BY JON HILLSON AND ELI GREEN
LOS ANGELES-Revelations of U.S. government complicity in the shipment of gigantic amounts of cocaine powder for production of crack that was sold in the South-Central section of this city have sent shock waves throughout southern California's Black communities, and beyond.
This bombshell was at the heart of a three-part series written by Gary Webb, a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News.
A year-long investigation, he writes, removes any doubt that paid CIA operatives in the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan mercenary army, referred to as the contras, flew thousands of kilos (1 kilo=2.2 pounds) into California in the 1980s. Their aim was to buy arms, and line their own pockets, with knowledge of superiors in the CIA, and the tacit approval of an array of local, state, and federal cop agencies.
At a September 10 news conference and meeting attended by 200 indignant community residents, Democratic representative Maxine Waters, whose district includes South Central, called for a congressional hearing and a federal investigation.
Waters subsequently announced a "town meeting" on September 28, co-sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) and KGLH, the city's main Black community-oriented radio station that has featured daily commentary by angered residents on the issue.
A similar CBC-sponsored meeting in Washington, D.C., recently drew 1,500 people.
On September 17, the Los Angeles County board of Supervisors voted unanimously to ask President William Clinton for an independent investigation of CIA involvement in the drug trade.
"It is time to demand that the long-standing suspicions of a connection between the drug trade in the inner city on the one hand, and the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. government, on the other hand, be investigated," the resolution stated. Last month, the Los Angeles City Council urged U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno to investigate the controversy.
Reno recently announced that "there is no evidence that supports the [San Jose Mercury News] allegations." Her written message, read by Waters at the September 10 meeting, that "the CIA has initiated an internal investigation," was met with jeers.
While the Los Angeles Times has been loathe to cover the growing scandal, the entire "Dark Alliance" series was reprinted by the New Times, and excerpted by the L.A. Weekly, two mass circulation news and entertainment journals. The Managua, Nicaragua, daily La Prensa published the series as well. In the articles, Webb traces the contra-CIA-cocaine links to U.S. aggression against the Nicaraguan government of Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in the 1980s.
The contra war was organized by Washington in its effort to overthrow the workers and farmers government that came to power in 1979 with the triumph of a popular revolution, led by the FSLN.
The CIA scraped the remnants of the murderous National Guard of deposed Nicaraguan tyrant Anastasio Somoza into the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN).
Webb's explosive series details the connection between former Somoza aide Oscar Blandón, who was also an FDN fund- raiser and coke pusher, and Ivan Norwin Meneses, another contra adviser and drug dealer. Blandón, who lives between Managua and San Diego, testified in federal court earlier this year that he began selling cocaine to fund the contras in 1982, and that FDN military chief, CIA employee Enrique Bermudez, was aware of the deals.
Under pressure from a developing movement in defense of Nicaragua's revolutionary government in the United States and around the world, the U.S. Congress voted to ban aid to the contras in 1982.
The CIA "invented the `contra' and converted it into the principal instrument of its dirty war against a Central American country," the Los Angeles Spanish-language daily La Opinión stated in an editorial. It noted that the "commerce between political objectives and cheap cocaine occurred, paradoxically, in the years when the First Lady, Nancy Reagan, began pushing to fellow citizens her slogan of `No to drugs.'"
The "bottom of the mess," La Opinión stated, "has yet to be reached."
Webb painstakingly documents the flood of cheap cocaine from Colombia to Nicaragua-with the support of the U.S.-supplied El Salvadoran air force, then engaged in a civil war against insurgent workers and farmers-then to northern California, and finally to the Black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, through gang street dealers.
When Congress voted to lift the ban on aid to the contras in 1986, Blandón and Meneses simply kept dealing coke, as capitalist entrepreneurs, operating a business for profit outside the formal, legal framework of, but ruled by the laws of the market system.
Blandón was later arrested, served short time, and hired on the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), where he remains today, having thus far earned $166,000 for services rendered. Meneses is now serving time in a Nicaraguan prison for narcotics trafficking.
In Webb's journalistic trek, when Blandón, Meneses, and their ilk wheel and deal, local beat cops become clueless, the FBI turns a blind eye, the DEA gumshoes lose interest, witnesses go deaf, dumb, and blind, files are classified or vanish, and government agencies invoke "national security."
The White House's "war on drugs" Webb said, was, in fact, "drugs for Washington's war." Blandón recently defended his coke-selling in testimony at a dope trial in San Diego. "There is a saying that the ends justify means," the ex-contra stated, "and that's what [CIA operative] Bermudez told us in Honduras, OK? So we started raising money for the Contra revolution."
In their heyday Blandón, Meneses, and others sold 100 kilos of discounted cocaine a week in South Central, which Webb states, "helped spark a crack explosion in urban America." A kilo of powdered cocaine is turned into three or more kilos of rock, or crack, by adding an anesthetic called procaine.
There is a widening discussion among working people here as knowledge of the revelations spreads, fueling outrage against the government.
At the Arco refinery in Carson, where a number of Black and Latino workers are employed, the scandal is a common topic of discussion. "We've known for years," a middle-aged Black worker said, "that Blacks don't have planes or boats to bring cocaine up from Colombia. Somebody like the CIA had to be involved."
One worker debated other unionists, questioning just how involved the CIA was in the drug sales.
On the ramp at Northwest Airlines, there is "a gut level feeling of disgust among a number of workers," one International Association of Machinists member said, "based on the hypocrisy of the government. The `war on drugs,' `just say no,' and then this. A lot of people don't know who the contras are. People want to read the [Webb] articles."
Tavis Smiley, a local Black political commentator, was speaking for more than himself when he told New Times, "You can't spend too much time digesting this because it makes you beyond angry."
"It makes you... less American," he said.
Eli Green is member of Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Local 1-675 at Arco Refinery in Los Angeles.