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The Untouchable Narco-State: Guatemala’s Army defies DEA

November 18, 2005/in The Texas Observer/by Frank Smyth

Original story including links to cited classified U.S. cables here.

(See also related links pegged to the release of this story by Harvard University’s NiemanWatchdog.org and George Washington University’s National Security Archive:
http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfmfuseaction=ask_this.view&askthisid=00152
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB169/index.htm).

The alert went out across the state this past July. A McAllen-based FBI analyst wrote a classified report that the Department of Homeland Security sent to U.S. Border Patrol agents throughout Texas. About 30 suspects who were once part of an elite unit of the Guatemalan special forces were training drug traffickers in paramilitary tactics just over the border from McAllen. The unit, called the Kaibiles after the Mayan prince Kaibil Balam, is one of the most fearsome military forces in Latin America, blamed for many of the massacres that occurred in Guatemala during its 36-year civil war. By September, Mexican authorities announced that they had arrested seven Guatemalan Kaibiles, including four “deserters” who were still listed by the Guatemalan Army as being on active duty.

Mexican authorities say the Kaibiles were meant to augment Las Zetas, a drug gang of soldiers-turned-hitmen drawn from Mexico’s own special forces. It’s logical that the Zetas would turn to their Guatemalan counterparts. In addition to being a neighbor, “Guatemala is the preferred transit point in Central America for onward shipment of cocaine to the United States,” the State Department has consistently reported to Congress since 1999. In early November, anti-drug authorities at the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala told the Associated Press that 75 percent of the cocaine that reaches American soil passes through the Central American nation.

More importantly, perhaps, the dominant institution in the country—the military—is linked to this illicit trade. Over the past two decades, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has quietly accused Guatemalan military officers of all ranks in every branch of service of trafficking drugs to the United States, according to government documents obtained by The Texas Observer. More recently, the Bush administration has alleged that two retired Guatemalan Army generals, at the top of the country’s military hierarchy, are involved in drug trafficking and has revoked their U.S. visas based on these allegations.

The retired generals, Manuel Antonio Callejas y Callejas and Francisco Ortega Menaldo, are Guatemala’s former top two intelligence chiefs. They are also among the founders of an elite, shadowy club within Guatemala’s intelligence command that calls itself “la cofradía” or “the brotherhood,” according to U.S. intelligence reports. The U.S. reports, recently de-classified, credit la cofradía with “engineering” tactics that roundly defeated Guatemala’s Marxist guerrillas. A U.N. Truth Commission later found the same tactics included “acts of genocide” for driving out or massacring the populations of no less than 440 Mayan villages.

Guatemala’s military intelligence commands developed a code of silence during these bloody operations, which is one reason why no officer was ever prosecuted for any Cold War-era human rights abuses. Since then, the same intelligence commands have turned their clandestine structures to organized crimes, according to DEA and other U.S. intelligence reports, from importing stolen U.S. cars to running drugs to the United States. Yet not one officer has ever been prosecuted for any international crime in either Guatemala or the United States.

There is enough evidence implicating the Guatemalan military in illegal activities that the Bush administration no longer gives U.S. military aid, including officer training. The cited offenses include “a recent resurgence of abuses believed to be orchestrated by ex-military and current military officials; and allegations of corruption and narcotics trafficking by ex-military officers,” according to the State Department’s 2004 report on Foreign Military Training.

While some in the Bush administration and Congress want to restart foreign military training, others are concerned about the inability of the Guatemalan government to rein in its military. “The reason that elements of the army are involved so deeply in this illicit operation is that the government simply does not have the power to stop them,” said Texas Republican Congressman Michael McCaul, who sits on the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee of the Committee on International Relations and is the Chairman of the Department of Homeland Security Subcommittee on Investigations.

Guatemala is hardly the first military tainted by drugs; senior intelligence and law enforcement officers in many Latin American nations have been found colluding with organized crime. But what distinguishes Guatemala from most other nations is that some of its military suspects are accused not only of protecting large criminal syndicates but of being the ringleaders behind them. The Bush administration has recently credited both Colombia and Mexico with making unprecedented strides in both prosecuting their own drug suspects and extraditing others to the United States. But Guatemala, alone in this hemisphere, has failed to either prosecute or extradite any of its own alleged drug kingpins for at least 10 years.

For decades, successive U.S. administrations have tried and failed to train effective Guatemalan police, while saying little or nothing about the known criminal activities of the Guatemalan military. That finally came to an end in the past three years under Republican Rep. Cass Ballenger, a staunch conservative from North Carolina, who served as chairman of the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee.

“Clearly, the Guatemalan government has not taken every step needed to investigate, arrest, and bring drug kingpins to justice,” said then-Chairman Ballenger in 2003 before he retired. Echoing his predecessor, the new Chairman, Indiana Republican Rep. Dan Burton, commented through a spokesman that he wants to see the same alleged ringleaders finally brought “to full accountability.”

Until that happens, drugs from Guatemala and the attendant violence will continue to spill over the Texas border.

Guatemala has long been sluggish in efforts to take legal action against its military officers for human rights violations. That impunity has since spread to organized criminal acts as well. The turning point came in 1994, when Guatemala’s extraditions of its drug suspects came to a dead stop over a case involving an active duty army officer. The case highlights both the terrible price for those who seek justice in Guatemala and the timidity of the United States in demanding accountability.

A military intelligence officer back in the early 1980s, Lt. Col. Carlos Ochoa briefly trained at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in 1988. Two years later, the DEA accused him of smuggling drugs to locations including Florida, where DEA special agents seized a small plane with half a metric ton of cocaine, allegedly sent by the colonel.

State Department attorneys worked for more than three years to keep Guatemala’s military tribunals from dismissing the charges, and finally brought Ochoa’s extradition case all the way to Guatemala’s highest civilian court. The nation’s chief justice, Epaminondas González Dubón, was already well respected for his integrity. On March 23, 1994, Guatemala’s Constitutional Court, led by González Dubón, quietly ruled in a closed session (which is common in Guatemala) four-to-three in favor of extraditing Ochoa.

Nine days later, on April 1, gunmen shot and killed González Dubón behind the wheel of his own car in the capital, near his middle-class home, in front of his wife and youngest son. On April 12, the same Constitutional Court, with a new chief justice, quietly ruled seven-to-one not to extradite Ochoa. The surviving judges used the same line in the official Constitutional Court register—changing the verdict and date, but not the original case number—to literally copy over the original ruling, as was only reported years later by the Costa Rican daily, La Nación.

The Clinton administration never said one word in protest. The U.S. ambassador in Guatemala City at the time, Marilyn McAfee, by her own admission had other concerns, including ongoing peace talks with the Guatemalan military. “I am concerned over the potential decline in our relationship with the military,” she wrote to her superiors only months before the assassination. “The bottom line is we must carefully consider each of our actions toward the Guatemalan military, not only for how it plays in Washington, but for how it impacts here.”

Four years after the murder, the Clinton administration finally admitted in a few lines buried in a thick report to Congress: “The Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court had approved [the] extradition for the 1991 charges just before he was assassinated. The reconstituted court soon thereafter voted to deny the extradition.”

Ochoa may not have been working alone. “In addition to his narcotics trafficking activities, Ochoa was involved in bringing stolen cars from the U.S. to Guatemala,” reads a “SECRET” U.S. intelligence report obtained by U.S. lawyer Jennifer Harbury. “Another military officer involved with Ochoa in narcotics trafficking is Colonel Julio Roberto Alpírez de Leon.”

Alpírez, who briefly trained at the U.S. School of the Americas in 1970, served “in special intelligence operations,” according to a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report. A White House Oversight Board investigation later implicated him in the torture and murder of a Marxist guerrilla leader who was married to the Harvard-trained lawyer Harbury, and in the torture and mysterious decapitation of an American hotelier named Michael Devine. Col. Alpírez, since retired, has denied any wrongdoing and he was never charged with any crime.

But Ochoa, his former subordinate, is in jail today. Ochoa was arrested—again—for local cocaine dealing in Guatemala City, where crack smoking and violent crimes, especially rape, have become alarmingly common. Ochoa was later sentenced to 14 years in prison, and he remains the most important drug criminal ever convicted in Guatemala to date.

Until now, the DEA had never publicly recognized the bravery of Judge González Dubón, who died defending DEA evidence. “The judge deserves to be remembered and honored for trying to help establish democracy in Guatemala,” said DEA senior special agent William Glaspy in an exclusive interview. Since the murder, the DEA has been all but impotent in Guatemala.

The impunity that shields Guatemalan military officers from justice for criminal offenses started during the Cold War. “There is a long history of impunity in Guatemala,” noted Congressman William Delahunt, a Democrat from Massachusetts, who is also a member of the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee. “The United States has contributed to it in a very unsavory way dating back to 1954, and also in the 1980s,” he added, referring to a CIA-backed coup d’état in 1954, which overturned a democratically elected president and brought the Guatemalan military to power, and to the Reagan administration’s covert backing of the Guatemalan military at a time when bloodshed against Guatemalan civilians was peaking.

It was also during this Cold War-era carnage that the army’s la cofradía came into its own.

“The mere mention of the word ‘cofradía’ inside the institution conjures up the idea of the ‘intelligence club,’ the term ‘cofradía’ being the name given to the powerful organizations of village-church elders that exist today in the Indian highlands of Guatemala,” reads a once-classified 1991 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency cable. “Many of the ‘best and the brightest’ of the officers of the Guatemalan Army were brought into intelligence work and into tactical operations planning,” it continues. Like all documents not otherwise attributed in this report, the cable was obtained by the non-profit National Security Archives in Washington, D.C.

According to the 1991 cable, “well-known members of this unofficial cofradía include” then army colonels “Manuel Antonio Callejas y Callejas” and “Ortega Menaldo.” (Each officer had briefly trained at the U.S. School of the Americas, in 1970 and 1976, respectively.)

The intelligence report goes on: “Under directors of intelligence such as then-Col. Manuel Antonio Callejas y Callejas back in the early 1980s, the intelligence directorate made dramatic gains in its capabilities, so much so that today it must be given the credit for engineering the military decline of the guerrillas from 1982 to the present. But while doing so, the intelligence directorate became an elite ‘club’ within the officer corps.”

Other Guatemalan officers called their approach at the time the practice of “draining the sea to kill the fish,” or of attacking civilians suspected of supporting leftist guerrillas instead of the armed combatants themselves. One former Guatemalan Army sergeant, who served in the bloodied province of Quiché, later told this author he learned another expression: “Making the innocent pay for the sins of the guilty.”

CIA reports are even more candid. “The commanding officers of the units involved have been instructed to destroy all towns and villages which are cooperating with the guerrilla[s] and eliminate all sources of resistance,” reads one 1982 Guatemala City CIA Station report formerly classified “SECRET.” The CIA report goes on, “When an Army patrol meets resistance and takes fire from a town or village it is assumed that the entire town is hostile and it is subsequently destroyed.” Forensic teams have since exhumed many mass graves. Some unearthed women and infants. More than 200,000 people were killed in Guatemala in what stands as Central America’s bloodiest conflict during the Cold War.

The violence left the military firmly in control of Guatemala, and it did not take long for this stability to catch the attention of Colombian drug syndicates. First the Medellín and then the Cali cartels, according to Andean drug experts, began searching for new smuggling routes to the United States after their more traditional routes closed down by the mid-1980s due to greater U.S. radar surveillance over the Caribbean, especially the Bahamas.

“They chose Guatemala because it is near Mexico, which is an obvious entrance point to the U.S., and because the Mexicans have a long-established mafia,” explained one Andean law enforcement expert. “It is also a better transit and storage country than El Salvador because it offers more stability and was easier to control.”

DEA special agents began detecting Guatemalan military officers running drugs as early as 1986, according to DEA documents obtained through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. That’s when Ortega Menaldo took over from Callejas y Callejas as Guatemala’s military intelligence chief. Over the next nine years, according to the same U.S. documents, DEA special agents detected no less than 31 active duty officers running drugs.

“All roads lead to Ortega,” a U.S. drug enforcement expert said recently. “Even current active-duty officers may have other ties with retired officers. They have a mentor relationship.”

U.S. intelligence reports reveal the strong ties that cofradía high-level officers cultivated with many subordinates, who are dubbed “the operators.” “This vertical column of intelligence officers, from captains to generals, represents the strongest internal network of loyalties within the institution,” reads the 1991 U.S. DIA cable. “Other capable officers were being handpicked at all levels to serve in key operations and troop command,” this U.S. report goes on. “Although not as tight knit as the cofradía, the ‘operators’ all the same developed their own vertical leader-subordinate network of recognition, relationships and loyalties, and are today considered a separate and distinct vertical column of officer loyalties.”

Cofradía officers extended their reach even further, according to another U.S. intelligence cable, as the mid-level officer “operators” whom they chose in turn handpicked local civilians to serve as “military commissioners [to be] the ‘eyes and ears’ of the military” at the grassroots.

Few criminal cases better demonstrate the integration between the Guatemalan intelligence commands and drug trafficking than one pursued in 1990 by DEA special agents in the hot, sticky plains of eastern Guatemala, near the nation’s Caribbean coast. This 15-year-old case is also the last time that any Guatemalans wanted on drug charges were extradited to the United States. Arnoldo Vargas Estrada, a.k.a. “Archie,” was a long-time local “military commissioner,” and the elected mayor of the large town of Zacapa. U.S. embassy officials informed (as is still required according to diplomatic protocol between the two nations) Guatemalan military intelligence, then led by Ortega Menaldo, that DEA special agents had the town mayor under surveillance.

Vargas and two other civilian suspects were then arrested in Guatemala with the help of the DEA. Not long after, all three men were extradited to New York, where they were tried and convicted on DEA evidence. But the DEA did nothing back in Guatemala when, shortly after the arrests, the military merely moved the same smuggling operation to a rural area outside town, according to family farmers in a petition delivered to the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City in 1992 and addressed simply “Señores D.E.A.”

“[B]efore sunrise, one of the planes that transports cocaine crashed when it couldn’t reach the runway on the Rancho Maya,” reads the document which the peasants either signed or inked with their thumbprints. The document names the military commissioners along with seven local officers, including four local army colonels whom the farmers said supervised them.

One of the civilian military commissioners the peasants named was Rancho Maya owner Byron Berganza. More than a decade later, in 2004, DEA special agents finally arrested Berganza, along with another Guatemalan civilian, on federal “narcotics importation conspiracy” charges in New York City. Last year, the DEA in Mexico City also helped arrest another Guatemalan, Otto Herrera, who ran a vast trucking fleet from the Zacapa area. Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft described Herrera as one of “the most significant international drug traffickers and money launderers in the world.”

Yet, not long after his arrest, Herrera somehow managed to escape from jail in Mexico City. Not one of the Guatemalan military officers the farmers mentioned in their 1992 petition has ever been charged. As the DEA’s Senior Special Agent Glaspy explained, “There is a difference between receiving information and being able to prosecute somebody.”

In 2002, then-Chairman Ballenger forced the Bush administration to take limited action to penalize top Guatemalan military officials thought to be involved in drug trafficking. “The visa of former Guatemalan intelligence chief Francisco Ortega Menaldo was revoked,” confirmed State Department spokesman Richard A. Boucher in March 2002, “under a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act related to narco-trafficking, and that’s about as far as I can go into the details of the decision.”

By then, Ret. Gen. Ortega Menaldo had already denied the U.S. drug charges, while reminding reporters in Guatemala City that he had previously collaborated with both the CIA and the DEA dating back to the 1980s. Indeed, a White House Intelligence Oversight Board has already confirmed that both the CIA and the DEA maintained at least a liaison relationship with Guatemalan military intelligence in the late 1980s and early 1990s when it was run by Col. Ortega Menaldo.

The CIA, through spokesman Mark Mansfield, declined all comment for this article.

Eight months after revoking Ortega Menaldo’s visa, the Bush administration again cited suspected drug trafficking to revoke the U.S. entry visa of another Guatemalan intelligence chief, Ret. Gen. Callejas y Callejas. But after the news broke in the Guatemalan press, this cofradía officer never responded publicly, as Ortega Menaldo did, to the U.S. drug allegation.

Rather than confront the impunity that allows Guatemalan military officers to traffic drugs, many of the country’s elected officials seem to be going in the opposite direction. Not long after the Bush administration named the two retired cofradía intelligence chiefs as suspected drug traffickers, members of the Guatemalan Republican Front, or FRG party, which was founded by another retired army general, introduced legislation in the Guatemalan Congress that would remove civilian oversight over the military in criminal justice matters.

Throughout the Cold War period, Guatemala’s civil justice system seldom had the opportunity to try officers for any crime. Instead officials submitted themselves to military tribunals. In the 1990s, civilian courts began for the first time tentatively to exert their authority to process military officers for crimes like drug trafficking. But the proposed legislation stipulates that any officer, whether active duty or retired, may only be tried in a military tribunal, no matter what the alleged crime. A court martial is normally reserved for crimes allegedly committed by military personnel in the course of their service. If this law is passed, however, it would ensure that Guatemalan officers accused of any crime, from murder to drug trafficking, could once again only be tried by their military peers.

“This would be a new mechanism of impunity,” noted José Zeitune of the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists and author of a 2005 report on the Guatemalan judiciary.

As Chairman, Ballenger accused the FRG party, which enjoys a plurality in the Guatemalan Congress, of drug corruption. The FRG was founded by Ret. Gen. Efrain Ríos Montt. A controversial figure, he launched a coup d’etat in 1982 to become president of Guatemala just as the intelligence officers of la cofradía were rising.

The new vice-chairman of the Western Hemisphere subcommittee is Jerry Weller III, a Republican from Illinois. He recently married Zury Ríos Sosa, who is Ret. Gen. Montt’s daughter. Unlike other members of the Subcommittee, Weller, through his spokesman, Telly Lovelace, declined all comment for this article.

Congressman Weller’s father-in-law groomed Guatemala’s last president, an FRG member named Alfonso Portillo, who fled the country in 2004 to escape his own arrest for alleged money laundering, according to a State Department report. During President Portillo’s tenure, one of his closest companions inside the National Palace was the cofradía co-founder Ortega Menaldo, according to Guatemalan press accounts.

Today the shadowy structures of Guatemala’s intelligence commands are so embedded with organized crime that the Bush administration, for one, is already calling on the United Nations. Putting aside its usual criticisms of the international body, the administration supports a proposal to form a U.N.-led task force explicitly called the “Commission for the Investigation of Illegal Armed Groups and Clandestine Security Apparatus” in Guatemala. So far the only nation to yield its sovereignty to allow the United Nations a similar role is Lebanon, where U.N. investigators are digging into the murder of a former prime minister.

The proposed U.N. plan for Guatemala also enjoys the support of its new president, Oscar Berger, a wealthy landowner and lawyer who is well respected by the U.S. administration. But the proposed U.N. Commission is encountering resistance from FRG politicians like Weller’s wife, Ríos Sosa, who is also an FRG congresswoman.

So what are U.S. officials and Guatemalan authorities doing to stop the military officers involved in drug trafficking?

“In terms of public corruption against both the army and others, [Guatemalan authorities] have a number of investigations underway, right now,” then-Assistant Secretary Robert B. Charles said earlier this year at a State Department press conference. But, in keeping with past practices, not one of these suspected officers has been charged in either Guatemala or the United States.

More troubling still is a recent case involving those Mexican soldiers-turned-hitmen, the Zetas. This past October 22, seven members of the Zetas were arrested in a Guatemalan border town with weapons and cocaine. The Associated Press reported that, according to Guatemalan authorities, the Zetas came to avenge one of their members who had been killed in Guatemala. Despite the evidence against the men, a little more than a week after their arrests, Guatemalan authorities inexplicably set them free.

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has been writing about Guatemalan drug trafficking since 1991 in publications including The Progressive, The Sacramento Bee, The Washington Post, the Village Voice, The New Republic, Salon.com and The Wall Street Journal. He has been a special correspondent for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram and The Economist. He is a contributor to Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, edited by Roy Gutman and David Rieff. His clips are posted at www.franksmyth.com.

U.S. Arms for Terrorists?

June 13, 2005/in The Nation/by Frank Smyth

Original story found here.

The Colombian police heard in early May that a big deal was going down inside a gated luxury community southwest of Bogotá. On May 3 they followed Colombian suspects, two of whom turned out to be retired Colombian Army officers, to a house filled with twenty-nine metal crates of arms and 32,000 rounds of ammunition. The police were still taking inventory of the cache when two more suspects knocked on the door. The police arrested them, only to learn they were US soldiers. The Colombian police said the arms were bound for an illegal paramilitary group that the State Department considers to be both a drug-trafficking and a terrorist organization.

The community of Carmen de Apicalá, where the arms were found, is only a short drive from Colombia’s Tolemaida military base, home to US Black Hawk helicopters and the place where US Special Forces train Colombian troops in combat skills. For convenience as well as security, many US military personnel and contractors rent condominiums in Carmen de Apicalá. “It’s a lot of ammunition, and it’s a very suspicious case,” Colombia’s police commander, Gen. Jorge Castro, told local radio. Colombian lawmakers in Bogotá said the US Ambassador, William Wood, should explain the circumstances to the Colombian Congress.

The State Department spokesman in Washington, Richard Boucher, denied that the arms were part of a secret US effort to arm Colombian paramilitaries. But he still refuses to say whether the arms are part of the unprecedented $3.3 billion in military aid the United States began sending in 2000 as part of Plan Colombia. The Colombian attorney general’s office, which is now investigating the case, said that the arms had been diverted from US stockpiles. The Colombian television station RCN broadcast footage of arms with US markings.

The case comes at a time when the Colombian government, led by President Álvaro Uribe, is negotiating a broad amnesty for Colombian paramilitaries. Known by their supporters as “self-defense” groups, Colombian paramilitaries have long been responsible for most of the country’s politically motivated massacres and murders, which often target peasants, trade unionists and students they suspect of supporting leftist guerrillas. The rightist paramilitaries have also long been accused of secretly collaborating with the military to carry out death squad crimes.

“I think that it’s probably fair to say that there is [sic] some episodes of contact between Colombian military and these so-called self-defense forces,” Roger Noriega, the senior State Department official for Latin America, told Congress during questioning eight days after the Bogotá arrests, adding that such “episodes” are against Colombian law and US policy. Yet, in nearly every region of the country, Colombian military officers of all ranks have been found to be secretly collaborating with rightist paramilitaries, and only a few have ever been seriously prosecuted.

The United States itself has long been ambivalent about Colombia’s paramilitaries. Back in the 1960s the US military, according to its own documents, encouraged the Colombian military to organize rightist paramilitary forces to help fight leftist guerrillas. By the early 1980s, Colombian drug traffickers and large landowners together organized the paramilitaries into a national force to ward off kidnappings and other forms of extortion by leftist guerrillas. But by the end of the decade, the government had outlawed paramilitaries after one group trained by the late drug lord Pablo Escobar blew up a Colombian airliner.

The Colombian military soon found a new way to maintain contacts with illegal paramilitaries, however. In the fall of 1990, according to a letter from the Pentagon to Senator Patrick Leahy, the US military helped its Colombian counterpart make its intelligence networks “more efficient and effective.” It was instructed, according to an April 1991 classified Colombian military order, to keep its operations “covert” and “compartmentalized,” to use only “retired or active-duty Officers or Non-commissioned Officers” as liaisons, and not to put orders “in writing.”

One new intelligence network killed at least fifty-seven people, including trade unionists, community leaders and a journalist, according to judicial testimony. But charges were dropped after most of the witnesses were either murdered or disappeared. In 2001 a former Colombian Army general, Rito Alejo del Rio, was arrested by Colombian authorities from the attorney general’s office on charges that he allegedly collaborated with illegal paramilitaries. But these charges, too, were soon dismissed, and the country’s top two civilian prosecutors fled the country.

Later that year (one day before 9/11, ironically), the US State Department finally put Colombia’s largest paramilitary group, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, on its list of terrorist organizations. In 2002 US authorities announced that the AUC was implicated in trading drugs for arms with none other than Al Qaeda. US authorities finally began indicting more Colombian rightist paramilitary leaders on drug charges, after having already indicted Colombian leftist guerrilla leaders on drug charges.

The May arrests of two US military officers for allegedly running arms to AUC paramilitaries raises many questions. US warrant officer Allan Tanquary and Sgt. Jesus Hernandez are now back in the United States, where officials say they may face criminal charges. “We’re committed,” said spokesman Boucher, “to a full investigation.”

Behind the Badge: Meet the GOP’s Law Enforcement Front Group

July 30, 2004/in The Texas Observer/by Frank Smyth

Original story found here.

Kirk Watson cannot forget the first time he saw it. Watson, a former Austin mayor, was running as the Democratic nominee for state attorney general. Only about 10 days remained before the 2002 November election. His campaign was in full gear. On that Sunday, Watson planned to visit dozens of churches. It was early in the morning in a Dallas hotel room and the candidate was shaving with the television on in the background.

He didn’t see the initial visuals of the commercial as the screen scrolled past stirring images of surgeons saving lives and the state Capitol building. A somber voice intoned “Personal injury lawyers like Kirk Watson have made millions suing doctors, hospitals, and small businesses, hurting families and driving up the cost of healthcare. Greg Abbott is different.”

By this point Watson was standing before the television, holding his razor, his face still lathered. “A respected Supreme Court Justice,” the voiceover in the ad continued, “Greg Abbott believes in common sense lawsuit reform and Greg Abbott supports the swift and aggressive prosecution of sexual predators and child pornographers. Greg Abbott has a plan for Texas. To learn more, log on now. [www.leaa.org] Law Enforcement Alliance of America.”

Watson rapidly called his campaign manager, smearing the phone with shaving cream. He had only one question: Who in the world was the LEAA?

“We have to find out,” he told his campaign manager.

Over the remaining 10 days leading up to the election, the mysterious group with the strong law-and-order moniker spent about $1.5 million for ads that ran in every major media market in Texas, gunning down Watson and lifting up the GOP’s Abbott (Ironically, it was Watson who had received an honorary commission in the Austin Police Department while Abbott sued and won millions on a lawsuit after a falling tree left him paralyzed). While the Texas media buy in the Abbott-Watson race seems to have been the largest for any single state, the LEAA also spent millions for commercials against candidates in at least four other states in 2002. In some places, like Mississippi, the LEAA dropped more money on ads than all the candidates combined.

And Watson is still waiting for an answer to his question. The former mayor notes that he, not Abbott, received the endorsement of the Combined Law Enforcement Association of Texas, which is the largest police group in the state. Two years later, he still wants to know who was behind the LEAA? Who funded the campaign against him and why?

One agency tasked with policing groups like the LEAA is the Internal Revenue Service. But the IRS doesn’t appear to be interested. It has designated the non-profit LEAA as “a social welfare organization.” Under this tax designation, the LEAA can legally “educate” voters about issues but, it cannot advocate for the election or defeat of a candidate. The IRS forbids such organizations from “direct or indirect participation or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office.” When big money is the key to demolishing political opponents, the biggest advantage that any “social welfare” group like the LEAA enjoys is that it is legally allowed to keep all its donors, even the largest ones, hidden.

Currently, the LEAA is under investigation by a Travis County grand jury as part of a wide-ranging inquiry into the 2002 campaign. Did the LEAA cross the line between “education” and “advocacy?” Did the LEAA serve as a key component in a coordinated GOP plan to skirt campaign finance laws and funnel prohibited corporate money into Texas politics? Was the author of that plan U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Sugar Land), whose principle objective was to redraw congressional lines so that more Republicans would be elected?

Those who track campaign money believe that the LEAA represents a troubling trend. “LEAA is one of a new breed of shadowy front groups that is willing to serve as a corporate money conduit and attack dog to benefit GOP candidates,” says Craig McDonald of the public policy organization Texans for Public Justice. “Its ‘issue ads’ are a mere hoax. When GOP candidates need a political attack from a so-called law-and-order group, they appear to funnel money to the LEAA to carry it out.”

What’s beyond dispute is the result of Greg Abbott’s ascension to attorney general. Without the attorney general’s approval, DeLay never would have been able to push through his redistricting plan. It was Abbott who was the first to rule that the state could pursue mid-decade congressional redistricting. This November, if Republicans do as well as expected, the GOP could lock in their controlling majority in the House of Representatives for years to come.

One day in late May, I decided to pay the LEAA a visit, so I drove less than 20 minutes from my office in Washington, D.C., to the edge of the I-495 beltway around the capital. I parked my car in a lot next to a northern Virginia office building filled with medical, accounting, and employment firms and the headquarters of the LEAA, an organization that bills itself as “the nation’s largest non-profit, non-partisan coalition of law enforcement personnel, crime victims, and concerned citizens.”

I took the elevator to the LEAA’s suite 421, consisting of a handful of cramped offices.

By this point, I had already called the headquarters and sent a fax, on both occasions, with the same request. What I wanted was the LEAA’s Form 990s. These publicly available tax documents, while not naming contributors, list how much the organization spends and where the money goes. By law, one can show up in person at the IRS-registered address of any non-profit group and simply ask for its Form 990. The law requires the group to provide a copy “generally” on the “day of the request.” There are even minor fines for not doing so.

The receptionist said that LEAA Operations Director Ted Deeds was not in. I showed her a copy of IRS regulations. I pointed out that now I was here in person, and was legally entitled to walk away with the form. There was another person in the office, who identified himself as the webmaster of www.leaa.org. While I waited, he went to call Deeds. He returned and told me “Mr. Deeds would honor my request.” When I pressed for more information, he said that there was no more.

On June 4, I sent Deeds an e-mail requesting the same information, which I copied to the IRS Media Relations Specialist for northern Virginia, James C. Dupree. In keeping with IRS policy, regional spokesman Dupree declined to say what, if anything, he or the IRS did with my request. To ensure that the IRS got it, I sent a letter of complaint to the IRS enforcement office for non-profit groups, which is based in Dallas, Texas, on July 1. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but a researcher at the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit watchdog Public Citizen had already complained in writing about the LEAA to the same IRS office on May 14 (Public Citizen eventually obtained some of the LEAA’s older Form 990s from the IRS).

At press time, the fines that could conceivably be levied against Chief Operating Officer Ted Deeds for ignoring two separate and ongoing requests for the LEAA’s 990 are more than $3,600, if the IRS were to enforce the law. “Responsible persons of a tax exempt organization who fail to provide the documents as required may be subject to a penalty of $20 a day for as long as the failure continues,” reads the tough language on the IRS website. “There is a maximum penalty of $10,000 for each failure to provide a copy of an annual information return.”

Four grand is no more than petty cash for a multi-million dollar non-profit like the LEAA, which had a budget in 2001 of nearly $5 million, according to a Form 990 obtained by Public Citizen. But $3,600 is not necessarily an insignificant amount for Ted Deeds, who is the official responsible, and who earned $82,500 operating the LEAA in 2001, according to the same form 990.

What Deeds has yet to provide to either the Observer or Public Citizen is the LEAA Form 990 for 2002. This is just one of the reasons why, according to Taylor Lincoln, a senior researcher at Public Citizen, the LEAA is the worst of its breed. Lately, Public Citizen and Lincoln have been collecting data on 30-odd non-profit groups involved in political campaigns, asking each one for copies of their Form 990s. “[The LEAA] are the only group which has not abided by its obligation to provide the form,” said Lincoln.

“A social welfare organization” like the LEAA is not supposed to be involved in politics, at least not full-time, according to the IRS website. “[A] social welfare organization may engage in some political activities, so long as that is not its primary activity.” Moreover, “any expenditure it makes for political activities may be subject to tax.”

One way to tell whether an activity is “primary” is how much the group spends on it. The LEAA spent only $43,050 on “political expenditures” according to its Form 990 in 2000, and far less, only $2,500, on “political expenditures” in 2001. But in both years the LEAA spent $2.43 million and $3.47 million, respectively, on what the LEAA told the IRS was “enhancement and education to further the understanding of and the need for revision in the current criminal justice system and education of the public into second amendment rights.”

The certified public accountant who prepares the LEAA’s IRS filings is Nanette K. Miller, whose office is in Washington, D.C. I asked her whether these “enhancement and education” expenditures were properly filed, or whether they should have been recorded instead as “political expenditures.”

“He’d be the one you have to ask,” she said, referring to LEAA Operations Director Ted Deeds. “I can’t disclose anything without talking to him, anyway.”

Deborah Goldberg of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University said that groups like the LEAA are taking advantage of a loophole involving the difference between federal and state laws. Since the Supreme Court upheld the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform legislation in 2003, it no longer matters what “magic words” groups like the LEAA use, says Goldberg. Whether or not they run “issue ads” or explicitly endorse a candidate, such groups must disclose their contributors for any ads they run during federal races. But they only need to do so for ads they run during state races if the state itself has such a law. “Both Texas and Mississippi,” said Goldberg, are among the states that do not.

Of course, the LEAA is hardly the only IRS-registered “social welfare” organization doing “public education.” One such group on the opposite side of the nation’s political fence is MoveOn.Org, which had a budget of $4.48 million in 2003, on par with the LEAA’s budget in 2001. While LEAA refuses to disclose its latest balance sheet, MoveOn.Org provided its Form 990s in compliance with the law. Moreover, while the LEAA has no “political” entity registered with the IRS, MoveOn has two other registered political groups, a Voter Fund and a Political Action Committee, both of which are required by law to disclose every contributor who donates $200 or more.

IRS officials confirm that the LEAA filed a balance sheet with the IRS for 2002. By law, anyone should be able to obtain this form from the IRS. But after more than four months, the IRS has still failed to produce the document in a “timely manner” in violation of the laws governing the agency.

A month ago, Mark W. Everson, the man President Bush tapped to be commissioner of the IRS, promised Congress that the agency was finally going to clean up dirty non-profits. “It’s fair to say this problem has crept up over time, and our response has lagged,” replied Commissioner Everson under questioning from senators, adding that the IRS would be reviewing non-profit groups as soon as this summer to start enforcing the law.

“It’s obvious from the abuses we see that there’s been no check on charities,” complained the chairman of the finance committee, Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican. Chairman Grassley went on, “Big money, tax free, and no oversight have created a cesspool in too many cases.”

But which non-profit “cesspools” will the IRS clean up first?

IRS officials said that Commissioner Everson is most concerned about non-profit groups and their affiliates whom the IRS suspects of either engaging in criminal fraud to deceive contributors or of hiding taxable income from the IRS. The latter includes environmental trusts, said the IRS official, who added, “[Everson] was not talking about the issue you raise.”

What about a little enforcement when the “law-and-order” group breaks the law?

“It would be a violation of federal law for us to comment on a specific entity,” said Bruce Friedland, public affairs specialist at IRS headquarters in Washington, D.C., declining to answer questions about why the IRS has failed to sanction the LEAA. All Friedland would say was, “This is a matter that the IRS takes very seriously.”

Commissioner Everson previously served in the Justice Department and in the Immigration and Naturalization Service back in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. More recently, Everson left a job in Dallas as vice-president of a multi-billion dollar, Texas-based food service company, to serve President Bush first in the Office of Management and Budget, where he reportedly earned a reputation for efficiency.

But the IRS under his leadership hardly looks efficient when it comes to the LEAA.

The Law Enforcement Alliance of America was reportedly started in 1991 by a grant from the National Rifle Association (NRA), which set up the LEAA just eleven miles away from its own headquarters in northern Virginia. Tax records from both groups show that the NRA has continued to finance the LEAA. But the LEAA’s mission appears to have expanded since its early days, as a Republican election machine controlled from Washington, D.C., has increasingly come to rely on “issue” ads as part of its national strategy. The Law Enforcement Alliance has been allying itself with other groups connected to the GOP as part of this growing effort. In the process, the LEAA’s bank account has grown and its message has changed depending on the circumstance. Nowhere has this been more evident than in Texas, where the LEAA found new friends in the Texas Association of Business (TAB), and a political action committee called Texans for a Republican Majority (TRMPAC) founded by House Majority Leader Tom Delay.

In 2002, TRMPAC and TAB were busy supporting candidates and pushing “issue” ads in an effort to remake the Texas Legislature. And indeed, after a slate of 19 Republican state representatives and senators won victory, they proceeded to elect DeLay’s close friend Tom Craddick (R-Midland) speaker of the House and push through, not only mid-decade congressional redistricting, but a host of giveaways for the corporate financiers of the campaign. A central link among all these groups and a likely target of the Travis County grand jury is John Colyandro.

Colyandro was the executive director of TRMPAC. He also worked on Greg Abbott’s campaign. According to a deposition in a civil suit filed by some of the losing Democratic candidates, Colyandro admitted that he contacted the LEAA to see if they would get involved in Texas legislative races. He has denied involvement in the LEAA’s television ads against Watson. Remarkably, four ads created for the $1.9-million TAB “issue” ad campaign mysteriously ended up with LEAA logos on them.

The ads were hardly subtle. “Mike Head is on the side of convicted baby killers and murderers,” read one. “When suspected crack cocaine traffickers and marijuana dealers found themselves in jail, Paul D. Clayton came to their aid,” read another.

The movement of the ads between the groups seems to indicate coordination between them, which could violate their tax status. This could become an important point in the grand jury proceedings as it brings into question how “independent” their “independent expenditures” really were.

The LEAA may also be channeling funds into other state races for America’s largest “business league,” reported The Wall Street Journal. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce represents more than three million firms, and includes an Institute for Legal Reform that carries out what its spokesman calls “voter education” in both national and state elections across the nation.

While the LEAA’s big issue is gun rights and criminal justice, the Chamber’s big issue is tort reform and limits on lawsuit damages. The organization has spent millions to support candidates on the lawsuit-reform bandwagon. “There are 42 supreme court races, and 11 attorney general races” in different states this year, said Sean McBride, vice president of communications for the Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform.

The Chamber, like the LEAA, favors unaccountable voter education drives. “We do not give contributions directly to candidates,” said McBride. “We take a hard look at those races in cooperation with business groups or other non-profits in those states.”

Do the non-profits include the LEAA?

Chamber spokesman McBride declined to comment.

When also asked about the LEAA, the Chamber’s General Counsel, Steve Bokat similarly replied, “I’m not at liberty to discuss it.”

No matter who is writing checks to the LEAA, its budget has increased nearly fivefold in just seven years. From 1995 through 1998, the NRA donated more than $500,000 a year to the LEAA, covering either nearly or slightly more than half of the LEAA’s budget, according to tax records from both groups obtained by the Observer. But the LEAA’s budget has swelled in recent years from $1.32 million in 1997 to $4.48 million by 2001. There is speculation the group spent even more money in 2002.

In addition to its presence in Texas, the LEAA has fought hard in Mississippi, which has long been the scene of pitched battles between trial lawyers and business interests. Two years ago, the LEAA sponsored smear ads in Mississippi against one 12-year sitting state Supreme Court justice. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce was active in Mississippi Supreme Court races in years past as well, but, in 2002, neither the Chamber nor its ads were anywhere in sight, while LEAA ads were everywhere.

What was odd about the LEAA’s campaign against this sitting Mississippi justice, Chuck McRae, was that, unlike many previous targets of the LEAA, he was a proud gun owner and the LEAA had no beef with him about gun rights. However, many businesses and, especially, doctors opposed Judge McRae’s re-election, complaining that he was too plaintiff-friendly in his Mississippi Supreme Court decisions. The LEAA’s ads, meanwhile, attacked him that year for overturning at least one murder conviction, and for voting against the disbarment of an attorney charged with stealing money from his own clients.

“What we find with a lot of these ‘front groups’ is that they adopt innocuous-sounding names that your average person is more likely to identify with than the chamber of commerce,” said Public Citizen’s Taylor Lincoln. “Take the Law Enforcement Alliance of America. Who is against law enforcement?”

It’s unclear whether the Travis County grand jury has tried to contact John W. Chapman, the chairman of LEAA’s board of directors, to ask him what he knows about the 2002 Texas campaign. It wouldn’t be hard; he’s just up the road on I-35. Chapman is a former police officer for juvenile offenses in Killeen, Texas. He joined the LEAA after the mass shooting by a lone gunmen in a Luby’s cafeteria there in 1991. On the LEAA website, www.leaa.org, Chapman can be seen in one photo shaking hands with then-Texas Governor George W. Bush, and in another photo with a past NRA President. (Chapman declined to comment for this story.)

State officials in Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Kansas have accused the LEAA of illegally pumping money into their state’s electoral campaigns in violation of this group’s so-called “social welfare” status.

One judge in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County, Paul F. Lutty Jr., issued a temporary restraining order against the LEAA over its ads in the Keystone State in 2001. But even those who disagreed with LEAA ads, like the editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, said the county judge’s ruling was a violation of free speech.

One of the largest LEAA campaigns after Texas was a 2002 attorney general race in Illinois, where the LEAA spent a reported $1.3 million. The group attacked a Democratic candidate, Lisa Magidan, telling voters that she “has never tried a single crime,” while pointing out that the Republican candidate, Joe Birkett, was an experienced prosecutor. This time the LEAA’s Executive Director James Fotis characterized the ads as “freedom of speech.”

Indeed they are. But since running such ads amounts, as the LEAA’s own IRS filings show, to the group’s primary activity, if the IRS were to determine that these expenses should be filed as “political” instead of “educational,” not only would the LEAA lose its “social welfare” status and be required to pay taxes on its political campaigns, but it would also be required finally to shed light on its contributors.

There are others who criticize the LEAA for different reasons. Jim Pasco is executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police. It’s the nation’s largest law enforcement association with more than 300,000 members. The Grand Lodge Fraternal Order of Police is based in Nashville, Tennessee, and has more than 2,100 local lodges nationwide. The FOP also has a National Legislative Office that occupies three floors of a Capitol Hill townhouse.

“It’s absurd to suggest that LEAA represents the law enforcement community,” said Pasco, who is himself a retired Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms special agent.

These two groups have worked together. Both the Fraternal Order of Police and the Law Enforcement Alliance backed a federal law, now awaiting President Bush’s signature, that will allow off-duty as well as retired police officers to carry concealed weapons in any state. But on other issues, from state supreme court to attorney general races, Pasco says the LEAA does not represent America’s law enforcement personnel.

“There is no way on God’s green earth that the LEAA could spend millions of dollars on campaign ads,” said Pasco. “It’s not their money.”

How much money the LEAA spent in 2002 and who provided it is anybody’s guess. Since the LEAA and the IRS refuse and fail, respectively, to give a proper public accounting, the mystery will remain unsolved for the time being. More importantly, in the absence of a legal deterrent, who knows what plans are being laid for the LEAA to strike once again in October, 10 days before the election?

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C. His work can be seen at www.franksmyth.com. Additional writing and reporting for this article was contributed by Jake Bernstein.

Drug War Blues

May 3, 2001/in The SAIS Review/by Frank Smyth

“Drug Wars,” Frontline, Public Broadcasting Service, October 9 and 10, 2000.
“Drug Wars,” Talk of the Nation, National Public Radio, October 3, 2000.

What kind of a man would stand up to the Republican mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, and tell him flat out that he is wrong? Tell him, “No, Rudy, just busting addicts doesn’t clean up the streets like you say. In fact, it does just the opposite. Busting ’em raises crime.” I can think of one guy, a lifelong Republican who held a much higher office. Former U.S. President Richard Nixon will always be known for his cover-up of the Watergate Hotel break-in, but who would have thought that he would have taken such a radical stance on drugs? “A program of law enforcement alone is not enough,” a composed President Nixon is seen saying in a two-hour Public Broadcasting System (PBS) Frontline series, “because as we succeed in the law enforcement side, we may increase crime, increase crime because of the inability of those who are unable to obtain drugs to feed their habit, and so this means on the treatment of addicts we go parallel with a program that is strong in this field,” a program that uses methadone as a substitute for heroin. Why would our government ever substitute one drug for another? Because methadone works and Nixon knew it.

The PBS Frontline documentary Drug Wars was reported and produced by a team led by former CBS News 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman. The result is the most comprehensive treatment of U.S. counter-narcotics policy available on film. Drug Wars credits and builds upon the path-breaking work of the 1998 book, The Fix, by Michael Massing, which documented Nixon’s unconventional drug policies. The PBS series was produced in coordination with National Public Radio (NPR) in a live panel moderated by Juan Williams at Georgetown University Law Center. The speakers included many of the same former U.S. drug control officials who appear in the Frontline series. Their collective discussion of the drug war includes many telling anecdotes and other surprises, especially about policies at home.

Yet anyone seeking to understand current U.S. counter-narcotics policies overseas will be disappointed by both productions. While they each answer the compelling question “How did we get to the point where we are now in the drug war?,” they barely mention the $1.3 billion in military aid that the United States is now providing to Colombia. This latest package has led the Andean nation to surpass El Salvador as the site of the largest U.S.-backed counter-insurgency effort since the Vietnam War.

What the PBS documentary does do is present Colombian drug traffickers like two of the infamous Ochoa brothers on camera for the first time. They chronicle the rise of the cocaine trade from the late 1970s into the early 1990s and its spread to other nations, including the Bahamas and Mexico. Their exclusive interviews underscore a point that is also made in the film by none other than another former U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, when he said that trying to stop drugs from crossing borders is as futile as “carrying water in a sieve.”

Both the PBS series and the NPR panel also present a number of former American drug war veterans who have since changed their own views. William Alden was the second-in-command of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for seven years beginning in 1986, the year the college basketball star, Len Bias, died from a new cocaine-based drug called “crack.” Although he once championed law enforcement efforts to control the problem, Alden now says, like Nixon did nearly three decades
ago, that this approach does not work by itself. Jack Lawn was Alden’s boss at the DEA under President Reagan, and he too told Frontline the same thing. The shifts in the U.S. policy pendulum between law enforcement and drug treatment is a thread throughout the PBS film.

The Vietnam Crisis

Why was Nixon the first to prioritize treatment for drug addicts? He was no fan of either the drug culture or the Haight-Ashbury crowd in San Francisco that unabashedly promoted marijuana and LSD while protesting the Vietnam War. However, cracking down on the cultural revolution that was part of the anti-war movement, notes author Michael Massing in the PBS documentary, might not have been to Nixon’s political advantage. When it came to drugs, his attention was focused elsewhere. As U.S. support for
South Vietnam was declining and U.S. servicemen were returning home by the thousands, two U.S. congressmen coming back from South Vietnam broke the news to the nation in April 1971. Robert Steele, a Republican from Connecticut, and Morgan Murphy, a Democrat from Illinois, told the country that 10 to 15 percent of returning GI’s were addicted to heroin.

Purple Heart bearers were among those coming back on smack, and Nixon was determined to use state-of-the-art treatment to help them get clean. Drug abuse is “public enemy number one in the United States” and it “is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive,” he said in the White House pressroom in June 1971. President Nixon was standing next to a psychiatrist, Jerome Jaffe, who once taught at Yeshiva University in the Bronx. “I consider this problem so urgent,” Nixon went on, “that it had to be brought into the White House.” Nixon was the first U.S. president to create an executive office to coordinate a national policy on drugs, and he picked Jaffe to run it on the strength of his successful heroin treatment programs in Illinois. Jaffe had become the nation’s “drug czar,” seventeen years before journalists coined the term to describe William Bennett’s job in the Bush administration.

Like Bennet, Jaffe was no moralist. Instead, the Nixon administration favored a pragmatic approach and Jaffe was given the budget and resources to make methadone available to heroin addicts nationwide. Within just one year in the wait for treatment in New York City dropped from six months to less than one month. Nationwide, the number of clients in federally funded treatment programs tripled to 60,000 by the fall of 1972. Although Nixon prioritized treatment in his national plan, he also included law enforcement efforts and diplomacy. U.S. pressure and support helped compel France and other states to break up the infamous French connection in 1972 for heroin en route from Asia to the United States. France was a key trans-shipment nation for heroin smugglers.

The combination worked and crime plunged. Crime in the District of Columbia had dropped by half, Nixon told voters as he campaigned against Democratic challenger, George McGovern, in 1972. In New York City, crime dropped 21.1 percent in the first five months of the year. Though in public much credit was given to law enforcement, Nixon privately acknowledged the importance of treatment for the policy’s success. Indicative of the drug war debate to come, Nixon was in a helicopter over New York City when he pointed down to Brooklyn and said to one of his aides, “You and I care about treatment, but those people down there, they want those people off the street.”

While Nixon continued treatment programs, he also escalated law enforcement efforts. In 1973, after he won re-election, he created the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, and, by the time he was forced to resign later in the year over Watergate, civil liberty abuses by DEA special agents were already rising.

Decriminalization

While Nixon’s legacy in the drug war remains as controversial as it was mixed, his Republican successor, Gerald Ford, backed off from all previously instigated policy initiatives, just as the nation’s attitudes toward drugs seemed to be changing. By then heroin treatment had helped enough addicts kick their habits that President Ford had no further plans. But Robert DuPont, his drug czar, did. DuPont had been hired by Nixon and then, under Ford, managed a smaller national drug policy office. DuPont told Frontline how Nixon had warned him that he would fire him if he ever made “any hint of support for decriminalization” of marijuana. But with Ford, DuPont had his chance. The new president admitted that his twenty-three year-old son, Jack, had “smoked marijuana.” DuPont soon prepared a White House study that recommended making marijuana a “low priority” for U.S. law enforcement. Not long after, in November 1974, DuPont even spoke at a conference organized by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana

Laws (NORML)

Tolerance for recreational drug use was on the rise in 1976 when Ford’s democratic challenger, Jimmy Carter, campaigned in favor of the decriminalization of marijuana. Marijuana use reached its highest peak ever across the United States two years later when one in ten high school seniors got stoned daily, and 40 percent took a hit once a month. Yet President Carter, and his drug czar, Peter Bourne, were undaunted by the news. Instead, the Carter administration maintained that marijuana was a relatively harmless drug that did not warrant much attention. Bourne was a British-born doctor who had run drug treatment programs across Georgia, and like his predecessors he focused on hard-core heroin use. Both Carter and Bourne, however, severely underestimated the reaction that marijuana use among kids would have among middle-class suburban communities. In 1976, Keith Schuchard, a parent in the suburbs of Atlanta recalls that he “saw flickering lights” that he first thought were cigarettes at a party in his backyard for his seventh-grade daughter: “They were stoned, but we didn’t realize [it until later], and that’s when we got alarmed and said, ‘The party’s over.'” Schuchard would help organize a movement against the “normalization” of marijuana use in the United States. Carter and Bourne dismissed them as mere gadflies, a mistake that still seems to haunt the Democratic party. The parents invited Bourne to speak in Georgia, and when he did they gave him “the bong show.” But to the outrage of parents like Schuchard, Bourne did not
seem to care.

Later in 1978, Bourne did a few things that today are hard to believe. He wrote a fake prescription for a downer called quaaludes for a member of his staff, and he attended a party hosted by none other than the head of NORML, Keith Stroup, where not only marijuana but cocaine was also apparently consumed. Stroup, angry that the Carter administration was not fulfilling its pledge to decriminalize marijuana, later confirmed rumors about Bourne’s attendance at the drug party to the press. “I made what I think was without question the stupidest decision in my life,” said Stroup.

One might then think that the Reagan administration reacted to the above by taking a hard-line turn away from normalization to moralization about drugs. But Ronald Reagan himself only made that transition slowly. When he took office in 1981, he briefly advocated a return to Nixon’s pioneering formula to focus on reducing addicts’ demand as opposed to traffickers’ supply of drugs. The reason, said Reagan, is that the influx of drugs could not be stopped.

“With borders like ours that, as the main method of halting the drug problem in America, [it] is virtually impossible. It’s like carrying water in a sieve. It is my belief, firm belief, that the answer to the drug problem comes through winning over the users to the point that we take the customers away from drugs, not take the drugs necessarily. Try that, of course. You don’t let up on that. But it’s far more effective if you take the customers away than if you try to take the drugs away from those who want to be customers.”

But Reagan’s pragmatic approach to drugs would be short-lived. It would not be long before the same parents’ movement that had been snubbed by Carter and Bourne would be embraced by Reagan and his wife, Nancy, whose “Just Say No” campaign steered the nation toward a “zero-tolerance” approach. By then U.S. law enforcement spending on drug control was already greater than spending on treatment.

Tough Laws

The advent of “crack” in inner cities across the country changed the drug war debate as well. The new substance was both much cheaper and more addictive than either powdered cocaine or heroin. Moreover, it decentralized trafficking syndicates like never before. “The [new] organization was a twenty year-old guy and three ten year-old kids,” said one DEA agent. Congress’ response was swift after basketball player Len Bias tragically died from crack and the man who sold it to him effectively walked away from the crime. As if trying to show who could be tougher on the new, dangerous drug, House and Senate committees competed with each other to pass mandatory minimum sentences for hard crack that were 100 times greater than the penalties for powdered cocaine. The result put a disproportionate number of blacks and Hispanics in jail. The new law caused street dealers, who transformed cocaine into crack, to do far more time in jail than the wholesale cocaine traffickers. Although it was not mentioned in either of the productions, Congress also passed a law for LSD possession in the 1980s that based sentences upon the weight of the drug including its carrier. The law would ultimately sentence to decades in jail many harmless white twenty year-olds who were caught with acid-soaked s sugar cubes.

The trend continued under President George Bush, who in 1989 created the modern Office of National Drug Control Policy and appointed a former secretary of education, William Bennett, to run it. He staffed the office with people who, like him, were hostile to most drug treatment programs, and they elevated the drug war to a crusade against all users of illegal drugs. “The casual user, the weekend user, the so-called recreational user that person needs to be confronted and face consequences, too,” Bennett said.

Bennett was so zealous about drug use that he and his staff initially greeted good news as bad news when the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse reported an unexpectedly good trend. The number of casual drug users had, in fact, fallen 37 percent, from 23 million in 1985 to 14.5 million in 1988, while chronic drug use, which Bennett spoke of less often, was soaring. The drug czar’s staff member David Tell said: “We were surprised and a little distressed because we’ve got this big report that everybody’s expecting and here’s data that seems to indicate the problem’s barely more than half the size we thought it was. So there was a moment’s wondering whether this was real or just hysteria, I think. On the other hand, it was quite apparent even from that very same survey that the problem that was driving public concern real, hard-core cocaine addiction was exploding.”

However, Bennett did little to address hard-core addiction, whether it stemmed from crack or heroin. Instead, he continued his call that all drug users of any kind must be punished. The Clinton administration did little better, even though President Clinton, like President Reagan before him, began his tenure by saying that he would reduce the demand not the supply of drugs. Clinton briefly prioritized treatment, but within two years he reversed course, returning to the traditional model that remains today of federal law enforcement efforts outspending federal treatment programs by two to one.

The apparent message of the Frontline series is that treatment works. Moralism has led the United States to incarcerate people at a rate only matched by Russia among industrialized countries. Well over half of the nation’s federal prisoners are in on drug charges, and two-thirds of them are minorities: 48 percent are black and 10 percent are Hispanic. The prison population is projected to pass 2 million inmates for the first time. Yet the United States is at an impasse in the drug war debate, as politicians cannot seem to get past “looking tough” on the issue.

If there was one moment of illumination in the recent forums, it came from a woman who walked to a microphone at NPR’s Talk of the Nation. She asked the panel a question that seemed to challenge whether law enforcement, as a way to control drug abuse, worked, and she identified herself Kendra Wright of Family Watch. “What is that?” asked the program’s host. Wright responded that Family Watch is an organization that takes the fundamental premise held dear by law and order advocates like William Bennett and turns it on its head. While in the past many groups have claimed that more law enforcement is necessary to protect families from drugs, Family Watch argues that it in fact hurts families by putting fathers and mothers in jail. “They are doing more harm than good,” Wright said. It is a radical notion, but so was Nixon’s idea nearly thirty years ago that treatment works.

SAIS Review, Winter-Spring 2001 Volume XXI, Number One

Guatemala’s Narco-military

November 18, 1999/in IntellectualCapital.com/by Frank Smyth

No country so small has ever moved so much cocaine north. Earlier in this decade, about 50 to 75 metric tons of cocaine passed through Guatemala each year, according to the State Department. But today, the State Department estimates that Guatemala annually transships (receives and then ships on) approximately 200 to 300 metric tons of cocaine, making Guatemala a frequent stop along the American drug-trade route. At least half of all the cocaine that State Department experts estimate reaches the U.S. market goes through Guatemala.

Colombia has long been at the heart of the drug trade, and back in the 1980s most of its cocaine was transshipped north through the Caribbean. But in the 1990s, Colombian drug trafficking routes shifted to the northern Central American and Mexican land isthmus. Throughout this decade, it was Mexico, which shares its southern border with Guatemala, that transshipped up to three-fourths of America’s cocaine. But over the past two years, Guatemala’s role in the trade has dramatically expanded. “Mexico still moves the same amount of cocaine,” says one U.S. expert, only now most of it goes to Guatemala first.

When it comes to the drug war, however, the Clinton administration along with its Congressional critics are concentrating mainly on Colombia. American leaders are focusing on the role of Colombia’s leftist “narco-guerrillas” in the drug trade, while ignoring the role being played by rightist military forces in Latin American nations from Colombia to Guatemala.

La Bodega

There is something ironic about Guatemala’s increased role in the drug trade especially when one considers the nature of the criminal syndicates behind it. Guatemala was a staunch Cold War ally of the United States and, back in 1954, the CIA engineered a coup from Honduras that deposed Guatemala’s elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, after he first nationalized the lands of the U.S. firm United Fruit and then received arms from Czechoslovakia. The coup established the Guatemalan military as the country’s dominant institution, and its officer corps has since enjoyed near-blanket impunity from prosecution.

While most of Central America was consumed by ideological warfare in the 1980s, Guatemala’s conflict was by far the bloodiest. Its anti-communist military explicitly rejected human-rights considerations along with any covert U.S. aid conditioned upon them, although the CIA continued to provide the Guatemalan military with covert assistance even as its forces committed many war crimes.

The war crimes peaked in the early 1980s with the wholesale massacres of as many as 400 ethnic Mayan villages suspected of supporting leftist guerrillas. Last February, a U.N. truth commission reported that the Guatemalan military abuses included acts of genocide. One month later, President Clinton apologized in Guatemala City for America’s past complicity in the Guatemalan military’s war crimes.

But President Clinton has yet to address the Guatemalan military’s role in drug trafficking, which the DEA first began to detect during the Bush administration. As early as 1990, DEA special agents termed Guatemala, la bodega or “the warehouse.” One of their first suspects was a Guatemalan Army lieutenant colonel, Carlos Ochoa Ruiz. The DEA maintains that Ochoa transshipped a half metric ton of cocaine –worth $7.5 million wholesale — from Western Guatemala to Tampa, Fla., where he remains indicted in a U.S. federal court.

Eastern Guatemala peasants say military officers there, too, transshipped cocaine. In 1992, they filed a petition with the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City that accused suspects including four Army colonels of driving them off their farmland in order to build clandestine runways to run drugs, after killing at least nine people — including a mother and her son — in order to accelerate the land clearing. One of the suspects named by surviving peasants, Arnoldo Vargas Estrada, was later convicted in a U.S. federal court in New York of smuggling several metric tons of cocaine a month from Guatemala to New York. Yet not one of the four Army colonels named by the peasants in Guatemala was ever charged with any crime.

While some Army officers moved cocaine in private planes, some Air Force officers moved drugs in military planes. The highest-ranking officer accused of trafficking by the DEA is Gen. Carlos Pozuelos Villavicencio who retired in 1993 as Guatemala’s Air Force commander. Although the Clinton administration denied him a U.S. entry visa explicitly over his alleged role in cocaine transshipments, Pozuelos, too, was never charged with the crime.

The Ochoa case

So far, only one major military drug suspect in Guatemala received a serious sentence. Ironically he is the same suspect, Army Lt. Col. Carlos Ochoa Ruiz, that the DEA first accused of trafficking back in 1990. Ochoa currently is incarcerated in Guatemala after being convicted in a Guatemalan court even as he remains wanted for trial in a U.S. federal court in Tampa. No case better illustrates the difficulties of prosecuting Guatemalan military officers for running drugs.

Ochoa was the first Guatemalan military officer the United States tried to prosecute for trafficking. After a U.S. federal grand jury indicted him in 1990 in Florida, the State Department asked Guatemala to extradite him there to stand trial. The Guatemalan military gave Ochoa a dishonorable discharge in order to put distance between his name and the institution, but that did not stop a military tribunal from inexplicably reclaiming jurisdiction over him later to try and dismiss the case against him allegedly for lack of evidence.

The State Department appealed the case three times — all the way to Guatemala’s Constitutional Court, the country’s highest judicial body. The presiding judge, Epaminondas Gonzalez Dubon, was already well respected for his integrity, having bravely ruled against a 1993 “self-coup” by Guatemala’s then-President Jorge Serrano. Because of his unblemished record, State Department officials were confident that Gonzalez would lead the court to favor their appeal.

Gonzalez did exactly that, although he paid with his life for his decision. According to court documents published later by the Costa Rican daily newspaper, La Nacion, Guatemala’s Constitutional Court led by Gonzalez voted four to three to extradite Ochoa on March 23, 1994. Nine days later, a four-man team murdered Judge Gonzalez Dubon in Guatemala City in front of his wife and son. Eleven days later, the same court led by a new presiding judge voted seven-to one against the extradition.

A wall of silence

Although the matter was the end of a four-year effort by the United States, Clinton, like his Guatemalan Ambassador Marilyn McAfee, remained shamefully silent about the interminable loss of the case. State Department officials would later say the administration saw no reason to protest a decision it could no longer appeal. Meanwhile, Ochoa went free only to go on running cocaine to the United States.

Ochoa got caught trafficking again — this time with 30 kilograms of cocaine — in Guatemala in 1997. This year in July, a Guatemalan court finally convicted him, with Judge Marco Tulio Molina Lara sentencing him to 14 years. Such a lengthy sentence is unprecedented for a senior Guatemalan military officer, even though hundreds of officers have been implicated in either human rights or drug-trafficking crimes.

No doubt, the conviction and sentencing of a recidivist military trafficker is an important first step for Guatemala toward breaking the wall of impunity that has long protected its officer corps from justice. But the State Department’s report about the country’s recent expansion in cocaine transshipments only shows that this change has come too little too late for the United States.

Frank Smyth, who covered El Salvador for CBS News Radio, the Village Voice, The Economist and other outlets, is co-author of Dialogue and Armed Conflict: Negotiating the Civil War in El Salvador. He is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Communication at American University.

A Brave Guatemalan Judge Challenges Corrupt Brass Hats

August 13, 1999/in The Wall Street Journal/by Frank Smyth

Original article can be found here.

Something new and promising happened in Guatemala last month when Judge Marco Tulio Molina Lara sentenced ex-Army Lt. Col. Carlos Ochoa Ruiz to 14 years in prison for trafficking in cocaine. Mr. Ochoa Ruiz is one of at least 31 current or former Guatemalan military officers the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has suspected of running drugs. But no Guatemalan officer of his rank has ever received such a lengthy sentence. He has one final appeal available, which may yet set him free.

In American eyes, Mr. Ochoa Ruiz is a recidivist criminal. In 1990, DEA special agents set him up in a sting operation; they claim that he sent half of a metric ton of cocaine, worth $7.5 million wholesale, to Tampa, Fla. He was indicted in absentia in federal court. The U.S. demanded his extradition but after Guatemala’s top judge ruled in favor of the extradition and was subsequently murdered, the ruling was later reversed by the same high court. The murder remains unsolved. Mr. Ochoa Ruiz was caught running cocaine again three years later, leading to his arrest and last month’s conviction.

Guatemala has a major problem bringing present or former military officers suspected of felonies to justice. “Guatemalan military officers strongly suspected of trafficking in narcotics rarely face criminal prosecution,” wrote the State Department in 1994, complaining that suspects like the former Lt. Col. Ochoa Ruiz were merely discharged from military service. “In most cases, the officers continue on with their suspicious activities.”

The Clinton administration has largely chosen to ignore military involvement in Guatemalan drug trafficking, in part because for much of its first term it was focusing on a peace agreement, finally concluded in 1997, to end Guatemala’s 35-year civil war. It feared that raising the impunity issue would disrupt the peace process. Earlier this year the State Department reported that Guatemalan traffickers are now moving 200 to 300 metric tons of Colombian cocaine a year to northern markets, up sharply from about 50 tons in the early 1990s. That is, according to State Department officials, at least half of all the cocaine reaching the U.S. Most of the cocaine coming in through Mexico transits through Guatemala as well.

Former or current military officers, who for years have enjoyed a high degree of impunity, often protect Guatemalan criminal syndicates. According to a signed petition from Guatemalan peasants that was presented to the DEA, one syndicate led by military officers and a mayor killed locals who resisted abandoning the land they farmed, which the trafficking syndicate wanted for clandestine runways. Ex-mayor Arnoldo Vargas Estrada was later convicted of drug trafficking in federal court in New York. The four Army colonels named by the peasants in the same petition were never charged anywhere.

Guatemalan President Alvaro Arzu undertook to clean house in the military when he began his four-year term in 1996. The State Department reports that last year he discharged even more “military officers thought to be involved in corruption and smuggling.” But one of the bravest steps taken by anyone in Guatemala so far was last month’s sentencing of Mr. Ochoa Ruiz by Judge Molina Lara. It was the Bush administration that first requested Mr. Ochoa Ruiz’s extradition in 1991. The Guatemalan military later discharged him explicitly to put distance between his name and the institution. But that did not stop a military tribunal from inexplicably reclaiming jurisdiction over the former officer in 1993 in order to dismiss the U.S. extradition case against him, citing a “lack of evidence.”

The Clinton administration appealed the case three times, all the way to Guatemala’s top judicial body, the Constitutional Court. The presiding judge, Epaminondas González Dubon, was already well respected for his integrity, having made a historic, independent ruling in 1993 when he declared unconstitutional the imposition of martial law by the country’s then-president, Jorge Serrano. Mr. Ochoa Ruiz’s extradition case reached Judge González Dubon’s bench less than a year later, and in March 1994 he signed an order to extradite the former officer and circulated it to the court’s other judges to sign as well. On April 1, as Mr. González Dubon was returning with his family from an Easter day-trip, four men assassinated him as his wife and son looked on.

How did the Clinton administration react? Neither President Clinton nor his ambassador to Guatemala, Marilyn McAfee, said a word about it. They remained silent when, on April 12, the Constitutional Court’s surviving judges quietly overturned the late Judge González Dubon’s ruling and set Mr. Ochoa Ruiz free. Apparently the Clinton administration saw no reason to publicly protest this reversal of its efforts to bring a suspected drug trafficker to justice.

Four months later, in the Village Voice I accused another military officer, Gen. Carlos Pozuelos Villavicencio, the former Air Force commander, of allegedly using military aircraft to transship cocaine. In a hastily called press conference, Guatemala’s then-defense minister, Gen. Mario René Enríquez, threatened to spend his “last personal penny” suing me for libel. Ambassador McAfee called her own press conference two days later and announced that Gen. Pozuelos Villavicencio was indeed a DEA suspect. The general was never charged nor did any lawsuit ever materialize.

Some important gains have been made under President Arzu, but Guatemala still has a long way to go and fear is still an overriding consideration for all judges. The record of impunity is one reason Colombian traffickers have made alliances, with Guatemalan military officers. Considering the price paid to finally convict Mr. Ochoa Ruiz, it is no wonder that the cocaine traffic through Guatemala expanded so rapidly.

—-
Mr. Smyth, a contributor to “Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know,” (Norton,
1999) writes regularly for Intellectual-Capital.com.

Heroes of the Revolution: Cuban Ingenuity Keeps American Classics Running

March 3, 1999/in Automobile/by Frank Smyth

SOUTH OF HAVANA, CUBA –The white ’57 Dodge convertible has perfect banana yellow underpanels with tall matching fins, even though its passenger compartment is all but gutted, save for the steering wheel.

The driver sits on a small wooden crate as he steers past fields of trees fruiting mangos as well as avocados.

He pulls into a cluttered yard with a tin-roofed shed and two small cinder block houses.

Ducks, chickens, and goats all make a racket, as children, followed by adults, come out to see who has arrived. All one can see of Alfredo, the breadwinner for both households, is his slate blue overall legs and sneakers. His back presses not against a dolly but against dirt as he works under the red body and fins of a four-door ’56 Dodge, which was built three years before Fidel Castro came to power.

Alfredo, 33, has been working on cars since he was eleven. His first job, of course, was in a state-owned shop, as by then all private enterprise on the island had long ended.

But things had begun to change by the time Alfredo turned twenty-three, when he began working for himself abajo del agua, or illegally under the water. Although he remains submerged, Alfredo has clients among some of the most discerning classic-car owners in Cuba. Some people like to go fishing. “I like fixing cars,” he explains, “and I like it when my customers are satisfied.”

Cars spanning the decades from the Great Depression to the Cuban Revolution await his care. In the yard is a black ’36 Chevy with skinny whitewall tires, broad running boards, and huge, round, free-standing headlights.

Beneath the barn’s falling roof is a ’49 Dodge convertible, its bench seats restored with creamy buttermilk leather smuggled to the island from Mexico. Next to the Dodge is a ’52 Chevy adorned with a shiny chrome swan. Both later models are painted only with sky blue primer.

Since Castro’s takeover in 1959, Cubans have managed to keep such vehicles running against all odds. Entirely cut off from trade with the United States and living on a communist-run island that prohibited, until recently, nearly all private economic transactions, Cubans have not enjoyed easy access to any consumer goods, let alone American automotive parts. The mechanics who have found ways past that handicap are among the most ingenious people anywhere. Take Alfredo. He compared American and Soviet engine blocks when looking for parts for the former Moscow planners were apparently so impressed by the innovations coming out of Detroit at the dawn of the industry’s golden age that they began copying the designs, and Alfredo discovered that many old Soviet trucks had engine blocks similar to those on many old American cars.

The pistons of a Soviet GAZ-51 truck, for one, are interchangeable with those of many early-fifties Chryslers.

“I learned this myself,” says Alfredo. “I took out each part and studied it, -he adds, holding up two matching pistons, one Russian and one American.”

Alfredo runs his operation like a prohibition-era moonshine still, and his example is now spreading like dandelions across the island. The soil has only been moistened by recent economic reforms. Although the Cuban Communist Party remains firmly in control of the country’s political affairs, Castro finally began loosening the reins over economic transactions in 1989, and then relaxed them more in 1993 following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Throughout the 1990s, dollars have slowly inundated the island, and anyone who can manage to attain them no easy task can now buy everything from disposable diapers to spark plugs.

The economic reforms have been accompanied, too, by a dramatic increase in state corruption, as Cubans pilfer government stockpiles like never before. Diesel fuel, which costs thirty-five U.S. cents per gallon in a legal, government-regulated transaction, can cost as little as five cents a gallon on the black market. While the profiteers risk possible incarceration, their cost for the stolen fuel is nearly zero. In this way, one can now buy anything from sheet metal to GAZ-51 parts dirt cheap. Of course, while widening informal economic transactions only make it easier to restore vintage automobiles, the pace of change overall raises many questions about the future of an island that has lived with a command economy for nearly four decades.

But to try and voice an answer would be dangerous, a risk most Cubans would still rather avoid. “You can swim safely if you keep your mouth closed,” explained another mechanic, Delfín Matos Ortíz. “But if you open your mouth, you may only drink in some water and drown.”

Unlike Alfredo, Ortíz operates legally and pays taxes. He has no choice because he is far better known. As early as 1962 it was apparent to Ortíz, a former shipbuilder, that Cubans would have to fabricate their own engine parts to keep their American cars running. He spent six months painstakingly testing the metal composition of piston rings and taught himself how to make them. Today Ortíz, a great-grandfather, is still doing what he has done for decades, skillfully crafting piston rings for old American engines.

“Every problem has a solution,” he says. “I feel best when I am doing challenging work.” As his wife joyfully serves tea, Ortíz displays some rusted iron tubes and, next to them, several shiny new rings that are tagged for different clients. How does he get from old iron pipes to those? “Well,” he says, “it took me some work to figure it out.”

Back in 1962, just months before the United States and the Soviet Union nearly went to war over the Cuban missile crisis, it became clear that the island and its northern neighbor were no longer going to trade goods. Could Cubans make their own piston rings? Ortíz decided to try. He brought some original rings to a few nearby university friends, who tested their chemical composition while he made ring molds, first out of wood and then out of metal. Relying on the same grapevine that is essential to everyone on the island, Ortíz made deals for equipment and materials. “There was a nickel and chrome factory,” says Ortíz. “They needed seals. I needed nickel.”

It took him about six months before he finally started producing rings that held up under pressure. Word of his craft spread fast. By 1964, Ortíz was producing engine rings for many people, although some were having trouble installing them. So he printed up a single-spaced, two-sided instruction sheet. Ortíz doesn’t just make piston rings for cars. He has made them for all sorts of gasoline-powered engines, and his reputation is so impeccable that his services were once requested by Castro himself. Regardless of what one might think of his strategic vision, the now gray-haired Communist leader has always been an incurable micro-manager, often intervening personally to make even the most mundane decisions. Back in early 1991 at a Politburo meeting, Castro learned that an old gasoline-powered generator in a Havana hospital had long been idle because its rings were shot. “What can we do?” he demanded. A Politburo member from Ortíz’s hometown of Santiago de Cuba told him about the mechanic and his skills.

The Communist Party flew him to Havana. “I spent three months on it,” he says. Though not paid for his time, Ortíz ate and slept at the hospital. It was a job, he adds with a self-effacing grin. “I did it.” Since then, Ortíz has been back in Santiago, quietly going about his business while living with his wife near their five grandchildren and two great- grandchildren. He is not sure what their future will be or what kind of political and economic system they will live under. But he doesn’t expect his own life to change. “As long as there are old cars here, I’ll continue making parts for them,” he says.

A generation younger, Edis de la Torre is among the few people willing to talk openly about politics, and that may be because he remains loyal to the Communist Party and its revolutionary ideals. “In the United States,” he notes, “the [vintage] cars would belong to rich people.” De la Torre has restored many vehicles for his family’s personal use, and he belongs to a community that transcends politics. What binds them is the enthusiasm they share for their automobiles and the common hurdles they have each needed to clear. “We are in solidarity with each other,” De la Torre says. But how do you keep the old cars running without easy access to anything? “No single place to buy parts exists,” he says while slowly shaking his head. There has not been one in Cuba since the early Sixties. “Instead I have had to find them through the grapevine.”

Fellow car owners, mechanics, government workers, party officials, and others have all helped De la Torre obtain parts for every vehicle he has maintained since La Revolución. Choosing models that he thought might last, De la Torre has owned five American classics, one Renault, and Russian motorcycle. When I met him, he was working on his latest, a ’52 Ford. But instead of selling this one after restoring it, as he has the rest, De la Torre is planning to drive a taxi.

This will be a new undertaking, since he has resigned from his abysmally low-paying government job. The Ford was owned by only one other man, De la Torre adds proudly, an architect who bought it back in ’52 directly from the dealer.

De la Torre has just finished the sky blue body, and it looks smooth. The six-cylinder engine, too, sounds clean. The block is original, as is the green vinyl rear bench seat, and the -FoMoCo- markings are still imprinted on the master cylinder. The wiper motors are also factory issue, working off suction generated by the carburetor. But appearances are deceiving. De la Torre points out that the carburetor was made by Ford in Argentina, the twelve-volt battery in Mexico, and the generator in the former Soviet Union.

While he is a self-taught mechanic, Julio, a 65-year-old grandfather, is a trained professional who got is start even before the Cuban revolution.

Just one month after D-Day in World War II, Julio, then only twelve, got his first job working in a car repair shop. He later became an electric motor specialist in his brother’s shop, which remained open for a time even after Castro took power. But by 1967, Castro launched a revolutionary offensive that nationalized nearly all remaining private property: It forced his brother’s shop to close. After that, Julio went to work for the state as an electrician.

Today, he knocks on doors as an unlicensed freelance mechanic, doing far more than just wiring for a growing number of car owners here and there in Havana. And he is revered by many for the patience he brings to each job. When we talk, Julio has just finished rebuilding the transmission of a ’48 Buick. It has a relatively small, straight-eight engine that Julio has also tuned.

Julio hopes to one day open his own repair shop. But only dollars are taken for taxes and rent. “Sure, I would like to open a shop,” he says. “But I don’t have the means to do it.” Julio, like De la Torre, is a taciturn man. Each is the kind of guy who avoids trouble. That’s the only way most people survive in cities like Havana, where the Communist Party, though giving them more room to roam, still tries to rein people in as if they were horses.

But elsewhere in Cuba, even right outside Havana, people like the Fernández brothers are already running loose. Oh, and they love speed. Alberto, the second-oldest and clearly the “alpha dog” of his siblings, peels out in the middle of a two-lane highway and then does fishtails in a teal ’58 Ford Thunderbird convertible, just to show off. It has a dual exhaust and a loud, bubbling V-8. It’s scary to watch him weave around opposing lanes of traffic especially since he’s just downed a few beers.

Finally, he gets off the road and turns off the ignition. He takes another can of beer, shakes it up, and sprays it. The Fernández brothers don’t bother about appearances. Take their Ford, a mean-looking T-bird with its convertible top long gone, revealing a rusted metal frame. Nor does it have any frills. No taillights, no headlights, not even a grille. No wipers. And inside? Nope, no dash.

There is little above the sheet metal floor but a makeshift seat. In fact, the T-bird’s only aesthetic distinction is its original chrome spoked wheels. Another original part that is long since gone is the double-barrel American carburetor. Alberto says that he and his brothers have installed a more efficient Soviet carburetor in the Thunderbird to save on gasoline. But they keep the American one safely oiled and stored and sometimes still install it for special occasions.

For racing, Alberto says, grinning. Sometimes we challenge them, sometimes they challenge us.

He adds without irony: “Yeah, for money.”

Frank Smyth, a freelance journalist who has also served as an investigative consultant for Human Rights Watch as well as Amnesty International, is a contributor to Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, edited by Roy Gutman and David Rieff.