e-Book Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America download

Arguably, the Kerry Report covered in detail in this book, revealed the template of lies, half lies, and cover-ups that make up the paradigmatic substrate for the "protected drug trade" -- as that trade is carried out under the auspices of the USG "National Security umbrella."

What we see time and again is that a country with a weak (always) rightwing authoritarian government (somewhere in and around the periphery of a drug producing country) is alleged to be under threat by either an internal or nearby (but always) leftist-leaning guerilla or terrorist insurgency. Clandestine U.S. counter-insurgency and (ostensible) humanitarian support (operating through the CIA with assistance from the State Department and directed by the NSC) are then needed (as a high-level US national Security objective, no less) to help shore up that nation's counter-insurgency forces.

It turns out not to be just a coincidence that the best way for the USG to provide such help invariably is by enlisting the same CIA assets (that is the same corrupt and criminal individuals, their criminal organizations and transport systems, equipment and routes) that are used to run guns and drugs to facilitate USG support for the country in question. In fact, the CIA's strongest argument for using criminals (including corrupt politicians and military officers "on the make") to carry out its loosely defined political objectives, is precisely because many are often already CIA assets that can be relied on, easily and carefully watched and monitored, and if necessary, completely controlled.

The best-case scenario for U.S. assistance is when at least a handful of terrorists or leftwing insurgents are actually found on the soil of the country in question. This situation usually seals the deal for large amounts of funding through the U.S. Congress. However, when the nature of the political or humanitarian goals are less clear, and the insurgency is either ill-defined or non-existent, then, due to limiting Congressional legislation such as the Boland Amendment, Congressional funding is carefully scrutinized, limited or even denied. Of course as just noted, the scenario that always seals the deal is that in which terrorists or leftwing insurgent forces or organizations are actually found on the ground in the country in question. Then Congress can be quite supportive, and thus can easily be petitioned for open-ended funding. And then the financial floodgates open widely and the ball get rolling down hill that much faster. When this is not the case (as in the Iran-Contra scandal, for instance), then assistance becomes a great deal more problematic. Ad Hoc, justifications must then be fabricated, and often funds must then be self-generated. In such situations, things can go badly awry as they did with Oliver North's mismanagement of the Iran-Contra case.

One does not have to be a Rocket Scientist, a cynic or even a skeptic to see that this whole Jerry-rigged paradigmatic apparatus is little more than a plausibly deniable pretext for the CIA to keep its hands and feet in the global drug and arms trade. And although the Kerry Report analyzed here, claimed that the CIA remained aloof and disinterested at a safe distance away from actually engaging in drug trafficking -- that is that they simply watched this process unfold at a safe distance away -- this book gives chapter and verse, and plenty of ongoing and historical evidence to the contrary. It produces reams of hard evidence that suggests that the CIA's role was much more involved than just that of a disinterested bystander.

What these authors' data reveal is that these CIA assets, often consisting of up-and-coming political and military leaders (like Manuel Noreiga), or landowners and soldiers of fortune like John Hull, or Cuban exile Francisco Chanes, or Honduran General, Jose Buesco Rosa, recruit "criminals-to-be" who are then allowed to operate with impunity as "cutouts" behind a wall of U.S. national security secrecy.

In this powerful heavily financed shadow world, they are then allowed to ply their drug (or weapons) trade in a relatively secure environment with pipelines that typically go from the poppy and cocaine fields to hidden processing plants in Third World countries. Once processed, the drugs are then air-dropped via electronically sophisticated aircraft to ad hoc landing fields in the U.S. interior (like Mena Arkansas for instance), or to similar fields in nearby friendly Central American countries. The drugs are then sold illegally in U.S. suburbs or on inner city streets. The proceeds are hand-carried or wire-transferred to banks (like BCCI and Florida's Northside Bank) in the USA and Europe where they are then laundered. The cycle then simply repeats itself in a different country, ad infinitum.

This whole process of "sub-contracting" out the global drug trade to low-level intelligence assets operating under the secure umbrella and loose supervision of their CIA controllers, for the most part, is a formula shielded from public scrutiny as part of the growing and out-of-control national security shadow world. But occasionally it does break through from behind this national security iron curtain, as it did when Eugene Hasenfus' plane crashed while transporting drugs for guns from Mena, Arkansas to the Nicaraguan Contras. When that happens, the same code of the jungle that governs organized crime applies to those working for the CIA: If they get caught red-handed, they are left twisting in the wind (as was the case with Hasenfus) to take the rap -- that is, so long as they do not talk. If Hasenfus had talked, as the infamous Barry Seal was about to do, they usually end up as Seal did, very, very dead.

This book offers convincing evidence that it intends to use in its call for a change of focus away from penalizing individual users of drugs toward curbing our own government's complicity in the global drug trade and its destructive fake war on drugs. It is so well documented that there can be no question but that our government is deeply engaged in -- not just carefully watching at a distance the global drug trade -- but is also knee-deep in it as well.

The cruelest paradox of US involvement in the drug trade is that while it sees the terrorists and leftwing insurgency threats to countries in our backyard as a U.S. "national security" priority, at the same time, it does not see the flooding of drugs into our suburban bedrooms or onto our inner city streets, as the same level of a national security threat or priority? For if it did, the war on drugs would be as vigorously fought and prosecuted as is the war on terror and the undeclared war on leftwing insurgencies. Five stars.

Repetitious and rambling, it is a great resource for scholars compiling research for a thesis. It is less useful for laymen attempting to simply understand the connections. If you weren't on a congressional subcommittee in the 1980s/1990s, you want to have Google up while you read.

This is a densely packed book that serves more as a collation of other sources - the exhaustive task of assembling it was no small feat and much thanks is to be given to Mr. Scott and Mr. Marshall for doing so. The story of drug corruption south of the border during the seventies and eighties is an epic of near mind- numbing detail, with dozens of story lines and characters intersecting at multiple junctures. This is, admittedly, no easy read, nor, for that matter, is the violence and corruption the book describes easy to stomach. But if we are to understand anything about the drug wars, aside from our government's own culpability, we must recognize how the US's unending appetite for narcotics is an integral part - if not extension - of our Cold War legacy. Forget the sanctimonious anti-drug bumper sticker slogans. Cocaine Politics shows us the Big Lie behind the fatuous eighties era motto of "Just say no."

A tremendous look at an important era of which the history has been suppressed. This is a must read for students of Iran-Contra and CIA-linked drug trafficking. But this e-book is a bad, computer recognized scan job. The footnotes don't worked and there are lots of garbled words. Still readable and still worth it if you must have an ebook, but a pretty poor job of conversion by the publisher sadly.

This text offers a well-written and thoroughly researched expose on the deleterious impact of U.S. foreign policy on Central America's ability to develop economies that work long-term for them; and how the CIA is able to engineer political results that maintain the status-quo of American imperial domination over the entire western hemisphere. The CIA's complicity in allowing anti-communists, and typically right-wing brutes, to distribute cocaine to fund their para-military operations and oppression of the people of Central America. The effect is a permanently marginalized population in a place such as Nicaragua; because of their hopeless dependency on U.S. aid as a means for merely surviving in this harsh economic and social landscape that has come to pass.

I had always this question in mind and this book throws some light on it. It seems that the feds have thrown the tower and aligned to the traffickers helping them to get rid off their competitors... The point is just to control where the profit goes, no matter the cost of it as long as it serves for some political intends.

very satisfied.

This book brings me back to events from the 80's when, in addition to short-wave international broadcasts, I listened to NPR for news and became aware of US support for government by death squad in EL Salvador and subversion by gangsters in Nicaragua. The Iran-Contra story broke in 1986, and Oliver North, on tv in 1987, defied the committee in Congress to discipline him much less repudiate his actions, and McFarlane faked a suicide attempt with some 20 diazepam tablets (for those who know of its pharmacology, that was merely a big sleeping pill and a very safe one). The text does become tiresome, not for its style but the constant flow of acts of American thuggery abroad and governmental aiding and abetting such repugnant activity by denial, disinformation and censorship. Particularly telling is the statement on pp 178-179 from Manufacturing Consent in which "US media function not as an information but as a propaganda system". I often suspect that news is manipulated for emotional effect in order to obscure any potential for stimulation of thought. This book is good for waking people up to governmental crimes and the failure of the war on drugs, but I fear the public will slumber on in its trivia-driven torpor.