Much as we need SDI, America also desperately needs a continental shield against a devastating barrage more insidious than nuclear missiles. Being fired at us by our same ruthless ideological enemies, in this case in league with mercenary criminals, is the multi-billion-dollar fallout of drugs godfathered by Fidel Castro's upper-echelon officials. This international narco-terrorism's publicly avowed purpose is to destabilize existing Latin American governments while wasting the minds and bodies of young Americans--who pay for their own destruction.
Hard evidence in U.S. official hands, including photos, clearly confirms the links between Marxist Latin American terrorists and criminal drug overloads, with Cuba, Colombia and Nicaragua as centers for refining and illicit shipping of today's deadly narcotic of choice, cocaine. A mounting record shows that the partnerships between traffickers and terrorists are growing tougher, bolder, richer and more devastating to Latin American stability each year.
In the late 1970s, and early 1980s, as cocaine displaced Mexican brown heroin as the drug most pushed for Yankee dollars. The narcotics production that had been spread through half a dozen countries from Mexico to Bolivia and in the Caribbean began concentrating increasingly in Cuba, Colombia and Nicaragua. The Marxist-Leninism that rules the capitals of Cuba and Nicaragua also rules the roost in Colombia's eastern llanos, the country's spottily forested plains.
Colombia is the world's principal grower of hardy, tropical coca leaves, the raw material of cocaine, which traffickers have long refined there, along with tons more smuggled in mostly by air from Bolivia and Peru. The sway and affluence of Colombia's leftist guerrillas of the Movimiento 19 de Abril (M-19), Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), and Ejercito Popular de Liberacion (EPL) grew in the Colombian backlands as they strong-armed more and more drug growers into coalition.
The guerrilla groups, it should be noted, swap names and affiliations freely among themselves with kaleidoscopic effect. This is why M-19 has popped up again after Colombian authorities announced its destruction three times. M-19 has recently staged raids as far afield as Ecuador. And on November 6, 1985, in the heart of Colombia's capital, M-19 carried out a daylight armed seizure of the national Palace of Justice, seat of the Justice Ministry and the nation's Supreme Court, taking hostage all of the Supreme Court justices in the building at the time--twelve of them, including the Chief Justice.
When Colombia's president Belisario Betancur refused to accede to the narco-terrorist demands and instead ordered Colombian troops to attack, the besieged terrorists murdered all twelve of the Supreme Court Justices they held, firing point blank into the head of each, execution fashion. Although ranking M-19 commanders were killed along with forty-seven other hostages and counter-attacking soldiers, the raiders succeeded in destroying records of petitions to extradite the guerrillas' drug-overlord partners from Colombia to America.
Strategically, the fiery, costly guerrilla action warned Americans and Latin Americans alike not to try the response to terrorism that President Ronald Reagan accented in the Achile Lauro episode: that terrorists must be legally tried in constitutional
...
Read Full Article
|
