CIA's Dark Alliance

When Gary Web's "Dark Alliance," a three-part series on the CIA's connection to the 1970s and '80s crack cocaine boom, surfaced August in the San Jose Mercury News, the urban myth was finally turned into a civic truth.

According to the report, money made from the sale of hundreds of pounds of cocaine was funneled to the Nicaraguan Contras by the CIA.

It was shocking.

Not finding out that the government has had its hand in the cocaine trafficking business, but that the findings wouldn't instantly dissolve in a court room procedure or be so quickly dismissed by former government officials as "garbage."

It was stunning.

And this revelation has hit home. Last weekend, 2,000 people gathered in a South Central Los Angeles park for a rally protesting the CIA's reported role in the saturation of their neighborhoods with drugs.

San Diego City Councilman Nate Holden was quoted as saying, "This is as if our own country has declared war on us. This is no different than an enemy dropping bombs on us."(How quickly we forget the tanks during the aftermath of the Rodney King trial.)

Holden's statement is something poor people in the midst of urban battlefields in ghettos nationwide have been saying for a long time now.

And this isn't the first time their hopes have been lifted with a newspaper report on a crime they've been witness to time and time again.

There have been, after all, reports of a CIA cargo plane shot down in Nicaragua while being used in a guns-for-drugs swap between Colombia and Nicaragua.

Six years ago the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department discovered documents linking the CIA to drug dealers during a raid. But when the motion was filed, explaining the discovery and the government's refusal to deny using money made in drug sales to purchase guns for the Contras, the evidence "mysteriously" disappeared and the attorneys were slapped with gag orders.

Dick Gregory, a nutritional guru and human rights activist who is fasting until an investigation is carried out on the current findings in "Dark Alliance," echoed the wide-spread dismay in a lecture at SF State last week.

Gregory, who has been arrested twice for trespassing during protests outside of CIA and Drug Enforcement Agency offices in Virginia, told students in Malcolm X Plaza that those building contained information that the CIA helped destroy black people.

"That's called genocide and it's a worse horror than slavery, because nobody blamed slavery on black people," he said.

But the illegal drug trade has hit the inner-city hard and taken its toll -- especially on Black and Latino communities -- putting violators of U.S.' hypocritical drug laws in jail (sometimes for life) for using or selling drugs imported with the help of the United States.

Of the 142,078 people in California prisons, more than 26 percent are there because of drugs, most of which not naturally grown in the nation. (We have yet to find a coca grove in South Central or even in "Cokeland," the Bay Area's equivalent.)

We wouldn't be going out on a limb to call the government's ploy genocide, would we?

Perhaps that's a little too left-wing extremist for the mainstream, which is still denying the connection between Republican poster boy Ronald Reagan's executive order for full Contra support and the opening of the floodgates, allowing crack to poison America's Black and Latino neighborhoods.

All the while his freaky wife Nancy was covering his tracks with her "anti-drug" campaign to "Just Say No."

[ Golden Gater Online October 3, 1996 ]

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