Drug War: Covert Money, Power & Policy: Viva Zapata

Zapatista Links

In 1978 the CIA's Confederación Anticomunista Latina, CAL, adopted "the Banzer Plan" for the coordinated death-squad tracking of "liberation theology" priests and nuns throughout Latin America. This was an extension of the CIA's Operation Condor.  The populist priests and nuns of Catholic Action, for instance, had become a formidable force in Guatemala, bordering southern Mexico. Catholic Action organized at least 150,000 peasants into rural coops that provided economic autonomy, the very last thing that the fascists wanted to see. Catholic Action's "Christian Base Communities" stressed education and consciousness-raising, and cooperated with one another throughout the highlands. They presented an alternative to both the guerrillas and the government, and, in many cases, peacefully supported the political goals of the guerrillas.

Catholic Action stood in opposition to a Latin Church too often ruled by the likes of Archbishop Casariego, who, in a famous photo, blessed U.S. military equipment for the Zacapa mass-murder campaign. During the 70's, throughout Latin America, the local Catholic hierarchy was pushed into active support of "the Church of the Poor" by the genuine Christian mysticism of its working class priests and nuns. The most famous convert to social activism was El Salvador's Archbishop Oscar Romero, whose support for the poor was deep and genuine. The Maryknoll Sisters have also proven to be particularly effective international freedom fighters who have indeed brought glory upon the Church. Many have been murdered by CAL death squads.

Overseeing the Banzer Plan in Mexico was the Bolivian CIA station chief who was Felix Rodriguez' boss when they hunted down Ché Guevara, Hugh Murray. In Mexico, Murray operated as a DEA agent. He had been recruited into the DEA to work with his old CIA buddy Lucien Conein, then running Nixon's covert DEA operations. "The Federal Bureau of Narcotics provided cover for the Central Intelligence Agency since just about the day it was formed," writes criminologist Prof. Alan Block. Murray's two chief Mexican contacts, DFS chief Miguel Nazar Haro and Mexico City Police Chief Arturo Durazo Moreno, both made a fortune in the drug trade, and both ran fascist death squads.

The DFS, the Federal Security Directorate, Mexico's CIA-trained combined CIA and FBI, was created as a subdivision of the Interior Ministry in the 1940's. In the mid-70's it organized Mexico's competing dealers and growers, centralizing all Mexican-based dope distribution. This operation was based in Guadalajara, home of the "Owl" death squads and the CIA's Autonomous University of Guadalajara, the Owl base, from which emanated the DFS's "White Brigade" death squads. The centralization enabled the DFS to rake off 25% of the cartel's gross - billions - and to protect its income more efficiently.

The Owls were founded by Carlos Cuesta Gallardo, a Mexican Nazi who spent World War II in Germany. Hitler's plan was to use Cuesta as his Mexican Quisling. The co-founder of the Owls was Father Julio Meinveille, an Argentine Jesuit. Meinveille is the author of The Jew, The Cabal of Progressivism, Among the Church and the Reich and Conspiracy Against the Church. These are the Owls' bibles.

High, very high up on the Owls' enemies list was Pope John XXIII, certainly the greatest Pope of the 20th century. He was a Jew, doncha know. Makes us Hebes proud. Pope Paul VI was not only a Jew, but a drug addict! Makes us dopers proud. Every time I take a poke, I get the heavenly feeling that I'm tokin with the Pope. Meinveille was the main speaker at the 1972 CAL conference in Mexico City. The Owls' front man at Vatican Council II was Jesuit Father Saenz y Arriaga, who was excommunicated for forging the signatures of Catholic leaders on hate literature.

Cuesta Gallardo founded the Autonomous University of Guadalajara in 1935. By 1960 Gallardo's University was just a few dilapidated buildings with an annual budget of $50,000. But CIA agent Oscar Wiegland, U.S. consul in Guadalajara, arranged AID funds for the struggling "university." By 1975 Cuesta's annual budget was $10 million. This is a CIA-financed hate-center, posing as a university, that runs classes in fascist "philosophy" and, literally, coordinates CAL death squad activities, and the dope-dealing that finances them, throughout Latin America.

When Manuel Buendia, a famous investigative journalist for Mexico City's daily Excelsior revealed these facts in 1984, he was shot dead. First on the murder scene was the Mexican DFS, whose agents immediately cleaned out Buendia's files, which were said to contain a videotape of high government officials meeting with Mexico's most powerful drug dealers. The engineer of the murder was the head of the DFS, Antonio Zorilla, whom Buendia had trusted as a source and confidant. Buendia was apparently unaware that the DFS shared operational control of the Owls.

At this time the DFS ran a fleet of 600 tanker trucks, ostensibly for ferrying natural gas. According to both objective DEA investigators and an informant DFS agent considered reliable by these hardboiled pros, "They ran ten to twelve trucks a day into Phoenix and Los Angeles. They had the whole border wired." The wiring was done, obviously, using the DFS border zone commanders. The DEA and FBI are always chasing some DFS border zone commander for trafficking, usually with his paper money trial or gaudy spending.

The first director of the DFS, Capt. Rafael Chavarri, after he left the agency, went to work for Mexico's leading drug trafficker, Jorge Moreno Chauvet. Through the 40's and 50's Chauvet was a major Syndicate heroin distributor and pot and coke supplier. The Mexican border is as porous today as it was then, although the contest for control has gotten more violent. That's what killed Enrique Camarena, the DEA agent who got too close to the massive DFS system. Despite considerable publicity about this, nothing will change. Elaine Shannon: "Most DEA agents who worked in Mexico and on the border considered the DFS the private army of the drug traffickers. They called the DFS badge 'a license to traffic.'"

Since the drug trade is worth billions, it should come as no surprise that the most powerful traffickers carry DFS (now DGSN) and Interior Ministry credentials, have the right to carry submachine guns, install wiretaps and interrogate anyone. The DFS/DGSN, of course, is the enforcement arm of the PRI, Mexico's ruling party. PRI stands for "Institutional Revolutionary Party" - how's that for an oxymoron? Until the last election, when its rightwing clone took over, it ruled Mexico uninterruptedly since 1921, using and discarding "kingpins" as needed. What remains is the DFS/DGSN - the Federal Security Directorate/General Directorate of Investigations and National Security; the IPS - the Bureau of Social and Political Investigations; and the PJF - the Federal Judicial Police.

The DFS/DGSN Interior Ministry is the CIA's main base in Mexico. As one disgusted DEA agent put it, none other than Dennis Dayle, 1978-82 chief of Centac, the DEA's international strike force: "In my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA." Dayle turned to novelist and reporter James Mills to advertise this. The result was Mills' The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace. Concludes Mills:

"The tracks are everywhere. The dapper, aristocratic Mr. Lung - 02 to his American government contacts - speaks laughingly of CIA-supported Thais helicoptering up the mountains to collect their 'goodies' from CIA client Chang Chi-fu [Khun Sa], the world's foremost opium dealer. Chang's heroin-dealing colleague, Chinese General Li Wen-huan, is known to be a CIA dependent. The CIA terminates Operation Durian, a DEA assault against [Chiu chau] Lu Hsu-shui, whose wife happens to be a cousin of Poonsiri Chanyasak, the Communist Lao government's 'minister of heroin,' and who himself turns out today to be associated with a representative of Communist Chinese intelligence. Assassin Michael Decker, suspected of CIA connections [SEAL, Operation Phoenix], describes a CIA weapons brochure found in the personal papers of Alberto Sicilia-Falcon, a major marijuana-heroin-cocaine dealer also suspected of employment by the CIA. Sicilia-Falcon and his influential bullfighter friend Gaston Santos join in a CIA-sanctioned Portugese arms deal. Sicilia-Falcon's friend and advisor, CIA-trained José Egozi, also involved in the Portugese weapons deal, talks to Centac agents and ends up hanging from a bed sheet in his Mexican prison cell. Sicilia, under torture, is said to confess to CIA drugs and weapons operations intended to destablilize Latin nations. Rearrested after his escape, facing assassination or further torture, Sicilia is rescued by a high Mexican official the CIA later identifies as its 'most important source in Mexico and Central America.' [Miguel Nazar Haro] In Panama the CIA inhibits a DEA intelligence operation, and blocks a Washington meeting between Panama's drug-dealing leader and DEA bosses." Dennis Dayle spent the better part of 1978-82 demonstrating these facts to Mills, while he was running the DEA's Central Tactical Unit.

In November of 1984 Mexican Federal Police, trapped by conservative American diplomatic pressure and aggressive DEA agents - flashing incriminating aerial photos - were forced to raid one of their own protected operations. With DEA agents, including Camarena, in tow, they turned up 10,000 tons of marijuana being grown on 150 acres in Chihuahua. That is more pot than the U.S. officially estimated was grown in all Mexico that year - in one bust.

DEA agents estimated the retail value to be $2.5 billion. This is real geopolitical power we're talking about, a weed artificially made as valuable as a precious metal. You better damn well not try to collapse that price. This enormously valuable high-tech plantation grew labor-intensive primo sinsemilla, "without seeds," marijuana in which the flowers are pinched back, causing the potent resin to accumulate in the leaves.

It was the peons like those on the Chihuahua plantation, who had been working for $6 a day, who recently joined their brethren in Chiapas and revolted, advocating their right to grow whatever the hell they wanted on an acre or two of their own.

As Subcommander Marcos, above, put it, in the Lacandona Jungle Declaration of August 1992 that announced the Zapatista rebellion: "Fifty-four percent of the population of Chiapas suffer from malnutrition, and in the highlands and forest this percentage increases to 80%. A campesino's average diet consists of coffee, corn, tortillas, and beans. One million Indigenous people live in these lands and share a disorienting nightmare with mestizos and ladinos: their only option, 500 years after the "Meeting of Two Worlds," is to die of poverty or repression."

"Government agencies made some horrifying statistics known: in Chiapas 14,500 people die every year, the highest mortality rate in the country. The causes? Curable diseases such as respiratory infections, enteritis, parasites, amoebas, malaria, salmonella, scabies, dengue, pulmonary tuberculosis, trachoma, typhus, cholera and measles."

"The oldest of the old in the Indigenous communities say that there once was a man named Zapata who rose up with his people and sang out, "Land and Freedom!" These old campesinos say that Zapata didn't die, that he must return. These old campesinos also say that the wind and the rain and the sun tell the campesinos when to cultivate the land, when to plant and when to harvest. They say that hope is also planted and harvested. They also say that the wind and the rain and the sun are now saying something different: that with so much poverty, the time has come to harvest rebellion instead of death. That is what the old campesinos say. The powerful don't hear; they can't hear, they are deafened by the brutality that the Empire shouts in their ears. 'Zapata,' insists the wind, the wind from below, our wind." Below, Zapata, and two of the women who fought with him.

On New Year's Day, 1994, the Zapatistas took San Cristóbal de las Casas, the old colonial capitol of Chiapas, and five surrounding towns. Dozens of federal police were killed before the Zapatistas retreated into the rugged Cañadas. Since then many Chiapas towns have kicked out the PRI and told its caciques what to do with their demands for a share of the crop.

The marching song of the original Zapatistas, who fatalistically called themselves "cockroaches," went: La cucaracha, la cucaracha, ya no puede viajar, porque no tiene, porque no tiene, marijuana que fumar. Today's Zapatista National Liberation Army, understanding that their ancient Mayan sacramentalism has been used as a pretext for their rape at the hands of the conquistador PRI, has banned all drugs and alcohol while at the same time calling for the "legalization of soft drugs throughout the planet." Below, Mexican troops in the Chiapas highlands, 1997.

The Zapatista "International Encounter" statement of August, 1996 insisted that the Drug War "has converted narcotrafficking into one of the most successful clandestine means of obtaining extraordinary profits" and called for "channelling the resources destined for combatting narcotrafficking into programs of development and social welfare." But Barry McCaffrey didn't become a field general by engineering cuts in his budget, or by bankrupting his "assets." The Green Berets ain't the Peace Corps.

In June of 1985, the commander of the Yucatán eradication zone, Hugo Quintanilla, his chief of pilots, and the entire Federal Judicial Police unit from the state of Campeche were arrested for trafficking in cocaine with the Herrera family, the Mexican equivalent of the Genoveses.

In July of 1990, the Mexican Secretary of the Navy, Adm. Mauricio Schleske, retired, to live part-time by his next-door neighbor in Houston, Adm. José Luís Cubria. Cubria was the recently retired Director General of the Mexican Merchant Marine. Between 1986 and 88, Schleske had military control of the Veracruz-Brownsville region, and Cubria controlled the access of commercial shipping to the same region. The Houston real estate each man bought during this period far exceeded in value anything their legal salaries could have afforded.

On November 7th, 1991, 100 Mexican soldiers, helping to unload a planeload - tons - of Colombian cocaine near Veracruz, were interrupted by Mexican drug agents. Seven of the drug agents were shot through the head, execution style. The Colombian plane escaped, the soldiers went unpunished, and the coke was distributed.

It is this army that Clinton, McCaffrey, Gelbard and Company are now arming and training in the name of the anti-drug effort. McCaffrey's "Hueys" and "Rapid Reaction Units," of course, are invariably aimed at the poor campesinos trying to maintain control of their own land. Shortly after the January 1994 onset of the Zapatista rebellion, in late April, Defense Secretary William Perry huddled with his Mexican counterpart, Gen. Enrique Cervantes Aguirre, to "explore ways in which our militaries could cooperate better."

In May, along with the first dozen of the 50 promised Hueys, combat helicopters, went Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey to oversee the formation of GAT, the Anti-Terrorist Group. GAT coordinates Mexico's secret service death squads with those of Guatemala, Spain and Argentina. Green Beret Gen. McCaffrey, who has operated as a "counterinsurgency expert" in the U.S. Southern Command since 1969, helped to coordinate the original Operation Condor death squads in the 1970's and 80's, which were also "anti-drug" operations.

Barry McCaffrey applauded the December of 1996 appointment of a career army officer, Gen. José de Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, rather than another corrupt politician, to head the INCD, Mexico's DEA. This coincided with the replacement of opposition party reformist Lozano as Attorney General, apparently for turning up way too much information on the PRI's family feud. Gen. Gutiérrez, said McCaffrey, "has a reputation of impeccable integrity, and he is known as an extremely forceful and focused commander.''

On February 19, 1997, after less than three months on the job, Gen. Gutiérrez was relieved of his INCD command and formally charged with being on the payroll of Amado Carillo Fuentes, Mexico's "Lord of the Skies.'' Carillo had pioneered the use of low-flying jetliners to transport multi-ton loads of cocaine from his Colombian partners to Mexico. Carillo, a power for years under Salinas, did this from his position within Mexican military intelligence. He carried Mexican Federal Judicial Police Group Chief credentials for special investigations and an officer's gold card.

Lucindo Carillo, cousin of Amado, was also un Jefe de Grupo de PJF, in Agua Prieta, Sonora, a port. The PJF Commandant in Agua Prieta, Luis Manuel Palofax-Juarez, was also a documented associate of Amado Carillo. Gen. Gutiérrez, one of the most powerful men in Mexican military intelligence, and his two top military aides, were also formally charged with stacking the INCD with Carillo's agents.

Since three-quarters of South America's cocaine must pass through Mexico on its way to the U.S., we are talking about a very high stakes power game - tens of billions in regular trade - $30 billion annually according to the U.S. Justice Department. Mexican military intelligence is not about to let that kind of power slide. That's why Gutiérrez' two top military aides were also indicted - they were under orders. That kind of money buys armaments.

Before he was relieved of command, Gutiérrez had been given repeated top-secret briefings on all Mexican-American anti-smuggling efforts and intelligence, including definitive lists of the INCD/DEA's paid Mexican informants. "The Lord of the Skies" might as well have been personally briefed by Barry McCaffrey himself. The head of the DEA, Thomas Constantine, said Gen. Gutiérrez probably would prove more damaging to the DEA than Aldrich Ames had been to the CIA.

"Aw shucks," said Barry, "I didn't know." DEA spokeman James McGivney backed McCaffrey up: "It's not our job to vet these people. We don't go around spooking military and government officials; we've got enough to do with the crooks." Pollyanna is running the DEA? Am I supposed to believe that the premier counterinsurgency expert of the vast U.S. Southern Command naval, air, radar and information system "just ain't too good at this intelligence stuff"?

Gen. Gutiérrez' narcotics trafficking was well-covered in the DEA's NADDIS (Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Information System) database long before McCaffrey hailed him as Mexico's salvation at the head of the INCD. On February 18, 1997, Mexican Defense Secretary Cervantes announced that Gutiérrez had systematically supported the Carillo cartel for 7 years. As head of the U.S. Southern Command, Gen. McCaffrey worked with Gen. Gutiérrez for most of those years.

Gutiérrez was defended in court by Tomás Arturo Gonzalez Velazquez, a very tough 43 year-old former military colleague of Gutiérrez. Gonzalez repeatedly insisted that the general's arrest was part of a power struggle within Mexican military intelligence. Gonzalez got very specific about the collaboration of top commanders, including defense minister Gen. Enrique Cervantes Aguirre, with the chief smuggling organizations. He even asserted that President Zedillo's brother-in-law had ties to a major methamphetamine trafficker. In a classified report given to Attorney General Reno in February of 98, DEA officials confirmed many of Gonzalez' accusations. Tomás Gonzalez was shot dead on April 21, 1998.