Protecting Traffickers, Not the Nation:
Washington and the Politics of Drugs, Part 1 of 2

by Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D.

Those struggling to solve America's drug problems are accustomed to talk of
"demand side" and "supply side" solutions. This language reflects a
bureaucratic perspec tive: it tends to project the problem, and focus
alleged "solu tions," on to others, often on to remote and deprived
popula tions. On the supply side, eradication programs are designed for
the mountains of Burma or the Andes. On the demand side, increasing funds
are allocated for the arrest and imprisonment (and less often, the
treatment) of the substance abusers, often ethnic and from the inner cities.

Increasingly, however, researchers are becoming aware of a third aspect to
the problem: protected intelligencedrug connec tions. Within the U.S.
governmental bureaucracy itself, intelli gence agencies and special
warfare elements have recurringly exploited drug traffickers and their
corrupt political allies for anticommunist and antisubversive operations,
often but not always covert, in other parts of the world.

History suggests that this third aspect of the drug problem, the protected
intelligencedrug connection, or what I call gov ermnentdrug symbiosis,
has been responsible for the biggest changes in the patterns and level of
drugtrafficking. Thus, at least in theory, it also presents the most
hopeful target for improvement.

No one now disputes that in the immediate postwar period CIA assistance to
the Sicilian Mafia in Italy, and the Corsican Mafia in Marseilles, helped
consolidate and protect the vast upsurge of drug trafficking through those
two areas. No one disputes either that a heroin epidemic in this country
surged and then subsided with our Vietnamese involvement and
disengagement. But the same upsurge of protected drugtrafficking was vis
ible in the 1980s, when the United States received more than half of its
heroin from a new area: the AfghanPakistan border, from drugtrafficking
Mujaheddin who were the backbone of the CIA's covert operations in
Afghanistan. Published U.S. statistics estimate that heroin imports from
the AfghanPakistan border, which had been insignificant before 1979,
accounted for 52 percent of U.S. imported heroin by 1984.[1] (In 1979, the
first year of the CIA's Afghan operation, the number of drugrelated deaths
in New York City rose by 77 percent.) [ 2]

In the same period, at least a fifth of America's cocaine, probably more,
was imported via Honduras, where local drug traffickers, and their allies
in the corrupt Honduran armed forces, were the backbone of the
infrastructure for Reagan's covert support of the Contra forces in that
country. [3] These specific facts are not contested by historians, and even
CIA veterans have conceded their agency's role in the genesis of the
postwar problem. Nevertheless, there is an ongoing and steadfast denial
on the part of U.S. administrations, the press, and the public. The
public's denial is psychologically under standable: it is disconcerting to
contemplate that our govern ment, which we expect to protect us from such
a grave social crisis, is actually contributing to it. This denial is
sustained by the general silence, and the occasional uncritical
transmission of government lies, in our most responsible newspapers of
record. [4]

It is further reinforced by a small army of propagandists, who hasten to
assure us that today "the CIA's part in the world drug trade seems
irrelevant;" and that to argue otherwise is "absurd." [5] Because of such
resolute denial, this most serious of public crises is barely talked about.
Yet the problem of a U.S.protected drug traffic endures. Today the United
States, in the name of fighting drugs, has entered into alliances with the
police and armed forces of Colombia and Peru, forces conspicuous by their
alliances with drugtraffickers in counterinsurgency operations. It is now
clear that at least some of the U.S. military efforts and assistance to
these countries has been deflected into counterin surgency campaigns,
where the biggest drug traffickers are not the enemy, but allies. Realists
object that it is not the business of the U.S. to reform drugcorrupted
regimes in other countries, such as Pakistan or Peru. Unfortunately U.S.
overt and covert programs in such countries are usually large enough to
change these societies anyway, if only to reinforce and harden the status
quo.

At the same time they affect the size and structure of the drug traffic
itself. In the postwar years, when the drugfinanced China Lobby was
strong in Washington, and the U.S. shipped arms and Chinese Nationalist
troops into eastern Burma, opium pro duction in that remote region
increased almost fivefold in fifteen years, from less than 80 to 300400
tons a year. Production doubled again in the 1960s, the heyday of the
KMTCIA alliance in Southeast Asia. [ 6] Drug alliances confer protection
upon designated traffickers, and such conferred protection centralizes,
rationalizes, and fur ther empowers the traffic.

When one American representative of the CIAlinked Cali cartel was arrested
in 1992, the DEA said that this man alone had been responsible for from 70
to 80 percent of U.S. cocaine imports (an estimate probably exagger ated
but nonetheless instructive). [7] It is true that this man, like many
others, was ultimately arrested by the U.S. Government. But in many if not
most such cases, key men like General Noriega are only arrested after U.S.
policy priorities have changed, and de facto alliances are made with new
drug figures. In short, up to now the U.S. Government, along with other
governments, has done far more to increase the global drug traffic, than it
has to diminish it.

The U.S., DrugTrafficking and Counterinsurgency in Peru

Today one of the most glaring and dangerous examples of a CIAdrug alliance
is in Peru. Behind Peru's president, Alberto Fujimori, is his chief adviser
Vladimiro Montes inos, the effective head of the National Intelligence
Service or SIN, an agency created and trained by the CIA in the 1960s. [8]

Through the SIN, Montesinos played a central role in Fuji mori's
"autocoup," or suspension of the constitution, in April 1992, an event
which (according to KnightRidder correspon dent Sam Dillon) raised "the
specter of drug cartels exercising powerful influence at the top of Peru's
government." [9]

Recently Montesinos has been accused of arranging for the bombing of an
opposition television station, while in August 1996 an accused drug
trafficker claimed that Montesinos had accepted tens of thousands of
dollars in payoffs. [10]

According to an OpEd in the New York Times by Gustavo Gorriti, a leader
among the Peruvian intellectuals forced into exile,

"Mr. Montesinos built a power base and fortune mainly as a legal
strategist for drug traffickers. He has had a close relationship with the
CIA, and controls the intelligence services, and, through them, the
military." [11]

In the New York Review of Books, Mr. Gorriti spelled out this CIAdrug
collaboration more fully.

In late 1990, Montesinos also began close cooperation with the CIA, and in
1991 the National Intelligence Serv ice began to organize a secret
antidrug outfit with fund ing, training, and equipment provided by the
CIA. This, by the way, made the DEA... furious. Montesinos appar ently
suspected that the DEA had been investigating his connection to the most
important Peruvian drug cartel in the 1980s, the RodriguezLopez
organization, and also links to some Colombian traffickers. Perhaps not
coincidentally, Fujimori made a point of denouncing the DEA as corrupt
at least twice, once in Peru in 1991, and the second time at the
Presidential summit in San Antonio, Texas, in February [1992]. As far as I
know, the secret intelligence outfit never carried out antidrug
operations. It was used for other things, such as my arrest. [12]

Others have pointed to the drug corruption of Peru's govern ment, naming
not only Montesinos, but the military estab lishment receiving U.S.
antidrug funding. [13]

Charges that the Peruvian army and security forces were continuing to take
payoffs, to protect the cocaine traffickers that they were supposed to be
fighting, have led at times to a withholding of U.S. aid. [14]

Such charges against Fujimori, Montesinos, and the Peruvian military are
completely in line with what we know about Peru over the last two decades.
In the 1980s the same Peruvian drugtrafficking organization, that of
Reynaldo Rodriguez Lopez, incorporated into itself several generals of the
Peruvian Investigative Police (PIP), at whose headquarters Rodriguez Lopez
maintained an office, and also the private secretary to the Peruvian
Minister of the Interior. [15]

Before that, senior PIP officials and Army generals were controlled by the
Paredes family organization, described by a DEA analyst as then "the
biggest smuggling organization in Peru and possibly in the world." [16]

In the words of James Mills, the Paredes were part of the established
Peruvian oligarchy that goes back to the Spanish viceroyalty, an oligarchy
which "controlled not only the roots of the cocaine industry but, to a
large extent, the country itself." [17]

Other observers have given a much more marginal account of cocaine's role
in Peruvian society. Patrick Clawson and Rensselaer Lee estimated that
"nearly all Peruvian cocaine base and hydrochloride is sold to Colombians
who fly in payments and fly out product." In their words, "As a $1.3
billion industry, coca accounted for 3.9 percent of the 1992 $33 billion
GNP;" and furthermore was "of shrinking importance." [18]

But at about the time this book was published, it was reported that
Peruvian police had seized a single shipment of 3.5 tons of pure cocaine
belonging to the LopezParedes branch of the family. This single shipment
was worth $600 million; and mem bers of this cartel later admitted to
having shipped more than ten tons (worth about $1.8 billion) to Mexico in
the previous year. [19]

The San Francisco Chronicle also reported from Mexican officials that
"Vladimiro Montesinos... and Santiago Fujimori, the president's brother,
were responsible for covering up con nections between the Mexican and
Peruvian drug mafias." [20]

It is evident that Clawson and Lee had seriously underesti mated the role
of cocaine in the Peruvian economy and polity.

The response of many Americans to the CIA's drugsymbiosis in Peru is to
object that the alternative power base, the revolutionary Sendero Luminoso,
is even more ruthless and bloodthirsty.

Such wouldbe realists should listen to the arguments of Gorriti and others
that what the U.S. isdoing now in Peru, as earlier in China, Laos, and
Vietnam, only plays into the revolutionaries' hands. [21]

The CIAGovernmentDrug Symbiosis in Mexico, Columbia, and Elsewhere

It is important to stress that the CIAdrug symbiosis described by Gustavo
Gorriti is not anomalous, but paradigmatic of the way the U.S. is
consolidating its power and its allies in parts of the Third World where
drugs are a part of the de facto political power structure. In the name of
law and freedom, alliances have been made for decades with criminals and
dictators. Now, in the name of fighting drugs, U.S. funds are channeled to
those whose political fates are allied with those of the drug traffickers.
These funds will, paradoxically, strengthen the status both of these
traffickers and of the social systems in which they form a constituent
element.

In Mexico, for example, the CIA's closest government allies were for years
in the DFS, or Direccion Federal de Seguridad, whose badges, handed out to
toplevel Mexican drugtraffickers, have been labeled by DEA agents a
virtual "license to traffic." [22]

Like the SIN in Peru, the DFS was in part a CIA creation; and the CIA
presence in the DFS became so dominant, according to the famous Mexican
journalist Manuel Buendia, that some of its intelligence was seen only by
American eyes. [23]

The Guadalajara Cartel, Mexico's most powerful drugtrafficking network in
the early 1980's, prospered largely because it enjoyed the protection of
the DFS, under its chief, Miguel Nassar (or Nazar) Haro, a CIA asset. [24]

Under theses circumstances, it is hardly surprising that members of the
Guadalajara Cartel became prominent among the drugtrafficking supporters
of the CIA's Contra operation. [25]

Throughout Central America, and most notoriously in Panama, Honduras and
Guatemala, the CIA recruited assets from the local Army G2 intelligence
apparatus, who recurringly were also involved in drugtrafficking. Manuel
Noriega, the most famous example, was already a CIA asset when he was
promoted to become Panama G2 Chief, as the result of a military coup
assisted by the U.S. Army. [26]

Later, when Noriega became Panama's effective ruler, his drug networks
doubled as Contra support operations, while Noriega himself was shielded
for years by the CIA from DEA investigations. [27]

In Honduras in 1981, the CIA similarly exploited the drug contacts of the
Honduran G2 Chief, Leonidas Torres Arias. (The most notorious of these,
the Honduran Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, was simultaneously a member of
Mexico's Guadalaja Cartel. His airline SETCO, under investigation by DEA
and Customs for drugtrafficking, was chartered by first CIA and then State
Department to fly supplies to the main Contra camps in Honduras.) [28]

The CIA was able to recruit both assets and Contra supporters from the
drugtainted Guatemalan G2 as well. [29]

One sees elsewhere this recruiting pattern of CIA collaborators with
intelligence and security networks who are allied with the biggest
drugtraffickers, not opposed to them. In Colombia, U.S. funds have gone to
the Colombian Army and National Police, both of which have collaborated
with paramilitary death squads financed by the drug cartels, against their
mutual enemies, the leftwing guerrillas. [30]

In Colombia and in Guatemala, as in Peru and Mexico, U.S.assisted
campaigns of repression, nominally against drugs, have in fact been
deflected in to counterinsurgency operations, misnamed as antidrug
operations to secure the support of the U.S. Congress.

[continued]