Past exploits of the former minister of the interior would
rival those of Manuel Noriega
During last week's summit in
Cartagena, Colombia, George Bush diplomatically chose not to discuss the
corruption of Latin American governments by the multi-billion-dollar cocaine
trade. But when Bolivia's President Jaime Paz Zamora next requests a
substantial increase in US aid, he will no doubt point to the recent
extradition from Bolivia as one of the last decade's most notorious uniformed
scoundrels.
Col. Luis Arce Gomes may not be a
household name like Manuel Noriega. But in the annals of drug-corrupted
governments, Bolivia's 1980-81 dictatorship - in which Arce was minister of the
interior - gave even Panama's recently fallen general a run for his
money.
With little fanfare, Arce was
extradited from La Paz to Miami on Dec. 11, nine days before the invasion of
Panama. On January 3, he was denied bail and ordered to await trial for
conspiring to import and distribute cocaine in Florida.
A 1983 Miami indictment also charges
Arce with creating a paramilitary squad to shake down drug dealers. Those who
withheld protection money were arrested. Bolivia's five leading drug
traffickers, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, paid Arce
$75,000 biweekly - in a country where the per capita income was $500 a year.
For a single 375-pound cocaine shipment, Arce allegedly charged $13 million.
That's only the tip of the Arce
iceberg. For his drug enforcers were led by the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie
and included same of the biggest names in European neofascist terrorism.
Though you never heard it mentioned
in eight years of Ronald Reagan speeches on the drug menace, Arce Gomez's tale
makes clear just how deadly were the consequences of South America's mix of
drugs with rightwing extremism.
July 1968 Coup
When Arce’s sidekick, Gen. Luis
Garcia Meza Tejada, led a July 1980 coup d’état, it was Bolivia's fourth in 26
months. With $3 billion in debts, tin exports of diminishing value,
skyrocketing inflation and an aggressive labor movement, instability was par
for Bolivia's course.
But this particular coup, Bolivia's
189th in 155 years, had a distinctly unsavory aroma - and it was directly
attributable to three contemporaneous phenomena. One was the tremendous growth
in American cocaine consumption. Another was Barbie, his hit squad and their
close association with Arce Gomez. A third was Gen. Jorge Videla's brutal
dictatorship in neighboring Argentina.
For centuries, the coca plant had
been cultivated by Bolivian and Peruvian Indians, who chewed its leave to
relieve hunger and fatigue. Only in the 1970s did a rich Bolivian rancher,
Roberto Suarez, organize and expand cultivation in his country and establish
the crucial connections in Colombia.
It was the Colombians who, with
easier access to America and chemists adept at extracting cocaine, assumed the
predominant role in trafficking. Yet, Suarez still managed to build an
organization that by the mid-'80s took in $500 million a year.
And when Suarez's cousin, Bolivian
army Col. I.uis Arce Gomez, established a private air-taxi business in 1975,
its function was to transport cocaine.
According to “The Nazi Legacy,"
the 1984 study of Klaus Barbie's second life in South America, by 1979 Arce
hail become the head of army intelligence - which gave him control over state
security and direct contact with the notorious Barbie.
Barbie recruits
enforcers
Barbie, who earned the name
"Butcher of Lyon" while Gestapo chief in occupied France's
second-largest city, had been living in Bolivia since 1951, when US
intelligence, which employed him after the war as a spy against the Communist bloc,
smuggled him out of Europe. In the 1970s, he advised the Bolivian army on “psychological
operations” and was given honorary rank colonel-developments of which the CIA
was aware.
When Roberto Suarez encountered
problems in 1978 with Colombians who stiffed him for his coca, he turned to
Barbie for assistance.
Through South America's Nazi exile
network, Barbie assembled an enforcement squad composed of European neo-Nazis
and neo-fascists, many of them fugitives from murder charges. They saw to it
that Suarez got paid.
And they soon caught the eye of Arce
Gomez, who, in 1979, formally recruited Barbie into army intelligence.
Bolivia's military rulers were then
playing musical chairs. Finally, in 1980, the government was turned over to civilians.
In an election held June 29, the progressive Hernan Siles Zuazo won a
plurality.
Three weeks later, Siles Zuazo's
presidency was preempted by coup 189. Calling the shots were Gen. Garcia Meza,
Col. Arce Gomez, and other officers knee-deep in cocaine.
Arce's Barbie-recruited henchmen
displayed their muscle during and after the coup - the official rationale
for which, as usual, was an alleged subversive threat. Some 2,500 priests,
labor leaders, journalists, and other "leftists" were arrested,
beaten up, and/or tortured, and hundreds were reportedly killed in a nation
with no noticeable guerrilla movement.
The real forces behind the coup were
Bolivia’s cocaine mob and Argentina’s military dictators. The coup’s methodical
execution and aftermath were compliments of the advice of the Buenos Aires
junta, which was then waging its own “Dirty War" against subversion.
The Argentines had anticipated that
a democratic neighbor might provide an operational base for its own opponents.
To foreclose such a development, Argentina reportedly doubled its contingent of
intelligence officers in Bolivia and dispatched some 200 military personnel to
assist Gen. Garcia Meza. Buenos Aires also sent La Paz’s new dictator
computerized lists of Bolivian dissidents, plus a $200 million loan to tide him
over.
But the Bolivian coup's initial
financing had come from the cocaine kingpins, who also anticipated rough times
if democratic forces assumed power. The dealers had promised and handed Garda
Meza a coup bonus of $100 million.
The Barbie-assembled group became Interior
Minister Arce Gomez’s enforcement squad - though they apparently remained
available for hire abroad. Several of its members, most notably the Italian
neo-fascist leader Stefano Delle Chiaie, were later charged in Italy with complicity
in the bombing on Aug. 2, 1980- only 16 days after the “Cocaine Coup"- of
Bologna's main railway station, postwar Europe's bloodiest terrorist act, which
claimed 85 innocent lives.
But like most of its predecessors,
the Garcia Meza government was short -lived.
Events overtake
principals
Early in 1981, Arce Gomez was compelled
to resign as interior minister after CBS' “6O Minutes" introduced him here
as the “Minister of Cocaine." Later that year, Gen. Garcia Meza turned
over power to a colleague, and, in 1982, civilian rule was restored.
Barbie was soon extradited to France,
where he was convicted in 1987 of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life
in prison. Stefano Delle Chiaie fled to Argentina and was eventually arrested
in Venezuela and extradited to Italy to face charges, including the Bologna
train station bombing.
Garcia Meza and Arce Gomez also
reportedly headed to Argentina. But their status became insecure when civilian
rule was restored there in 1983, and the ring leaders of Argentina's
"Dirty War" were indicted on charges of torture and murder.
In April 1986, Garcia Meza
reappeared in Bolivia. But ensuing attempts to try him for sedition, armed
revolt and assassination have faltered because of a shaky Bolivian judiciary -
one judge has been shot - and more recently, because of Garcia Meza's disappearance.
On Dec. 10, Arce Gomez was arrested
at a farm outside Santa Cruz, Bolivia. He was whisked off to Miami the next day
- despite murder charges against him dating to 1980 -apparently to curry
Washington's favor prior to President Bush's Latin American drug summit this
past Thursday. But what Arce's trial will make clear is that what the Reagan
administration liked to call "narco-terrorism" was as often as not a
right-wing phenomenon.
