18 – The Nicaraguan Revolution (1979)

“Fundamental to Jacksonville University’s mission is support for an environment where divergent ideas, theories, and philosophies can be openly exchanged and critically evaluated. Consistent with these principles and the concept of Academic Freedom, this course may involve the discussion of ideas that you find uncomfortable, disagreeable, or even offensive. These ideas are intended to be presented in an impartial manner, they are not intended to persuade and are not an endorsement of what you should personally believe.”

This concise guide is designed as an introductory scholarly resource. The questions posed herein are not central to the principal debates of this course; rather, they function as basic points of departure. The material is presented with the complete commitment to objectivity, while recognizing that the interpretive framework is, and cannot be, neutral. Prof. Jorge Majfud.

Table of Contents

Questions

What was the Liberation theology
What was the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979?
What was the Iran-Contra Affair?
What role did the Contras play in the conflict against the Sandinista government?
How did U.S. officials become connected to the Contras’ alleged drug-trafficking activities?
What did the Iran-Contra Affair reveal about covert U.S. foreign policy operations?

Introduction

The Evangel of the Needy and the Doctrine of Weapons

Every hegemon requires a theology. When the poor of Latin America began to read the Gospel on their own, power discovered that a book written by an executed Galilean carpenter could be more dangerous than a rifle.

Liberation theology was born from that reading. After the Medellín conference of 1968, priests and lay activists such as the Peruvian Gustavo Gutiérrez argued that Christianity was not a sedative for suffering but a commitment to the oppressed. God, they said, had a «preferential option for the poor.» In base communities across the continent, peasants who had been told for centuries that poverty was a divine trial began to suspect it was a human arrangement. For the Committee of Santa Fe, which advised Ronald Reagan in 1980, this was a threat to be countered. That same year, Archbishop Óscar Romero was shot while celebrating Mass in San Salvador. The message was clear: the Gospel was tolerated as long as it stayed in heaven.

In Nicaragua, heaven had been governed for more than four decades by the Somoza family, a dynasty founded under the protection of the US Marines who had occupied the country and battled Augusto Sandino. On July 19, 1979, the Sandinista National Liberation Front, named after that rebel, toppled Anastasio Somoza Debayle. The revolution blended Marxists, nationalists, and Christians. Priests like Ernesto Cardenal and Miguel d’Escoto entered the government, and a literacy campaign taught hundreds of thousands to read. For some, it was the first time the poor inscribed their own names. For others, it was the first domino of a Soviet Caribbean.

Washington selected the domino. Beginning in 1981, the CIA organized and armed the Contras, a force built largely around former officers of Somoza’s National Guard. Reagan labeled them the moral equal of America’s Founding Fathers. In 1983, the CIA airdropped thousands of copies of a comic book over Nicaragua, The Freedom Fighter’s Manual. It instructed citizens to call in sick, leave the lights and taps running, plug toilets with sponges, and make Molotov cocktails. Its cover declared that sabotaging the «Marxist tyranny» was a way to vindicate Sandino’s memory. Even the rebel’s ghost was conscripted against his own heirs. The Contras fought a war that targeted cooperatives, clinics, and schools and killed 30.000 people. In 1984, the CIA mined Nicaraguan harbors, and in 1986 the International Court of Justice determined that the United States had breached international law. Washington repudiated the court’s jurisdiction. Freedom, once again, was a matter of who possessed the dictionary.

When Congress cut off military aid through the Boland Amendment, the war went underground. National Security Council officials, including Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, arranged secret arms sales to Iran, a country under embargo, partly to free American hostages in Lebanon, and redirected part of the profits to the Contras. In May 1986, former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane flew to Tehran in an unmarked Boeing 707, carrying an Irish passport, missile parts, pistols, a Bible signed by Reagan and a kosher chocolate cake from a Tel Aviv bakery, decorated with a key to symbolize «opening the door.» He was met not by moderates but by the Revolutionary Guards, and he left the cake behind. Meanwhile, the State Department solicited 10 million dollars from the Sultan of Brunei for the Contras. The money never reached them. The scheme collapsed when the Sandinistas shot down a CIA-arranged cargo plane on October 5, 1986, the first public proof of the secret supply network.

The planes did not always return empty. In 1989, a Senate subcommittee headed by John Kerry determined that individuals in the Contra network were engaged in drug trafficking and that US agencies knew it. The State Department disbursed more than $806,000 in «humanitarian funds» to four corporations owned and operated by narcotics traffickers, and it kept conducting business with one of them, DIACSA, six months after its principals were indicted. In 1986, North’s assistant Robert Owen cautioned him in writing that a plane conveying taxpayer-funded aid had previously been used to smuggle drugs.

Several officials were convicted, some convictions were overturned on appeal, and in 1992 President George H. W. Bush pardoned six of those involved. The Iran-Contra affair showed that covert policy is not an exception to democracy but its shadow: the place where power goes when the people say no, and where a cake, a Bible and a comic book can wage the same war.

The Gospel According to the Poor

For generations, the Church in Latin America understood very well whose side it was on. It blessed the conquistador’s sword, sanctified the encomienda, and taught the Native and the slave that suffering on earth was the price of a ticket to heaven. Nobody labeled that politics. Politics is always what the other side does.

Then, in the 1960s, something inexcusable happened: some clergy began studying the Gospel. They observed that the carpenter from Nazareth did not dine with rulers but with fishermen, sex workers and lepers; that he did not say “blessed are the rich investors” but “blessed are the poor.” In 1968, at Medellín, the bishops spoke of “structural sin,” a perilous idea, because it implied that poverty was not a natural phenomenon like rain, but a design, with planners and beneficiaries.

Gustavo Gutiérrez bestowed it a title in 1971: liberation theology. Its approach was straightforward and, for that reason, subversive. First, observe reality. Then, reflect about God. Not the other way around. The poor ceased being objects of charity and became protagonists of history, assembled in base communities to read the Bible with their own eyes and pose an old, prohibited question: why?

The answer did not please Washington. In 1980, the Santa Fe Document, written by advisers to the incoming Reagan administration, recommended that the United States confront liberation theology. Rome, for its part, worried about the Marxist vocabulary. It is curious: nobody worried that the Church had spoken the vocabulary of feudalism for four hundred years.

The reaction was not only theological. That same year, Archbishop Óscar Romero was shot while celebrating Mass in San Salvador, the day after imploring soldiers to stop slaughtering their own people. In 1989, six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter were slain at the Central American University by a battalion trained in the United States. Ideas are contested with ideas, they say. Except when ideas endanger interests. Then they are confronted with bullets, and later with silence.

Decades afterward, a Latin American pontiff met with Gutiérrez and proclaimed Romero a saint. History has these paradoxes: yesterday’s dissenters become today’s icons, once they are securely dead.

Liberation theology did not eradicate poverty. But it perpetrated a sin that power never forgives: it stole God from the mighty and returned him to the destitute, which is where, according to the Gospel, he had always been.

Between the Altar and the Barricade

In Nicaragua, as throughout Latin America, the Bible had spent centuries in the hands of those who knew how to interpret it correctly, that is, in the way most advantageous to the landowner, the general and, later, the dynasty of the Somozas, who ruled the country as if it were a family estate with a flag. But in the 1960s, after Vatican II and Medellín, something unforeseen happened: the poor began to read the Bible for themselves, in the base communities of Managua’s barrios and in the voices of peasant Delegates of the Word, and they discovered that Pharaoh was not a figure from antiquity but a man with a National Guard.

In 1966, the priest and poet Ernesto Cardenal founded a small community on the islands of Solentiname, where fishermen and farmers discussed the Gospel as one debates the news, and where, little by little, the parables began to sound like accounts from the present. Some of those young peasants, who had learned from Christ that love without justice is mere ornamentation, joined the Sandinista Front and attacked the San Carlos barracks in 1977; the dictatorship responded as dictatorships always respond to opponents, by burning the place where they were born.

Uriel Molina, in a Managua barrio, assembled students who would later become guerrillas, and the Spanish priest Gaspar García Laviana, who had come to save souls, ended up giving his body to the conflict in 1978. Thanks to them, a Marxist movement found its path under a slogan that scandalized Rome more than any rifle: between Christianity and revolution there is no contradiction. In 1979, the victory placed priests in the ministries of a revolutionary government, and four years later the Pope Juan Pablo II, on the airport tarmac in Managua, wagged his finger at a kneeling Ernesto Cardenal, as one scolds a child who has taken the Gospel too literally. It was, perhaps, the most honest image of the century: the Church of the powerful chastising the Church of the poor for the unpardonable sin of having believed what it preached.

Washington’s answer to liberation theology was a Cold War strategy more than a single CIA plot. The 1980 Santa Fe Document urged Washington to counter it, and in the 1980s US evangelical missions spread across Central America, preaching personal salvation and obedience instead of social justice. In Guatemala, the evangelical general Ríos Montt led the bloodiest phase of the counterinsurgency. The scope of CIA orchestration of this evangelical boom, however, remains a matter of discussion—not the fact of intervention.

Contras and Iran-Contra Affair: The Arithmetic of Freedom

In 1984, through the Boland Amendment, the US Congress barred the Reagan administration from financing the Contras, the army of former Somoza guardsmen and mercenaries tasked with liberating Nicaragua from the Nicaraguans. That same year, Nicaragua brought Washington to the International Court of Justice over the mining of its harbors, and in 1986 the court ruled against the United States. Washington replied that the court had no jurisdiction. Laws, like the Bible, must be interpreted correctly.

But the war had a dilemma that no budget could solve: witnesses. Since 1983, thousands of Americans, students, nuns, pastors and farmers, had journeyed to the Nicaraguan war zones with Witness for Peace, carrying cameras and notebooks instead of rifles. They documented burned cooperatives, mutilated bodies and orphaned children, and then returned home to show the slides in church basements and university halls, and to reiterate in congressional offices what the official reports called “allegations.” Photographers like Paul Dix recorded the accounts of peasant families assaulted by the Contras, such as the Pérez family in Lagartillo at the end of 1984. It was a dangerous kind of tourism: these Americans had gone to see the backyard and had discovered that people lived there.

Some gave their lives. Ben Linder, a young engineer who had journeyed to Nicaragua to help construct a small hydroelectric dam for an impoverished rural community, was slain on April 28, 1987, together with two Nicaraguans, in a Contra ambush. His offense was bringing electricity to the darkness. In Washington, some argued that he should not have been there. The Contras, of course, were exactly where they ought to be.

Thanks to those witnesses, American public opinion became a hindrance, and Congress kept the money withheld. But freedom, as everyone knows, has a cost, and if Congress refused to pay it, someone else would. So in the basement of the White House, men like Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North devised an elegant solution. The United States would covertly sell weapons to Iran, the nation it officially called a sponsor of terrorism, in exchange for help releasing American hostages in Lebanon, the very thing it had sworn never to negotiate. The proceeds would then be diverted to the Contras, the very thing the law forbade. Three prohibitions violated in a single transaction: a masterpiece of effectiveness that any businessman would admire.

The machine was perfect until it fell from the sky. In October 1986, the Sandinistas shot down a cargo plane loaded with weapons for the Contras, and the only survivor, an American named Eugene Hasenfus, walked out of the jungle with the whole story in his pockets. A month later, a Lebanese magazine revealed the arms sales to Iran, and the shredders in Washington worked harder than the Contras ever did. President Reagan first denied trading arms for hostages, and then explained that, although the facts said otherwise, his heart still told him it was not true. Rarely has a confession been so sincere.

The investigations concluded as such inquiries typically end. North and his superior John Poindexter were convicted, but their verdicts were overturned on appeal, and in 1992 President George H. W. Bush, who had been vice president during the whole affair, pardoned six of those implicated. A Senate committee had also discovered that some of the networks supplying the Contras were connected to drug traffickers, a detail that was filed away with the discretion reserved for inconvenient truths.

In the end, the accounts balanced perfectly. Washington got its war, Iran got its missiles, and the officials got their pardons. The students and pastors who had brought back the photographs got nothing but the uncomfortable privilege of having been right. And the Nicaraguans, tens of thousands of them, paid in full.

CIA, Contras, Noriega, and Pablo Escobar: The White Powder of Freedom

In February 1990, the Sandinista revolution accomplished something that dictatorships never do and that Washington had always said it would never do: it lost an election and departed. Violeta Chamorro, at the head of a coalition generously financed by the United States, defeated Daniel Ortega. The voters were not choosing between two ideas but between two exhaustions. After a decade of Contra conflict, some 30.000 dead, a US trade embargo and an economy where inflation ran faster than the soldiers, Nicaraguans grasped the message very well: as long as the Sandinistas governed, the war would not end. It was not a defeat at the ballot box but at gunpoint, though history, which is written by the winners, would call it a triumph of democracy. The Sandinistas, for their part, did not leave with clean hands either: in the weeks before handing over power, some of their leaders distributed houses, land and businesses among themselves, in what Nicaraguans dubbed “la piñata.” Revolutions, too, have their own arithmetic.

But the war for freedom had another outcome, less virtuous than democracy and more lucrative than coffee. In the 1980s, the planes that transported weapons south did not always return vacant. The Kerry Committee of the US Senate found in 1989 that individuals involved in the Contra supply networks were also implicated in drug trafficking, and that the State Department had even paid firms owned by traffickers to deliver “humanitarian aid” to the Contras. Freedom, it seems, was also sold by the gram.

The case of Manuel Noriega is the perfect parable of the era. For years, the Panamanian general was a paid operative of the CIA, a dependable friend who assisted with the Contras and with whatever else was required, while his country served as a laundromat for the cocaine of the Medellín cartel. Nobody in Washington seemed to observe, or rather, everyone noticed and nobody cared. George H. W. Bush, who had directed the CIA in the 1970s and was vice president during the years of greatest collaboration, discovered the drug problem during his presidential campaign and when Noriega ceased to be useful. In 1988, he was indicted in Miami for drug trafficking, and in December 1989, President Bush invaded Panama to capture him. Hundreds of forgotten Panamanian civilians died in the operation. Noriega was tried and convicted in Florida. It was the first time in history that a country was invaded to arrest one of its own employees.

Pablo Escobar also played a part in this drama. In 1984, the pilot Barry Seal, a trafficker turned DEA informant, photographed Escobar’s men loading cocaine onto a plane at an airfield in Nicaragua, in the presence of a Sandinista official. President Reagan exhibited the photos on national television as evidence that the Sandinistas were narcoterrorists. Nicknamed “The Fat Lady,” the airplane was actually fitted with hidden CIA cameras for a DEA sting. Seal was slain by the cartel in 1986. His aircraft, a C-123, was subsequently transferred to the Contra supply network and was the same one shot down over Nicaragua months later, with Eugene Hasenfus aboard. History is a poor storyteller: it does not care about being credible.

And then there was California. In 1996, the journalist Gary Webb released “Dark Alliance” in the San Jose Mercury News, revealing how two Nicaraguan traffickers connected to the Contras, Danilo Blandón and Norwin Meneses, had sold tons of cocaine in Los Angeles through a dealer named “Freeway” Rick Ross, and had sent part of the profits to the war against the Sandinistas. The cocaine became crack, and crack ravaged the Black neighborhoods of the city. The major newspapers of the country, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post, did not investigate the CIA; they investigated Webb. They discovered his exaggerations and disregarded his facts. His career was shattered.

Two years later, the CIA’s own Inspector General acknowledged that the agency had collaborated with people it knew or suspected were involved in drug trafficking, and that in 1982 it had reached an agreement with the Justice Department that exempted it of the obligation to report drug crimes committed by its non-employee collaborators. Almost nobody read that report. In 2004, Gary Webb was found dead with two gunshot wounds to the head. It was ruled a suicide.

In the end, the campaign against communism and the campaign against drugs turned out to be the same conflict, waged by the same men, with the same planes, in the same direction. The Nicaraguans forfeited a revolution, the Panamanians surrendered their sovereignty, and the young people of South Central Los Angeles lost a generation. The officials, as always, secured their pensions. Freedom, once again, was paid for by others.

Documents and sources

The Contras, Cocaine, and Covert Operations (docs)

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 2

Washington, D.C. – An August, 1996, series in the San Jose Mercury News by reporter Gary Webb linked the origins of crack cocaine in California to the contras, a guerrilla force backed by the Reagan administration that attacked Nicaragua’s Sandinista government during the 1980s. Webb’s series, «The Dark Alliance,» has been the subject of intense media debate, and has focused attention on a foreign policy drug scandal that leaves many questions unanswered.

This electronic briefing book is compiled from declassified documents obtained by the National Security Archive, including the notebooks kept by NSC aide and Iran-contra figure Oliver North, electronic mail messages written by high-ranking Reagan administration officials, memos detailing the contra war effort, and FBI and DEA reports. The documents demonstrate official knowledge of drug operations, and collaboration with and protection of known drug traffickers. Court and hearing transcripts are also included.

Special thanks to the Arca Foundation, the Ruth Mott Fund, the Samuel Rubin Foundation, and the Fund for Constitutional Government for their support.

Documentation of Official U.S. Knowledge of Drug Trafficking and the Contras

The National Security Archive obtained the hand-written notebooks of Oliver North, the National Security Council aide who helped run the contra war and other Reagan administration covert operations, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed in 1989. The notebooks, as well as declassified memos sent to North, record that North was repeatedly informed of contra ties to drug trafficking.

In his entry for August 9, 1985, North summarizes a meeting with Robert Owen («Rob»), his liaison with the contras. They discuss a plane used by Mario Calero, brother of Adolfo Calero, head of the FDN, to transport supplies from New Orleans to contras in Honduras. North writes: «Honduran DC-6 which is being used for runs out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into U.S.» As Lorraine Adams reported in the October 22, 1994 Washington Post, there are no records that corroborate North’s later assertion that he passed this intelligence on drug trafficking to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

In a July 12, 1985 entry, North noted a call from retired Air Force general Richard Secord in which the two discussed a Honduran arms warehouse from which the contras planned to purchase weapons. (The contras did eventually buy the arms, using money the Reagan administration secretly raised from Saudi Arabia.) According to the notebook, Secord told North that «14 M to finance [the arms in the warehouse] came from drugs.»

An April 1, 1985 memo from Robert Owen (code-name: «T.C.» for «The Courier») to Oliver North (code-name: «The Hammer») describes contra operations on the Southern Front. Owen tells North that FDN leader Adolfo Calero (code-name: «Sparkplug») has picked a new Southern Front commander, one of the former captains to Eden Pastora who has been paid to defect to the FDN. Owen reports that the officials in the new Southern Front FDN units include «people who are questionable because of past indiscretions,» such as José Robelo, who is believed to have «potential involvement with drug running» and Sebastian Gonzalez, who is «now involved in drug running out of Panama.»

On February 10, 1986, Owen («TC») wrote North (this time as «BG,» for «Blood and Guts») regarding a plane being used to carry «humanitarian aid» to the contras that was previously used to transport drugs. The plane belongs to the Miami-based company Vortex, which is run by Michael Palmer, one of the largest marijuana traffickers in the United States. Despite Palmer’s long history of drug smuggling, which would soon lead to a Michigan indictment on drug charges, Palmer receives over $300,000.00 from the Nicaraguan Humanitarian Aid Office (NHAO) — an office overseen by Oliver North, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Elliott Abrams, and CIA officer Alan Fiers — to ferry supplies to the contras.

State Department contracts from February 1986 detail Palmer’s work to transport material to the contras on behalf of the NHAO.

Evidence that NSC Staff Supported Using Drug Money to Fund the Contras

In 1987, the Senate Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism and International Operations, led by Senator John Kerry, launched an investigation of allegations arising from reports, more than a decade ago, of contra-drug links. One of the incidents examined by the «Kerry Committee» was an effort to divert drug money from a counternarcotics operation to the contra war.

On July 28, 1988, two DEA agents testified before the House Subcommittee on Crime regarding a sting operation conducted against the Medellin Cartel. The two agents said that in 1985 Oliver North had wanted to take $1.5 million in Cartel bribe money that was carried by a DEA informant and give it to the contras. DEA officials rejected the idea.

The Kerry Committee report concluded that «senior U.S. policy makers were not immune to the idea that drug money was a perfect solution to the Contras’ funding problems.»

U.S. Officials and Major Traffickers

Manuel Noriega

In June, 1986, the New York Times published articles detailing years of Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega’s collaboration with Colombian drug traffickers. Reporter Seymour Hersh wrote that Noriega «is extensively involved in illicit money laundering and drug activities,» and that an unnamed White House official «said the most significant drug running in Panama was being directed by General Noriega.» In August, Noriega, a long-standing U.S. intelligence asset, sent an emissary to Washington to seek assistance from the Reagan administration in rehabilitating his drug-stained reputation.

Oliver North, who met with Noriega’s representative, described the meeting in an August 23, 1986 e-mail message to Reagan national security advisor John Poindexter. «You will recall that over the years Manuel Noriega in Panama and I have developed a fairly good relationship,» North writes before explaining Noriega’s proposal. If U.S. officials can «help clean up his image» and lift the ban on arms sales to the Panamanian Defense Force, Noriega will «‘take care of’ the Sandinista leadership for us.»

North tells Poindexter that Noriega can assist with sabotage against the Sandinistas, and suggests paying Noriega a million dollars — from «Project Democracy» funds raised from the sale of U.S. arms to Iran — for the Panamanian leader’s help in destroying Nicaraguan economic installations.

The same day Poindexter responds with an e-mail message authorizing North to meet secretly with Noriega. «I have nothing against him other than his illegal activities,» Poindexter writes.

On the following day, August 24, North’s notebook records a meeting with CIA official Duane «Dewey» Clarridge on Noriega’s overture. They decided, according to this entry, to «send word back to Noriega to meet in Europe or Israel.»

The CIA’s Alan Fiers later recalls North’s involvement with the Noriega sabotage proposal. In testimony at the 1992 trial of former CIA official Clair George, Fiers describes North’s plan as it was discussed at a meeting of the Reagan administration’s Restricted Interagency Group: «[North] made a very strong suggestion that . . . there needed to be a resistance presence in the western part of Nicaragua, where the resistance did not operate. And he said, ‘I can arrange to have General Noriega execute some insurgent — some operations there — sabotage operations in that area. It will cost us about $1 million. Do we want to do it?’ And there was significant silence at the table. And then I recall I said, ‘No. We don’t want to do that.’»

Senior officials ignored Fiers’ opinion. On September 20, North informed Poindexter via e-mail that «Noriega wants to meet me in London» and that both Elliott Abrams and Secretary of State George Shultz support the initiative. Two days later, Poindexter authorized the North/Noriega meeting.

North’s notebook lists details of his meeting with Noriega, which took place in a London hotel on September 22. According to the notes, the two discussed developing a commando training program in Panama, with Israeli support, for the contras and Afghani rebels. They also spoke of sabotaging major economic targets in the Managua area, including an airport, an oil refinery, and electric and telephone systems. (These plans were apparently aborted when the Iran-Contra scandal broke in November 1986.)

José Bueso Rosa

Reagan administration officials advocated on behalf of José Bueso Rosa, a Honduran general who was heavily involved with the CIA’s contra operations and faced trial for his role in a massive drug shipment to the United States. In 1984 Bueso and co-conspirators hatched a plan to assassinate Honduran President Roberto Suazo Córdoba; the plot was to be financed with a $40 million cocaine shipment to the United States, which the FBI intercepted in Florida.

Declassified e-mail messages indicate that Oliver North led the behind-the-scenes effort to seek leniency for Bueso . The messages record the efforts of U.S. officials to «cabal quietly» to get Bueso off the hook, be it by «pardon, clemency, deportation, [or] reduced sentence.» Eventually they succeeded in getting Bueso a short sentence in «Club Fed,» a white collar prison in Florida.

The Kerry Committee report reviewed the case, and noted that the man Reagan officials aided was involved in a conspiracy that the Justice Department deemed the «most significant case of narco-terrorism yet discovered.»

FBI/DEA Documentation

In February 1987 a contra sympathizer in California told the FBI he believed FDN officials were involved in the drug trade. Dennis Ainsworth, a Berkeley-based conservative activist who had supported the contra cause for years, gave a lengthy description of his suspicions to FBI agents. The bureau’s debriefing says that Ainsworth agreed to be interviewed because «he has certain information in which he believes the Nicaraguan ‘Contra’ organization known as FDN (Frente Democrático Nacional) has become more involved in selling arms and cocaine for personal gain than in a military effort to overthrow the current Nicaraguan Sandinista Government.» Ainsworth informed the FBI of his extensive contacts with various contra leaders and backers, and explained the basis for his belief that members of the FDN were trafficking in drugs.

A DEA report of February 6, 1984 indicates that a central figure in the San Jose Mercury News series was being tracked by U.S. law enforcement officials as early as 1976, when a DEA agent «identified Norwin MENESES-Canterero as a cocaine source of supply in Managua, Nicaragua.» Meneses, an associate of dictator Anastasio Somoza who relocated to California after the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979, was an FDN backer and large-scale cocaine trafficker.

Testimony of Fabio Ernesto Carrasco, 6 April 1990

On October 31, 1996, the Washington Post ran a follow up story to the San Jose Mercury News series titled «CIA, Contras and Drugs: Questions on Links Linger.» The story drew on court testimony in 1990 of Fabio Ernesto Carrasco, a pilot for a major Columbian drug smuggler named George Morales. As a witness in a drug trial, Carrasco testified that in 1984 and 1985, he piloted planes loaded with weapons for contras operating in Costa Rica. The weapons were offloaded, and then drugs stored in military bags were put on the planes which flew to the United States. «I participated in two [flights] which involved weapons and cocaine at the same time,» he told the court.

Carrasco also testified that Morales provided «several million dollars» to Octaviano Cesar and Adolfo «Popo» Chamorro, two rebel leaders working with the head of the contras’ southern front, Eden Pastora. The Washington Post reported that Chamorro said he had called his CIA control officer to ask if the contras could accept money and arms from Morales, who was at the time under indictment for cocaine smuggling. «They said [Morales] was fine,» Chamorro told the Post.