Recent Central American History

David Smith

In 1979, the leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) overthrew the Nicaraguan government that the United States had supported. Many people in Washington, including the incoming president Ronald Reagan, thought Jimmy Carter had been too soft on communism in Nicaragua. The incoming administration vowed to fight Central American communism much more enthusiastically, and one of their goals was to overthrow the new Sandinista regime. Congress, however, had passed laws prohibiting the government from funding the Contras, the right-wing paramilitary resistance to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. In order to circumvent licit funding from Congress, the Reagan administration devised illegal schemes to provide the funds necessary to continue their proxy war in Nicaragua. The most notable of these illegal schemes is the Iran-Contra affair in which Oliver North and the Reagan administration sold weapons to Iran and then funneled the proceeds to the Contras without any Congressional oversight. The Contras were also linked to selling the first batches of cocaine that were turned into “crack,” or cocaine hydrochloride, in Los Angeles so that they could increase their war chest. Whether or not the CIA organized and directed these drug deals has been the subject of much inquiry and speculation since the Contra-crack connection has been established, and what can be concluded is that the CIA was complicit or extremely irresponsible in the Contras crack cocaine networks in the poorer communities of Los Angeles. The CIA-Contra connection is very important for a few reasons. It reveals truths about the Central American Cold War and the War on Drugs that are difficult to reconcile with the professed morality of such wars. While the Iran-Contra affair is obviously a massive chapter in modern US history, the Contra-cocaine connection has stunning implications for 1980s US-Central America relations.

The only reason we know about the Contra drug ring in Los Angeles is due to the reporting of Gary Webb. In 1995, Webb published a 3-part story in which he detailed the connections between the Contras and a man by the name of “Freeway” Rick Ross. As the story goes, Norwin Meneses and Oscar Blandon, two Contras, came to San Francisco with the direction to sell a bunch of cocaine. The Contras didn’t know how to sell the cocaine, so they tried their luck further south, in Los Angeles. Around the time the Contras were in Los Angeles, some people had begun experimenting with cooking cocaine into “crack,” or adding baking soda to cocaine in order to make a cheaper, smokable form of the drug. When the Contras got to Los Angeles, they encountered a young, street-wise entrepreneur names Rick Ross. Ross bought the Contras’ cocaine, cooked it into crack, and then sold it to gangs in Los Angeles, creating an infamous empire in the process. Thus, the crack cocaine epidemic that ravaged Los Angeles and other black communities across the country was started, in part, by a Central American para-military that was sponsored by the CIA. Webb’s reporting never definitively established that CIA directed these activities or knew about the specific drug ring in Los Angeles, but there is evidence that the Reagan administration knew that the Contras were involved in drug-trafficking operations. There is much speculation as to how these Contras were able to transport the amount of drugs they did with the aircraft that they did and go unmolested by authorities in the United States for decades.

Here, we see what could be considered a paradoxical intersection between the Cold War and the War on Drugs in the 1980s. In one sense, you have the United States funding paramilitary activities against a Communist regime, which is normal and expected. On the other hand, the United States is involved in a regional, even global, War on Drugs in order to stop the flow of illicit substances into the United States. However, with the CIA-Contra scandal, the Reagan administration clearly violates it’s prohibitionist approach towards drugs and drug traffickers and uses them to help fund their unsuccessful war on communism in Nicaragua. At the same time that tens of thousands of black people across the county are suffering from an addiction to crack cocaine and being incarcerated for it by the US government, the CIA was working with the drug traffickers responsible for selling the cocaine that sparked the epidemic. For obvious reasons, this hypocrisy outraged the South Los Angeles community, and the response was so forceful that it required an unprecedented response from the CIA chief.

Source: Scott, Peter Dale and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 23-50

Further Reading:

1. For a history of the Sandinista Revolution and its origins, motives, and consequences, see https://vianica.com/go/specials/15-sandinista-revolution-in-nicaragua.html
2. For access to an Iran-Contra affairs database compiled by Brown University that explains the facts and Congressional investigations, see https://www.brown.edu/Research/Understanding_the_Iran_Contra_Affair/iran-contra-affairs.php
3. To see the evidence that supports the conclusion that the US government was aware of the drug trafficking activities of the Contra army and explores memos written by government officials, as well as testimony from Contra drug dealers, see https://www.brown.edu/Research/Understanding_the_Iran_Contra_Affair/iran-contra-affairs.php
4. To read Gary Webb’s original reporting on the CIA-Contra-Los Angeles crack connections, see https://www.mega.nu/ampp/webb.html
5. To read about how “Freeway” Rick Ross grew up in Los Angeles and built an empire from crack cocaine, see https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jpz79y/a-drug-kingpin-and-his-racket-the-untold-story-of-freeway-rick-ross
6. To read about the meeting between the Los Angeles community and the Chief of the CIA in 1996, see https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/11/16/cia-chief-faces-angry-crowd-at-los-angeles-meeting-on-drug-allegations/d6d7dcaa-c429-4feb-94d6-496717211916/?utm_term=.1f53d93f0a67

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