- 1.
- U.S. Ready To Attack Syria Outside UN? From: Rick Rozoff
- 2.
- Europe Replaces U.S. As Cheerleader For Military Expansion From: Rick Rozoff
- 3.
- Missile Shield To Middle East Mayhem: U.S. Planning Broad Conflict? From: Rick Rozoff
Everyday of Freedom is an Act of Faith for my writings ============> http://robertoscaruffi.blogspot.com for something on religions ===> http://scaruffi1.blogspot.com
Thursday, 31 May 2012
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May 31, 2012 Tomgram: Nick Turse, Hot Drone-On-Drone Action
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Today,
you are witnessing the birth of a TomDispatch experiment. Nick Turse
and I are launching Dispatch Books, our own little publishing venture
(and adventure), with our initial e-book, Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050. We’ve carefully reworked the original analysis and reporting we’ve been doing on drones for years at this website. It’s a
rich history of the last decade of drone warfare, a clear-eyed look at
its present, and a far-reaching guide to its future. You used to have
to watch science fiction movies to imagine where that future was headed,
now you can read this book -- and know.
Because Amazon now has the capacity to create books remarkably quickly, Dispatch Books is a reality. We think it’s a unique chance for TomDispatch to reach new audiences in different ways. We only hope you agree. If Dispatch Books isn’t to be a one-shot wonder (or the book equivalent of a crash-and-burn drone), we have to sell some copies. We’re hoping that you, the corps of TomDispatch readers, are ready to lend a hand. Our wish is that a surprising number of you will buy Terminator Planet for yourself, give a copy to a friend, and then convince everyone you know who might be interested to pick up a copy as well. Word of mouth remains crucial in our world, especially if, like us, you don’t have the finances or staff to publicize a book in other ways. If you are an Amazon customer and buy the e-book by clicking here, you not only give a lift to our latest venture, but a little contribution to the site as well (since we get a cut of every Amazon purchase at no cost to you). If you’re like me and you still prefer the ancient paper version of the book, you can buy a print-on-demand copy at Amazon’s CreateSpace by clicking here (and then, of course, clicking “add to cart”). We’re hoping the response is a strong one. If so, we’ll release our next book in the fall. If not, we’ll have learned a lesson. One more thing: If you would like a paperback version of the book, personalized and signed by both Nick and me, you can get one for a contribution of $75 (or more) and give a real boost to TomDispatch’s always shaky coffers. Check out the offer at our donation page by clicking here. As part of the launch of Terminator Planet, we’re posting the book’s conclusion today. Tom] It’s now commonly estimated that more than 50 nations have drones, are making plans to develop them, or are at least planning to buy them from those who do produce them. In other words, the future global skies are going to be a busy -- and increasingly dangerous -- place. They will be filled not just with robotic surveillance aircraft, but also with non-U.S. remotely piloted armed assassins which, thanks to the path Washington has blazed, need pay no attention to anyone’s national sovereignty in a search for their version of bad guys to destroy. Iranians, Israelis, Russians, Chinese, Indians, British -- you name it and if they don’t already have something robotic aloft, they undoubtedly will soon enough. And those estimates don’t even include insurgent groups and terrorists, who are undoubtedly giving real thought to how to develop and use the equivalent of suicide drones. Just keep an eye on the news, because those numbers are only going to rise. In fact, just this month they’ve gone up by at least one, thanks to the decision of the Obama administration to sell surveillance drones to the Iraqis (and it is evidently also preparing to arm Italy's six Reaper drones with Hellfire missiles and bombs). Right now, Washington is almost alone in launching drones at will in countries ranging from Yemen to the Philippines, but that won’t last long. Already we know that these wonder weapons, hailed like so many previous wonder weapons as the ultimate answer to a military’s problems, as the only game in town, will kill many, but won’t deliver as promised. Take Pakistan. Last week, among other attacks, a U.S. drone launched two missiles at a bakery in the North Waziristan tribal area, killing (we are assured by ever-anonymous officials) four suspected “foreign” militants “buying goods.” (No information was available on the fate of the baker, of course.) Strange to say, the Pakistani people, or at least 97% of them, haven’t taken as well as Washington might have expected to its urge to launch endless drone attacks on their territory, no matter what they or their parliament might say. Drones, which have certainly killed their share of “bad guys” (and children) in the Pakistani borderlands, have also managed to throw U.S.-Pakistan relations into chaos, caused a surge of anti-Americanism, undoubtedly created future blowback among the relatives of the dead, and have almost singlehandedly made it impossible for the Pakistani government to reopen its borders to supplies for our Afghan War. This, in turn, has helped send the already-exorbitant costs of that war skyrocketing, an immediate form of blowback for the American taxpayer. Like most wonder weapons, drones have proven a distinctly mixed bag for Washington wherever they have been used (though you wouldn’t know it from the press they get), but like most wonder weapons, not delivering ultimate global victory or even victory on local battlefields hasn’t stopped them from proliferating. In search of the perfect solution to impossible-to-win local and global wars, Washington has ensured that drones will proliferate everywhere on what, for all of us, will turn out to be the worst possible terms. Assassination was once a complex, secret, shameful, difficult to arrange, and relatively rare act of state. Now, it’s as normal, easy, and -- amazingly enough -- almost as open as sending a diplomat to another country. Nick Turse, TomDispatch regular and co-author of the new book Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050, explores just why the drone has a remarkably dismal future ahead of it and why that won’t stop the dronification of our world for a second. Tom A Drone-Eat-Drone World |
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NARCOTICS: CIA-Pentagon Death Squads and Mexico's 'War on Drugs"
Mexico Arrests Three Army Generals
NARCOTICS: CIA-Pentagon Death Squads and Mexico's 'War on Drugs"
Mexico Arrests Three Army Generals
NARCOTICS: CIA-Pentagon Death Squads and Mexico's 'War on Drugs"
Mexico Arrests Three Army Generals
By Tom Burghardt
Global Research, May 28, 2012
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31100
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.
Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, he is a Contributing Editor with Cyrano's Journal Today. His articles can be read on Dissident Voice, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, and the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press and has contributed to the new book from Global Research, The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century.
Napulità è solo un pasticcione compradoro che vi immerda più degli altri ossesso dall'ansia di essere più compradoro degli altri...
Napulità è solo un pasticcione compradoro che vi immerda più degli altri ossesso dall'ansia di essere più compradoro degli altri...
Monti e l'incubo dello spread
«Il problema del contagio c'è ancora»
ECONOMIA Il presidente del Consiglio: «È dovuto a una debolezza complessiva del sistema più che al singolo paese»
Vertice telefonico tra Monti, Obama, Merkel e HollandeF.Fubini
This is FREE intelligence for distribution. Forward this to your colleagues.
A Serial Bomber in Phoenix
A small improvised explosive device (IED) detonated at a Salvation Army
distribution center in Phoenix, Ariz., on the afternoon of May 24. Two
Salvation Army employees discovered the explosive device, which was
concealed inside a yellow, hand-held 6-volt flashlight, as they were
sorting through a box of donated items. The IED exploded when one of the
employees picked up the flashlight and attempted to turn it on. The
blast was not very powerful, and the two employees suffered only minor
injuries.
This was the third incident in the Greater Phoenix area in recent weeks involving an IED concealed in a flashlight. Two explosive devices very similar to the May 24 IED exploded May 13 and May 14 in Glendale, Ariz., a city in the Greater Phoenix metropolitan area. Both devices were abandoned in public places. In the May 13 incident, a woman discovered a yellow, hand-held 6-volt flashlight next to a tree outside a Glendale business. When the woman picked up the flashlight and attempted to turn it on, it exploded, causing minor scratches and bruises to her face and hands. It also inflicted minor wounds to a woman beside her. The next day, a man found an identical flashlight in a ditch where he was working in another part of Glendale. He was lightly injured when the flashlight exploded as he attempted to turn it on.
So far, the explosive devices have failed to cause significant injury or death, but they do seem to indicate that there is a serial bombmaker operating in the Phoenix area. While it is not yet clear what the bombmaker's motives are, past cases of serial bombers suggest that the publicity he has received and the fear he has invoked will likely influence him to continue manufacturing explosive devices until he is captured. (Based on earlier cases involving serial bombers, it is also safe to assume that the culprit in the Phoenix area is a man.) The bombmaker's method of concealing his explosive devices may also change after gaining publicity for this wave of attacks. Finally, there is a chance that the destructive effect of the bombmaker's devices will increase as he becomes more proficient at building IEDs. Read More »
This was the third incident in the Greater Phoenix area in recent weeks involving an IED concealed in a flashlight. Two explosive devices very similar to the May 24 IED exploded May 13 and May 14 in Glendale, Ariz., a city in the Greater Phoenix metropolitan area. Both devices were abandoned in public places. In the May 13 incident, a woman discovered a yellow, hand-held 6-volt flashlight next to a tree outside a Glendale business. When the woman picked up the flashlight and attempted to turn it on, it exploded, causing minor scratches and bruises to her face and hands. It also inflicted minor wounds to a woman beside her. The next day, a man found an identical flashlight in a ditch where he was working in another part of Glendale. He was lightly injured when the flashlight exploded as he attempted to turn it on.
So far, the explosive devices have failed to cause significant injury or death, but they do seem to indicate that there is a serial bombmaker operating in the Phoenix area. While it is not yet clear what the bombmaker's motives are, past cases of serial bombers suggest that the publicity he has received and the fear he has invoked will likely influence him to continue manufacturing explosive devices until he is captured. (Based on earlier cases involving serial bombers, it is also safe to assume that the culprit in the Phoenix area is a man.) The bombmaker's method of concealing his explosive devices may also change after gaining publicity for this wave of attacks. Finally, there is a chance that the destructive effect of the bombmaker's devices will increase as he becomes more proficient at building IEDs. Read More »
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