mission. So here's this murderer who was later convicted of murdering... or conspiring to murder Kiki Camarena and he was on the US government payroll in spite of the fact that the DEA called him a drug trafficker, in spite of the fact that Kiki Camarena was investigating him. Now here's Kiki Camarena investigating the Oliver North supply line and he's tortured to death."

As investigative journalist Robert Parry revealed two years later on the Consortium News web site, Matta-Ballesteros' airline, SETCO, "emerged as the principal company for ferrying supplies to the contras in Honduras."

"During congressional Iran-contra hearings, FDN political leader Adolfo Calero testified that SETCO was paid from bank accounts controlled by Oliver North. SETCO also received $185,924 from the State Department for ferrying supplies to the contras in 1986."

Let's get this straight: Ollie North, a convicted felon who turned a blind eye to drug trafficking Contra networks he helped stand up runs for the U.S. Senate, hosts a "national defense" program on Fox News and earns millions of dollars. "Kiki" Camarena, who's investigating North's criminal assets is brutally murdered by those same "resistance" fighters.

Curiously enough, when Sinaloa Cartel head Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán escaped in 2001 from a maximum-security prison during the "reform" administration of Vicente Fox, then the leader of the neoliberal Partido Acción Nacional, or PAN, and whose Federal Police chief was recommended by Luis Echeverría, it emerged that Guzmán once worked for Matta-Ballesteros, Gallardo and Zuno Acre's Guadalajara Cartel.

Small world.

But then again, with the CIA suppressing evidence that they negotiated a quid-pro-quo with the Sinaloa Cartel and can't talk about it because of "national security," or that an FBI drug-trafficking informant was at the center of the Justice Department's gun-walking "Fast and Furious" fiasco and can't be prosecuted, perhaps controlled chaos is just what the Global Godfather wants.

A bent general or two is the least of our problems.

The CIA, Paramilitarism & Narcotrafficking: the Colombian Connection

The National Security Archive has released a treasure-trove of declassified documents that provide explosive new information on CIA and U.S. military collaboration with far-right narcotraffickers and paramilitary gangs in Colombia.

Released under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, the documents confirm what has long been suspected by activists and researchers: the CIA and the Pentagon, as part of a joint U.S.-Colombian task force charged with bringing drug lord Pablo Escobar to ground, were linked to one of Colombia's most notorious paramilitary leaders and drug kingpins, Fidel Castaño.

According to Michael Evans, director of the National Security Archive's Colombia Documentation Project,

...the U.S.-Colombian Medellin Task Force, known as "the Bloque de Búsqueda or 'Search Block,' was sharing intelligence information with Fidel Castaño, paramilitary leader of Los Pepes (Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar or 'People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar'), a clandestine terrorist organization that waged a bloody campaign against people and property associated with the reputed narcotics kingpin.

The killing of Pablo Escobar is the subject of popular cultural lore -- and disinformation. Witness the success of Mark Bowden's 2001 book, Killing Pablo, "a work that drew heavily on classified sources and interviews with former U.S. and Colombian officials," according to the Archive.

Evans goes on to inform us that,

The collaboration between paramilitaries and government security forces evident in the Pepes episode is a direct precursor of today's "para-political" scandal. The Pepes affair is the archetype for the pattern of collaboration between drug cartels, paramilitary warlords and Colombian security forces that developed over the next decade into one of the most dangerous threats to Colombian security and U.S. anti-narcotics programs. Evidence still concealed within secret U.S. intelligence files forms a critical part of that hidden history.

According to Garry Leech, writing in the New York-based Colombia Journal:

The para-politics scandal has its roots in allegations made following the March 2006 congressional and municipal elections that paramilitary leaders had worked closely with right-wing pro-Uribe candidates in northern Colombia to ensure their victory at the polls. The scandal escalated dramatically following the seizure of a laptop belonging to [United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia] AUC commander Rodrigo Tovar, also known as "Jorge 40." The laptop was not delivered to authorities as part of the demobilization process; it was discovered in the possession of Tovar’s right-hand man when he was arrested in early 2006.

According to Colombia's attorney general's office, the laptop contained evidence that unemployed peasants in northern Colombia were paid to impersonate paramilitary fighters and to participate in the demobilization process while real paramilitaries continued committing crimes. These crimes, according to information on the laptop, included the killing of 558 individuals in just one region of northern Colombia during the cease-fire. The laptop also contained evidence of paramilitary links to local and national politicians as well as to state security forces. It is the information found on Tovar's laptop that spawned the para-politics investigation, not confessions or evidence obtained under the Justice and Peace Law.

It has long been known that the CIA and related U.S. intelligence agencies have utilized narcotraffickers and far-right paramilitary gangs as intelligence assets and "special warfare groups," particularly when the Agency and their local allies targeted left-wing political forces for extermination.

In Argentina for example, during the "dirty war" that followed the 1976 neofascist coup d'etat by the Argentine military, the CIA directly collaborated with Propaganda Due (P2) Nazis connected with José López Rega's notorious Triple A (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance) death squad in the transcontinental snatch-and-kill program known as Operation Condor.

Modeled after the CIA's Phoenix Program in Southeast Asia and NATO's European-wide Operation Gladio, Operation Condor was a cross-border alliance amongst the military elites of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. Its reach was global and Condor operatives carried out murders, bombings and "disappearances" of tens of thousands of left-wing activists deemed "terrorists."

According to researcher John Dinges CIA and U.S. military support for Condor extended far beyond casual contact amongst "sister" agencies.

FBI Agent [Robert] Scherrer said he learned that the CIA provided [Chilean intelligence agency] DINA with the computer systems and training that he presumed were used in the Condor data bank. ... The intelligence services were to communicate by telex and by a continent-wide radio network -- infrastructure elements that were also provided by the United States. The telex system was given the name "Condortel" ... A powerful military radio network provided by the U.S. military, whose central transmitter was located in the Panama Canal Zone, was also used for Condor communications. ... There were no restrictions, however, on the use of the radio transmitters by the Latin American military, and that ... intelligence agencies would have access to the system and with simple codes could have used it as the infrastructure for a continent-wide communications system. (The Condor Years, New York: The New Press, 2004, pp. 121, 122, 123)

In 1980, Condor-linked Bolivian military officers, drug lords and neo-Nazis, staged what came to be known as the "Cocaine Coup." Though Gen. Luis Garcia Meza was the front-man for the junta, drug kingpin Roberto Suarez was the power behind the throne.

Among the thugs employed by Argentine military intelligence whose "technical expertise" was essential to the coup's success and the horrors that followed, was the notorious Gladio operative Stefano Delle Chiaie and his sidekick, Pier Luigi Pagliani, described by the U.S. Embassy in La Paz as a "terrorist torture freak."

After the putsch, Interior Minister Luis Arce Gómez put together a Special Security Service led by Delle Chiaie and escaped Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie working in close collaboration with other Nazis known as the Fiances of Death.

Under the control of drug lord Suarez, this unsavory crew instructed Bolivian soldiers in torture techniques and provided protection for the booming cocaine trade. According to Martin A. Lee and Kevin Coogan in a 1985 Village Voice article, one of Delle Chiaie's confidantes claimed the Italian fascist served as a middleman between the Bolivian army's cocaine barons and the Sicilian mafia.

Fast-forward and a similar phenomenon emerges in Colombia. According to Peter Dale Scott,

Drug trafficking and right-wing terrorist activity have been linked in Colombia for at least thirty years. The evidence suggests that the Colombian state security apparatus, in conjunction with the CIA, has had continuing contact with this right-wing nexus and may even have played an organizing role. The story goes back to the Alianza Anticomunista Americana in the 1970s, an international network centered in Argentina that targeted revolutionaries with the assistance of CIA-trained Cuban American terrorists. Left-wing sources have claimed that the AAA operated in Colombia as part of the state security apparatus, and with CIA assistance. (Drugs, Oil, and War, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003, p. 85)

We now know with the release of declassified CIA and U.S. Embassy documents that this was indeed the case. More importantly, the documents provide confirmation that CIA "anti-narcotics interdiction efforts" do not target the drug trade per se, but only those criminal gangs who have run afoul of wider U.S. geostrategic interests in resource rich Colombia. In other words, U.S. policy in the area amounts to a protected drug traffic for allies engaged in anti-left counterinsurgency operations. Contextually, while the U.S. military and the CIA were targeting Escobar's Medellin cartel, they were collaborating via Los Pepes, with the equally brutal and substantially larger Cali syndicate to bring his organization down.

Michael Evans informs us:

An Embassy post-mortem cable on the Escobar affair, written less than a month after his death, similarly reported that "any substantiation of Cali-police complicity in the activities of Los Pepes would have seriously damaged the Bloque's credibility in their efforts against Escobar." (Document 30)

More importantly, U.S. military intelligence doubted that the Gaviria government was sincere about cracking down on Castaño's gang, questioning whether it made sense to target a group that shared a common enemy: leftist Colombian guerrilla groups. One briefing document prepared by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in the midst of the Pepes episode concluded that the Colombian government's willingness to pursue Pepes military chief Castaño "may depend more on how his paramilitary agenda complements Bogota's counterinsurgent objectives rather than on his drug trafficking activities." (Document 16)

During the 1990s and contemporaneously, CIA operations, now under the flag of the Clinton-Bush Plan Colombia has facilitated precisely this policy. While Fidel disappeared and is presumed dead, his brother Carlos Castaño took over operations and united Colombia's paramilitary gangsters under the banner of the AUC, a hydra-headed monster notorious for its targeting of left-wing activists, peasant organizers and union militants.

Since the 1980s, over 4,000 union leaders and activists have been assassinated by Colombia's anti-union killing machine, often with the connivance of U.S. multinational corporations such as Chiquita Brands, Coca-Cola, Drummond Coal Company and Occidental Petroleum.

And, as on-going investigations by Daniel Hopsicker and Bill Conroy reveal, CIA and corporate America's collaboration with neofascist narcotics syndicates and death squads are an enduring feature of the capitalist deep state.

Of Wolves and Sheep: The CIA and the International Drug Trade

Researchers have long argued that the proliferation of international narcotics trafficking is in direct proportion to worldwide U.S. military and intelligence operations. Endless resource wars are launched to benefit U.S. corporate overlords and guide U.S. foreign and domestic policy; all the rest are fulsome words to placate the rubes.

The latest in a deepening series of scandals, as attentive readers are aware, involves the disclosure by Mexican authorities and independent investigators in the U.S., that two CIA and Department of Homeland Security-linked jetliners busted in Mexico with multi-ton loads of cocaine may very well be the tip of a dark iceberg of official corruption, the corrosive heart of a system in need of one.

According to Daniel Hopsicker at MadCowMorningNews,

The first, a DC9 airliner (N900SA) busted carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine, had been painted to impersonate aircraft from the Dept. of Homeland Security.

The Gulfstream II business jet (N987SA) caught in September with at least 4 tons (estimates vary) had been used in the CIA's extraordinary rendition operation for several years, and, prior to that, as first reported by Narco News, by both the CIA and DEA in operations in Colombia during the 1990's.

Bill Conroy, reporting for The Narco News Bulletin tells us that,

Given these realities, attorney Mark Conrad, a former supervisory special agent with U.S. Customs, ICE's predecessor agency, speculates that the Mayan Express operation is not controlled by ICE at all, but is, in fact, a CIA-run operation using ICE as a cover. He adds that the CIA has agents operating inside many federal law enforcement agencies utilizing what is known as an "official cover."

Among the many reasons why this is the case, Douglas Valentine, an investigator who has written the definitive history of the CIA's Southeast Asia death squad operation, The Phoenix Program, argues in CounterPunch that,

The DEA and its predecessor federal drug law enforcement organizations have always been infiltrated and, to varying degrees, managed by America's intelligence agencies. The reason is simple enough: the US Government has been protecting its drug smuggling allies, especially in organized crime, since trafficking was first criminalized in 1914. Since then drug law enforcement has been a function of national security in its broadest sense; not just protecting our aristocracy from foreign enemies, but preserving the Establishment's racial, religious and class prerogatives.

In The Strength of the Wolf, Valentine traces the origins of federal efforts to stem the flow of illicit narcotics, situating repressive drugs policy within the context of state efforts to clamp down on what are perceived to be "dangerous" social elements: the poor, minorities and others viewed as threats to the established order. Federal efforts were never conceived as a means to eradicate the narcotics trade but rather, to manage it, particularly when organized crime assets centered with the deep state were concerned.

According to this reading, drug syndicates, from the Corsican-controlled heroin rackets of the 1940s and 1950s, the Nationalist Chinese bandit armies of Chiang Kai-shek who ran the Golden Triangle opium trade, the Afghan mujaheddin and their Pakistani masters in the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), through the Medellin and Cali cocaine cartels who supplied the Nicaraguan Contras with drugs that sparked the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, down to today, are viewed as crucial allies.

According to former DEA agent Celerino Castillo,

In Central America, the Contras' drug connection was no secret. The Salvadoran military knew. The U.S. Embassy knew. DEA knew. The CIA knew: "with respect to (drug trafficking by) the Resistance Forces...it is not a couple of people. It a lot of people," the CIA's Central American Task Force chief would tell Congressmen a month after [Oliver] North's testimony. ... And there were indications North knew. (Powderburns: Cocaine, Contras & the Drug War, London: Sundial, 1994, p. 22)

Dubious intelligence assets such as these have one thing in common, however: like their CIA handlers and the political minders who "guide" the ship of state, they champion a far-right ideological perspective that holds no quarter with quaint notions of a "preferential option for the poor." Whether they are Corsican or Sicilian mafiosi, Cuban counter-revolutionaries, Turkish Grey Wolves, Nicaraguan Contras, Colombian sicarios or bin Laden's medieval-minded killers, fascism is their preferred methodology and terror their weapon of choice.

Why do anti-narcotics operations get sidetracked? Valentine explains:

The glitch in the system is that while investigating traffickers, federal drug agents are always unearthing the Establishment's ties to organized crime and its proxy drug syndicates. US intelligence and security agencies recognized this problem early in the early 1920s and to protect their Establishment patrons (and foreign and domestic drug smuggling allies fighting communists), they dealt with the problem by suborning well-placed drug law enforcement managers and agents.

In a new book to be published later this year, The Strength of the Pack, Valentine proposes to document how "the CIA infiltrated the DEA and how, under CIA direction, the war on drugs became a template for the war on terror."

An how has the new "war on drugs" panned out, you might ask?

With ever-greater quantities of heroin flowing out of Afghanistan and a burgeoning new opium trade in Iraq.

Business has never been better...

(Full Disclosure: As editor of the 2002 book, Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, I included Douglas Valentine's article, "Homeland Insecurity: Phoenix, CHAOS, and the Politics of Terror in America," in that volume.)

"Enigmatic and Magical:" The Butcher Suharto

The death of Indonesian dictator Suharto on January 27, wholly a creature of Washington's Cold War jihad against "international Communism," will be mourned by pathological killers, multinational corporations and their sycophants everywhere.

Between 1965-66, Suharto's "New Order" embarked on a killing spree that led to the slaughter of some 500,000-1,000,000 Indonesians. The massacres commenced again a decade later, when, with the blessing of President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the Indonesian army invaded and occupied East Timor and slaughtered some 200,000 Timorese. In the process, Suharto's uniformed thugs "opened up" the seabed off the coast of the beleaguered island for "development" by Western oil and gas companies.

The destruction of the Maoist-aligned Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) was so atrocious and diabolical that the normally staid New York Times called the purge "one of the most savage mass slaughters of modern political history." [New York Times, March 12, 1966.] The ensuing violence reached such malevolent proportions that Life magazine declared it "tinged not only with fanaticism but with blood-lust and something like witchcraft." [Life, July 11, 1966.] (cited in Blum, below)

William Blum, in his excellent study, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, wrote:

Twenty-five years later, American diplomats disclosed that they had systematically compiled comprehensive lists of "Communist" operatives, from top echelons down to village cadres, and turned over more than 5,000 names to the Indonesian army, which hunted those persons down and killed them. The Americans would then check off the names of those who had been killed or captured. Robert Martens, a former member of the US Embassy's political section in Jakarta, stated in 1990: "It was really a big help to the army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment." ... "No one cared, as long as they were Communists, that they were being butchered, said Howard Federspiel, who in 1965 was the Indonesian expert at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. "No one was getting very worked up about it."

Business as usual, move along...

Since after all, the "business of government is business", John Pilger writing in Monday's Guardian, lets the cat out of the proverbial (body) bag:

The deal was that Indonesia under Suharto would offer up what Richard Nixon had called "the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in south-east Asia". In November 1967 the greatest prize was handed out at a remarkable three-day conference sponsored by the Time-Life Corporation in Geneva. Led by David Rockefeller, all the corporate giants were represented: the major oil companies and banks, General Motors, Imperial Chemical Industries, British American Tobacco, Siemens, US Steel and many others. Across the table sat Suharto's US-trained economists who agreed to the corporate takeover of their country, sector by sector. The Freeport company got a mountain of copper in West Papua. A US/European consortium got the nickel. The giant Alcoa company got the biggest slice of Indonesia's bauxite. America, Japanese and French companies got the tropical forests of Sumatra. When the plunder was complete, President Lyndon Johnson sent his congratulations on "a magnificent story of opportunity seen and promise awakened". Thirty years later, with the genocide in East Timor also complete, the World Bank described the Suharto dictatorship as a "model pupil".

Merely the journalistic conceit of wishy-washy leftists and other malcontents, you ask? Here's what the CIA's own 1968 National Intelligence Estimate had to say:

An essential part of the Suharto government's economic program, therefore, has been to welcome foreign capital back to Indonesia. Already about 25 American and European firms have recovered control of mines, estates, and other enterprises nationalized under Sukarno. In addition, liberal legislation has been enacted to attract new private foreign investment. Tax incentives are offered and the rights of managerial control, repatriation of profits, and compensation in the event of expropriation are, in large measure, guaranteed. The prospects for private foreign investment in extractive industries are fairly good, but it will take several years before survey and exploratory work can pay off in large scale production, export earnings, and tax revenues. Some of Indonesia's traditional export industries such as rubber, tin, and copra are on the decline because of inadequate maintenance over the years and falling prices on the world market. Nevertheless, there is substantial foreign interest in new investment in relatively untapped resources of nickel, copper, bauxite, and timber. The most promising industry, from the standpoints of both foreign capital and Indonesian economic growth, is oil. Crude production, chiefly from the fields of Caltex/5/ in Central Sumatra, now averages 600,000 barrels per day, and daily output will probably exceed one million barrels within the next three years. On balance, however, Indonesia's export earnings (and, therefore, much needed foreign exchange) will probably grow slowly, not increasing substantially before the mid-1970's. [emphasis added]

Would that be one barrel for every dead "communist"? A bargain by any reckoning and consistent with the grim "metrics" of U.S. economic shock jocks.

But just for laughs, here is how The New York Times' Helen Berger describes the Dear Leader. Under the heading "Enigmatic and Magical" she writes,

Mr. Suharto was an unlikely character to play such a major role in his country's destiny. He was a private person, and although he wielded complete power, he spoke in gentle tones, smiled sweetly to friend and foe and presented himself as a man of humble origins, shy, retiring and enigmatic. Short and thick set, he almost invariably dressed in a Western business suit or a safari jacket once he gave up his military uniform, and a black songkok, the flat traditional Indonesian cap.

But as readers know only too well, fascists and other "friends of Washington" don't always shave their heads...