Justify My War: Why Clinton Eyes Haiti’s Drug Trade and Ignores Guatemala’s
While Bill Clinton’s White House invokes Haitian drug trafficking as a key rationale for invasion, it is continuing the Bush administration policy of virtually ignoring…
Posts
Crossfire: The War Behind the Closed Doors of the NRA
/in The Village Voice/by Frank SmythThe 123-year-old group convened its annual board of directors meeting in Ballroom D of the Hilton Hotel. Unbeknownst to the 74 directors, eight officers, and 25-odd NRA staff and VIP members assembled, the Voice was present, there to witness the inner workings…
Rwanda’s French Connection
/in The Village Voice/by Frank Smyth“We have eight million people here,” an aid worker told me last June in Rwanda, “and all you Americans care about are those damn gorillas.” I was in Rwanda investigating weapons trafficking for the Human Rights Watch/Arms Project, but I couldn’t argue with the man, a Tutsi. Almost the only news reaching the West last […]
Blood Money and Geopolitics
/in The Nation/by Frank SmythThe April 6 plane crash that killed the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi (they may have been shot down) is only the latest violent act for these neighboring Central African countries. As many as 100,000 people have died and more than a million have fled ethnic and politically based attacks in recent years. Elements of […]
Box of Pain
/in The New Republic/by Frank SmythWhat does the Grateful Dead, America’s most popular live musical act, a band whose devoted following helped it sell 1.8 million concert tickets and gross $47 million last year, have to do with mandatory minimums? Quite a bit. Five years ago, no more than 100 Deadheads were believed to have been in jail. But today…
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 […]
Green Berets in El Salvador
/in Covert Action Quarterly, franksmyth.com/by Frank SmythFrank Smyth interviews Greg Walker, an ex-adviser in El Salvador who says that senior U.S. officials covered up the combat role of U.S. advisers and hid a pattern of human rights violations by the Salvadoran army.