Bolivia and the Arce Gomez connection | By Jerry Meldon | published in the Boston Globe Feb 18 1990

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.

Did the CIA coddle Camarena’s killers? Revelations at trial cast doubts on Reagan-Bush actions | by Jerry Meldon | The Boston Sunday Globe, July 29, 1990

 

Although Honduran drug lord Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros was convicted last week in connection with the 1985 murder of federal drug agent Enrique Camarena Salazar, much more has been on trial than the conduct of Matta and the three Mexicans who were his alleged accomplices.

            During the two-month-long trial in Los Angeles federal court, a parade of witnesses, many with checkered pasts, portrayed high-standing Mexican enforcement personnel and politicians as the drug lord’s partners in crime. One defendant, brother-in-law of a former Mexican President, was purportedly the drug cartel’s link to the powers that be.

            But while the corrupting power of America’s billion-dollar drug habit was once again made clear, there were also revelations and allegations far more unpleasant to gringo ears – casting doubt on the Reagan/Bush administration’s sincerity about waging war on drugs.

            According to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration’s report of its interrogation of one informant, the CIA, in the early Reagan years, trained guerrillas on a ranch owned by Rafael Caro Quintero, a drug kingpin serving time in Mexico for ordering DEA agent Camarena’s murder. (Quintero was the archvillain in NBC-TV’s six-hour dramatization of the case.) Yet as disturbing as that sounds, CIA collaboration with drug lords was hardly anything new.

            Similarly, the murder of a lone narcotics agent was nothing unique in itself. It was the degree of brutality, and the Reagan administration’s sluggish response, that made DEA pursue the case with a vengeance.

            Shortly after noon on Feb. 7, 1985, DEA undercover agent Enrique (Kiki) Camarena walked out of the US consulate in Guadalajara, heading to a lunch date with his wife. Two Jalisco state policemen, two hired killers and a drug lord’s lieutenant told him that “the comandante wants to see you” and shoved him into the car.

            They sped him to a house owned by Caro Quintero, where he was tortured and questioned for 30 hours. The interrogator, a captured tape reveals, was a commander in the Federal Security Directorate, Mexico’s FBI/CIA. One month later, Camarena’s mutilated body was discovered beside that of his Mexican pilot.

            Although the apparent motive for the murders was revenge for Camarena-led raids on vast marijuana plantations – which cost the traffickers as estimated $5 billion – the interrogation focused on what he knew about corruption in Mexico’s political hierarchy.

            At meetings leading up to Camarena’s abduction, the defendants were allegedly joined by such prominent figures as Javier Garcia Paniagua, now police chief of Mexico City, and Manuel Ibarra Herrera, former head of Mexico’s Federal Judicial Police.

            But the key participant, for those curious about connections between intelligence operations and drug trafficking, was defendant Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, who reportedly told the plotters that “we will soon have the identity” of the DEA agent and he will be silenced. Camarena was silenced, according to a forensic specialist, by the application of a Phillips-head screwdriver to his skull.

            Matta, whose presence at the house where Camarena was tortured was supported by hair sample analysis, is already serving one life term for drug trafficking and now faces sentencing for Thursday’s racketeering, kidnapping and conspiracy convictions. Yet he harbors hope for an eventual reduction in time behind bars because of his once-secret relationship with Washington – a relationship largely overlooked in media coverage of the sensational trial.

            An April 1989 report of the Senate Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism and International Operations, headed by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass), exposed Matta’s clandestine partnership with the Reagan administration. According to the Kerry report, Servicios Ejecutivos Turistas Commander, or SETCO, an airline Matta controlled, “was the principal company used by the contras in Honduras to transport supplies and personnel … from 1983 to 1985.”

            Even before SETCO was hired, a 1983 US Customs report had linked it to Matta, referring to him as “a class I DEA violator,” and citing DEA’s finding that SETCO was formed by “American businessmen dealing with Matta [and] smuggling narcotics into the United States.”

            Despite knowledge of this, and the fact that Matta had become a prime suspect in Enrique Camarena’s murder, the State Department three years later renewed SETCO’s contract to supply the contras.

            For unknown reasons, Washington had long treated Matta with kid gloves. After he was arrested in Dulles airport in 1970 following a major cocaine seizure, he was sentenced to five years at a minimum security prison. One year later, he took a walk and never came back.  

            By 1975, according to Jonathan Marshall and Peter Dale Scott’s forthcoming “The Politics of Cocaine in Central America,” narcotics agents had become aware of Matta’s partnership with Mexico’s leading drug baron, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo (currently wanted for Camarena’s murder and under arrest in Mexico on unrelated drug charges.) But Matta’s charmed life would continue another 13 years.

            According to  DEA intelligence report cited in James Mills’ penetrating 1986 book, “The Underground Empire,” Matta in 1978 financed a coup d’etat in his native Honduras led by his partner, Gen. Policarpo Paz Garcia. Honduras would become both a key transit point for US-bound cocaine and the hub of CIA contra support.

            As the Kerry report examines in detail, the two developments were not unrelated. When Customs asked the DEA to investigate Matta’s airline SETCO, as it was about to begin supplying the contras in 1983 – which might have nipped the contra drug connection in the bud – the Reagan administration shut down DEA operation in Honduras. And Vice President George Bush became head of a White House task force on narcotics.

            Two years later, in the wake of the Camarena murder, things got hot for Matta – if only temporarily. He was jailed in Colombia in 1986, but, with $2 million, he bribed his way out. Then he made his way back to Honduras, where he lived in luxury until April 1988. That was when Washington finally pressured the Honduran military to arrest him – just as the former DEA agent in Honduras, whose office Washington had closed in 1983, was about to tell all to Sen. Kerry.

            If that’s not hard to swallow, consider the recently released DEA report of its interrogation of Camarena case witness, Laurence Victor Harrison. A self-described lawyer who became a communications expert for Guadalajara’s drug lords, Harrison told the DEA in February that in the early ‘80s, the CIA, using the Mexican Federal Security Directorate as a cover, trained Guatemalan guerrillas on a ranch near Veracruz owned by drug lord Caro Quintero.

            When the Federal Judicial Police raided the ranch, 19 of its officers were allegedly slaughtered by the CIA-trained guerrillas. Now Harrison says the DEA misquoted him, and what he really said was that the CIA trained contras on Caro Quintero’s ranch.

            CIA coziness with Mexican drug kingpins – a story that apparently originated with journalist Manuel Buendia (assassinated in 1984 while investigating links between Mexican narcotics traffickers, politicians, and the CIA) – unfortunately rings all too true.

            When this writer mentioned it to retired DEA undercover agent Michael Levine, the author of “Deep Cover,” he called it “not only logical but probable.” To appreciate his viewpoint, consider the case of Alberto Sicilia-Falcon, predecessor of Felix Gallardo and Matta Ballesteros as godfather of Mexico’s far-reaching drug empire.

            When arrested in 1976, Sicilia spoke nearly the exact same words as Harrison. According to a 1977 investigation by the German weekly Der Spiegel, Sicilia, commonly portrayed as a Mexican but actually a CIA-trained Cuban exile, claimed that the CIA had facilitated his drug operations to use the profits to arm Central American guerrillas.

            Why would the agency fund guerrillas? According to Sicilia, the aim was to destabilize Central American governments and turn them into dependent allies.

            And why did it take until 1988 – three years after Camarena’s murder – when the CIA/contra drug connection was public knowledge – for Felix Gallardo and Matta Ballasteros to be arrested?

            The real answers may never be known. Felix Gallardo reportedly told DEA informant Harrison that he was protected because his drug profits were financing the contras. But the presiding judges, in both the current Camarena trial and one held last year in Los Angeles, refused defense attorney requests to raise CIA-drug lord connections before a jury.

            But until these issues receive long-overdue attention, we cannot hope to comprehend the full meaning of a heroic narcotics agent’s death. And increased CIA involvement in the “drug war,” which former agency director George Bush has been prompting, had, at the very least, better be put on hold.

 

 

The real Iran-contra scandal stays hidden: As Poindexter trial ends, questions linger about US and drug kingpins | by Jerry Meldon | Published in The Boston Globe Sunday Focus, April 8, 1990

 

The close of the trial of Adm. John Poindexter, the former national security adviser, ends the short run of prosecutions of Iran-contra crimes. If the admiral’s head rolls, it rolls alone.

Neither his boss, Ronald Reagan, nor George Bush, we’re told, knew profits from arms sales to Iran went to the contras.

Robert MacFarlane, Poindexter’s predecessor, admitted lying about it to Congress but served no time behind bars. Lawyers for Oliver North and his field managers – Richard Secord, Albert Hakim and CIA agent Joe Fernandez – used the threat to expose state secrets to keep their clients likewise out of jail.

But while our attention spans have been worn down by the parade of finger-pointing defendants, the most insidious Iran-contra scandal remains covered up.

 Narcotics-tainted “allies”

 A year ago, Sen. John Kerry’s Senate subcommittee on narcotics, terrorism and international operations issued its long-awaited report. Among its more sensational findings was that the Reagan administration had hired several narcotics-tainted companies to supply the contras.

The owner of one of those companies was Juan Matta Ballesteros. In September, he was convicted in Los Angeles of moving cocaine in tonnage quantities. One enforcement official described him as the most significant drug kingpin ever tried in the Western states. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

The charges against Matta were filed in 1984, the same year as Matta’s air freight company, SETCO, according to Kerry’s report, became “the principal company used by the contras in Honduras to transport supplies and personnel.”

Ignoring the 1984 indictment – and a 1983 US Customs report that called Matta a Class I Drug Enforcement Administration violator and SETCO a firm “formed by American businessmen who are dealing with Matta and are smuggling narcotics into the United States” – the State Department, two years later, handed SETCO a $186,000 contract to resupply the contras.

Asked if his subcommittee had received an explanation, Kerry told this writer: “None whatsoever.”

But the contra connection does explain how Matta could live comfortably in Honduras until his arrest in April 1988. And there he might have remained, had the DEA not been after him for the murder of one of its own.

Matta and his Mexican partner, heroin and cocaine kingpin Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, were prime suspects in the February 1985 murder in Guadalajara of DEA agent Enrique Camarena Salazar – which was dramatized in a recent NBC-TV mini-series. Camarena had been on the trails of Matta and Gallardo, both of whom in January were finally indicted in Los Angeles for his murder.

 The case of John Hull

 Gallardo walked free until a year ago, 12 months after Matta was seized. His bribes of Mexican officials had paid off. And Washington, for its part, couldn’t have been eager to see the Mexicans arrest him. According to Gallardo’s pilot, Werner Lotz, he, too, was a major contra supporter.

For the same reason, the Bush administration is unlikely to extradite John Hull. A rancher from Indiana, Hull was paid $10,000 a month by the CIA as its link to the contras in Costa Rica, where his land included several strategic airstrips. Five of Kerry’s witnesses testified that pilots who supplied the contras flew drugs, with Hull’s active participation, on the way back. Hull dismisses such charges as part of a communist plot.

But the stakes are now higher. Two weeks ago, a Costa Rica court charged Hull with murder for his alleged role in the May 1984 terrorist bombing of a press conference called by contra leader Eden Pastora in La Penca, Nicaragua. Four people, including an American journalist, were killed. Many others, including Pastora, were injured.

Pastora, a disenchanted former hero of the Sandinista revolution, was then under intense pressure to play ball with Hull, the CIA and the right-wing contra leadership. He refused.

In the aftermath, as noted in a forthcoming book by Jonathan Marshall and Peter Dale Scott, the Costa Rica-based contras began working closely with CIA-trained Cuban Americans. Though several had histories of narcotics arrests, their connections to the CIA had kept them out of jail.

Among those closest to Hull was Felipe Vidal, whom the Costa Ricans also charged with murder for the La Penca bombing. Another was the notorious Frank Castro. Castro had been arrested in a Miami drug bust in 1981, then released and arrested again in 1983 in Beaumont, Texas, for allegedly smuggling 200 tons of marijuana. The Texas charges were conveniently dropped in June 1984, when Castro began training contras in Florida.

Castro was closely associated with another Bay of Pigs veteran, Jose Antonio (Tony) Fernandez, who was recently sentenced to 50 years in prison for smuggling 750 tons of marijuana from Colombia. Castro was an unindicted co-conspirator in that case.

Castro’s links to Fernandez and the contras are eye-catching in light of an ongoing Houston Post investigation of the savings and loan scandal. In 1978, according to the Post’s Pete Brewton, Fernandez associates fronted for him in the purchase of a Florida bank with $1.1 million in drug money. The bank was kept afloat in 1984 by a $3 million loan from a Texas thrift. The same thrift went under in 1988, some $200 million in the red.

Brewton estimates the cost of government bailouts of the S & Ls with underworld and CIA connections at $13 billion, and asserts “the money may have been used to pay for covert CIA-sponsored activities, including aid to the Nicaraguan contras.”

Given the CIA’s history of collaborating with narcotics traffickers, it’s alarming that President Bush – a former CIA director – is now involving the agency in the war on drugs. Its record in Mexico alone should make this clear.

There, the CIA maintained a close working relationship with its sister agency, the Federal Judicial Police, despite that agency’s long record of protection of drug traffickers and the torture of alleged subversives. One former director of the Mexico agency was arrested in California for masterminding an international stolen-car ring – before exercising his CIA get-out-of-jail-free card. Another former agency director has just been indicted, along with his benefactors, Felix Gallardo and Matta Ballesteros, for the murder of DEA agent Camarena.

It was bad enough that Bush, exploiting his high-profile vendetta against Gen. Manuel Noriega, loosened the lid on CIA operations – allowing even the assassination of foreign leaders, which had been banned following a 1975 Senate investigation.

Washington had long tolerated Noriega’s drug trafficking and paid him generously with CIA funds. The irony is lost on the majority in Congress, which supports Bush’s policy.

Indeed, you begin to think Iran-contra never did happen.