Justify My War: Why Clinton Eyes Haiti’s Drug Trade and Ignores Guatemala’s
While Bill Clinton’s White House invokes Haitian drug trafficking as a key rationale for invasion, it is continuing the Bush administration policy of virtually ignoring…
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Crossfire: The War Behind the Closed Doors of the NRA
/in The Village Voice/by Frank SmythThe 123-year-old group convened its annual board of directors meeting in Ballroom D of the Hilton Hotel. Unbeknownst to the 74 directors, eight officers, and 25-odd NRA staff and VIP members assembled, the Voice was present, there to witness the inner workings…
Arms and Mandela: After the Honeymoon, He Faces the Deadly Dilemmas of South Africa’s Arms Industry
/in The Washington Post/by Frank SmythThe little-noticed role of South African-made arms in the catastrophe of Rwanda presents Nelson Mandela with…
Rwanda’s French Connection
/in The Village Voice/by Frank Smyth“We have eight million people here,” an aid worker told me last June in Rwanda, “and all you Americans care about are those damn gorillas.” I was in Rwanda investigating weapons trafficking for the Human Rights Watch/Arms Project, but I couldn’t argue with the man, a Tutsi. Almost the only news reaching the West last […]
Blood Money and Geopolitics
/in The Nation/by Frank SmythThe April 6 plane crash that killed the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi (they may have been shot down) is only the latest violent act for these neighboring Central African countries. As many as 100,000 people have died and more than a million have fled ethnic and politically based attacks in recent years. Elements of […]
French Guns, Rwandan Blood
/in The New York Times/by Frank SmythThe horrendous vioIence that has seized the tiny African republic of Rwanda is not as random as it looks. For the members of the Akazu, the ruling clan around the late President Juvenal Habyarimana, the only way to retain a 21-year monopoly on power was to kill their enemies as fast as they could. And until yesterday, when…
A New Kingdom Of Cocaine: For Colombia’s Powerful Cali Cartel, the Crucial Connection Is Guatemala
/in The Washington Post/by Frank SmythThe ignominious end of cocaine baron Pablo Escobar obscured the fact that his Medellin cartel had long since been eclipsed by another network of cocaine traffickers based in the Colombian city of Cali. The Cali cartel, led by the Rodriguez Orejuela family, is now said to control up to 85 percent of the world trade […]