Arms and Mandela: After the Honeymoon, He Faces the Deadly Dilemmas of South Africa’s Arms Industry
The little-noticed role of South African-made arms in the catastrophe of Rwanda presents Nelson Mandela with…
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Blood Money and Geopolitics
/in The Nation/by Frank SmythThe April 6 plane crash that killed the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi (they may have been shot down) is only the latest violent act for these neighboring Central African countries. As many as 100,000 people have died and more than a million have fled ethnic and politically based attacks in recent years. Elements of […]
French Guns, Rwandan Blood
/in The New York Times/by Frank SmythThe horrendous vioIence that has seized the tiny African republic of Rwanda is not as random as it looks. For the members of the Akazu, the ruling clan around the late President Juvenal Habyarimana, the only way to retain a 21-year monopoly on power was to kill their enemies as fast as they could. And until yesterday, when…
A New Kingdom Of Cocaine: For Colombia’s Powerful Cali Cartel, the Crucial Connection Is Guatemala
/in The Washington Post/by Frank SmythThe ignominious end of cocaine baron Pablo Escobar obscured the fact that his Medellin cartel had long since been eclipsed by another network of cocaine traffickers based in the Colombian city of Cali. The Cali cartel, led by the Rodriguez Orejuela family, is now said to control up to 85 percent of the world trade […]
Guatemala’s Gross National Products: Cocadollars, Repression, and Disinformation
/in Covert Action Quarterly/by Frank SmythIn the early 1980s, leftist guerrillas in Guatemala blew up bridges, ambushed army convoys, and attacked military outposts. A decade later, the fighting in Guatemala’s civil war is winding down. Combat between the government and the guerrillas now occurs in only a few departments and only a few times each year. But political violence, almost […]
Mysterious Influx of Soviet & Chinese Arms for Salvador Rebels
/in The Sacramento Bee/by Frank SmythTitle: A Mysterious Influx of Soviet and Chinese Arms for Salvador Rebels Source: The Sacramento Bee Date: June 4, 1989 Morazan, El Salvador — Seventeen-year-old Odilia playfully pushed her tongue through her teeth as she recalled how she shot seven Salvadoran army soldiers in an ambush a few days before. Odilia’s under five feet tall, […]