Quote:On Sept. 19, 1991, the Venezuelan daily El Globo reported that a congressional investigatory committee had found that the Organizacion Diego Cisneros owned a Miami-based company, Celere, Inc., which was under investigation by the U. S. Drug. Enforcement Administration for at least three separate cases of cocaine trafficking. The committee was investigating drug-running and terrorism charges raised against several Venezuelans, including Lazaro Rogelio Ugarte Bresselau, a top executive of Celere, Inc. who had also served as a top security adviser to the Cisneros-allied Banco Latino.

(07-18-2019, 02:57 PM)Firestarter Wrote: The following picture shows from right to left Ronald Reagan, Oliver North, Adolfo Calero (CIA operative installed as FDN commander) on 4 April 1985.


In the following picture are Adolfo Calero (centre) and drug lord Norwin Meneses on the far right, around June 1984


(...)

Gary Webb “Dark alliance - The CIA, the CONTRAS, and the CRACK COCAINE EXPLOSION” (1998): http://www.mediafire.com/file/kdayngc76n2s5sv/953236.pdf

Quote:They were afraid that, if they went to aerial eradication, the U.S. pilots would just eradicate willy nilly and a lot of their own poppy fields would be hit.
...
NATO forces were more or less guarding poppy fields and poppy production, under the guise of counterinsurgency. The logic was ‘we don’t want to take away the livelihoods of the people.’ But really, what we were doing at that point was protecting the wealth of our friends in power in Afghanistan.

Quote:We literally gave the guy $10 million in cash for rubbing out his competition. If you were going to write a movie about this, they’d say ‘This is too far fetched. No one is going to believe this. Nothing is this insane or stupid.’ But that is the way it is.

Quote:It is not surprising that the Taliban government today has started to take draconian measures to crack down on opiate addiction in society and regulate demand and supply domestically. This does not, however, mean the new rulers of Afghanistan have taken their eyes off European markets. On the contrary, the long-term objective seems to be moving toward centralization of the narcotics industry in government hands and ultimately the maximization of revenues from that industry in state coffers.
(...)
“The Taliban have counted on the Afghan opium trade as one of their main sources of income,” César Guedes, head of UNODC’s Kabul office, told Reuters last year. Nor are Taliban officials any longer hindered by the political considerations that motivated U.S.-led counternarcotics policies. These policies were to a large degree pursued to shield allied European nations from relentless flows of narcotics and the consequent organized crime. The Taliban now pledge to patrol and protect their borders to prevent the drug trade, but in reality they intentionally overlook to smuggling activities.

(07-18-2019, 02:57 PM)Firestarter Wrote: By early 1983, CIA dollars were pouring into Honduras and Costa Rica, which benefitted the Contras. But the money the Contras received wasn’t nearly enough to finance the growing military organisation. The CIA recruited Norwin Meneses so that drug sales could be used to support the Contras.
Ronald Reagan installed Oliver North to arrange the details.

The following picture shows from right to left Ronald Reagan, Oliver North, Adolfo Calero (CIA operative installed as FDN commander) on 4 April 1985.


In the following picture are Adolfo Calero (centre) and drug lord Norwin Meneses on the far right, around June 1984.

Quote:The new [2016] law makes it virtually impossible for the DEA to freeze suspicious narcotic shipments from the companies, according to internal agency and Justice Department documents and an independent assessment by the DEA’s chief administrative law judge in a soon-to-be-published law review article. That powerful tool [freezing opioid shipments] had [previously] allowed the agency to immediately prevent drugs from reaching the street.