The U.S. Govt. Has Been Complicit In Gun & Drug Running For Decades
Barry Seal -- gunrunner, drug trafficker, and covert C.I.A. operative extraordinaire -- is hardly a familiar name in American politics. But nine years after he was murdered in a hail of bullets by Medellin cartel hit men outside a Salvation Army shelter in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he has come back to haunt the reputations of three American presidents.
Seal's legacy includes more than 2,000 newly discovered documents that now verify and quantify much of what previously had been only suspicion, conjecture, and legend. The documents confirm that from 1981 to his brutal death in 1986, Barry Seal carried on one of the most lucrative, extensive, and brazen operations in the history of the international drug trade, and that he did it with the evident complicity, if not collusion, of elements of the United States government, apparently with the acquiescence of Ronald Reagan's administration, impunity from any subsequent exposure by George Bush's administration, and under the usually acute political nose of then Arkansas governor Bill Clinton.
July 2011: U.S. federal law enforcement officers allegedly granted the Sinaola cartel permission to smuggle several tons of cocaine into the U.S. in exchange for information on rival cartels.
According to the El Paso Times, the accusation is part of Vicente Zambada-Niebla's defense against drug trafficking charges in Chicago. The federal court in Illinois held a status hearing Wednesday, ordering the government to respond to Zambada-Niebla's accusations by September 11. This prosecution comes on the heels of the ATF's "Operation Fast and Furious" case where agents allowed U.S. weapons to be smuggled into Mexico. Zambada-Niebla contends agents allowed him to smuggle the coke in via jets, buses, railcars, tractor trailers, and automobiles over a five-year period. These charges bolster long-standing beliefs held by some that Mexican and U.S. governments work with Sinaola as part of a plan to weaken rival organizations.
