Reply #2: Cocaine Politics

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Drug_War/Cocaine_Politics.html

Cocaine Politics
by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall
University of California Press, 1991, paper


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In country after country, from Mexico and Honduras to Panama and Peru, the CIA helped set up or consolidate intelligence agencies that became forces of repression, and whose intelligence connections to other countries greased the way for illicit drug shipments.
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It has ... become more clear just how cynical were the government' claims that the apprehension of Noriega would help constrain the hemispheric drug traffic. Within a year of Noriega's ouster, U.S. drug agents admitted that the Cali cartel had turned Panama into a financial and logistics base for flooding North America and Europe with cocaine. And U.S. Ambassador Deane Hinton complained in 1993 that Panamanian authorities had not arrested a single person for the crime of money laundering in the three and a half years after Noriega's capture in a bloody U.S. invasion.
These problems are of more than historical interest, given that 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, armed forces, and intelligence agencies of Colombia and Peru, forces conspicuous by their own alliances with drug traffickers in counterinsurgency operations.
One of the most glaring and dangerous examples is in Peru. Behind Peru's president, Alberto Fujimori, is his chief adviser Vladimiro Montesinos, the effective head of the National Intelligence Service, or SIN, an agency created and trained by the CIA in the 1960s.'4 Through the SIN, Montesinos played a central role in Fujimori's "auto-coup," or suspension of the constitution, in April 1992, an event which (according to Knight-Ridder correspondent Sam Dillon) raised "the specter of drug cartels exercising powerful influence at the top of Peru's government." Recently Montesinos has been accused of arranging for an opposition television station to be bombed, and in August 1996 an accused drug trafficker claimed that Montesinos had accepted tens of thousands of dollars in payoffs.
According to an opinion column 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."
In the New York Review of Books, Mr. Gorriti spelled out this CIA-drug collaboration more fully:
In late 1990, Montesinos also began close cooperation with the CIA, and in 1991 the National Intelligence Service began to organize a secret anti-drug outfit with funding, training, and equipment provided by the CIA. This, by the way, made the DEA. . . furious. Montesinos apparently suspected that the DEA had been investigating his connection to the most important Peruvian drug cartel in the 1980s, the Rodriguez-Lopez 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 anti-drug operations. It was used for other things, such as my arrest.