International:
Foreign
press
gets
real
about
the
War
on
Drugs
8/8/97
While most American media outlets feed their consumers drug war pablum, the international press is often willing to dig down to the issue's rotten core. In the wake of the recent San Jose Mercury News series on CIA links to drug trafficking, which was roundly criticized by such papers as the New York Times and Washington Post, it is refreshing, indeed almost shocking, to see what the rest of the world is reading about America's longest and dirtiest war. While the foreign press is less than accessible to most English-speaking Americans, a service called the Weekly News Update on the Americas regularly culls and translates such articles. The current week's update includes excerpts from a series carried in the Spanish-language weekly "Cambio16- Espana" Colombian edition, called "Confessions of an Agent." Included in the series are accusations, made by a reported DEA Latin American operative, of CIA complicity in cocaine production and trafficking from a secret facility in Huanchaca, Bolivia, the US-ordered assassination of a Bolivian Congressman who made public charges about the facility and was about to demand the expulsion of the DEA from that country, a CIA operation that brought about the escape from a Colombian maximum-security prison of convicted trafficker Jose Santacruz Londono, and the subsequent US- ordered assassination of Londono when he wouldn't be lured to a country from which he could be extradited to America. This is only the tip of the iceberg of this week's coverage. Go to http://home.earthlink.net/~dbwilson/wnusup02.html, or e-mail [email protected] for more information on the Weekly News Update on the Americas.
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