Check out this recent article I wrote with Bill Weinberg,
the author of Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico (Verso 2000). His website is World War 4 Report (WW4Report.com)
In its never ending effort to justify its military presence in Latin America the U.S. has employed any number of rationales, the most recent being the need to combat drug trafficking. Those countries on the right which assist in the U.S.-funded war on drugs are rewarded handsomely with military and political assistance while countries on the left who criticize U.S. foreign policy are demonized and risk Washington’s wrath.
Indeed, as ex-Honduran President Manuel Zelaya found out, criticizing the U.S. war on drugs can be a sticky affair. Before he was overthrown in a military coup d’etat in June, Zelaya was frequently at odds with U.S. officials over the fight against drug trafficking. There’s no evidence that Zelaya’s opposition to Washington on this score was a factor in his overthrow, but it’s no secret that the U.S. has been less than enthusiastic in calling for Zelaya’s return to power.
Drugs and Demonization of the Sandinista Regime
To put the recent Honduran affair in proper context go back some twenty years to the Reagan administration’s Contra war against Nicaragua. In an effort to discredit the left wing Sandinistas, Washington employed a dirty propaganda campaign attempting to link the regime to drug trafficking. The case involved Barry Seal, a convicted drug dealer turned informant who worked closely with Vice President George H.W. Bush’s anti-drug task force.
The CIA, which was training the Contras at the time in an effort to overthrow the Sandinistas, installed a hidden camera in Seal’s C-130 cargo plane. Seal then snapped an out-of-focus photo of himself with a top Sandinista official --- who was likely a U.S. spy --- and a Colombian drug trafficker unloading bags of cocaine at an airstrip in Nicaragua. Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Agency was intimately involved in the affair and coordinated efforts with the CIA.
When the photo of Seal in Nicaragua was leaked to the press, all the major papers ran sensational articles about Sandinista drug running. The Reagan administration used the incident for maximum PR effect, with the president displaying Seal’s photo in a nationally televised speech in March 1986.
Operation “Just Cause” and the Drug Connection in Panama
Washington also employed a propaganda campaign against Panamanian dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega. In an effort to justify invasion, the U.S. sensationalized Noriega’s links to drug trafficking. Yet throughout the 1980s, the CIA collaborated with Noriega and Colombia’s Medellin Cartel to overthrow the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. “Privatized” CIA assets maintained Honduran and Costa Rican airstrips as transfer points for coke going north and guns coming south for the Nicaraguan contra rebels. Officially derided as “conspiracy theory,” this fact has been abundantly documented since the “Contragate” scandal broke in 1986.
In July 1989, just months before the invasion of Panama, five key U.S. figures associated with the Contragate scandal—Lt. Col. Oliver North, Maj. Gen. Ricard Secord, former National Security Advisor John Poindexter, former Ambassador Lewis Tambs and former local CIA station chief Joe Fernández—were barred from returning to the territory of U.S. ally Costa Rica after a special commission of the country’s congress concluded that the contra resupply network they had established on the Nicaraguan border doubled as a cocaine-smuggling operation.
Following the Contragate scandal, Noriega became more useful as a scapegoat than a client. In Christmas 1989, the U.S. invaded Panama and installed the client regime of Guillermo Endara. Endara was also ensconced with the cartels. As an attorney he had represented companies run by Carlos Eleta, a Panamanian business tycoon arrested in Georgia that April for conspiring to import more than half a ton of cocaine each month into the U.S. (The indictment would be dropped following the invasion.) His vice president Guillermo "Billy" Ford was a co-founder and part owner of the Dadeland Bank in Miami, named in federal court testimony in the U.S .as a repository for Medellín Cartel money.
These rather salient facts went down an Orwellian Memory Hole as the media portrayed a one-sided U.S. victory over a corrupt narco-regime in the Christmastime 1989 invasion of Panama.
Double Standards and the War on Drugs in South America
When fiery Hugo Chávez came to power in Venezuela in the late 1990s the U.S.-fueled drug war once again became the topic du jour. A fierce critic of U.S. militarization in neighboring Colombia, Chávez prohibited Pentagon over-flights of Venezuelan airspace. In an inflammatory move, he furthermore ceased cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), accusing the agency of drug running and espionage.
It wasn’t long before the Bush administration started to accuse Caracas of being derelict in fighting the drug war. The Bush administration, in fact, said Venezuela “failed demonstrably” to halt the flow of drugs through Venezuela. Specifically, the U.S. government accused Venezuela of not eliminating coca and poppy fields along the Colombian border. Venezuelan officials countered that Washington was simply acting for political motives.
When Chávez allied to Bolivia after 2005 and the rise of the leftist former coca-growers leader Evo Morales, Washington once again went on the offensive, claiming that the Andean nation was not doing enough to prosecute the drug war. During the George W. Bush years, U.S. officials were dismayed by Morales’ coca policy which sought to increase the amount of coca that could be legally grown for traditional and medicinal purposes and asked farmers to voluntarily tear up their plantings above half an acre.
The policy, which promised to crack down on cocaine, abandoned previous efforts of government-forced eradication of coca plants. The State Department lambasted Bolivia for supposedly backsliding in the counter-narcotics effort.
For some contrast, let’s look at the situation in the closest U.S. ally in South America—Colombia, where President Alvaro Uribe now hopes to open the country to permanent U.S. military bases to police the rest of the continent against drug trafficking. Somehow, evidence of Uribe’s ties to the cartels doesn’t seem to stick.
In 2004, a single New York Times story noted the emergence of a 1991 report from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) naming Uribe as a high-level operative of the Medellín Cartel. The DIA report was released under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act to a D.C.-based research group, the National Security Archives. The report asserts that Uribe, then a senator from the department of Antioquia, was "dedicated to collaboration with the Medellín cartel at high government levels." It named him as a "close personal friend" of cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar, and claimed he helped Escobar secure his seat as an auxiliary congressman.
Both Uribe and the U.S. State Department denied the charge. But the National Security Archives' Michael Evans said: "We now know that the DIA, either through its own reporting or through liaison with another investigative agency, had information indicating that Álvaro Uribe was one of Colombia's top drug-trafficking figures."
Washington portrays Uribe as a key ally in the war on drugs and terrorism, boasting that his administration has extradited 150 accused traffickers to the U.S., more than twice the number extradited in his predecessor's four-year term. But there have been persistent claims that as chief of Colombia's civil aviation authority in the late 1980s, Uribe protected drug flights. When he was governor of Antioquia between 1995 and 1997, paramilitary activity exploded in the department.
Another study in contrast is provided by Peru—second to Colombia as a U.S. ally and anti-drug aid recipient in South America. According to the latest report of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), coca cultivation fell in Colombia last year (after several years of growth) but rose 6% in Bolivia and 4.5% in Peru. Yet, the two countries are treated entirely differently. While the U.S. has entered into a free trade agreement with Peru, it has just cut trade preferences with Bolivia— a move that could cost thousands of jobs in the country's export industries—on the grounds the government of Evo Morales is not doing enough to combat coca cultivation.
The Honduras Imbroglio and ALBA
While using trade to punish Bolivia, Washington simultaneously works against efforts to establish regional trade pacts that seek to create an alternative to U.S. hegemony.
The Latin American right and its allies in Washington have been particularly concerned about the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas, also known by its Spanish acronym ALBA. A reciprocal trade agreement designed to promote trade reciprocity between like-minded left regimes in Latin America, the project groups Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Honduras and Ecuador. To really understand the politics of the drug war one must fundamentally understand its connection to ALBA.
Consider once again the case of deposed Honduran president Manuel Zelaya. Originally a political moderate, Zelaya went along with the larger U.S. political and economic designs until recently. However, the Bush administration may have been taken aback by the Honduran’s desire to convert the U.S. airbase at Soto Cano into a civilian airport. The base is used for drug surveillance flights. Then, in late 2008 the Honduran came out for drug decriminalization and confirmed that he would join in Chávez’s ALBA scheme.
With alarm bells going off within the Bush administration, outgoing U.S. Ambassador to Honduras Charles Ford fired a warning shot across Zelaya’s bow. A large portion of remittances sent by U.S.-based Hondurans back to their home country, he remarked, were the product of illicit drug trafficking.
Speaking to local TV media, Ford declared that 30% of remissions from the U.S. were the product of money laundering by drug smugglers. The U.S. ambassador was joined in his criticism by his French counterpart in Honduras Laurent Dominati, who remarked that the Central American nation was in danger of becoming a “narco-state.”
Ford’s remarks caused a diplomatic firestorm, with the Honduran foreign minister shooting back that the ambassador’s comments were unacceptable. The foreign minister added that his government had officially protested to both the U.S. and France, and requested that both back up their inflammatory statements.
Having caused a massive diplomatic row, Ford left Tegucigalpa after three years of ambassadorial duty. And what was Ford’s next job? He served as diplomatic attaché for the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, which seeks to prosecute the drug war in Latin America.
In an interview with the Honduras paper La Prensa, Ford warned that “big people” from the Mexican, Guatemalan and Colombian cartels had arrived in Honduras in recent years. It was up to the U.S. and like minded Latin American regimes, Ford added, to counteract such influence through joint efforts such as the Mérida Initiative.
Zelaya himself voiced support for the U.S. program, which included millions in military aid for anti-drug efforts. In an effort to tone down tensions, he met with new U.S. ambassador Hugo Llorens to shore up the Mérida plan. Zelaya was still critical of the U.S., however, and declared that Washington was not doing enough to help Honduras counteract violence and the cartels. (Zelaya was joined in his criticisms of U.S. drug policy by none other than Daniel Ortega, whose Sandinista party was maligned by Washington in the 1980s for its alleged ties to drug trafficking. Ortega, who has also moved his country into Chávez’s ALBA, charged that Washington only provided petty change for its war on drugs. )
Furthermore, Zelaya charged that the U.S. was the “chief cause” of drug smuggling in Latin America and the Caribbean. Ford had been “belligerent,” Zelaya affirmed, simply because Honduras pursued diplomatic relations with Caracas, Havana, and Managua. Just because Honduras received U.S. aid, Zelaya said, did not mean that his country was a “vassal” of its northern benefactor. Zelaya accused the U.S. of promoting coup d'etats, invasions, and uprisings across Central America.
Honduras Coup and Drug War Rhetoric
Soon enough, Zelaya was removed from power. However, the drug issue has not faded and in fact has taken on a heated new political dimension in recent weeks. Even though Zelaya clamped down on the drug trade, he has been predictably accused of having links to narco-trafficking. Right-wing politicians in Honduras have always been critical of Zelaya’s efforts to cultivate diplomatic ties to Hugo Chávez. Now, the coup government is trying to link Zelaya with alleged drug trafficking emanating from Venezuela.
In the wake of Zelaya’s overthrow, the new Honduran Foreign Minister Enrique Ortez said that the government had proof that Venezuelan planes landed in Honduras loaded with cocaine and cash. “Every night, three or four Venezuelan-registered planes land without the permission of appropriate authorities and bring thousands of pounds ... and packages of money that are the fruit of drug trafficking,” the minister told CNN en Español. “We have proof of all of this. Neighboring governments have it. The DEA has it,” he added.
The de facto coup-installed president of Honduras Roberto Micheletti himself also insinuated that Zelaya could be mixed up in the drug trade and the constant Venezuelan drug flights. Meanwhile, the Honduras attorney general’s office is conducting an investigation into whether Zelaya funded pro-Chávez demonstrations with FARC or drug smuggling money.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration told the AP it could neither confirm nor deny that it was investigating the matter, though the U.S. State Department has frankly declared that in Honduras “official corruption continues to be an impediment to effective law enforcement and there are press reports of drug trafficking and associated criminal activity among current and former government and military officials."
Adding fuel to the fire, TV network Telemundo reports that Zelaya government officials could have been linked to Venezuelan and Colombian drug traffickers. The report fingered Héctor Zelaya, the president’s own son, as a possible mafioso. Seizing on the reports, U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, met with DEA officials to discuss drug trafficking in Honduras. “Obtaining an assessment from DEA about the situation on the ground is of increasing importance in light of recent developments in Honduras and reports of possible Zelaya drug ties,” Ros-Lehtinen said.
Could the accusations form part of a concerted PR effort on the part of the Micheletti government? The Los Angeles Times reports that Cardinal Oscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, the Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, was overheard speaking to the country’s attorney general on his cell phone nine days after the coup. According to the report, Maradiaga urged the government official to produce drug trafficking evidence against Zelaya. “My son,” he remarked, “we need that proof. It's the only thing that will help us now.”
In an effort to legitimize his government, Micheletti has emphasized the drug issue. Recently, he remarked that “during our short period of being in power no small plane has landed in the country loaded with drugs, which used to happen frequently. The police and army are protecting the wellbeing of the Honduran people.” Micheletti’s positive spin was revealed as questionable however when a cocaine-trafficking plane crashed on a highway in northern Honduras. It was the second such accident involving a cocaine-transporting plane since the military coup.
Target: ALBA
ALBA nations, however, have not taken the Honduran government’s accusations against Zelaya lightly. Recently, they banded together in an effort to return the ousted Central American president to power. “Revolutionary” governments, Chávez declared, would not remain idle as long as the coup government was in power in Tegucigalpa. The Venezuelan leader rejected Honduran press reports linking the ousted Zelaya with drug traffic.
Chávez said that the claims were simply a “ghost” being used to justify “anything.” “Now they are accusing Zelaya of being a drug-trafficker, they say it in 100 newspapers, as article and breaking news. They report that since the ousting of Zelaya –a constitutional ousting, they say-, mysterious Venezuelan light planes stop arriving there loaded with dollars and drugs. Thus, they use this ghost for anything, for ousting governments, for killing people,” Chávez added.
For his part, Evo Morales declared that the coup in Honduras was “a warning” from “North American imperialism” that the U.S. was intent on halting the spread of ALBA.
Rafael Correa has voiced similar concerns --- the Ecuadoran president recently remarked that he had “intelligence studies showing that after Zelaya, the next destabilization effort would be me.”
“Honduras was not an isolated occurrence,” Correa said. “A de facto government which is so crude and insulting could not maintain itself without external assistance and it gets this help from powerful groups in the U.S. and the Latin American oligarchy.”
Correa has denounced a supposed domestic and international media campaign designed to destabilize his country and link him with FARC guerrillas in Colombia. In a video which surfaced in Colombia, a FARC leader named Jorge Briceño says that his organization helped to finance Correa’s presidential campaign in 2006. Correa believes the video is part of a right-wing strategy to destabilize progressive governments in the region.
There have been similar accusations made against Chávez, alleging that the Venezuelan has military ties to the FARC. Such charges are patently false, says Bolivian Evo Morales, who says that his South American counterparts in Ecuador and Venezuela had been unfairly maligned.
It is predictable that Zelaya is being ensnared in the same propaganda campaign.
Honduran authorities claimed July 27 that Colombia's FARC guerilla organization has financed supporters of ousted President Manuel Zelaya. The National Police say they seized a book and receipts that show payments between $2,500 and $100,000 for officials of the Zelaya government to "spend in El Paraiso," the region on the Nicaraguan border where followers of Zelaya wait for the ousted president's return. Given the FARC’s current state of disarray in the face of Uribe’s offensive, this seems highly improbable.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal Aug. 10, columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady cited a 2005 letter purportedly intercepted by Colombian authorities from the late FARC chief Raul Reyes to another commander listing “political contacts.” One was apparently the Honduran Democratic Unification (UD) party—which, while not Zelaya’s party, is a key voice demanding his return. So not only is this evidence pretty far removed from Zelaya, but it means little more than that Reyes sought to propagandize the UD—even assuming the letter is real.
ALBA Nations Shoot Back With Their Own Accusations
Morales says the drug spin about Zelaya is all backwards: it is the CIA, the Pentagon, the Southern Command and drug smugglers who are really behind the coup in Honduras. In making his startling accusations, Morales is echoing reports in recent weeks that de facto Honduran President Roberto Micheletti may be tied to traffickers.
The Havana-based website Cuba Debate sports a scanned version of what purports to be an undated document from the Honduran Defense Ministy that names one “Roberto Michelleti Bain” (with an evident mis-spelling) on a list of several Honduran nationals with international drug trafficking connections. His “connection” is named as the Calí Cartel and his area of operations is named as Yoro. In the ‘80s, when the Calí Cartel was at its peak of power, Micheletti was a member of the local council in Yoro department, in the north of the country near the Caribbean coast. He would later sucessfully run for congress from Yoro.
Jean Guy Allard, the author of the article, has not answered e-mails to clarify where he acquired the document implicating Micheletti in drug trafficking. This however has not stopped others in fellow ALBA nations from repeating the accusations. In early August, José Vicente Rangel, who has served in various high level posts within the Chávez government, made reference to the Cuban report on Venezuelan TV.
Illegal drugs are simply a major part of the Latin American economy, right up there with oil, tourism and legal agro-exports like coffee, beef and bananas. Allegations of narco-corruption against anyone in the region’s power elite are never hard to find. But which charges stick against which leaders in the U.S. media appears to have more to do with politics than fact.
