President Ronald Reagan:
He may or may not have known what was
done in his name, but
new evidence suggests that much of the Iran-
Contra affair was covered up is
emerging in Spanish-language media.
Report: Reagan in Bed with Drug Traffickers; CIA Ordered DEA
Agent Killed (Tico Times, Costa Rica)
"I am convinced U.S. authorities are hiding something here.
There appears no will in the media, where I have many close and respected
friends, to take up the challenge of putting the facts in their proper place.
Ask yourself why? ... To my Costa Rican colleagues: have courage, do not remain
silent. Demand explanations. They deceived my generation. I hope my generation,
with the help of younger journalists, can now write the truth."
Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, now a Fox News analyst, was at the center of the Iran-Contra scandal, an affair that nearly brought down the Reagan Administration. Now, 30 years later, new evidence is coming to light showing that the CIA made a deal with Latin American drug traffickers to ship huge amounts of cocaine to the U.S. market - and that DEA agent Enrique Camarena may have been killed to keep him from spilling the beans.
Working
in El Salvador, crusading Costa Rican reporter Lafitte Fernández
is challenging fellow Costa Rico journalists to investigate the 1985 presence
in the country of Mexican drug kingpin Rafael Caro Quintero.
Fernández reports on new evidence, which suggests
that Quintero was part of a wide-ranging conspiracy to arm and train Nicaraguan
Contrarebels with the proceeds of cocaine trafficking.
Writing
for the Salvadoran
newspaper Diario Uno, Fernández
connects the dots of seemingly scattered events to make the explosive charge
that in the 1980s, to aid the Contras, the U.S. administration of Ronald Reagan
partnered with the largest drug traffickers of the time - Caro Quintero,
Colombian drug lord Pablo
Escobar, Bolivian "King of Cocaine" Roberto Suárez Gomez and Honduran trafficker Juan Matta-Ballesteros - to ship great quantities of cocaine
through Costa Rica and El Salvador to the United States.
The
alleged conspiracy even includes Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, who Fernández says colluded in the cocaine-trafficking business
in Bolivia with Roberto Suárez Gomez.
"My
purpose isn't to rewrite history based on what has been written. It is to use
what came before as a point of departure to discover the truth that we should
have been told years ago," Fernández told The Tico Times.
Fernández writes that El Salvador's Ilopango Air Base was ground zero for the cocaine and arms
trafficking. There, both the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and "private
benefactors" who helped the Contras after the U.S. Congress prohibited
official aid under the Boland
Amendment - maintained aircraft hangars through which weapons to the
Contras and cocaine to U.S. markets flowed.
Fernández draws on information from a number of
sources, including the book Powder Burns by former Drug
Enforcement Administration official Celerino
Castillo III, which details the running of cocaine through Ilopango.
According
to Castillo, aircrft that flew weapons to the Contra
rebels through Ilopango would return with cocaine,
which was then transshipped to U.S. military bases by where it avoided U.S.
Customs. According to his book, when Castillo tried to bring the matter with
superiors, he was told to drop it.
Flights
were allegedly made possible by a deal struck among U.S. National Security
Council official Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, Panama
Dictator Manuel
Antonio Noriega, and the drug traffickers, which guaranteed access to the
U.S. market by the drug lords in exchange for supporting the Contras.
The
records of Iran-Contra show that North had a least one meeting with Noriega on
Sept. 22, 1986, while Noriega was under close U.S. scrutiny for his alleged
drug trafficking.
Fernández cites the book by Ayda
Levy, the widow of Roberto Suárez Gomez, The
King of Cocaine(Spanish), which recounts a deal struck between North, Suárez, Escobar and Noriega, under which the first three
received 30 percent each of the profits, with 10 percent going to Noriega.
According
to the book, on a return trip to South America, Suárez
told Escobar, "Pelican, from today on we are playing in the big leagues,
but we must proceed with great care. Those Gringos are more dangerous than a
monkey with a razor."
Noriega
was overthrown in the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, and subsequently served
prison time in the U.S. and France before returning to Panama, where he
currently resides under house arrest. Escobar was killed by Colombian forces in
December 1993, and Suárez, after serving eight years
in a Bolivia prison, was released in 1996, and died of natural causes in July
2000.
Citing
The King of Cocaine, Fernández writes that Noriega arranged a 1982meeting including Suárez,
Escobar, and then-Costa Rican presidential candidate Luis Alberto Monge, in which the drug lords allegedly gave Monge $2 million to fund his campaign in exchange for free
rein to ship cocaine through Costa Rica's Puerto Limón, on the Atlantic coast,
and an airstrip in the northwestern province of Guanacaste, where it was
transshipped to Ilopango Air Base or directly to the
United States.
Monge vehemently denies the charges, saying
he can prove he was campaigning in Costa Rica at the time the alleged meeting.
In
April 1985, while Monge was president, the Mexican,
Caro Quintero, fled to Costa Rica after the murder in Mexico of DEA agent Enrique Camarena, who endured 30 hours of torture before being
killed, allegedly for having busted a large marijuana plantation belonging to
Quintero.
In
an early morning raid, Costa Rican police, accompanied by DEA agents, burst
into Alajuela's Finca California [hotel?] in the
neighborhood of Ojo de Agua, near the Juan Santamaría International Airport, surprising Quintero and a
number of his confederates.
According
to press reports of the time, Caro Quintero, who is also said to have provided
space on his Mexican ranch to the Contras to train, complained to his captors
that he had paid handsomely for his haven in Costa Rica.
A
Costa Rican legislative assembly commission that investigated the affair,
concluded that a "high political authority" was responsible for the
drug lord's arrival in Costa Rica, without mentioning a name.
Another
legislative commission assigned to investigate revelations made by a U.S.
Congressional commission that probed Contra drug trafficking recommended that
several former U.S. officials, including North and U.S. Ambassador Lewis Tambs, be banned from entering Costa Rica for their roles
in facilitating drug trafficking.
Journalist
Fernández says, "This country [the United
States] appointed two investigative commissions on matters of drug trafficking.
My question is whether their members deceived us or whether they, too, were
deceived. ... Look at what has happened with Caro Quintero. Now it turns out
that he didn't kill [DEA agent] Enrique Camarena, but that someone was sent from El Salvador to
kill him."
A
month ago, Mexican news magazine Proceso made the startling accusation that to
silence the drug agent after he stumbled on the Contra drug operation, the CIA
was involved in Camarena's murder.
The
article, which cites two former DEA agents and a CIA contract pilot, claims
that famed CIA operative FélixRodríguez, a veteran of
the Bay of Pigs,
was behind Camarena's murder - and not drug lord Caro
Quintero.
A
Fox News report on the subject using
the same sources didn't go so far as to accuse U.S. officials of ordering Camarena's murder, but did place U.S. intelligence assets
at the scene of his interrogation, torture and killing. Fox
said that the sources had identified "a Cuban" as one of the
"assets" at the scene, but didn't identify Rodríguez.
Rodríguez, who resides in Miami, denied Proceso's
allegations and threatened to sue for slander the sources of the information. Rodríguez, who was also in on the 1967 capture and
execution of Argentine revolutionary Ernesto "Ché" Guevara, attributed the story to the
machinations of Cuban intelligence, who wanted it to coincide with the Oct. 9
anniversary of Guevara's death. Rodríguezalso denies any knowledge of cocaine
trafficking through the Ilopango Air Base, even
though he, along with fellow Cuban CIA operative Luis Posada Carriles, allegedly oversaw the Contra arms operation
at the base.
Though
the stunning allegations of CIA involvement in Camarena's
murder have been aired in the United States only by Fox, the charges have been
widely disseminated in Mexico and Central America, where a good number of news
outlets have picked up the story, and in Spain, by one of that country's
principal newspapers, El País.
If
true, the allegations put the arrival of Caro Quintero on Costa Rican soil in
an entirely new light, Fernández of the Tico Times says.
"I
am convinced they are hiding something here. There appears no will in the
media, where I have many close and respected friends, to take up the challenge
of putting the facts in their proper place. Ask yourself why?" Fernández said.
In
an op-ed piece following his four-part series, Fernández
challenged Costa Rican journalists to get to the bottom of the affair.
"To
my Costa Rican colleagues: have courage, do not remain silent. Demand
explanations. They deceived my generation. They deceived my generation. I hope
my generation, with the help of younger journalists, can now write the
truth," Fernández wrote.
Mauricio
Herrera, editor-in-chief of Semanario
Universidad, says he is interested in pursuing the story.
"If
we can have firsthand access to testimony and evidence, we would dare to
publish something," Herrera said.
The
apparent lack of press interest in the United States could reflect of how
poisonous the Contra drug story became when Gary Webb, a reporter for the
California-based San Jose Mercury News,
committed suicide in 2004, after his editors rejected a series he wrote linking
Contra drug-running to the rise of the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles
and then the United States as a whole.
Posted By Worldmeets.US
Initially
supportive, Mercury News editors
backed away from the story after The New
York Times, The Los Angeles Times
and The Washington Post all published
articles claiming that the quantity of drugs trafficked by the Contras could not
account for the crack epidemic which devastated inner-city communities
throughout the United States, especially in the Black community.
From
his job covering California's capital of Sacramento, Webb was demoted to a San
Jose suburban bureau, and he eventually quit, finding work first as a
legislative aide and then with alternative media.
Unable
to find a job at a major daily, Webb apparently fired two bullets into his head
on Dec. 10, 2004. Despite the unusual manner of his death, the Sacramento coroner's
office ruled it a suicide. Some, including Lafitte Fernández,
have rejected the coroner's findings, and continue to believe that Webb was
murdered.
In
the aftermath of Webb's series and the accompanying outcry in the Black community,
CIA Inspector General Fredrick Hitz conducted an
investigation that found no evidence that agency personnel were involved in
drug trafficking. However, it did detail that a number of individuals within
the Contra movement, and others who assisted the Contras, did traffic in drugs.
Amid
articles critical of Webb's reporting, the Washington
Post Ombudsman noted that the three newspapers devoted more attention to
reporting on what did not happen than on illuminating exactly what did.
Perhaps
as a result, after nearly 30 years, at least in Latin America, the Contra drug
tale still has legs.
