Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America

by Peter Dale Scott

Now in paperback, this penetrating account of the real drug war will lead readers to demand a more thorough accounting of foreign policy. "Scott and Marshall call for immediate action to end Washington's complicity. Their heavily documented book deserves a wide audience".--Publishers Weekly.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Drugs, The United States Of America, Conspiracy Theories, American

260 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

Reviews

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're ever in doubt as to how abominable your nation can behave (though these days that's easily clarified) just give this one a read.
The skinny: the US used criminal and often atrocity-loving drug dealers and terrorists and, well, narcoterrorists, to help with "policy-making" in Central America, read: killing lots of people for no real reason. The Cold War hardly an excuse, the "war on drugs" later eminently laughable given everything that his book discusses.
Hardly a casual read and so chuck full of names, dates, intricate webs of narco-espionage-CIA-drug cartel insanity, that you'll feel like you just did a shitload of cocaine while piloting a Cessna through a Duran Duran video in order to violently topple a democratically-elected government. Very 80s, in other words, but also strikingly familiar now.
Seriously, folks, the US has pulled some stupid, vile shit in its time, and Scott and Marshall are here to detail some of the most nefarious moments for you. Fans of US iniquity will find much familiar here, as the secret US/CIA use of known drug lords and terrorists to wage stupid wars in the name of nothing in Central America ties in with things like the Iran/Contra scandal and the BCCI investigations in the early 90s. In fact, S&M's work here is based off the committee John Kerry led (would've been known as the president with the best hair if he'd been elected) to investigate shady intelligence dealings, but the authors fill in the gaps. There are Cuban exile terrorists, American businessmen shuttling cocaine and heroin into the US, Israelis, Pakistanis...damn, it runs the gamut.
The main takeaway: maybe there's a better tact to behave, like targeting those drug traffickers the US was complicit in helping become so powerful and rich, instead of flooding our prison system with petty abusers.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this 30 years after it was published there's inevitably a few rough edges from this being a contemporary report. But the overall conclusions are just as damning, and the core problem it highlights of drug funded proxy forces being used for US covert operations has only gotten worse. Just this week various US NGOs have put out stories lamenting that the Taliban's ban on poppy cultivation has forced farmers to switch to 'low value crops' like wheat.

The US is a Mafia state, it has been for a long time, and in its dotage today has only gotten more vicious as it circles the drain.

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started with this Peter Dale Scott book to get a sense of his tone and handling of a subject before trying his more controversial works. This book turned out to be very careful and fair, almost too fair. Here Scott largely sticks to the Kerry report exposing U.S. government complicity in South and Central American drug trade as a mere tip of it emerged in Oliver North's Iran-Contra crimes. The book isn't as powerful as Robert Parry's seminal reporting gathered in Lost History or as contextualized as Alexander Cockburn's Whiteout. Scott goes into more, not always helpful, detail than either of these works. Now I'll have to try Alfred McCoy's more historically extensive The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. Wherever the CIA goes, drug trade skyrockets. Now Afghanistan is once again the top heroin producer in the world, and in the past few weeks more reports have surfaced about U.S. military planes in Afghanistan used as transports. It's the same old practices that go back before Vietnam.

[Mike Espejo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Once you open your heart to the amount of evil things the Company has been up to over the past half century, at some point stuff like this should stop surprising you. The CIA was not simply turning a blind eye to murderous right-wing rebels and drug cartels, but was an active participant in their operations (anti-communism always seems to make some fun bedfellows...) All the while Washington is leading a punitive and violent War on Drugs back at home, the effects of which we're still feeling today. It sometimes feels like this story is a bit antiquated, even quaint compared to the post-9/11 nightmares we know will follow, but it's an important chapter in the book of the U.S. Empire and the closing years of the Cold War. Not really a sexy book by any means, PD Scott does a solid job arranging the info here. I would probably recommend reading up on some big names and faces of Iran-Contra, since Scott frequently references the scandal with an informality that definitely read a bit easier for his 1991 audience.

[Grump · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was dryer than a popcorn fart. Dense, slow-moving reportage about the US Government's blind eye for coke smuggling during it's dirty wars down south. The Boland amendment said no more financing the Contras. But Reagan and Ollie North wanted to help the contras anyway so they let them fly up from Costa Rica and Honduras with drugs and back down with guns and didn't say shit. The interesting part of this book was the bit on the media and how major outlets (NYT, WP et al) wouldn't print any stories about it even though they were aware it was going on. This was to protect their relationships with the white house. If you piss off the prez you don't get any more hot scoops. Anyway this book was boring and really just added granular detail to stuff I was already aware of.

The end.

[Twain · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wild book.

Starts off looking at Iran Contra, the Kerry report and all the drug trafficking going on by the Contras that the Reagan admin was definitely aware of. Starts by looking at all the state department contractors who were either already under investigation for drug trafficking when they received lucrative govt contracts or investigated right after. Looks at the state dept trying to play down the drug sales of the contras and later a justification that the contras “had to sell drugs” because we weren’t getting them enough aid on time.

Goes into a bunch of people (especially anti-communist Cuban exiles) who were very involved in the drug trade and yet escaped US prosecution despite it being well known by at least one (if not more) of the 3 letter agencies. Some truly insane shit about Oliver North in here.

Talks about how Reagan used “narcoterrorism” and “the war on drugs” more so to go to war with communism (after Vietnam people were questioning the idea so he needed a new spin on how to kill leftists) and despite this “war on drugs” they seem to team up with a bunch of drug traffickers.

Details how a lot of these people either avoided charges until they were no longer of use to the US or got off charges completely for questionable reasons.

The Frank Castro stuff is nuts.

It turns out there’s this really cool thing that happens sometimes when the CIA extensively trains you to on how to sneak into Cuba to spy on them (like it did for a lot of bay of pigs guys) where after they teach you all that it turns out you can also use it to run drugs into the US. Reminds me of some of the Fort Bragg stuff going on now.

Decently deep dive into Juan Matta-Ballesteros and his operation. He’s currently serving a life sentence for drug trafficking. In 1983 US Customs cited SETCO aviation as a company who are dealing with Matta and smuggling narcotics into the US, which is corroborated in the Kerry report. However, the US still used SETCO as a contractor to deliver aid to the contras between 1983-1985. Conveniently customs asked the DEA to look into Mattas/SETCO and then one month later their station in Honduras gets shut down (mentioned more below).

Relies a lot on source material that I would call “acceptable to liberals” ie the Kerry subcommittee report, Iran-Contra, the mainstream press, government documents, Oliver North’s diary, government memos, testimonies, court cases, lawsuits, criminal cases, etc.

Looks at how the 1978 Honduras coup was funded by cocaine traffickers. The cocaine traffickers were also funding the contras, so the US looked the other way. Around page 56 a really funny thing happens where the DEA opens a station in Honduras, are unable to make any arrests because they need military assistance and the military is running the drugs, and then they get shut down due to lack of funding after a few years. Around the time that they’re shutting down the DEA offices, they’re coincidentally doubling the size of the CIA office. In May 1983 Customs asks the DEA to look into SETCO (which is being run by a cocaine trafficker and the CIA to send weapons and supplies to the Contras) and weirdly the decision to shut down the DEA office there comes June 1983.

From p 60: “Honduran coup plotters approached two former U.S. Army commando leaders to organize the hit team, promising them $300,000, twenty pounds of cocaine, a jet, and all manner of high-tech weapons. Unfortunately for the ringleaders, these recruits went to the FBI and turned them all in.^^ The cocaine to finance this plot, according to Latchinian, came from the chief of police of Honduras, who had approached one of the coconspirators for advice on how to dispose of more than a ton of the drug in the United States.^^ Bueso Rosa was convicted in 1986 on murder-for-hire conspiracy charges. The Justice Department called his plot "the most significant case of narco-terrorism yet discovered."^^ Yet one current and one retired senior U.S. government official testified on his behalf at the sentencing, and the administration filed a sealed deposition to urge leniency.^^ "General Bueso Rosa has always been a valuable ally to the United States," it read. "As chief of staff of the Honduran armed forces he immeasurably furthered the United States' national interest in Central America. He is primarily responsible for the initial success of the American military preserve in Honduras. For this service, he was awarded the Legion of Merit by the president of the United States, the highest award that can be presented to a foreign military officer." “ this weirdly happens like a bunch of times in the book

Barry Seal stuff is pretty crazy. Basically they let off a pretty high level guy and allow him to go work for the DEA and make some busts on lower level guys (typically from a rival cartel) and then send him to take pictures so the admin can do pro-Contra propaganda in an attempt to stop the Boland II Amendments.

The book challenges the idea that you need to go after a “kingpin” to undo a drug trafficking operation. Asserts that some of these drug lines survived changes in who is supplying the drugs (not like you’re gonna pack it up and go work at a diner after a decade of drug running you’re just gonna go find a new job in your field of expertise). But beyond that it claims that the drug operations the US chooses to go after are based on who is an ally/in favor and who is disposable. For example after the US kinda sours on Eden Pastora in the south FDN movement they start making arrests of his people and John Hull in the north gets to start moving cocaine through similar channels that Pastora used.

The Frigorificos stuff is crazy.

Looks at how Oliver North used his position and anti-terrorist task forces in an attempt to discredit a witness who claimed the Contras were running drugs

From 51%-52% of the book: “By this time Robinette had prepared a second memo on Terrell, dated July 17, assessing that what Terrell knew "could be embarrassing to R[ichard] S[ecord]," and "could be dangerous to our objectives." Robinette saw Terrell as a possible "serious threat to us based on the fore-going."i« Robinette's July 17 memo corroborates Terrell's own story that Robinette tried to silence Terrell by offering funds for a proposed helicopter service business in Costa Rica. It recommends that Robinette's "interest" in this project be increased: "The 'investors' would require that he reduce or stop his 'political talking' as it would 'affect our investment.' " The memo concludes that by this means "the chopper or air freight service in Costa Rica" could be "connected to some future non-commercial work"; and that "we would have him [Terrell] in hand and somewhat in our control."^^ On the basis of Robinette's second memo. North prepared a memo…In his own memo, North reported Robinette's evaluation of Terrell as "dangerous" but also went further. Where Robinette had called Terrell an "Operational Threat"—a possible "serious threat to us based on . . . his previously spoken statements"—North called him a "Terrorist Threat." Robinette had said Terrell "may possess enough information . . . to be dangerous to our objectives"; North wrote that "one of the security officers for Project Democracy" (Robinette) had evaluated Terrell as " 'extremely dangerous' and possibly working for the security services of another country."….. second memo from North's, dated July 28, in which the president was told of Terrell's "anti-contra and anti-U.S. activities" as a "principal witness" for the Christie suit and for Senator Kerry, but which said nothing about the alleged assassination plot or about the FBI's alleged belief that Terrell was a foreign agent. This second memo was accompanied by an FBI memo on Terrell dated July 18. In its declassified portions, the FBI memo says nothing about Terrell as a paid asset of Nicaraguan intelligence. Instead it confirms that the FBI had interviewed Terrell because he was "knowledgeable" in such possible crimes by CMA as "smuggling weapons from south Florida into Central America on behalf of the 'Contra' guerrillas, smuggling narcotics, plotting the assassination of the U.S. Ambassador to Costa Rica and discussing bombing the U.S. Embassy in Costa Rica."^^ North forwarded the FBI memo to Poindexter with his own memo for President Reagan. In his covering memo to Poindexter, North wrote, "At Tab III is the March report of Terrell's debrief by FBI New Orleans. It is important to note that shortly after Terrell offered this information, reports began to circulate regarding Contra drug running and a plot to kill Ambassador Tambs. Much of this information was eventually reported in the media."^^ In his memo for the president (which is initialled "RR"), North spelled out the real nature of Terrell's threat more explicitly: "It is important to note that Terrell has been a principal witness against supporters of the Nicaraguan resistance both in and outside the U.S. Government. Terrell's accusations have formed the basis of a civil law suit in the U.S. District Court in Miami [the Honey-Avirgan Christie suit] and his charges are at the center of Senator Kerry's investigation in the Foreign Relations Committee."^^ This memo makes it clear that North's obsession with Terrell had nothing to do with terrorism or counterterrorism, but rather centered on the danger Terrell posed as a witness” (ends on p144). North basically tells the FBI they have to look into this guy cause he’s a foreign agent terrorist trying to kill the president, but tells his friends and the president they have to look into this guy because he’s anti-Contra and a threat to US operations in the area and could help investigations into the Contras.


Basically North and his people are implicated in multiple of these cases/investigations so North claims this guy is a terrorist so he can have the FBI/the special anti-terrorist committee North runs (OSG/TIWG) to get all this info on the witness and then tried to label him a terrorist. When that fails they just threaten to indict him on the crimes he is trying to whistleblow on. Given pending indictment his lawyer advised him not to testify in the Kerry subcommittee or the Christie Institute lawsuit despite Terrell being the first person willing to testify to contra drug smuggling and Iran-Contra. This effective witness tampering shuts down someone who could bring serious allegations against the US government and its allies.

“Whatever the pressures, however, the DEA could hardly plead ignorance about the criminal intersection of the Contras and drugs. It directly employed as an informant—and protected from prosecution—one drug pilot who was under contract to the State Department to deliver humanitarian supplies to the Contras. The pilot, Michael Palmer, smuggled enormous amounts of Colombian marijuana into the United States from 1977 to 1986. Yet the DEA managed to have his 1986 indictment dropped as "not being in the interest of the United States." (59% according to kindle not sure what page)

NYT 60% highlight

Delves into Noriega and his working with drug trafficking, Medellin, and the contras. He got glowing reviews from the DEA for a number of years and money from the CIA even though Panamanian forces were running drugs and working with the Medellin cartel. Basically due to supporting a US ally, and occasionally turning in someone who owed the cartel money or was a member of the rival cartel, Noriega was beloved by the three letter agencies and the Reagan admin for years and got glowing reviews even though he was pretty clearly implicated in the drug trade.

A bit of Noriega stuff from 61% in the book: “Panama was the setting for the notorious failure of the DEA to act against one of the region's most powerful trafficker allies, Noriega himself. The agency worked out a convenient modus vivendi with Noriega: he would turn in scads of big- and small-time drug rivals in return for flattering reviews from Washington. In 1978, DEA Administrator Peter Ben-singer lauded Noriega's "excellent efforts which have contributed substantially to the ongoing battle against drugs." In 1984, at the height of Noriega's involvement with the Medellin cartel, DEA Administrator Francis Mullen, Jr., told Noriega that his "long-standing support of the Drug Enforcement Administration" was "very meaningful to us." Two years later Mullen's successor, John Lawn, conveyed his "deep appreciation for the vigorous anti-drug trafficking policy" that Noriega had supposedly adopted. The DEA and Justice Department continued to send letters of commendation to the Panamanian dictator despite a warning from one congressional committee that “Given the persistent allegations of narcotics corruption in the PDF [Panamanian Defense Forces] such letters seem unwise” “ (p169)


In January 1987, Noriega's confidant and drug pilot, Floyd Carlton, called the DEA's resident agent in Panama and offered to cooperate in exchange for protection of his family. The agents asked what crimes Carlton could expose. "Money laundering, drugs, weapons, corruption, assassinations," he replied. But as soon as he mentioned the name of General Noriega, they immediately became upset. "And 1 noticed that, and of course I became nervous at that point. They did not try to contact me again."^^ Six months later, Costa Rican authorities working with a Miami-based DEA operative nabbed Carlton at a hotel in San Jose and extradited him to the United States. With Carlton in hand, the U.S. attorney's office in Miami began building its case against Noriega. But the DEA station in Panama did little to help. "We kept asking, and they kept coming back empty handed," complained Richard Gregorie, the prosecutor in charge of the case”

Deals with what I’ll call the Aslinger/media problems. In the 1950s Aslinger ran the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and lied about an epidemic of Chinese opium in the US to secure funding. The myth persisted until we normalized relations with China, and then Reagan wheeled it out again for the Sandinistas. The problem is the media gets a good amount of their information on this stuff from anonymous government sources. So these sources are typically able to lie to the media to push their agenda.

SF Examiner 63%

Does some manufacturing consent stuff towards the end of it.

There’s an absurd amount of details and names in here and I feel like that’s a bit to the book’s detriment cause it can be confusing to follow at times but once things start to come up for the second or third time it’s easier to figure out.


Would not recommend the ebook it is not formatted at all and you can’t jump back and forth between the notes easily. It’s almost like the book was clumsily scanned in all the pages numbers and sub headers are just normal text and some commas are periods, every now and again an f is read as a £ and a bunch of sloppy stuff like that.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A SUMMARY OF CIA/DEA INVOLVEMENT WITH DRUG SMUGGLERS, ETC.

Authors Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall wrote in the Preface to the paperback edition of this 1991 book, “The drug traffic should be visualized, not as a horizontal line between producers and consumers, but as a triangle. At its apex sit governments whose civilian and military intelligence agencies recurringly afford de facto protection to drug kingpins beneath them. In the United States … this vertical dimension of protected trafficking has created windows of opportunity for importing narcotics by the ton. Our conclusion remains that the first target of an effective drug strategy should be Washington itself, and specifically its own connections with corrupt, drug-linked forces in other parts of the world. We argued that Washington’s covert operations overseas had been a major factor in generating changes in the overall pattern of drug flows into the United States... [including] the explosion of cocaine trafficking through Central America in the Reagan years, made possible by the administration’s covert operation to overthrown the Nicaraguan Sandinistas.” (Pg. vii)

They continue, “The United States cannot afford to become enmeshed in counterinsurgency campaigns abroad, in Third World jungles, nor at home in the streets of our cities The social cost of trying to reproduce for illicit drugs the conditions of Prohibition is too high. This book offers evidence to support changing the focus of our drug strategies away from penalizing individuals and toward curbing our own government… the American people cannot begin to cope with the deeper social problems of drug abuse so long as their political representatives remain such a powerful obstacle to reform.” (Pg. xi-xii)

They add in the Introduction, “Although the CIA did not actually peddle drugs, it did form gray alliances with right-wing gangs deemed helpful against a common enemy.” (Pg. 4) They go on, “In Afghanistan, as in … Central America, the White House and CIA chose to look the other way while their allies sold vast quantities of drugs to the U.S. market… As our study aims to show, the Afghanistan story has repeated itself in Central America.” (Pg. 5) They continue, “This book is a modest effort to set forth the facts of the Central American drug connection and to fill in the significant gaps left by the Kerry report’s valuable but incomplete account… this work analyzes available evidence on the way corrupt military elites, Contra leaders, the CIA, and Washington policy-makers opened the door to the cocaine trade through Central America… we hope to revive the debate over solutions to the nation’s long-standing drug problem---and ways to avoid phony cures that only compound it.” (Pg. 7)

They assert, “President Reagan came to office with a mission: to roll back the frontiers of world communism, especially in the Third World… But with the American public’s anticommunist sentiments dulled by a decade of détente and memories of Vietnam, how could his administration revive support for combatting the Nicaraguan challenge to U.S. power and credibility? One answer was to invent a new threat…narcoterrorism. The term… encompasses a variety of phenomena: guerrilla movements that finance themselves by drugs or taxes on drug traffickers, drug syndicates that use terrorist methods … and state-sponsored terrorism associated with drug crimes… The term ‘narcoterrorism’ also soon became an essential adjunct to the doctrine of national security developed by right-wing Latin American military forces to rationalize their repressive domestic activities and seizures of power.” (Pg. 23-24)

They state, “Reagan… needed [friends] to support the Contra cause. [Panamanian General Manuel] Noriega’s influence and smuggling facilities could be useful… The CIA deposited the money in Noriega’s account… Noriega earned his pay. He supplied pilots who helped smuggle weapons to the Contras… he promised to help train Contra units and let the use Panama as a transit point.” (Pg. 67) They continue, “The Reagan administration may not have known every detail of these and other transactions, but it surely knew the general outlines long before it stopped conspiring with Noriega against the Sandinistas.” (Pg. 70) They go on, “Noriega lost his most ardent defenders within the administration, [Oliver] North and [William] Casey, when the Iran-Contra scandal blew up in November 1986. As the whole White House program of covert support for the Contras came crashing down, Noriega suddenly became expendable.” (Pg. 72)

They note, “the documentary evidence suggests that each major faction in the Contras had its own cocaine connection and that the rise of each connection corresponded to a change in the management of the U.S.-Contra relationship… each major Contra faction in Costa Rica was strengthened with a drug connection, and each Contra drug connection in Costa Rica arose … with a political change in the overall direction of the Contras.” (Pg. 104) They add, “The U.S. did not invent this Contra-drug symbiosis… But there are documentary indications that … Washington used or at least condoned many or all of these different Contra drug connections to maintain Contra support operations.” (Pg. 106) They assert, “the March 1985 Corvo shipment represented a guns-for-drugs operation protected by the U.S. government in which those protected included suspected major drug smugglers and CIA-trained terrorists. This U.S. government protection appears to have been … extended to individuals with previous narcotics indictments, which were always thrown out.” (Pg. 120)

They state, “North turned to the counterterrorism powers conferred on him by Bush to investigate … [Col. Jack] Terrell the whistle-blower… In short, the FBI and Justice Department were collaborating with North in a documented effort to silence an FBI witness who threatened to expose Contra-related drug trafficking.” (Pg. 139-140) They summarize, “the U.S. Government in the mist of its self-proclaimed War on Drugs, was using its own powers of law enforcement and justice to protect known drug traffickers. The successful silencing of Terrell was only part of a larger… campaign… to prevent exposure of the Contra-drug connections… This larger cover-up led the administration to engage in illegal acts with the suspected drug traffickers.” (Pg. 156)

They observe, “Where the Iran-Contra Committee report suppressed and misrepresented the truth (as happened too often), it usually did so to prevent disclosure of past of current covert operations already authorized by Congress. Congress’s demonstrated reluctance to raise the larger issues of covert operations was understandable. The track records of those isolated members of Congress who have challenge covert operations or foreign interventions in the past is not encouraging.” (Pg. 163)

They state, “The sheer scale of the Contra-drug connection … raises the troubling quest: Where was the DEA all that time?... Three factors may have converged to make the drug agency see, hear, and speak no evil about the Contras. One was the alleged… corruption of some DEA agents in Central America. Another was the … tendency of drug enforcement agents to protect their sources… Finally, the agency’s mission was blocked by administration officials … to serve their broader political agenda in Central America.” (Pg. 165)

They conclude, “In the 1980s, the United States press was open to voices of dissent on policy, but no to questions about the fundamental legitimacy of institutions accused of systematically breaking the law. It is chilling to recognize the extent to which this defense of the status quo entailed… a protective cover-up of the United States security system’s involvement with international drug traffickers, its supposed enemies.” (Pg. 185)

This book will be of great interest to those studying these issues.

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very dry, but worth reading.

[Colin Thin · Rating 3 out of 5]

V interesting but hard to read

[Elian Sanchez · Rating 3 out of 5]

reads like an indictment

[6655321 · Rating 3 out of 5]

like, i guess this is part of the Noam Chomsky school of writing where you write a bunch of true things and illustrate how complicity in like right wing death squads and the manufacture of drugs is like *basically a bipartisan part of the political establishment in the USA* but suggest somehow transparency or liberalism will solve all that?

[Elias McClellan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Detailed, nearly academic, study of the actors behind the the CIA's sanction of the drug business.