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The Underground Empire Strikes Back
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11520 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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10 / 1986 |
2,194 Words |
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March Bell
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We are losing the war on drugs and losing badly, not just in our neighborhoods, school yards, and workplaces, but at the foreign policy and national security level.
Explanations and solutions for the drug problem range from the Reverend Jesse Jackson's "say no" campaign to the call for stiff penalties for users. President Reagan, acting on the theory that "big is better," wants the U.S. military involved. Meanwhile, countries of origin insist they are doing all they can to curb production and that if U.S. demand were lessened, the narcotics business would shrink accordingly.
James Mills, author of The Underground Empire (Doubleday, 1986), offers a new and plausible answer. Mills believes that narcotics organizations have formed secret alliances for mutual benefit with national governments. The power, wealth, and position of government officials place them well beyond the reach of traditional buy-bust-and-prosecute law enforcement.
Mills argues that the rarified air of international diplomacy makes U.S. relationships with foreign government officials the sole domain of the Department of State. Agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) simply do not bust vice presidents of foreign countries.
Mills' views were formed over a five-year period during which he personally shadowed a little known anti-narcotics unit called Centac.
Evidence emerges
The claim of government involvement in narcotics trafficking has been emerging in piecemeal fashion for some time, at a recent briefing of top U.S. Senate staff, for example, the former head of the Central Bank of Suriname produced authentic documents demonstrating that Libyan agents have placed Suriname officially in the business of drug trafficking. Suriname's former Cuban caretakers departed shortly after the U.S. rescue effort in Grenada, and Libyans were subsequently invited in to help run the economy. The secret documents pointed not to mere corruption in high places or official acquiescence, but to concrete plans for governmental participation in drug trafficking as economic policy.
Furthermore, foreboding evidence has surfaced that Mexican government officials were present during the torture and murder of U.S. DEA agent Enrique Camarena.
In another example, top Colombian drug trafficker Jaime Guillot Lara is known to have negotiated a business deal with Rene Rodriquez Cruz, a senior Cuban intelligence officer; Aldo Sontainaria Cuadrado, vice admiral of the Cuban navy; and several other high-level officials of the Cuban government. The Cubans promised safe haven for drug ships. In return, Guillot paid cash and smuggled weapons to the M-19, a Cuban-backed terrorist group.
It is now clear that when the M-19 attacked and brutally murdered the members of the Colombian Supreme Court last year, the motive was not only terrorism; the guerrillas immediately destroyed investigative files on drug dealers.
U.S. prosecutors, indictment in hand, thought they would bring Guillot to trial when the
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