|
T A B L E+T A L K
Did the interview change your perception of Monica Lewinsky? Weigh in on Monica and Babs in the Politics area of Table Talk
R E C E N T L Y Let the sexual healing begin The war at home Burn, baby, burn California Republicans: "Circular firing squad" Russian roulette - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Browse the - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
|
![[ Mothers Who Think: Feminists on Broaddrick's rape charge ]](/news/1999/03/src/05newslinks.gif) |
||
|
GENOCIDE, AND DRUG-TRAFFICKING TOO | PAGE 1, 2,
Lt. Col. Carlos Ochoa Ruiz, for instance, aka "Charlie," according to a U.S. federal grand jury indictment against him, was the kind of military officer with blood on one hand and white powder on the other. "Charlie" was a captain in Uspantan, Quiche, in late 1979 when the military carried out a number of abuses there against the civilian population. By 1990, according to the DEA, "Charlie" was also a multi-ton drug trafficker. At the same time that Lt. Col. "Charlie" was, according to the DEA, loading a half metric ton of cocaine -- enough to fill a few million pipes with crack -- on board a small plane en route to Tampa, Fla., Arnoldo Vargas Estrada, also known as "Archie," says the DEA, was transshipping "several tons of cocaine to the U.S. each month in tractor-trailers" overland through Mexico. While "Charlie" was working near Guatemala's Pacific coast, "Archie" was the mayor of Zacapa, near the Atlantic coast. "Archie" was close to military officers in Zacapa and had a ranch house right across the street from the army base. A Guatemalan expert said that "Archie" had been a member of the Mano Blanca death squad since he was 19. "He was a real big fish," said one U.S. official. "The kind of guy who could order a guy killed." By 1990, the DEA had placed "Archie" under surveillance for his smuggling operation. But somebody tipped him off, and soon "Archie" and his confederates rushed to move it 35 miles away across a state line to a rural area of five hamlets known as Los Amates. After "Archie" was arrested in December, his confederates speeded up the move. According to former subsistence farmers from Los Amates, 32 of whom affixed their thumbprints along with their signatures or marks to a complaint addressed to the DEA, "Archie," along with four Guatemalan army colonels, began threatening people and ordering them to abandon plots of land. Thousands of families lived among the five hamlets of Los Amates, however, and most had roots there going back generations. Many farmers like Celedonio Perez and two other men stubbornly resisted leaving. The three men were captured "by the commander and seven soldiers from the Los Amates military detachment" on Nov. 18, 1990, according to the complaint, and tortured. I later saw a photograph of one victim with a pencil-thin laceration from a wire tourniquet around his neck. The next month, the DEA arrested "Archie" but none of the above-named military personnel. His arrest gave new urgency to their need to move the operation. On Jan. 19, 1991, Perez was found murdered. The farmers who signed the 1992 complaint say the military killed eight more people, including a mother and son, over the next year. While the military was trying to compel farmers like Perez to flee the land so they could use it, they killed others to cover up what they were planning to use it for. The complaint to the DEA identifies 67 suspects led by "Archie" and the four army colonels, who, according to the complaint, have built so many clandestine runways throughout Los Amates that they have "converted its five hamlets into warehouses for drugs." At the same time, DEA special agents were beginning to identify Guatemala as the new "bodega" or warehouse of Colombian drug cartels. Colombian law enforcement officials say processed cocaine was arriving by sea as well as by air. The United States managed to extradite "Archie" to stand trial in U.S. federal court in New York where he was later convicted on the DEA's evidence. But "Archie's" military confederates remained free, part of a pattern of impunity enjoyed by the entire officer corps. "Guatemalan military officers strongly suspected of trafficking in narcotics rarely face criminal prosecution," reported the State Department in 1994. "In most cases, the officers continue on with their suspicious activities." Take Lt. Col. "Charlie." The military gave him a dishonorable discharge over the DEA's accusations against him, in order to put distance between his name and the institution. But that didn't stop a military tribunal from reclaiming jurisdiction over "Charlie" later and ruling to dismiss the charges for lack of evidence. Rather than try him in Guatemala, the State Department was hoping to extradite him to Florida to be tried. The United States lost the extradition case against "Charlie" three times in Guatemalan courts and appealed it all the way to Guatemala's highest judicial authority, its Constitutional Court. State Department officials at the time were sanguine that they would win, as the Constitutional Court president, Epaminondas Gonzalez Dubon, was a judge who had already established his independence. In May 1993, when then-President Jorge Serrano declared a "self-coup" and imposed martial law, Judge Gonzalez promptly declared it unconstitutional. The ruling helped galvanize both domestic and White House opposition to the coup. One week later Seranno fled the country and the country's constitutional order was restored. In March 1994, Judge Gonzalez made an equally independent ruling and signed a Constitutional Court decision declaring "Charlie's" extradition constitutional and circulated it to the court's other judges for their concurring signatures. On April 1, Judge Gonzalez left Guatemala City with his family for an Easter day trip to nearby Antigua. Upon the family's return, four men in a car shot and killed Gonzalez in front of his wife and son. Eleven days later, the surviving judges secretly ruled that "Charlie's" extradition was unconstitutional, and he went free. His was the DEA's most important test case in Guatemala. DEA special agents, however, learned the hard way that the CIA-backed Guatemalan military was above the law. How did the Clinton administration react to the judge's murder? U.S. Ambassador Marilyn McAfee accepted the Guatemalan government's claim that the judge had been killed in an attempted car-jacking, even though no one tried to steal anything. American authorities helped Guatemalan authorities cover up any link between the judge's murder and the court's subsequent decision. Only later in the year would Human Rights Watch report that Gonzalez had signed an extradition order for "Charlie" shortly before his murder. Later still, in 1995, I reported that the surviving judges secretly denied his extradition 11 days after it occurred. After I accused Ambassador McAfee, who has long held specialty posts within the U.S. Information Agency, of dropping "Charlie's" case, she issued a press release that finally made the extradition denial public, but made no mention of Judge Gonzalez or his murder. "Charlie," who was never extradited, went on running drugs. He was arrested again in 1997 in a Guatemalan sting operation, this time with 30 kilos of cocaine. But "Charlie" managed to get off free yet again in Guatemala, even though he remains wanted by a U.S. federal grand jury in Tampa, Fla., over 500 kilograms of DEA-seized cocaine.
Frank Smyth has written about the Guatemalan military's role in cocaine trafficking in the Washington Post, the Village Voice and the Wall Street Journal. Hell no, we
won't throw away the key Serious civil disobedience against the
nation's drug sentencing laws is being staged -- by prosecutors and senior
judges.
Right hand, left
hand One drug agent's decade-long battle to expose the contra-cocaine
connection -- and how the government got in the way.
Burden of
proof Does the press have different standards of skepticism for
different stories? The coverage of the CIA-crack story, compared to that of
the various Clinton scandals, seems to indicate that it does.
Clinton finally
cranks up war on meth How speed ran circles around dozing feds.
|
||