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Heroin is "Good for Your Health": Occupation Forces support Afghan Narcotics Trade (May 10, 2007)
"The occupation forces in Afghanistan are supporting the drug trade, which brings between 120 and 194 billion dollars of revenues to organized crime, intelligence agencies and Western financial institutions."

U.S., allies seen as losing drug war (May 7, 2007)
"The United States and its Latin American allies are losing a major battle in the war on drugs, according to indicators that show cocaine prices dipped for most of 2006 and U.S. users were getting more bang for their buck."

101-year-old Zambian man nabbed over cannabis cultivation, trafficking (May 3, 2007)
"DEC spokesperson Rosten Chulu confirmed the arrest of Timothy Chilekwa, a peasant farmer of Namembo village in Southern province who was born in 1906. Chulu said the old man was nabbed for alleged unlawful cultivation of cannabis weighing 1.2 tons. He was also found trafficking two sacks of cannabis weighing 6. 95 kg, Chulu said. The spokesperson said the 101-year-old would appear in court soon."

Was Timothy Leary Right? (May 3, 2007)
"Are psychedelics good for you? It's such a hippie relic of a question that it's almost embarrassing to ask. But a quiet psychedelic renaissance is beginning at the highest levels of American science, including the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and Harvard, which is conducting what is thought to be its first research into therapeutic uses of psychedelics (in this case, Ecstasy) since the university fired Timothy Leary in 1963. But should we be prying open the doors of perception again? Wasn't the whole thing a disaster the first time? The answer to both questions is yes."

The Farce of the War on Drugs (May 1, 2007)
"My brother Howard Wooldridge served as a decorated police officer and detective in Lansing, Michigan for 18 years. During that time, he collared killers, drunk drivers, child molesters, rapists, wife beaters and drug dealers. What he learned launched him on a crusade to stop the federal government’s useless 35 year 'War on Drugs.'"

Coca Growers Shake the Andes Once Again (April 27, 2007)
"During the last few days, coca growers, especially in Peru and Colombia, have been in the news again, as their actions have given the media something to talk about."

LSD as Therapy? Write about It, Get Barred from US (April 27, 2007)
"BC psychotherapist denied entry after border guard googled his work."

No Jail for Willie Nelson on Drug Charge (April 25, 2007)
While the editor of DrugWar.com applauds this decision by the judge, I can't help but wonder how hard the judge would have thrown the book at me for the exact same offense.

The War on Salvia Divinorum Heats Up (April 14, 2007)
"Middlebury, Vermont, this week declared a public health emergency to prevent a local business from selling it. It's already illegal in five states -- Louisiana, Missouri, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Delaware -- and a number of towns and cities across the country, and now politicians in at least seven other states have filed bills to make it illegal there. For the DEA, it is a 'drug of concern.'"

Book Offer: Lies, Damn Lies, and Drug War Statistics (April 14, 2007)
"Normally when we publish a book review in our Drug War Chronicle newsletter, it gets readers but is not among the top stories visited on the site. Recently we saw a big exception to that rule when more than 2,700 of you read our review of the new book Lies, Damned Lies, and Drug War Statistics: A Critical Analysis of Claims Made by the Office of National Drug Control Policy."

Plant growers served search warrant (April 11, 2007)
"Three WSU students were surprised when a plant they were growing in their closet was mistaken for marijuana."

California in bid to impose 7.25% sales tax on cannabis (April 10, 2007)
"For decades, smoking marijuana has been an illicit affair, a key anti-establishment ritual for America's counter-culture underground. But the legalisation of the drug for medicinal purposes in California has presented its advocates with a dilemma: to remain firmly on the wrong side of the law or accept a demand to pay taxes on its sale."

The Other War: Democratic Candidates are Deafeningly Silent on the Drug War (April 9, 2007)
"There is a major disconnect in the 2008 Democratic race for the White House. While all the top candidates are vying for the black and Latino vote, they are completely ignoring one of the most pressing issues affecting those constituencies: the failed War on Drugs, a war that has morphed into a war on people of color."

Ex-officer likens drug war to Prohibition (April 8, 2007)
"Retired police officer Peter Christ on Tuesday compared the contemporary war on drugs to National Prohibition of the 1920s."

Minnesota drug laws: Are they too harsh? (April 8, 2007)
Momentum gathers for review of sentencing rules

Drug Czar Blasted for Lack of Leadership (April 8, 2007)
"During the course of research for this series, it became apparent that many prominent players in the war on drugs don't have many compliments for the current drug czar, John Walters."

Is the Drug War Nearing an End? (April 8, 2007)
"Little by little by little there is some hope that the "war" on drugs is becoming a political issue - the first step in undoing a set of policies that make little sense no matter how you look at them."

Law Enforcement Group Visits Maine To Advocate For Legalization Of Drugs (April 8, 2007)
"LEAP, or Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, says it has 5,000 members, made up mostly of retired and active law enforcement professionals. The group tours the country speaking to various civic groups about what they call a $60 billion failed war on drugs."

Afghans pin hopes on a new economy (April 8, 2007)
"As a competitive economy awakens in one of the world's poorest countries, the residents of Kabul are jockeying to get ahead in a city flush with cash from US soldiers, foreign aid workers, new investors, parliamentarians, and drug traffickers."

Salvadoran Murders in Guatemala (April 8, 2007)
"If the trip to Guatemala was a fiasco, Colombia was no better, Bush's arrival in Bogotá couldn't have happened at a worse time as every moment ticked off another scandal, some of them leading in the direction ofo President Uribe's office, and nothing that Bush or Uribe president could say concealed the fact that the Colombia phase of the U.S. anti-drug war was more dead than alive, which was even more certain when it came to extraditing Colombian suspected felons to the U.S."

Analysis: U.S. anti-drug war in Afghanistan (April 8, 2007)
"In a bluntly worded letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the lawmakers said inter-agency rivalry and U.S. policy failures in Afghanistan risked allowing it to slide back into chaos."

Law Enforcement: This Week's Corrupt Cops Stories (April 7, 2007)
"A Georgia fire captain gets caught peddling coke, a pair of New Haven narcs lose their jobs, a former Mississippi police chief cops a plea, and a former Ohio cop goes back to prison. Let's get to it...."

Methamphetamine: Feds Make First Cold Medicine Bust Under Combat Meth Act (April 7, 2007)
"An Ontario, New York, man last Friday won the dubious distinction of being the first person arrested under the 2005 Combat Meth Epidemic Act. According to a DEA press release, William Fousse was arrested for purchasing cold tablets containing more than nine grams of pseudoephedrine within a one month period."

Harm Reduction: New Mexico Governor Signs Overdose Death Reduction Measure (April 7, 2007)
"New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D) Wednesday signed innovative legislation that would protect friends or family members who seek medical attention for drug overdose victims. The law is the first of its kind in the country."

Pot-Growing Takes Root in the Suburbs (April 1, 2007)
"In Coldwater Creek, a middle-class housing development outside Atlanta, the neighbors mind their own business and respect each other's privacy - ideal conditions, it turns out, for growing marijuana in the suburbs."

Bob Barr Flip-Flops on Pot (March 28, 2007)
"Bob Barr, who as a Georgia congressman authored a successful amendment that blocked D.C. from implementing a medical marijuana initiative, has switched sides and become a lobbyist for the Marijuana Policy Project."

What the heck is Sibel Edmonds' Case about? And why should I care? (March 28, 2007)
"Essentially, there is only one investigation – a very big one, an all-inclusive one... But I can tell you there are a lot of people involved, a lot of ranking officials, and a lot of illegal activities that include multi-billion-dollar drug-smuggling operations, black-market nuclear sales to terrorists and unsavory regimes, you name it... You can start from the AIPAC angle. You can start from the Plame case. You can start from my case. They all end up going to the same place, and they revolve around the same nucleus of people."

Mexican Envoy Highly Critical of U.S. Role in Anti-Drug Effort (March 23, 2007)
"The United States has contributed 'zilch' to Mexico's efforts to combat the nations' joint problem with criminal narcotics gangs, Mexico's new ambassador to Washington said yesterday."

Colorado Has Song in Its Heart, and Not Drugs on Its Mind (March 14, 2007- Free NYTimes registration required)
"The Colorado General Assembly wants to be quite clear on this point: When the singer-songwriter John Denver praised the joys of Colorado and sang about 'friends around the campfire, and everybody’s high,' in 1972, he was not referring to illicit drugs. Definitely not. Don’t even think it. The high in question, lawmakers say, is really about nature and the great outdoors — the tingly feeling you get after a nice hike, perhaps."

U.S. faults friends, foes in drug war (March 5, 2007)
"The United States said top anti-terror allies Afghanistan, Pakistan and Colombia had fallen short in the war on drugs despite enhanced counter-narcotics efforts and it criticized perennial foes Iran, North Korea and Venezuela for not cooperating."

Cuba’s War on Drugs (March 5, 2007)
"A review of the main results of the Cuban efforts against illegal drug trafficking as well as prevention during 2006, shows a marked reduction in the presence of drugs on the island, with 1.7 tons of narcotics seized, the lowest figure of the past 11 years and almost four times less than the amount detected in 2003."

Drug War Corrupting Cops In Hawaii and Elsewhere (March 5, 2007)
"Claiming to be the 'world’s leading drug policy newsletter,' the Drug War Chronicle publishes a regular online feature called, 'This Week’s Corrupt Cops Stories.' The typical Hawaii newspaper reader probably comes across these cops-gone-bad stories pretty rarely. But, when hundreds of reports compiled over the past year from around the nation are read at one sitting, they add up to a hidden cost of America’s ill-fated drug war -- widespread corruption inside local police departments, prisons and jails."

Drug war rips apart Mexico (March 5, 2007)
"More than 250 people were executed last year in Acapulco as the sweltering Pacific resort became the latest battleground between rival cartels battling for supremacy of the multibillion-dollar drug trade."

In Guatemala, officers' killings echo dirty war (March 5, 2007)
"The two sets of brazen killings set off a vicious diplomatic conflict between Guatemala and El Salvador — heightened by news reports suggesting that the congressmen were indeed drug dealers — and ignited a political scandal here. It shed light on how corrupt the National Police has become, and raised questions about links between drug dealers and high-level police officials, as well as whether the government can contain drug trafficking without international help."

Collision Course: Bolivia's "Coca, Si; Cocaine, No" Policy Runs Afoul of the International Drug Control Board and, Probably, the United States (March 1, 2007)
"A confrontation is brewing over Bolivian President Evo Morales' effort to rationalize coca production in his country and expand markets for coca-based products....Now, the Morales government is also pushing for expanded legal markets for coca products and, in a joint venture with the Venezuelan government, is preparing to begin coca product exports to that country."

Ga. Reconsiders No - Knock Warrant Rules (March 1, 2007)
"A group of lawmakers wants to make it harder for police to use ''no-knock'' warrants in the wake of a shootout that left an elderly woman dead after plainclothes officers stormed her home unannounced in a search for drugs."

Here we go again (Feb. 22, 2007)
"We're happy we could help with that, Mr. Vice President, but Colombian cocaine is still readily available in U.S. cities, so we have a difficult time thinking we got a good deal for our $4 billion. In fact, we don't believe Americans are getting their money's worth for any of the cash the government has thrown into the bottomless pit of the drug war. Court dockets are packed and prisons are overcrowded, yet illicit drugs are still readily available to anyone who wants them."

Latin America: Mexico Moves to Decriminalize Drug Possession -- So It Can Concentrate on Drug Traffickers (Feb. 22, 2007)
"Legislators from Mexican President Felipe's Calderon's National Action Party (PAN -- Partido de Accion Nacional) have introduced a bill in the Mexican Senate that would decriminalize the possession of small amounts of drugs for 'addicts.'"

DPS officials were told of lax lab security (Feb. 22, 2007)
"Texas Department of Public Safety officials were aware of security breaches in the handling of their drug evidence as recently as 2006 and as far back as at least 2003 — problems such as failure to log evidence out of storage, containers of marijuana left open and the lack of a monitoring system for a high-security drug vault — according to the agency's internal audits."

'Safest city' now has drug war (Feb. 22, 2007)
"From the shopping malls and the fashionable clothes of its residents, this could be any affluent U.S. suburb. Residents pride themselves on their prosperity. But in recent weeks, drug-related violence has shattered the tranquillity."

Mexican president gives soldiers pay hike as drug war intensifies (Feb. 22, 2007)
"Soldiers waging a nationwide offensive against drug traffickers will get a pay hike of nearly 50 percent this year in a bid to insulate them from corruption, Mexican President Felipe Calderon announced Monday."

New Federal Study Shows Methamphetamine Use Decreased Between 2002 and 2005 (Jan. 31, 2007)
"A new analysis of data from The National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) shows that past-year use of methamphetamine, a highly addictive stimulant, declined between 2002 and 2005 among persons age 12 or older....The study also shows that the number of persons who used methamphetamine for the first time in the 12 months before the survey remained stable between 2002 and 2004 but decreased between 2004 and 2005."

Tell Governor Spitzer to Support Rockefeller Drug Law Reform (Jan. 31, 2007)
"The Rockefeller Drug Laws require extremely harsh prison terms for the possession or sale of relatively small amounts of drugs. Most of the people incarcerated under these laws are convicted of low-level, nonviolent offenses, and many of them have no prior criminal records. Today 14,139 people are locked up for drug offenses in NY State prisons, comprising nearly 38% of the prison population. This costs New Yorkers over half a billion dollars a year. Send a message to Governor Spitzer now, urging him to support real reform."

Mexico eyes Colombian experience in drug battle (Jan. 27, 2007)
"Mexico's top prosecutor on Thursday looked to Colombia's experience in counter-narcotics and conflict for lessons to help his government battle drug cartels whose violence has engulfed parts of the country."

Rio gang kills seven as drug war spreads (Jan. 27, 2007)
"The mutilated bodies of seven youths, some with their heads and legs chopped off, have been found in an abandoned car in a notorious Rio de Janeiro slum. They appeared to be the latest victims of a long-running drug war that has made Rio, which depends heavily on tourism, one of the most violent cities in the world."

Drug Policy Reform Group to Partner with State of New Mexico in Federally-Funded Meth Prevention Education Program (Jan. 27, 2007)
"In a first for drug reform organizations, the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) New Mexico office has been designated to create a statewide methamphetamine education and prevention program directed at high school students, thanks to a $500,000 grant obtained by US Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) as part of a Justice Department appropriations bill. The grant is the result of years of close collaboration between DPA and New Mexico state and local officials dating back to the administration of former Gov. Gary Johnson (R), a prominent voice for drug law reform."

Spot in brain may control smoking urge (Jan. 27, 2007)
"Damage to a silver dollar-sized spot deep in the brain seems to wipe out the urge to smoke, a surprising discovery that may shed important new light on addiction. The research was inspired by a stroke survivor who claimed he simply forgot his two-pack-a-day addiction - no cravings, no nicotine patches, not even a conscious desire to quit."

Case highlights medical-pot dilemma (Jan. 23, 2007)
"'If they didn't arrest me with 1,500, it's not likely they're going to come back and arrest me for 50,' said Sarich, whose advocacy group, CannaCare, says it has provided marijuana plants for 1,200 patients all over the state. Some of his new plants, delivered by patients in Longview, Federal Way and Vancouver, Wash., are descendants of the plants he lost."

Alleged cartel members extradited to Texas (Jan. 23, 2007)
"A suspected Mexican drug lord whose cartel allegedly smuggled more than 4 tons of cocaine a month over the U.S. border will stand trial in Texas. Osiel Cardenas-Guillen, the alleged kingpin of the Gulf Cartel, and three other alleged drug lords appeared in a Houston court Monday. Mexican authorities delivered Cardenas-Guillen and 14 other alleged Mexican drug dealers and criminals to Houston late Friday and early Saturday, the Drug Enforcement Administration said."

Burdened U.S. military cuts role in drug war (Jan. 22, 2007)
"Stretched thin from fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military has sharply reduced its role in the war on drugs, leaving significant gaps in the nation's narcotics interdiction efforts."

S.F. area is No. 1 for regular drug use, study says (Jan. 21, 2007)
"The San Francisco metropolitan area has a higher percentage of people who are regular drug users than any other major metropolitan area in the USA, a study from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration found."

Executive Order 13420 -- Dismantling the DEA (Jan. 21, 2007)
"This is the order I will sign after delivering my inaugural address," says Steve Kubby, who is again running for office this time seeking the nomination from the Libertarian Party as their Presidential candidate.

Cocaine found on 99.9% of UK banknotes (Jan. 21, 2007)
"Pretty well every banknote in the UK shows traces of cocaine, forensic scientists have claimed. According to a report in the Sunday Telegraph, 99.9 per cent of the two billion notes currently in circulation have come into contact with Bolivian marching powder."

A Legacy of Torture: From Cointelpro to the Patriot Act (Jan. 21, 2007)
"In today's world, the US government's use of torture and complicity in its clients' use of it is part of the headlines on a regular basis. Yet very few US citizens believe that methods like waterboarding, beating, and electrical shocks could be -- and have been -- used on US citizens." But the fact that torture is used profusely in US jails and prisons is unsurprising to those who've been inside the US "justice" system.

Reefer Madness (Jan. 21, 2007)
"I was never an activist until I got busted [noted Tommy Chong]. But it ’s not so much my efforts as the substance itself. Pot lives and dies on its own reputation....Years ago, people would do booze jokes. Then they start dying of cirrhosis of the liver and all these alcohol-related car accidents. Alcohol started out as a fun thing and ended up as this evil thing that kills people. Pot is the opposite...."

In the Costly War on Drugs, Who's To Say What Is Right? (Jan. 21, 2007)
"It seems like you lack a certain enthusiasm for the war on drugs, I said. I do lack enthusiasm for the war on drugs, he said. I asked about legalization. He shrugged. 'Monday, Wednesday and Friday I think they should be legalized. Tuesdays and Thursdays I think they should be illegal. I don't like drugs. I strongly disapprove of them. The costs are great. But it's expensive to incarcerate somebody. The costs are enormous either way. I don't know what's right.'"

Democracy and Plan Colombia (Jan. 21, 2007)
Just what effects are the massive spraying in anti-cocaine and poppy efforts that are one of the main tenents of Plan Colombia, not to mention all the arms and training given to the Colombian military and governments to combat Colombian peasents...errr, I mean, dastardly narco-terrorists? No major advancement of democracy it appears.

Drug mafia, CIA blamed for sacking of Afghan governor (Jan. 21, 2007)
"As The Washington Post has plainly summarized, 'corruption and alliances formed by Washington and the Afghan government with anti-Taliban tribal chieftains, some of whom are believed to be deeply involved in the trade, [have] undercut the [counter-narcotics] effort.'"

PAST NEWS ARCHIVE

Drug War: Covert Money, Power & Policy: Neocolonialism

Coffee prices multiply approximately 3-fold from producer's wholesale to retail. Heroin multiplies approximately 200-fold from its Prohibition-inflated wholesale price to retail. Heroin now retails, by weight, for 10 times the price of gold. That, of course, makes it the basis of military power in Burma.

Military power is built on money, and, thanks to Prohibition, drug trafficking is the most profitable business on the planet. As the State Department itself puts it, in its end-of-year 1996 Enforcement Affairs report, "In terms of weight and availability, there is currently no commodity more lucrative than drugs. They are relatively cheap to produce and offer enormous profit margins that allow the drug trade to generate criminal revenues on a scale without historical precedent."

As anyone who has grown it knows, pot is as cheap and easy to grow as corn or squash, and can be mass-produced for a few dollars a pound. A legal pound of primo pot would retail for about $300. An illegal pound of primo pot now retails for about $3000.

The U.N estimates the global drug trade in the early 1990's to be worth 400 billion untaxed dollars a year. In 1994 Apolinar Biaz-Callejas of the Andean Commission of Jurists put it at $460 billion. That's about one-tenth of all global commerce. The legal value of that trade would be about a tenth of that.

Since military power is built on money, and since governments, or at least relations between governments, are built on military power, the structural effect of the artificial value has been to create, over the decades, an unbreakable symbiosis between drug-dealing and covert military intelligence. Each is the greatest strategic ally of the other. The political effect has been the institutionalization of global industrial fascism, death-squad genocide, wherever campesinos threaten to take control of their own land. I speak of Burma, Guatemala, the Philippines, Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Indonesia, Malaysia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uruguay, Congo, Liberia, Nigeria - the list is endless.

According to the U.N. Drug Control Program, the biggest heroin and cocaine trading institutions in the world are the Burmese, Pakistani, Mexican, Peruvian and Colombian militaries - all armed and trained by U.S. military intelligence - in the name of the anti-drug effort, of course. Funny how all that effort never has any strategic effect.

The centers of power controlling the trade in these demanded global commodities are the same centers of power disseminating the artificial hysteria necessary for their continued criminalization. That keeps the retail price a hundred times higher than the legal value and the trade exclusively in the hands of the muscle.

Another name for the muscle is military intelligence. The $500 billion dollar drug trade is run by allies we train and arm. Batista was no more an aberration than Somoza, or Diem, or Ne Win, or Chiang, or the Shah, or Marcos, or Salazar, or Papadopoulos, or Stroessner, or Mobutu, or Amin, or Videla, or Noriega, or Cedras, or Samper, or Salinas, or Suharto, or Fujimori.

The politic Clinton administration, on June 28, 1996, released the report of its Intelligence Oversight Board: “The Army School of the Americas . . . used improper instruction materials . . . certain passages appeared to condone practices such as executions of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion, and false imprisonment.” As Clinton’s continued support for the military fascists in Indonesia, Burma, Peru, Colombia, etc. proves, that understatement was just a “partial hangout,” intelligence damage control, not a basic policy shift.

Guatemala is the archetypal CIA-OPS operation, a real pattern-setter. In October of 1944 a popular coup led by liberal young army officers finished the brutal 14-year dictatorship of General Jorge Úbico.

The triumvirate that led the 1944 coup: Major Francisco Arana, Jorge Toriello and Captain Jacobo Arbenz; Rafael Morales

In March, Dr. Juan Arévalo, an idealistic scholar, was elected president with 85% of the vote. Arévalo's political hero was Franklin Roosevelt, whose "four freedoms" - freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear - became the basis of his political program.

The 1951 elections saw Arévalo replaced by his Defense Minister, 41 year old Jacobo Arbenz, one of the engineers of the 1944 October Revolution that brought electoral democracy to Guatemala. Arbenz was elected with the votes of 63% of an electorate that now included literate women. The problem with the brilliantly competent Arbenz was that he proceeded to do everything Arévalo had so eloquently promised.

Arbenz nationalized nothing except some unused rural land. He left all businesses in place, but set out to break the most destructive monopolies, what he called "feudalism," by competing with them, creating a "a national and independent capitalism."

He began the construction of a government-run hydroelectric facility to compete with the Fruit-run monopoly and also initiated rural electrification and telephone service. These were, of course, the same infrastructure techniques that had been used to build the United States. Private enterprise built none of our highways, public schools or harbors, and almost all of our seminal railroads and hydroelectric facilities were publicly financed.

Arbenz then challenged United Fruit's rural slave-labor system, which dominated 90% of the country's 3 million people, 60% of them Indians, and most of the rest mestizos, known as ladinos. The 1952 Agrarian Reform Law aimed mostly at plantations larger than 670 acres, although fincas of over 223 acres were vulnerable if more than a third of the land was unused. Arbenz confiscated only unused arable land, distributing 1.5 million acres to 100,000 landless families, in 42 acre plots. Arbenz himself, his extraordinary Salvadoran wife and his Foreign Minister, lost thousands of acres.

Arbenz at his inauguration; Rafael Morales

Practicing sweat-equity free-enterprise, Arbenz immediately put the confiscated land into production by providing government-run support systems, as Roosevelt had done. He instituted no political repression of any kind in a mixed economy that was, for the first time, beginning to grow by leaps and bounds. United Fruit, Ike and the Dulles brothers insisted that this constituted "Communism in the Caribbean" and "a Russian toehold" in the hemisphere.

Guatemala, of course, had virtually no relations at all with Russia. The Communist Party, in fact, had been the only party that remained illegal under the idealistic libertarian Arévalo, who insisted that communism was "contrary to human nature." Arbenz' Revolutionary Action Party legalized the Guatemalan Workers Party in 1951, and it held 4 of 56 seats in Congress.

Arbenz used Arévalo's 1947 Labor Code, which was based on Roosevelt's Wagner Act. It insisted on the right of plantation workers to unionize, strike and bargain collectively. For the first time in Guatemalan history, the campesinos had military protection. Arbenz established rural cooperatives, public schools, public clinics, public buses and local cultural institutions. Everything Arbenz did, in fact, conformed to John Kennedy's 1961 Alliance for Progress model.

One of the designers of the Alliance for Progress, Kennedy's Special Assistant Arthur Schlesinger, wrote in 1946: "All across Latin America the ancient oligarchies - landholders, Church, and Army - are losing their grip. There is a groundswell of inarticulate mass dissatisfaction on the part of peons, Indians, miners, plantation workers, factory hands, classes held down past all endurance and now approaching a state of revolt."

Like Arbenz, Schlesinger understood that the key to political stability was economic, so he looked to the inclusive social democratic parties, which built from the ground up. Kennedy would have given Arbenz all the help he could, in order, as Schlesinger put it, "to check Peronismo and Communism." The Dulles brothers, quite literally, chose Peronismo.

Since Arbenz was serious about land reform, he put committed Marxists, whom he trusted not to sell out, in charge of administering the Agrarian Reform program. But they were bound by the strictures of the law, and the basis of that law was sweat-equity free-enterprise. The market that the campesinos were encouraged to enter was just that, a free market. Arbenz' Agrarian Reform Program was his idea of a rural Small Business Administration. He was succeeding in rendering thousands of campesinos economically independent, creating a genuinely nationalist, capitalist alternative to corporate colonialism. What the U.S. proceeded to do, however, convinced the 25 year-old Argentine doctor Ché Guevara, who was part of this, and quite a few others, that militaristic communism was indeed the only alternative to United Fruit.

Arbenz seized nearly 400,000 of United Fruit's 550,000 acres, all unused, and all originally seized from the Indians. He compensated United Fruit in government bonds based on the company's own radically deflated 1952 book value, which the company had used to lower its already miniscule land taxes. The company was enraged, and the company was led by Sam "the Banana Man" Zemurray, one of the craftiest and most dangerous fighters ever to rise from the streets of New Orleans.

Zemurray's team included not only his Mafia partners on the New Orleans docks, led by the deadly Carlos Marcello, but the Boston Brahmin Thomas Cabot, for a short while a president of United Fruit. Thomas Cabot was the brother of John Moors Cabot, the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs. Another major Fruit stockholder was Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who violently denounced Arévalo's unionism from the Senate floor in 1949.

Both Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles, CIA Director since 1953, were major Fruit stockholders. Through their law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, they had helped arrange, through Schroeder Banking, the 1936 United Fruit takeover of Guatemala's rail system, the International Railways of Central America.

Allen Dulles was a director of the British-based Schroeder Banking Ltd, which he had turned into a key conduit of CIA funds. United Fruit was, therefore, a de facto CIA proprietary. When the Dulles brothers engineered the destruction of the Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953, the largest corporate beneficiary was the de-nationalized Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, largely controlled by Schroeder Banking. Like Arévalo, Mossadegh had in fact refused to legalize the Communist (Tudeh) Party. Mossadegh's threat was economic nationalism, not the communism the Dulles brothers had falsely accused him of. Like Arbenz, Mossadegh was a liberal democrat replaced by a murderous fascist dope peddler. The results, as we have seen, have not been happy.

Peron's Argentina, Stroessner's Paraguay and Papadopoulos' Greece became major drug entrepôts thanks to cooperating German, British, French and American secret services. During the 1947 civil war in Greece between the popular leftist coalition that had defeated the Nazis and the British-backed Royalists, the U.S., using Gehlen's agents, backed IDEA, the Holy Bond of Greek Officers. These were the fascist elements in the professional army that had fought with the Nazis during the war. With enough American matériel for 15,000 men, Colonel Papadopoulos, a Nazi war criminal, was able to take control of Greek intelligence, the KYP, and thereby control the Greek military. In 1967, Papadopoulos took direct control of Greece in a bloody coup that initiated a period of death squad assassinations for which Greek democrats have yet to forgive the U.S.

Aside from the "Peronist" Dulles brothers and the high command in the State Department, Zemurray's United Fruit team included "Tommy the Cork" Corcoran, one of Roosevelt's original brain trusters. Corcoran represented the Teamster insurance company, U. S. Life, Chiang Kai-shek's brother-in-law, and the CIA's proprietary airline, Civil Air Transport, which serviced the Kuomintang opium armies in Burma.

The KMT's main Bangkok connection, General Phao, the commander of the Thai police who coordinated CAT air traffic with the KMT, was also the commander of the Thai government's relationship with the CIA. Explained KMT Gen. Tuan Shi-wen, "To fight you must have an army, and an army must have guns, and to buy guns you must have money. In these mountains, the only money is opium." According to Professor McCoy, to whom Gen. Tuan was speaking, the first snow-white #4 heroin lab was opened by KMT-affiliated Hong Kong chemists on the Thai-Burma border in the late 60's. The KMT are also known, fittingly, as the "White Chinese."

The KMT's lawyer, "Tommy the Cork" Corcoran, was also United Fruit's lawyer. Corcoran was intimate with the entire leadership of the CIA, which he had helped to organize, and which was, in any case, extremely sympathetic to United Fruit. Walter Bedell Smith, Gen. Eisenhower's wartime chief of staff and Truman's CIA director, was now John Foster Dulles' Undersecretary of State. In 1953 he had asked Corcoran for the presidency of United Fruit, and in 1955 was named to its board of directors. Gen. Robert Cutler, chairman of the National Security Council, already sat on the United Fruit board. Robert Hill, ambassador to Costa Rica, got to the UF board in 1960. Hill was connected to Grace Shipping, another CIA friend heavily invested in Guatemala.

Sam "the Banana Man" Zemurray's team also included Edward Bernays, the formidable "father of public relations," who filled the American media with phony reportage about "communism in Guatemala." The right-wing John Clements, a Hearst vice-president with his own major magazines and PR firm, did the same. Once the "demographics" had been taken care of, Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers had the support of every Democrat in Congress. With Nicaragua's Somoza, the Dominican Republic's Trujillo and Cuba's Batista champing at the bit, Operation Success began in early June of 1954.

With control of the air, the sea and all the neighboring countries, Allen Dulles' CIA had no trouble overwhelming Jacobo Arbenz with a military and propaganda campaign coordinated from both inside and outside the country. Aerial bombardment of the presidential palace was combined with a mercenary ground force of about 180 men, led by Guatemalan Col. Castillo Armas, the size and popularity of which was wildly exaggerated by well placed Radio Liberty transmitters.

In 1957 the intrepid Mafia point-man and Batista operative, Johnny Rosselli, made another trip to Guatemala City, as he had done many times throughout 1956. This time the trip was in reaction to Castillo's jailing of his partner, casino operator Ted Lewin. Castillo was promptly gunned down, and Col. Enrique Trinidad Oliva, Johnny Rosselli's gambling and narcotics partner, became the new head of Guatemala's secret police.

Col. Trinidad Oliva was also the key CIA contact in the Guatemalan government, working under his half-brother, the defense minister. Trinidad Oliva coordinated all "foreign aid" coming through the CIA conduit ICA, the International Cooperation Administration, the forerunner of the Agency for International Development, AID.

Rosselli and Trinidad then helped the murderous old Gen. Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, one of Úbico's assassins with close ties to mob partner Trujillo, to become head of state. Mario Sandoval Alarcón. "the father of Latin America's death squads," organized the right-wing of Castillo's party into the National Liberation Movement  and hired himself out to Trinidad and Rosselli.

The same year that Johnny Rosselli helped the CIA engineer the change in the Guatemalan government, he was asked by his Syndicate associates to put together Giancana in Chicago, Costello in New York, Lansky in Miami, and Marcello in New Orleans for the huge $50 million Tropicana construction project in Las Vegas. According to Fred Black, a political fixer who was close to Rosselli, Bobby Baker and Lyndon Johnson, Rosselli's influence was such that he gave orders to the Dorfmans, who controlled the Teamsters' huge Central States Pension Fund. During the 50's and 60's, it was Johnny Rosselli who "set up protection" in Las Vegas.

Throughout 1956 and 57 Rosselli travelled back and forth from Mexico City, the planning center for all CIA operations in Latin America, and Guatemala City. An experienced ICA operative noted that "John had access to everyone and everything that was going on there. He had an open door at the embassy in Guatemala, and in Costa Rica. He was in there plenty of times. I know because I saw him. He supplied information to the government, and had a hand in a lot of the intrigues that were going on."

This means, operationally, that Johnny Rosselli's interests became the CIA's interests. "Throughout Latin America," notes Frank McNeil, a junior political officer in the Guatemalan Embassy in 1960, "there were two American governments - one intelligence and one official." McNeil's boss, Ambassador John Muccio, learned of the Bay of Pigs invasion force being trained in Guatemala only after the story broke in The New York Times. As John Kennedy found out to his chagrin, Rosselli, his Syndicate and Batistiano allies, had more operational clout than the State Department.

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