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.

 

 

 

 

Election will force Chile to face its bloody past: Decision to follow on whether to prosecute rights violations of last 16 years | by Jerry Meldon | The Boston Globe Sunday Focus, October 10, 1989

 

            Chileans will be voting this Thursday in a historic free nationwide election, the first since Gen. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte led a September 1973 military coup d’etat that replaced democracy with reign of terror. For Pinochet and his fellow generals, more will be at stake than presidential and legislative offices.

            After the election, a decision will have to be made whether to grant amnesty or prosecute the well-documented violations of basic human rights the Pinochet regime committed in the last 16 years in the name of protecting “Western Christian civilization from subversion.

           

            Human-rights abuses

 

            Pinochet and his colleagues fear a tribunal similar to that in neighboring Argentina, which sent members of juntas that ruled between 1976 and 1983 behind bars for ordering the torture and disappearance of thousands of alleged subversives.

            For the same reason, the election will be closely monitored in Washington. Reexamination of the last two decades will remind the world that following Chile’s 1970 presidential election, President Richard M. Nixon instructed the CIA to use any means necessary to prevent the accession to power of the socialist Salvador Allende Gossens. Allende survived three years of CIA destabilization maneuvers, only to be assassinated during the Pinochet-led coup.

            Conservative estimates place at 1,000 the number of Chileans executed for political reasons in the coup’s aftermath. Tens of thousands were held in concentration camps, and many of them were tortured. Nearly 1,000 disappeared after detention. Their corpses are still turning up in mass graves.

            That was just the beginning. The state of siege continued from September 1973 until April 1978, when the junta granted amnesty for crimes committed over that period, except for those already prosecuted in civil courts. The violence has continued another decade. According to a report issued last month by Americas Watch, the human-rights monitoring group, the Catholic church’s Vicara de la Solidaridad claims some 40,000 files on victims of the regime.

            Thousands more files would no doubt eventually have to be added if not for the fact that on Oct. 5, 1988, Pinochet was the lone candidate for president in a plebiscite that figured to rubber-stamp eight more years of his reign. When the votes were tallied, the ‘nos’ totaled a remarkable 55 percent. A crippled economy and 15 years of brutality had finally taken their toll. Plans were soon made for the transfer of power.

 

            Violence continues

 

            Nonetheless, the violence and abuses have continued. Just last month, masked, armed men broke into the Santiago home of Enrique Silva Cimma, campaign manager for Christian Democrat Patricio Aylwin, the presidential candidate of the moderate coalition, Concertacion, and the odds-on favorite to win Thursday’s election. The thugs beat Silva Cimma’s wife and granddaughter and stole nothing but family documents.

            Pinochet also has placed legal roadblocks in the path of his successors. For any party to secure two legislative seats from a single district, it must receive at least two-thirds of the vote. A party with only one-third of the vote, such as the minority coalition favored by Pinochet, is guaranteed one of two available seats.

            Pinochet also intends to remain the army’s commander-in-chief. And in September, he demanded retention of the 1973-78 amnesty. In October, he declared: “The day they touch any of my men will be the end of the state law.”

            Confrontation appears inevitable. The platform of the Concertacion coalition states: “The democratic government will seek the derogatory or annulment of the Degree Law on amnesty.” Even the conservative Union Democrata Independiente supports investigations and, where appropriate, prosecutions.

            The longevity of the post-election government will hinge on how its words translate into action. In neighboring Argentina, threats from a disgruntled military have already evoked a pardon of nearly all convicted officers and amnesty for those not yet tried. In Uruguay, where on a per capita basis more political prisoners than anywhere else in Latin America were incarcerated and tortured under the military dictatorship of 1973-1985, fears of the same kind defeated a movement to prosecute the perpetrators in a plebiscite held there last spring.

           

            US hands are far from clean

 

            Those decisions were unfortunate, according to Harvey Cox, professor of theology at Harvard Divinity School, who has written extensively on Latin America. “Even if people go unpunished,” Cox said recently, “such trials are enormously important for everyone’s mental health and the health of society as a whole.”

            For the new Chilean government to investigate – and prosecute – the crimes of the Pinochet regime, the solid backing of the US government would appear necessary. However, the Bush administration is an unlikely supporter. For as Cox notes, if an investigation is undertaken, “the strings will lead to the US and agencies of the US government.”

            The Reagan administration distanced itself from Pinochet and supported restoration of democracy. Nonetheless, the State Department ended a ban on financing from the Export-Import Bank, and Washington was lone in opposing continued UN monitoring of Chilean human-rights abuses. In September, the Bush administration sent Chile 15 helicopters, seemingly violating a ban on the sale of military equipment.

            If the Bush administration discourages the Chilean government from investigating, some of Bush’s predecessors in the White House will be grateful.

           

            Nixon and Allende

           

            The role of the Nixon administration in destabilizing the Allende government – eventually ousted by Pinochet – was established long ago by a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee headed by the late Sen. Frank Church. However, because the CIA was the committee’s primary source of information, much of the truth remained hidden, according to biographies of then national security adviser Henry Kissinger, written by journalist Seymour Hersh and by former National Security Council staffer Roger Morris.

            The CIA’s own intelligence reports concluded that Allende, though a socialist who nationalized American-owned companies, represented no real threat to US national security. In fact, nationalization was initiated by Allende’s Christian Democrat predecessor, Eduardo Frei. Nonetheless, as Hersch revealed, the Nixon administration’s response to Allende’s 1970 election victory included an (unsuccessful) plan to have him assassinated.

            According to Hersch and Morris, the great contempt for Allende was on the part of Nixon and adviser Kissinger was primarily ideological in origin. At a White House planning session prior to Allende’s victory, Kissinger declared: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

            According to Hersch, Kissinger’s “fear was not only that Allende would be voted into office, but that – after his six-year term – the political process would work and he would be voted out of office in the next election.” Proof that communists could participate in a fair political process was considered dangerous.

            Kissinger, Hersch states, took charge of the anti-Allende plotting. By the coup of 1973, the CIA had spent $8 million, which became five times that amount on the black market. Though neither the White House nor CIA have been implicated in either the takeover or Allende’s assassination, Pinochet’s mob was well aware of what Washington wanted.

           

            Kissinger’s decisive role

 

            Washington’s attitude was clear. Facing defeat in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger sought victories elsewhere and viewed authoritarian Latins as comrades in arms – much as the Reagan and Bush administrations have viewed El Salvador’s army.

            But as Edmond L. Browning, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, declared following the recent killings of church workers in El Salvador: “There comes a time when accountability must be demanded of our government’s actions.”

            If anyone should be called to account, it is Kissinger, whose decisive role in the Chilean disaster is clear. Moreover, according to State Department documents obtained by journalist Martin Andersen and excerpted two years ago in the Nation, as secretary of state in the Ford administration, Kissinger also gave the Argentines a green light for their “Dirty War.”

            According to a State Department memo, in June 1976 – at a meeting in Pinochet’s Chile – Kissinger asked the Argentine foreign minister, Adm. Cesar Guzzetti, “How long will it take you [the Argentines] to clean up the problem?” The “secretary wanted Argentina to finish its terrorist problem before year end – before Congress reconvened in January 1977.” Mass execution of prisoners and suspects, Andersen notes, became widespread only after the Kissinger-Guzzetti meeting.

            If America is to avoid repeating such costly mistakes, a thorough accounting for past policies is in order. After all, if the Soviets can face reality in Eastern Europe, then surely we whose institutions are so much stronger can face ours in Latin America. Washington has an obligation to enthusiastically support Chile’s new government when it comes to grips with the recent past.