From: cdp!christic%labrea.stanford.edu Subject: MURDER OF A DRUG AGENT /* Written 4:18 pm Dec 31, 1990 by christic in cdp:christic.news */ /* ---------- "MURDER OF A DRUG AGENT" ---------- */ ----------------------------------------------------------------- DEATH OF A NARCOTICS AGENT EXPOSES RIFT BETWEEN D.E.A., C.I.A. By ANDREW LANG Convergence Magazine, Christic Institute, Winter 1991, p. 3 The murder of a United States narcotics agent in Mexico has exposed a rift between the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Central Intelligence Agency over the C.I.A.'s alleged collaboration with Mexican drug traffickers. According to D.E.A. sources, the C.I.A. used Mexican drug traffickers to smuggle military supplies to the Nicaraguan contras during the United States Government's covert war to overthrow the Nicaraguan Government. The conflict between the two agencies surfaced during the trial in Los Angeles last summer of four Mexicans accused of the murder of D.E.A. agent Enrique Camarena, who was assassinated in 1985 in Guadalajara, Mexico. The trial also forced declassification of secret D.E.A. reports on two earlier deaths--the murders of Mexican investigative reporters Manuel Buendia and Javier Juarez Vasquez. Buendia, a syndicated columnist read throughout the Spanish- speaking world, was following leads on the relationship between the C.I.A. and Mexican druglords when he was shot down in Mexico City on May 30, 1984. Vasquez was killed one hour later. On the same day in La Penca, Nicaragua, an assassin detonated a bomb at a press conference, killing three journalists but only wounding the bomb's intended target, contra commander Eden Pastora. The Christic Institute is investigating whether the murders of Buendia and Vasquez are related to the attempt on Pastora's life. Camerena's murder unleashed a bloodbath D.E.A. officials have blamed on the powerful and secretive Federal Security Directorate (D.F.S.), an elite agency that collaborated with the C.I.A. for years. More than a dozen witnesses and suspects connected with the case have been killed. Until it was finally disbanded by the Mexican Government, the D.F.S. was closely tied to the Guadalajara drug cartel, a criminal organization responsible for nearly a third of the cocaine smuggled into the United States. The cartel flourished under the protection of Mexico's law enforcers. Some of Mexico's leading drug traffickers were surrounded by bodyguards drawn from the ranks of the Federal Judicial Police and the D.F.S. Camarena arrived in Guadalajara in June 1980 after reassignment from the D.E.A.'s office in Fresno, Calif. Within months the enterprising agent had concluded that Mexico's drug eradication program, heavily financed by the United States Government, was a failure. Corrupt officials in the Mexican Attorney General's office were stealing most of the United States aid. ``In Guadalajara, Camarena found himself pitted against an underworld cartel that was running the city like an occupation force,'' writes journalist Elaine Shannon in her book, Desperados. The cartel was led by three men--Felix Gallardo, Rafael Caro Quintero and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo. [Rafael Caro Quintero is not related to Rafael ``Chi Chi'' Quintero, a Cuban- American terrorist and one of the defendants in Avirgan v. Hull.] Repeated attempts by the drug agents in Guadalajara to warn the Reagan-Bush Administration that the Mexican cocaine industry was operating under the protection of the country's Government were a failure. By 1985 Camarena had had enough. He applied for a transfer to the United States. On Feb. 7, 1985, three weeks before he was scheduled to leave Mexico, Camarena was abducted outside his office at the United States consulate in Guadalajara. The D.E.A. later identified his kidnappers as a drug trafficker, two state policemen and two hired killers. The agent's body was found several weeks later. The autopsy showed that Camarena's captors had first tortured him, then drove a blunt instrument into the left side of his skull. By 1989 the United States Government was finally able to bring four suspects in Camarena's murder to trial in Los Angeles. In July they were convicted on Federal racketeering and kidnapping charges. The trial was overshadowed, however, by charges that the C.I.A. used Mexican drug traffickers to smuggled weapons to contra forces in Central America. ``[T]he Mexican drug-trafficking cartel that kidnapped, tortured and murdered D.E.A. agent Enrique Camarena . . . operated until then with virtual impunity,'' William Branigin of the Washington Post reported during the trial, ``not only because it was in league with Mexico's powerful Federal Security Directorate (D.F.S.), but because it believed its activities were secretly sanctioned by the C.I.A.'' Evidence released at the trial suggests that the C.I.A. traded protection for drug traffickers in Mexico for help in the Reagan- Bush Administration's war against the Nicaraguan Government. ``At a minimum,'' Branigin reported, ``the C.I.A. had turned a blind eye to a burgeoning drug trade in cultivating its relationship with the D.F.S. and pursuing what it regarded as other U.S. national security interests in Mexico and Central America.'' ``The C.I.A. didn't give a damn about anything but Cuba and the Soviets,'' retired D.E.A. agent James Kuykendall told the Post. The agency protected the D.F.S. and ``didn't want their connection . . . to ever go away, and the D.F.S. just got out of hand.'' Kuykendall served with Camarena in Guadalajara. One senior D.E.A. official charges that the C.I.A. has withheld information about drug traffickers from his agency. ``They look at it from the standpoint that narcotics is related to national security,'' he told the Post. The dramatic revelations during the Camarena murder trial are not the first reports that the Administration used drug traffickers to fight its covert war in Central America. Several independent investigations already have shown that contra bases were used as staging areas for cocaine flights into the United States. The testimony of pilots who flew weapons to the contras and returned to the United States with drug cargoes was published in 1988 by the Senate Foreign Relations narcotics subcommittee. The ``guns- for-drugs'' scheme is also a key issue in Avirgan v. Hull, the Christic Institute's pending lawsuit against 29 Iran-contra figures. But until the trial of Camarena's killers, most of these reports centered on contra camps in Honduras and Costa Rica. Documents released at the trial show that drug airstrips and bases in Mexico also played a role in the Central American war. One source for charges that the C.I.A. worked hand-in-hand with the Guadalajara cartel is Lawrence Victor Harrison. Harrison, the cartel's specialist in electronic communications, says he served directly under Fonseca, Caro and Gallardo--the three cartel chieftains who allegedly ordered Camarena's murder. Harrison says he overheard thousands of radio and telephone communications by drug traffickers and their partners in the Mexican police. He told D.E.A. agents that: --He spoke to C.I.A. agents visiting Fonseca's house in 1983. --He knew that the C.I.A. was using a ranch owned by Caro for contra war games. --Gallardo told him the cartel felt secure because it was supplying arms to the contras. C.I.A. spokesman Mark Mansfield, however, has denied the agency trained guerrillas at Caro's ranch in Mexico and has called Harrison's statement that C.I.A. agents stayed at Fonseca's house ``ridiculous.'' ``I want to emphasize in the strongest possible terms that the C.I.A. neither engages in nor condones drug trafficking,'' he told the Washington Post in July. Harrison's confidential reports to the D.E.A. were disclosed last summer when defense lawyers for the four men accused of Camarena's murder obtained copies of two classified D.E.A. documents. According to the documents, Harrison said the two alleged C.I.A. agents who visited Fonseca's home told him they were ``working with the contras.'' When he warned one of the men of the danger of being picked up by United States radar if they flew too close to the border, the agent ``said he was the U.S., that he didn't have any problem.'' The documents also suggest that Buendia and Vasquez, the two journalists murdered on the same day as the La Penca bombing, were killed because they were getting too close to the ``guns- for-drugs'' operation in Mexico. According to one of the D.E.A. documents, Harrison ``had learned that the reporter from Veracruz [Vasquez] . . . before his death was allegedly developing information that, using the D.F.S. as cover, the C.I.A. established and maintained clandestine airfields to refuel aircraft loaded with weapons which were destined for Honduras and Nicaragua. ``Pilots of these aircraft,'' the report continues, ``would allegedly load up with cocaine in . . . Colombia and in route to Miami, Florida, refuel in Mexico.'' The Mexican airstrips, Harrison told the D.E.A., were operated by narcotics traffickers and maintained by the C.I.A. Buendia and Vasquez were working together on the investigation. Vasquez, according to Harrison, was Buendia's source for information that Caro's ranch was a training camp for the contras. ``The operations/training at the camp were conducted by the American C.I.A., using the D.F.S. as a cover, in the event any questions were raised as to who was running operation. ``Members of the Mexican Federal Judicial Police (M.F.J.P.) arrived at the ranch while on a separate narcotics investigation and were confronted by the guerrillas,'' the document adds. ``As a result of the confrontation, 19 M.F.J.P. agents were killed. Many of the bodies showed signs of torture; the bodies had been drawn and quartered. ``Buendia had allegedly also gathered information on C.I.A. arms smuggling activity and the relationship the C.I.A. had with known narcotic traffickers in Veracruz area.'' Anxious to share the information with law-enforcement authorities, Buendia went to D.F.S. Director Jose Antonio Zorilla Perez. According to the D.E.A. report, Zorilla told the journalist that the ``C.I.A.-narcotic trafficker situation was very delicate (not to be spoken about).'' The reporter's decision to go to the head of the security service apparently was a fatal mistake. Zorilla assigned a contingent of D.F.S. agents ``ostensibly to provide security and protection for Buendia and his family,'' according to the D.E.A. report. The security detail surrounded Buendia's home. Buendia was shot dead on May 30 by the men assigned to protect him. Thirteen minutes after the shooting Zorilla arrived on the murder scene to take charge of the investigation. Shortly before his death Buendia had published a column in Mexican newspapers exposing the complicity of high government officials in the drug trade. According to Harrison's debriefing by the D.E.A., D.F.S. agents after Buendia's murder seized his files ``concerning the information on C.I.A. arms smuggling and the connection the C.I.A. had to narcotics traffickers.'' The document notes that the La Penca bomb was detonated on the same day as Buendia's murder. ``Shortly thereafter Eden Pastora, . . . another individual who had given Buendia information on C.I.A. arms smuggling allegedly, suffered a C.I.A.-sponsored bomb attack,'' the report says. The attempt to kill Pastora came as the renegade contra leader was resisting pressure by the C.I.A. to merge his small guerrilla band with the ``Nicaraguan Democratic Force,'' a larger rebel army controlled by the United States. Although Pastora was a contra commander, he hated other contra leaders who had been officers in the Nicaraguan National Guard. Before his regime was toppled in 1980 by the Sandinista revolution, dictator Anastasio Somoza used the National Guard to suppress political opposition. Pastora's hatred of the National Guard was personal. His father had been killed by its troops. The La Penca bombing is the central issue in Avirgan v. Hull, which alleges the attack was ordered by the same criminal enterprise that used contra bases for drug smuggling operations. Harrison is not the only source for reports that the C.I.A. may have protected drug traffickers in the Mexican D.F.S. In 1981 the man then serving as D.F.S. chief, Miguel Nazar Haro, was indicted in San Diego on charges that he was part of a ring that smuggled stolen cars across the Mexican border. Witnesses in other Federal trials have charged that Nazar was also active in the drug trade. The United States Embassy in Mexico City urged the Justice Department not to prosecute Nazar, however. Nazar was ``an essential contact for C.I.A. station Mexico City,'' the embassy told prosecutors. The angry United States Attorney in San Diego, William Kennedy, publicly revealed that the C.I.A. was blocking the trial on national security grounds. He was soon forced out of office by President Reagan, and the charges against Nazar were dropped. Another source on the ``guns-for-drugs'' operation is Robert Plumlee, who describes himself as a former arms pilot for the C.I.A. Plumlee admits that he flew weapons to the contras between 1979 and 1986. The pilot says he made ``four or five'' stops at a Mexican ranch owned by Caro, one of the three Guadalajara druglords, and once observed Caro personally unloading a cargo of marijuana the arms pilot had flown up from Panama. [For a history of the Mexican drug underworld and its relationship with the C.I.A., read Jonathan Marshall's Drug Wars, published in 1990 by Cohan and Cohen and available from the Christic Institute. Call the Institute at 202-797-8106 for details on how to order the book, or write us at 1324 North Capitol Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20002.] >>From Christic DataBank BBS, Washington, D.C., 202-529-0140<<