On August 23 the Los Angeles City Council voted 11-0 to ask US attorney general Janet Reno for an investigation into charges that US-backed Nicaraguan contra rebels supplied tonnes of cocaine to Los Angeles street gangs in the 1980s and that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was aware of the operation.
A CIA spokesperson called the story "ridiculous", but Geraldine Washington, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said it was high time "the government and the CIA took responsibility for the destruction of human lives".
From August 18 to August 20, the Mercury News of San Jose, California, ran a three-part series documenting contra sales of "tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles".
The articles charge that a contra "drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the 'crack' capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America."
Although contra links to the cocaine trade were revealed in the 1980s, the Mercury News series — written by staff reporter Gary Webb and based on a year-long investigation including official documents, court testimony and hundreds of hours of interviews — is the first revelation of the operation's full scope.
The CIA-created Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN) set up its Los Angeles drug network in 1981, when crack, a potent, relatively inexpensive form of cocaine, was uncommon in US inner cities. The Los Angeles operation was entrusted to Danilo Blandon Reyes, a wealthy Nicaraguan with a masters degree in marketing who had run a $27 million US-financed agricultural program for the government of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Garcia.
Blandon enlisted the services of ghetto youth Ricky Donnell Ross ("Freeway Rick") and Nicaraguan drug dealer Juan Norwin Meneses Cantarero, who allegedly had run a stolen car ring for Somoza's military. Ross provided access to black Los Angeles neighbourhoods, while Meneses had the links to Colombian drug cartels.
In 1981 alone, its first year, the contra drug network sold 900 kilograms of cocaine in the US, worth $54 million. Some of the cocaine was shipped in through a US Air Force base in Texas. The contras also sold assault weapons to Los Angeles street gangs and even tried to interest them in grenade launchers.
The CIA apparently lost interest in contra drug sales after Congress started funding the rebels openly in 1985, although as of this year the agency is still using "national security" concerns to suppress public testimony on the cocaine operation.
Blandon, Meneses and Ross went into business on their own after 1985, and all three were eventually arrested. Meneses is now in jail in Nicaragua; Ross faces a possible life sentence in California.
But the US Drug Enforcement Administration told US courts that Blandon was "extraordinarily valuable". He was released in the early 1990s after just 28 months in custody, and the DEA paid him $166,000 for his services. Blandon now lives in Managua and is trying to regain family property nationalised by the Sandinista government after the 1979 revolution.
[From Weekly News Update on the Americas, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY, 10012, USA; email nicanet@blythe.org.]