The World of Narcoterrorism
Brock, David
David Brock THE WORLD OF NARCOTERRORISM The growing violence of the drug wars makes it clear that it's time for the Bush Administration to name names, identifying the insidious political forces...
...foreign aid and are identified by the State Department as major drug-producing and drug-transporting countries are "cooperating fully" with efforts to crack down on the trade...
...destroys and corrupts U.S...
...At another point, speaking of the cash payoff to the Cubans, Ruiz said, "The money went in Fidel's drawer...
...policy...
...Though the media used the Noriega affair to discredit the Reagan Administration and the CIA, the real story here was the threat to democracy in the region posed by the still-undisturbed alliance of Noriega, Castro, the Sandinista regime, and narcotics traffickers...
...rr he Ceballos indictment came on 1 the heels of the February 1988 indictment of Panama's Noriega, which accused the general of cooperating with drug traffickers to guarantee a virtual free-trade zone for drug shipments, as well as giving them the run of Panama's airports and banking system...
...Baker also has implicitly accepted the Kerry smear that the Reagan Administration's foreign policies thwarted the drug war...
...There were in fact some efforts early in the Reagan Administration to focus the attention of policy-makers on nar- coterrorism, for example, the growing links between Marxist-Leninist terrorist groups like the Castro-backed M-19 in Colombia and the drug trade...
...law enforcement officials crack down on smuggling through the Bahamas and other Caribbean islands...
...officials undertook an investigation of the career of Colombian Jaime Guillot Lara, who later was accused of narcotics smuggling in Miami by a federal grand jury...
...in fact, his sentiments pretty much sum up the conventional wisdom...
...limits, by government torpedo boats equipped with advanced radars that were able to alert the smugglers as to the whereabouts of U.S...
...26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1989 interview published March 23 in the Washington Times, he asserted that drug traffickers are frequent guests of the Cuban government at Havana's Triton Hotel...
...It affects individuals, society, above all democracy...
...Other law enforcement officials said the series of indictments in the last year involving Ceballos, the Ruizes, and others showed that cocaine traffickers were turning to Cuba as a transit base, as U.S...
...borders...
...The report does not deal with evidence of drug smuggling by the Sandinista regime...
...should act to counter the narcoterrorists' assault...
...While there, the indictment alleges, they brought approximately 1,400 kilograms of cocaine into Nicaragua, which was stored at Los Brasiles air force base just northwest of Managua...
...The Latin criminal cartel which has profited from the depravity of some Americans constitutes an international underworld so extensive, so wealthy and so powerful that it can literally buy governments and destabilize entire societies," retired US...
...In fact, the entire congressional approach to the issue only makes matters worse...
...nurture the kinds of governments willing to help stem the drug flow...
...According to the indictment, one cocaine shipment was successfully brought into the United States...
...The plan stresses beefed up law enforcement, additional prisons, and enhanced federal-local efforts in intelligence-gathering and forensics...
...Drugs in this hemisphere are an equal threat and they are a more immediate and effective threat...
...it was forced to look for staging bases and places to launder money abroad after the murder of Colombian Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla in April 1984 provoked a government crackdown on Medellin's operations...
...weapons, among other things...
...One former State Department official told me that Secretary of State Jim Baker, who ran the Bush campaign, fought hard against the State Department's anti-Noriega effort, on the grounds that just raising the issue helped Dukakis...
...Who are John Kerry and his fellow obfuscators kidding...
...made it easier or at least gave him a moral justification to do anything that was necessary...
...Rangel said: "It is time to depoliticize narcotics efforts with Cuba...
...another was escorted from Cuban territorial waters by the Cuban coast guard...
...By 1985, however, the cartel was paying the M-19 to do its dirty work...
...Though the details referred to two specific operations, Ruiz and his father, Reinaldo, told the undercover agent that the Cuban connection was a routine link that began on secret airstrips in Colombia, continued into Cuba for unloading and repackaging, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1989 25 and then came to America's shores by boat...
...Moreover, the revenues gained provided "good economic benefit" to support the aims of the Revolution...
...It seems unlikely that Castro is prepared to abandon this important vehicle...
...In statements from the Senate committee, and in the flurry of media profiles that followed, Bennett's task was described, in pitying tones, as an impossible one...
...6 6N arco-guerrilla" is a word that falls easily and often from the tongues of those in the know throughout Latin America, but the concept has been pooh-poohed as a right-wing fantasy by the more sophisticated Latin affairs analysts north of the border...
...The four high-ranking officials, as well as Guillot, were never extradited to stand trial but were convicted in absentia...
...The Washington program is envisaged as a model for attacking the demand side of the problem...
...The Cuban-American accountant, who is now serving a 43-year jail term, suggested that Cuba's involvement with drugs may be part of a grand plan eventually aimed at killing the cartel leaders and taking control of an organization that reaches into many of the region's governments and financial institutions, and has a hold over millions of drug addicts in the U.S...
...In return, the big narcotraffickers supply the guerrillas with sophisticated weaponry...
...Charles Rangel, chairman of the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, said Castro "made a commitment . . . to share intelligence with us on drug traffickers or suspected drug traffickers who fly over Cuban airspace or find their way navigating through Cuban waters...
...State Department report, "Inside the Sandinista Regime," Sandinista involvement in the drug trade evolved in two steps...
...Southern Command, told a Senate subcommittee last February...
...ertainly, the U.S...
...It is a struggle against imperialism that has come to poison us, to corrupt us, and it is a struggle for the dollars needed by the people of Latin America in order to liberate themselves and shake off the imperialist yoke forever...
...This will prove quite difficult, however, if the Democratic left continues adhering to its dovish policies on Cuba and Nicaragua while at the same time distorting the issue in places like Panama for partisan advantage...
...In March, Nicaragua offered to work with the U.S...
...Rene Rodriguez Cruz, a member of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist party...
...This had the effect of keeping the Colombia-Panama drug network in place, which was in Castro's interest, in more ways than one...
...The fact is, however, that only through strong intervention on the side of democracy can the U.S...
...T his sort of cooperation—between 1 Marxist-Leninist regimes and movements and greedy drug merchants —is often strained, like a bad marriage...
...But the various bureaucracies involved in the issue—the Drug Enforcement Admin- istration, the Customs Service, the FBI, as well as the foreign policy apparatus —were not organized for what was needed: an ideological war on the Latin drug trade...
...Ruiz said that the Cubans who then supervised the unloading of cocaine from the plane were "government...
...The report blasts U.S...
...This was seen most recently in the confirmation hearings for federal drug czar William Bennett...
...What to do...
...He said Nicaraguan leaders told him that cocaine trafficking to the U.S...
...law enforcement authorities...
...In April, Colombian President Virgilio Barcodelivered a speech in Washington in which he called for greater coordina- tion of intelligence and greater police cooperation between the United States and the drug-producing countries it often criticizes...
...Fidel's view of the situation was that the war in Central America waged by the U.S...
...Both Castro and Noriega made millions in hard currency from Colombian drug sources for allowing the use of their countries as shipment destinations...
...Cuba was also able to utilize the smuggling expertise and capabilities of Guillot by having him transport and deliver arms which were ultimately destined for the M-19, led by Guillot's close friend, Jaime Baternan...
...when a trafficking route is shut down, traffickers simply switch routes...
...intelligence information to Castro, allowed the KGB to set up operations in Panama City, and provided arms to the Sandinistas since at least 1982...
...Drug Enforcement Administration...
...When we do not accomplish this —as we have not in either Panama or Nicaragua—the problem is not going to go away...
...The best example of such muddled thinking issued recently in a statement from the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism and International Operations, John Kerry, in which he called on the Bush Administration to focus its Latin American national security initiatives on the drug issue: In the post-World War II era, the national security focus of the United States was framed by our predominant concern with . . . Marxist expansion...
...law enforcement personnel as a follow-up to the trial of Carlos Lehder Rivas, a leader of the Medellin cartel...
...Sendero Luminoso also has dedicated itself to thwarting Peruvian-U.S...
...rr he other major criminal case in-1 volving Cuba reaches back to 1982, when U.S...
...Those were big guys...
...Cayo Largo . . . was organized as a front for tourists...
...Army general...
...Blandon also told the story of how Noriega had accepted $5 million in 1984 from the Medellin drug cartel in exchange for letting it establish a cocaine processing plant in southern Panama...
...By punishing only foreign aid recipients, countries not allied with the U.S...
...At a recent conference at the Carter Center at Emory University, Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez said drug trafficking is now the biggest threat to sovereign governments in Latin America...
...It has lent itself to the purposes of terrorists, of saboteurs, of spies, of insurgents, and of subversives...
...Those that do not qualify lose half of their economic and military aid and could suffer other penalties...
...During the fall campaign, the New York Times put it this way: "Like its predecessors, the Reagan administration has repeatedly subordinated the drug issue to other American interests, from support for insurgents fighting leftist regimes to the belief that punishing drug-producing countries might destabilize them...
...for every coca field sprayed anddestroyed, another is cultivated...
...In April, in a report titled "The Killings in Colombia," Americas Watch asserted that the Reagan Administration had "misleadingly portrayed" an alliance between drug traffickers and left-wing guerrillas and "completely ignored" what it called Colombia's "narco-repression," a supposed alliance between drug dealers and military officers...
...He also regularly turned over U.S...
...Some in Congress are hailing prematurely this "new spirit of cooperation...
...foreign policy by portraying it as a roadblock to solving the drug problem...
...In congressional testimony and in the Noriega indictment, Jose Blandon, a former top adviser to Noriega, identified 1984 as a "key year for the development and growth of this international network...
...These photos were declassified and released by then-Florida Sen...
...According to Antonio Farach, the former minister-counselor at the Nicaraguan embassies in Honduras and Venezuela, Raul Castro made a visit to Managua in 1981 during which he introduced the Sandinistas to members of Bolivian and Colombian drug cartels and arranged for Nicaraguan entry into the syndicate...
...The indictment described how cocaine, marijuana, and quaaludes were moved by drug traffickers from Colombia to Cuba, and then transferred in Cuban waters from large "mother ships" to small speedboats, which took the drugs to southeastern Florida in a matter of hours...
...If you want to move arms and munitions in Latin America, the established networks are owned by the cartel...
...it was flown by Lehder's pilots from Nicaragua, over Cuba, to Andros Island, Bahamas, and then brought by boat to Florida...
...has sent more antidrug agents and helicopters to help in a government campaign against the cocaine trade...
...Despite all this attention, there is an equally widespread and converse view —that the war on drugs is unwinnable...
...The profits from this huge enterprise—of which the $30 billion annual American drug market is no small part—and 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1989 bankroll the agendas of Marxist-Leninist governments, in Cuba and Nicaragua, and movements, in Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and elsewhere, bent on destroying legal and social institutions, fomenting chaos, terrorizing innocent people, and eventually exporting revolution...
...Senator Kerry's report follows the all-toofamiliar pattern of beating up on the alleged transgressions of our friends while refusing even to examine those of our enemies...
...There is, for example, the 1986 antidrug law, mentioned above, that requires President Bush to certify that twenty-five countries which receive U.S...
...This alliance was solidified in late 1984, when Colombia's Medellin drug cartel, which operates out of the city of Medellin 150 miles northwest of Bogota, began major foreign operations...
...The base is only 100 miles south of the Florida Keys, a major entry point for drug shipments to the US...
...His interests were political, they were economic and they were interests linked to the war which was being waged with the U.S.," Blandon said...
...dollars...
...Cuban officials informed Federal Aviation Administration officials in Miami, where the plane was scheduled to land, that it had run into "fuel trouble' on the flight from Colombia and needed to make an emergency landing at Varadero...
...These were not simply a few rogue, low-level Cuban officials...
...A second cocaine flight into the United States, piloted by an American, Barry Seal, a DEA informant, led to the seizure of 665 kilograms of cocaine by the U.S...
...He then fled to Nicaragua and was later reported killed in an airplane crash...
...he told DEA authorities before he was murdered that Frederico Vaughan, a personal assistant to Sandinista Interior Minister Tomas Borge, arranged for him to continue the trip to the United States in another plane...
...In Senate testimony in 1984, Farach said that in subsequent years Sandinista officials regularly allowed drug traffickers from South America to land, refuel, and take off from the international airport in Managua...
...One shipment was escorted over Cuban airspace by a Soviet MiG, flown by a Cuban air force pilot (U.S...
...Prosper Avril, who try to make progress in curbing official involvement in drug trans-shipments, must face grave political consequences: his efforts in this direction are thought to have pro- voked Haitian military officers to seek his ouster in a coup recently...
...The evidence, however, would suggest the opposite, that the drug war has a rather large political dimension...
...the largest number, 48 percent, named drug trafficking...
...The undercover agent was also told by the pair that those involved in the smuggling ring included an agent of the DGI, the Cuban secret police, as well as several top Cuban military officers...
...According to a recent article in the proMRTA publication Cambio, the guerrilla groups have become self-financing through heavy involvement in a lucrative protection racket, extracting money from drug dealers and killing those who refuse to pay...
...drug-interceptor vessels...
...in a regional antidrug effort in Central America...
...In an interview two years before he was tried on drug trafficking charges in 1987, Lehder explained that "cocaine is the Latin American time bomb" because it is a "double struggle...
...He described how, at Castro's direction, the M-19 guerrillas in Colombia oversee and protect drug shipments from Colombia to Panama to Cuba and then into the United States...
...The indictment charged that Guillot had been responsible for sending 2.5 million pounds of marijuana, 25 million methaqualone tablets, and eighty pounds of cocaine to the U.S...
...escape sanction...
...The Colombian government has recently reported that the M-19 and another insurgent group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (known as the FARC), under the sponsorship of the Soviet Union, have been building their own airstrips to transport drugs out of the country...
...Let's start working with our friends against those throughout the hemisphere whose activities—exporting drugs and importing arms—are strengthening the thugs of the left and the right at the expense of the democratic center...
...In the new indictment, the United States charges that after Pablo Escobar Gaviria, another Medellin cartel leader, assassinated Lara Bonilla, the top Medellin cartel leaders fled Colombia...
...Lehder flew directly to Nicaragua...
...At the same time, a DEA official noted there was "potential" for greater cooperation with Cuba "because it's so strategically located...
...Cuban officials also seem to have played a critical role in getting the Sandinista regime involved in the drug trade...
...The M-19 has been forging links with other guerrilla movements that are deeply involved in the drug trade, most notably Peru's Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and MRTA—the Castro-backed Marxist Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement—both of which moved into the country's highly fertile, tropical areas two years ago, where the cocaine trade is based...
...each year...
...policy...
...Kerry is not alone in his thinking...
...According to a federal indictment of March 1988, the five had smuggled two drug shipments totaling 700 kilos of cocaine from Colombia to Cuba's Varadero military base, seventy miles east of Havana on Cuba's northern coastline...
...The guerrillas are also moving beyond guard duty at plantations and warehouses to transporting partially processed cocaine, following M-19's lead...
...In valleys largely under guerrilla control, Peruvian peasants farm about 450,000 acres of coca, enough to supply half the cocaine consumed in the U.S...
...It is time for the Bush Administration to name names, identifying the insidious political forces underlying the narcotics business...
...Even this modest effort immediately brought charges from those who provide the narcotraffickers' political cover—the influential United Left opposition party—that the government had bowed to U.S...
...Last July, Hugo Ceballos and four others were convicted in Miami of smuggling more than $10 million worth of cocaine through Cuba in 1987...
...In December, Fidel Castro told a visiting congressional delegation that he wanted to begin joint efforts with the U.S...
...Academic experts, policy-makers, and the press all tend to view this relationship as at best irrelevant and at worst contradictory...
...Increasingly, the heretofore reluctant leaders are ac- knowledging that outside help will be essential in the war, even at the risk of provoking an outcry from the many leftist apologists for the drug traders and terrorists...
...Discussing the Cuban strategic agenda in a recent monograph for the Cuban American National Foundation, Rachel Ehrenfeld writes: Based on all the evidence, it appears that Castro accepted the Soviets' recommendation to exploit any perceived weaknesses in the United States, and that the flow of narcotics has become a salient of Cuba's strategy...
...In an The U.S...
...28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1989...
...Drug planes from Colombia routinely land at Nicaraguan military installations, refuel, take on provisions, and continuetheir journey...
...In exchange, Castro demanded massive payoffs, up to a whopping $500,000 per shipment...
...antidrug efforts and U.S...
...The most famous example came that year when the M-19 killed twelve Colombian supreme court justices and dozens of others for a $5 million payoff from the cartel...
...The organization is thought to take in more than $2 billion in drug sales annually and is responsible for 80 percent of all cocaine crossing U.S...
...T he public clamor for the govern- ' ment to do something about America's drug epidemic recently has reached an unprecedented pitch...
...This was also a refrain of the Dukakis presidential campaign...
...In April, for example, Senator Kerry's subcommittee, after two years of hearings, issued an exhaustive report on the hemisphere's drug trade and U.S...
...Atha arranged that the Nicaraguan government would provide aircraft for the cocaine traffickers and allow them to use Nicaraguan airports for refueling stops...
...aid are "cooperating fully" with efforts to crack down on drug smuggling and that he appoint a cabinet-level "drug czar" to coordinate U.S...
...According to a U.S...
...Now we see we need controls even more than you...
...Later, Borge made contact with Colombian cocaine dealers through Paul Atha, manager of an Interior Ministry front operation called Holding Investment Corporation, which handles business activities in Managua and abroad to obtain U.S...
...Since then, the M-19 has carried out assassinations and provided the cartel armed protection for its drug The evidence—much of it on the public record—of a largely unrecognized Marxist nexus with the drug lords of Latin America is piling up...
...as a protest against the eradication drive, Sendero has launched bombing attacks in Lima and other densely populated areas...
...Kerry expended vast amounts of time and resources to come up with evidence that contra leaders were trafficking in drugs, but all that he could do is resurrect old stories involving the long-defunct contra southern front of Eden Pastora...
...In places like Panama and Mexico, authoritarian military elites are involved deeply in the drug trade and have made unholy alliances with the revolutionary left to get or maintain power...
...You can traffic in drugs and anything else...
...The drug issue was prominent in the fall presidential campaign, though discussion rarely reached beyond George Bush's pledge to execute drug-related murderers and Michael Dukakis's charges that the Reagan Administration had coddled Panama's Gen...
...Blandon, who was present at the meeting, said that Castro brokered a deal that involved return of the protection money paid by the cartel and release of twenty-three drug traders to Colombia without prosecution...
...dealings with Noriega, even though it was the Reagan Administration that, once it had the evidence, indicted him and attempted to remove him from power...
...In Central America, the administration's preoccupation with the contra war against the Nicaraguan government has contributed to a lack of urgency in the war on drugs...
...Learning of a cartel plot to assassinate him after he reneged on the deal and had the plant raided, Noriega turned to Castro for help...
...DEA agents who normally advise Peru's Civil Guard on eradicating coca fields and cocaine processing laboratories were called off duty for a few weeks so they could reinforce their base camp against anticipated attacks by Sendero...
...and Peruvian antinarcotics experts, however, got the government to agree to allow a test spraying of Spike in a small, isolated coca field in the centraljungle area...
...At the trial, evidence was presented documenting meetings between Fidel and Raul Castro, the Cuban intelligence services, Cuba's Americas Department, and Colombian M-19 guerrillas and Medellin drug smugglers...
...Escobar, Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, Jorge Ochoa Vasquez, and his brother Fabio Ochoa Vasquez first fled to Panama, but joined Lehder in Nicaragua within a few weeks...
...Colombian officials have all but conceded that they have lost their country to the drug lords...
...Fidel feared that Noriega would be replaced in Panama...
...This demonstrated knowledge at high levels of the Cuban defense establishment...
...In congressional testimony in 1986, Alvaro Baldizon, a former top deputy to Borge who is described as the highest-ranking, most credible defector from Nicaragua, said Sandinista government leaders frequently provide support for Colombian drug traffickers bound for the United States...
...In fact, the Medellin cartel's original intent was to put the M-19 movement, which is closer to Castro than any other insurgent group in the hemisphere, out of business after the terrorist group had kidnapped for ransom one of the daughters of the Ochoa family...
...youth so as to harm and weaken future generations...
...Now we must take equally drastic steps to combat the new threat to our national security, the tide of drugs which are flooding our hemisphere...
...Law enforcement officials working on the case told me that the State Department does not look favorably on the filing of charges against Cuban officials, but State denies it has gotten involved...
...The Sandinistas knew, Farach said, that the drugs were destined for American young people and so were a"political weapon" against America...
...N one of this has kept Havana and Managua from embarking on a major propaganda offensive to turn the drug issue in their favor...
...pressure...
...issue of choking off the flow of drugs into the country...
...Army Gen...
...In late March, Peru's government announced that it would bar the wide spraying of a controversial herbicide, known as Spike, in the coca fields of the mostly guerrilla-controlled Upper Huallaga Valley...
...In recent months, the U.S...
...Ruben Ruiz, one of Ceballos's co-conspirators, told a government informant in a secretly recorded videotape (released by the Miami district attorney this March) that he arranged for Cuban officials "at the toppest channels in Havana" to provide a cover story for a May 1987 drug flight's landing...
...How often have we heard, when the question of drug supplies and suppliers is broached, that no matter how much is spent on interdiction efforts, coping with our 12,000-mile international border is an impossible task...
...Jamaica's new prime minister, Michael Manley, who in his previous term in office was the epitome of an anti-American demagogue, told the conference: "People used to say drugs are a U.S...
...In 1982, Tomas Borge's Interior Ministry began selling on the international market cocaine recovered by the Nicaraguan police...
...See my article "Christic Mystics and Their Drug-Running Theories," TAS, May 1988...
...concern, not to worry...
...military planes are forbidden to pursue such flights...
...The indictment further charges that Seal was murdered at the direction of Fabio Ochoa and Escobar in retaliation for tipping off U.S...
...Nonetheless, the evidence—much of it on the public record—of a largely unrecognized Marxist nexus with the drug lords of Latin America is piling up...
...Four Cuban officials were indicted with Guillot: Fernando Ravelo Renedo, formerly Cuba's ambassador in Bogota...
...At bottom, people like Kerry want to discredit interventionist U.S...
...The official, quoted anonymously in the New York Times, said there was "pretty strong evidence" that drug traffickers are operating through Cuba with "some official complicity...
...Borge had collections of Rolex watches, 1,000 videocassettes, 20 Mercedes and two jaguars in the yard of his house, and harems of women...
...Besides making money and helping undermine the government, the drug traffickers themselves lately have been pointing to an ideological convergence of interest with Marxist-Leninist insurgents...
...Manuel Noriega...
...The drugs flow into the U.S., tearing apart the country's social fabric and killing off our youth...
...In a recent Gallup poll, respondents were asked which of five leading international issues was the most important facing the country...
...W bile it is in fact true that the Reagan Administration's efforts to stanch the supply of drugs flowing into the country were inadequate, this was not an inevitable effect of its anti-Communist initiatives in Latin America...
...The Bush Administration should continue this effort, though it seems to have dropped the ball...
...the plan would establish a centralized drug enforcement authority in each Central American country...
...When flying from Colombia to Nicaragua, Seal had damaged his aircraft in a landing at Los Brasiles...
...The international drug syndicate is portrayed as hydra-headed: when one drug baron is taken out of commission, another quickly moves in...
...We are more vulnerable to these vicious people and we need help...
...Attorney Dexter Lehtinen: "The evidence in the [Ceballos] trial demonstrated that Cuban territory was used with the knowledge, approval, and cooperation of the Cuban government...
...This furthers the agenda of the left, both here and south of the border, in much the same way that proposals to "bomb Medellin" without cooperation from Colombia do...
...While in earlier years narcoterrorism was used opportunistically as a source of profits and as a convenient means of creating self-sustaining insurgencies, today it is a major channel through which the Cuban-Soviet strategy is implemented to exert political influence on a state level in Latin America...
...He's Fidel's right-hand man for all clandestine activities," Aspillaga said...
...to get cozy with him, it has become clear that much of the activity is directed by Fidel Castro as a new weapon in his long war on America...
...There is so far no hint, however, as to how the Bush Administration will deal with the trickier David Brock is a senior editor of Insight magazine...
...Once he traveled to a third country, Mexico, Guillot was arrested and inexplicably released...
...the cash from the venture is put into arms and explosives that flow to Castrosurrogates throughout the continent and also helps keep the head of his own sinking revolution above water...
...His brother Fidel views drugs as "a very important weapon against the United States because drugs demoralize people and undermine society," Aspillaga said...
...Aspillaga said he had been told by the chief of the Cuban DGI that drug syndicates used a fleet of thirteen ships and twenty-one aircraft that operated on Cuban territory and in Cuban waters with the protection of Cuban Special Troops—commando-type units under the direction of Castro confidant Jose Abrahantes, the Cuban interior minister...
...This is not simply the fulmination of a conservative U.S...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1989 27 processing labs and clandestine airstrips...
...In the past year, just as the Democratic left has been pushing the U.S...
...between 1977 and 1981...
...An indictment issued this March in Jacksonville, Florida, adds considerable weight to Blandon's contentions...
...The supply side of the equation seems at first glance overwhelming in its breadth: there is evidence to implicate a host of government officials, from the Bahamas to Paraguay, in the narcotics trade...
...government has known for quite some time that those involved in either the production or the transport of drugs are enemies of democracy and of American influence in the region...
...He also said that Colombian drug traffickers met regularly in Cuba with Cuban Defense Minister Raul Castro...
...Jesse Helms team up to decertify allies like Mexico, which polarizes Mexican politics and guarantees that the positive efforts undertaken by the government will fail...
...Cartel leaders took refuge in Panama and Nicaragua...
...often, the guerrillas intervene to make sure the peasants are paid good prices for coca leaf and paste sold to intermediaries...
...antidrug efforts...
...In a recent interview in the Washington Post, Mario Arango, a Medellin city council member and unofficial cartel spokesman, said the narcotics business has ushered in an egalitarian "social revolution...
...No Cuban officials have been indicted yet, but the case is on-going...
...In 1988 there was also an important disclosure about drug trafficking from a high-ranking Cuban defector, Maj...
...Noriega allowed Cuban officials to set up a network of front companies in Panama that enabled them to circumvent a U.S...
...For his part, Bennett recently has unveiled an $80 million effort to attack the epidemic on the streets of Washington, D.C...
...This high-level involvement indicates that the drug-related activities could not have been carried out without the approval of Castro...
...Farach said that officials of the government as high as Defense Minister Humberto Ortega were directly involved in the operations...
...Throughout the region, there is a new sense among the democratic leaders that their political survival is threat- ened by the narcoterrorism phenome- non...
...Paul Gorman, former commander of the U.S...
...to halt the flow of drugs...
...The article noted that Arango's home "is decorated with an embroidered portrait of Joseph Stalin...
...The case was investigated by U.S...
...Gonzalo Bassols Suarez, formerly the minister-counselor in the Bogota embassy...
...In mid-February, U.S...
...In return, the Sandinista regime was given a percentage of the worth of the shipments...
...According to the congressional testimony of Francis Mullen, then the head of the DEA, Guillot first met with Cuban officials assigned to the Cuban embassy in Bogota in 1979 and in 1980 "began to receive official Cuban protection for the movement of his drug-laden vessels to the U.S...
...Both Vaughan and Escobar, escorted by Nicaraguans in uniform and recorded on videotape, personally helped Seal load the cocaine into the aircraft...
...Kerry's report follows the all-toofamiliar pattern of beating up on the alleged transgressions of our friends while refusing even to examine those of our enemies...
...In the past couple of years, Congress has passed laws requiring, among other things, that the President certify annually that countries receiving U.S...
...This half of the drug policy puzzle will be solved only when an entrenched misconception about the relationship between U.S...
...military in bilateral assaults on the Latin drug cartels, but since taking office he's understandably backpedaled until all the foreign policy appointments are in place...
...The boats were escorted out of Cuban waters, close to U.S...
...Even in nondemocratic countries such as Haiti, moderate, pro- American leaders like Gen...
...trade embargo, allowing them to buy U.S...
...Secretary of State George Shultz, for his part, made some memorable speeches on the topic, and States Latin Bureau issued an important document on Sandinista involvement in drug trafficking...
...In addition, he revealed that a tourist resort in Cuba built for use by members of Colombian narcotics cartels has been in operation since 1981...
...and Vice Admiral Aldo Santa Maria Cuadrado, the chief of the Cuban navy, who is also a member of the CCP...
...the two can and should proceed in tandem...
...Not only has that salient been steadily expanded, but Castro has been able to capitalize on the growing, associated "support network'!---and particularly the tentacles of narcoterrorism—to strengthen Cuba's influence in strategic parts of the hemisphere more generally...
...The U.S...
...This is the greatest international crimi- nal conspiracy we have ever known...
...Kerry apparently was not interested in following up any leads in this area, even though the subcommittee's chief investigator, Jack Blum, told a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1986: "We have heard that there are narcotics operations in Nicaragua, and there is no question about it...
...In Senate testimony last year, Ramon Milian-Rodriguez, a former money launderer for the Medellin cartel, went public with a story about Communist infiltration of the cartel...
...David Brock THE WORLD OF NARCOTERRORISM The growing violence of the drug wars makes it clear that it's time for the Bush Administration to name names, identifying the insidious political forces underlying the narcotics business...
...You can go directly there and don't need a passport into Cuba so you can do all kinds of movements there...
...The only beneficiaries will be those revolutionary forces eyeing Peru, Colombia, El Salvador, and eventually even Mexico...
...Outlining the Castro-cartel relationship, Blandon said Castro's strategy is: "If you want to have influence on Colombia's political world, you have to have influence on the drug trafficking world, too...
...All of us are concerned about the spread of Communism in Latin America and elsewhere, but we cannot afford to put on blinders to other threats which are equally grave...
...I was informed that the activity involved giving protection, lodging, refueling and access to the landing strip for Colombian traffickers traveling to the U.S.," Baldizon testified...
...A notable exception was a piece in the April issue of TAS by Fred Barnes...
...According to the federal prosecutor in Miami, U.S...
...I should say further, senator, that some of these same people have turned up going in and out of Cuba with impunity...
...Equipped with a hidden camera, Seal returned to the airport to retrieve the drugs...
...Some of the money was used to provide trips for their relatives to Europe, the United States and Cuba" and to finance the war against the contras...
...In return, the Nicaraguan government is given "a percentage of the proceeds" from the eventual sale of the drugs, Baldizon said...
...The report fails, of course, to note that these military officers are chafing under democratic rule and are no friends of the United States...
...To facilitate this trade, Blandon said, Castro assigned an ambassador to Colombia who also served as a contact between the M-19 guerrillas and the drug traffickers...
...The DEA learned that Cuba's facilitation of Guillot's smuggling ventures providedhard currency—conservatively estimated at $10 million a month'which Cuba used to support revolutionary activity in Latin America," Mullen said...
...Often, such strange bedfellows as Kerry and Sen...
...The Kerry report's real target, however, is the Nicaraguan contra resistance...
...The people who suggest this would never contemplate bombing Havana...
...In this, Castro wins both ways...
...Paula Hawkins in April 1984...
...foreign policy is reversed...
...They also provided false passports and visas to the drug-runners...
...Florentino Aspillaga Lombard...
...Bennett has been receptive in the past to the idea (suggested by Barnes and others) of involving the U.S...
...government has known for quite some time that those involved in either the production or the transport of drugs—from the bloodthirsty Maoist guerrilla insurgents in Peru, to the gang of pineapple-faced military dictators in Panama, to America's regional Communist nemesis, Fidel Castro—are enemies of democracy and of American influence in the region...
...Father and son both pleaded guilty to a 27-count smuggling indictment in March...
Vol. 22 • June 1989 • No. 6
