A call to justice | by Jerry Meldon | The Boston Globe, May 6, 1991

 

To America’s lasting shame, Costa Rica has done what Washington should have done long ago – taken justice into its own hands in the case of John Hull, Lt. Col. Oliver North’s principal link there to the contras from 1984 to 1986.

The State Department has confirmed that Costa Rica’s embassy has submitted a request for Hull’s extradition to face charges of murder and drug trafficking, connected directly with his role in supporting the contras.

Since North’s dirty work for the Reagan White House was exposed in 1986, two administrations have stonewalled, lied and covered up to protect President Bush and former President Reagan from impeachment, and keep their closest aides out of jail.

Congress itself became an accomplice when it bungled its own investigation, never managing to interrogate Hull, immunizing the testimony of North and others, making it easier for the CIA and Justice Department to hamstring special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh.

Although much has been said of Congress’ split along partisan lines, even Democrats steered clear of such issues as drug trafficking – ignoring hearings by Sen. John Kerry on the smuggling of cocaine aboard contra-resupply planes.

Five Kerry witnesses linked Hull to drug trafficking at his Costa Rica ranch, which served as a hub of contra-resupply operations. Hull, who was introduced to North in 1983 by an aide to then Indiana Sen. Dan Quayle, operated with a $10,000-a-month subsidy from North.

When federal attorneys in Miami looked into charges in 1985 that Hull was running guns for drugs, Attorney General Edwin Meese derailed their investigation. Thus did the Reagan administration keep its support of the contras a secret from the American voters, in violation of the 1984 Boland Amendment.

Despite Kerry’s exposure of cocaine connection, the Justice Department looked the other way.

Accountability has been left to Costa Rica, which served as the contras’ southern staging ground during Reagan’s vendetta with neighboring Nicaragua.

A sticking point with the Costa Ricans was the May 1984 explosion at contra leader Eden Pastora’s press conference at La Penca, just across the border in Nicaragua. Pastora had been under CIA pressure to cooperate with right-wing contras based in Honduras. He refused, was wounded, but survived. Two Costa Ricans and an American reporter were among the five who did not.

When the cover was finally blown off the contra-resupply operation, a soldier-of-fortune told reporters about a meeting at which he, Hull and others plotted Eden Pastora’s murder.

The Costa Ricans waited for Washington to police itself. But when the Justice Department showed now signs of pursuing the killers, they decided to act. A Costa Rican prosecutor’s report issued in 1989 placed Hull at the center of the plot.

More threatening to the Reagan/Bush team, witnesses testified that Hull had operated under direction of the CIA, and confirmed Hull’s active role in cocaine trafficking. Costa Rican authorities arrested Hull on narcotics charges. But he disappeared after jumping bail.

Rather than assist them in bringing Hull to justice, Washington responded with a heavy hand. Nineteen congressmen – including Lee Hamilton of Indiana, the Democrat who headed the Iran-contra committee – sent a letter to President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica, warning him “to avoid situations … that could adversely affect our relations.”

            Arias, who received the Nobel Prize for his role in ending the contra war, replied that he was taken aback by the insinuation that “relations between your country and mine could deteriorate because our legal system is fighting against drug trafficking.”

            Costa Rica’s legal system has again taken the initiative, this time confronting murders allegedly committed by Washington’s proxies. Will the Bush administration let justice take its course? Or will it scoff again at the rule of law?

 

 

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.