by robertdreed » Mon Oct 24, 2005 2:55 am
In the meantime, I'll salvage those excerpts from Whitewash, that I previously posted on DeadNetCentral:<br><br> <!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://hotline.deadnetcentral.com/WebX?14@82.luqCaCW6wmp.63991@.ee7aad0/538">hotline.deadnetcentral.co...e7aad0/538</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>HCu - 10:15pm Dec 19, 2000 PDT (#538 of 1638 ) [ you know, fuck your fucking emoticons. RDR. ] <br><br>click on "HCu" for updated unusual history booklist and websites<br>Reposting the link, so it works-- <br><br>Pinochet and Chilean military regime linked to cocaine, Contras- <br> <!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,409347,00.html">observer.guardian.co.uk/i...47,00.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br>HCu - 10:42pm Dec 19, 2000 PDT (#539 of 1638 ) <br>click on "HCu" for updated unusual history booklist and websites<br><br>Now that some factions in U.S. government circles are beating the war drums for increased military intervention in Colombia, I thought that it might be useful to post some of the more cogent information that I've gleaned from various sources on the drug trade in Latin America. <br><br>Colombia has recently joined other nations like Mexico, Burma, and Afghanistan as a principal supplier of heroin to the U.S. and world market. In fact, it is currently alleged by the DEA and Customs to be the #1 supplier of heroin to the U.S. market. Since the cultivation of opium poppies, the source of refined heroin, was virtually unknown in Colombia 25 years ago, this phenomenon deserves further explanation. The following excerpt from the book Whitewash, by Simon Strong, offers some provocative leads as to the reason for the sudden explosion in Colombian opium plantations and heroin laboratories. <br><br><br>"In late 1984, the U.S. embassy in Bogota initiated a bizarre cover-up of Colombia's incipient opium trade. Reports of opium seizures had started in the late 1970s, after the seeds were brought in by the Mexicans. The plantations were said to be in the departments [states]of Cauca, Tolima, Meta, and Cundinamarca. In late 1984, a British journalist and drugs expert, Timothy Ross, bought 2 grams of heroin in Bogota and filmed it for ABC television. To test the purity, he gave half to a toxicology clinic and half to the DEA. Not less than 65 per cent pure, said the clinic. It has no opiate content whatsoever, said the DEA. 'It was the first indication that something was weird,' said Ross, who then secured another sample, this time a 10-gram blob of opium which he bought off a Cauca poppy grower. With no reason to distrust the DEA, with whom he was on good terms, Ross asked them to test it for morphine content. 'The effect was extraordinary. A few weeks later, they denied getting the sample. The secretary who had received it from me was transferred abruptly, and nobody said where to, so there was no way I could prove I had ever given it.' <br><br>Meanwhile, a propaganda visit by five members of the Afghanistan anti-Soviet resistance was organized. 'A friend in the attorney general's office told me that two of them stayed on, and that it was reported that they were helping Colombians to make proper quality heroin,' said Ross. 'My friend had already claimed that an Israeli agronomist had been brought in to improve poppy cultivation. I was naively chatting with the embassy about what I was hearing when they suddenly got very weird with me.' One week of what Ross described as 'serious terror tactics' culminated in his being summoned by the embassy security officer, who pointed his finger at him and declared: 'You are going to lay off this story or you are going to die.'" <br>from Whitewash: Pablo Escobar and the Cocaine Wars, 1994, by Simon Strong, MacMillan Publishing, p.106 <br><br>HCu - 11:18pm Dec 19, 2000 PDT (#540 of 1638 ) <br>click on "HCu" for updated unusual history booklist and websites<br><br>Also from Whitewash, page 193, concerning an early 1980s link between the Colombian branch of the notorious BCCI and the Conservative Party's Andres Pastrana, currently the President of Colombia- <br><br><br>Drug-money laundering was [a BCCI] specialty. The BCCI had won access to the U.S. financial system through its illegal purchase of First American Bank using U.S. nominees at the turn of the 1980s. It acquired a hot line to the cocaine industry in an apparently similar way: using Colombian nationals to secure full control over the Banco Mercantil. 'The nominees then pledged the shares to BCCI, signed blank transfer powers to BCCI, and gave it the right to vote shares.' <br><br>This occurred during Colombia's financial crisis, when many of the Mercantil's manufacturing clients were suffering badly from cheap imports- resulting from policy originally inspired by the influx of cocaine dollars- and the bank was suffering accordingly. At least one member of the Banco Mercantil's board had very close links to the Rodriguez Orejuelas of the Cali cartel. Also on the board at the start of its takeover by the BCCI- which already had an office in Bogota, run by a Pakistani later jailed for money laundering after a mass sting operation in Florida- was the future Conservative presidential candidate, Andres Pastrana. Pastrana was fined- although this fine was later quashed under a statute of limitations rule- in connection with a loan of about $2 million paid by the Mercantil to a financial group of which he was the board member. The BCCI took over the Mercantil shortly afterwards and the loan went unpaid after Pastrana's financial group, Promoviendo, went into liquidation. The so-called loan had all the appearance of a BCCI political sweetener to the Conservative government. (Juvenal Betancur, brother of the then president, Belisario Betancur, was implicated in money laundering operations uncovered by the United States in 1982.) <br><br><br> <p></p><i></i>
