"From the people who brought you The War on Drugs Follies AND The Death Squads in South and Central America "
"A few minutes later, the five men crouched naked in the center of the hut, their pleading eyes searching for a sympathetic face…From the corner of my eye, I saw a glint of steel…The interrogator lifted the machete and brought the razor edge down across the politician's shoulder blade, opening his back…He let out a long, anguished scream, "Mamacita Linda," he wailed, crying for a mother who could not hear him…The blood sprayed the other men, driving home the certainty of their fate."
Extracts from the book: (page: 191) POWDERBURNS: The Way of the Death Squads Ex DEA Cele Castillo, 3rd Guatemala, Central America
Back in the 1980s, for approximately six years, I was literally in the trenches of the Reagan/Bush so-called war on drugs in Latin America. As a DEA Special Agent, I came face to face with the contradictions of my assignments. At first, I was trying to stamp out what I considered Americans' greatest foreign threat, but then, I realized that we were the bad guys and for the first time in my life, I was ashamed to be an American.
First and foremost, my father made sure that he taught us about Duty, Honor, and Patriotism. My father was a decorated World War II veteran, a survivor of the Philippines' campaign. As an infantry scout with the Americal Division, he had been shot six times in an ambush. He still had copper in his legs where the Army doctors had wired the bone back together. The Japanese killed his brother as they tried to take Alaska. My uncle's bones remain on an icy island somewhere in the Aleutians Islands. I would serve proudly, as they had done. My father instructed me to pay my dues to my country, and as his only son, I did as I was told. I too, became an infantry sergeant with the Fist Cavalry Division in Vietnam.
We were a family of long tradition, tracing our heritage back to the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. I was baptized Celerino Castillo III, after my father, who carried the name for my grandfather. My son, Celerino Castillo, IV will carry the family's name to other generations. As far as I can remember, I had followed my father's footsteps. It started when I was very young; he dressed me in military attire, with the teaching of patriotism. Like him, I competed in sports and most important, I became a Boy Scout, which teaching saved my life in Vietnam. After Vietnam; I became a police officer like he had before me. However, it was Vietnam where I had made my choice of what was to become of my career, the rest of my life.
The Viet Cong did not kill the first man I watched die in Vietnam. Heroin did. He was a well-built private, about my age, with a young wife back home somewhere in the Midwest. He had received a "Dear John" letter that day, just before we went on patrol. "It don't mean nothin'," he muttered, folding the letter and stuffing it into his Alice pack.
Some of the other soldiers had introduced him to heroin to take the edge off combat. After a few weeks, he was shooting up whenever the stress overwhelmed him. That night, he hunkered down in his foxhole and cooked his powder into pure syrup. As he drew the liquid into the syringe, his buddy tried to talk some sense into him. The distraught private looked away and pulled the plunger back further. After the fire fight that night we found out that the hit was too big, and too pure.
He was the first of many I watched fall to the "other" enemy in Vietnam. Some soldiers simply wandered into the jungle and disappeared. If the men who discovered the body decided he had been a good soldier, someone would pump an AK-47 round into the body. The family would be told he died a hero's death, "Killed In Action". It was there, that I promised myself that if I survived Vietnam, I would become a veteran of my second war, "the war on drugs".
After Vietnam, I became a police officer for the city of Edinburg, Texas, for approximately six years. I would work the midnight shift, and at 8:00am, I would attend Pan American University, now the University of Texas at Edinburg. By 1976, I had graduated with a Bachelors of Science degree in Criminal Justice. In 1979, I was hired as a Special Agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration. My first assignment was New York City for approximately four years. My assignment in New York City was to conduct deep undercover operation on organize crime families. We did it, the New York City way, everything I learned at the academy, went out the window.
Because of my expertise in jungle operations, I was assigned to Peru, South America. The jungles were once again calling. I felt best at home in the jungles of the world. The way I analyzed my life, was that I have been on borrowed time since Vietnam, everything else was gravy. So I continued to meet the "beast" head on. Peru was the world's top producer of coca leaves. A thousand-mile long coca belt stretched along the Andean low - lands through the center of the country, where the Peruvian government estimated peasants illegally grew and harvested about 200,000 acres of the tall, innocent-looking coca plants. From these remote, hostile jungles, some of the world's poorest people grew the world's richest crop. They were mining white gold. My mission was to stop the production of coca paste and shut down the cocaine labs. The Colombians drug cartels finished the refining process in scattered clandestine labs, using nearly four kilos of paste to make a kilo of pure, white cocaine hydrochloride for American nostrils.
From the jungles of Tingo Maria in Peru to the Amazon basin, I felt like the Jacques Cousteau in a snow storm in the jungle. I promise myself that I would leave my mark on South American in making a different on the war on drugs. However after spending some time in the Huallaga Valley, I learned to measure my progress in small increments. I was a guppy in a piranha tank.
The Colombians owned Tingo Maria. The national currency, the sol, was nowhere to be found. The town ran on dollars, attracting cash-hungry bankers from Lima who flew in to buy U.S. currency. The Colombians knew they had a DEA agent in their midst. When I passed them on the streets, they greeted me with arrogant smiles. They knew that if my made to much trouble, they could swat me like a mosquito. They also played both sides by shoveling cash into the jaws of prospective enemies. They purchased the loyalty of Tingo Maria's military officers, who declared a truce with the traffickers. The first sign of something gone in disarray in the drug war was when I stumbled on to a soccer field. The Peruvian soldiers were playing their weekly Sunday futbol with the Colombians. Now I had two beasts to face, but where would I start my assault? The factory Cocaine labs! I figure that in the borders of Colombia, Peru, and Brazil was where 100% cocaine was being produced. It was known as the triangle of the snow storm in the jungles.
DEA, CIA, and the Guardia Civil came up with Condor. After prodding, CIA provided us satellite photos of the jungle to help us spot labs. I flew to Leticia, Colombia, the country's only toehold on the Amazon. A contingent of Guardia Civil officers accompanied me, dressed in their best combat gear. We had an appointment with the Colombian National Police to plan the first joint anti-narcotics operation ever attempted by the two countries.
The Colombians and Peruvians called it "Operacion Condor", in honor of the massive vulture Peruvians adopted as a national symbol. DEA dubbed it "Relampago", the Spanish word for Lightning. I had a day of training this special group on the air assault techniques on clandestine runways. We had to do this before the cat was out of the bag of why we were there. Our target was one hour from Leticia, deep in the Peruvian jungle in the area known as Callaru. The airstrip, located near the Rio Tigre, was the hub for the area, where the jungle hid an estimated 110 airstrips and an untold number of clandestine labs.
On August 13, 1985, two Bell helicopters filled with adrenaline-pumped Colombian and Peruvian police lifted for the target airstrip. The trip brought me back to Vietnam. We flew at treetop level, the skids almost brushing the green carpet. Hundreds macaws, disturbed by the thumping rotors, erupted from the trees and flew below us in a red, blue, and green clouds. We arrived to a hot LZ (landing zone). We were receiving gun fire and we landed at the end of the run way. We captured a wounded Colombia and the interrogation was initiated in the "Inca style".
The end result was the seizure of a half a Billion dollars cocaine lab. It was the biggest cocaine lab capture in South American history. After several weeks out on the operations, I wandered into the Lima office and I picked up a local newspaper left on my desk and almost choked on my coffee. My photo, napped by a Reuter's photographer with a telephoto lens, took up a quarter of the page. Luckily, I was wearing a large pair of Porsche sunglasses, but the DEA insignia on my Vietnam camouflage shirt was unmistakable. The headlines screaming "Contra narcotraffico." I had certainly believed that by putting my life on the line, once again, I had preserved my country. I had kept my promise. Because of security reason, I was asked to depart South America. My next assignment was in Central America at the height of the CONTRA wars. The CONTRAS were part of the civil war that fought against the Sandinista government in Nicaraqua. It was illegal for any entity of the U.S. government to overthrow the government in Nicaragua, yet we had this illegal covert operation being conducted, with "carte blanche" from the White House.
My orders in Central America were to train the Narco-Terrorist Units. These units were identified as Latin America's Military's Counter-Intelligences, notoriously known as "La Dos" (G-2) and "La Mano Blanca". The death squads mandate was to literally initiate a campaign against any individual or group of people that protested their government. Whether it was the church or students at their university. We need to keep in mind, that the militaries have always control their governments, whether in claimed a democracy or not.
My government assured me that these units were to be a major part of America's drug wars. As I found out, these units unleashed a sadistic "scorched earth" campaign modeled in large part on lessons that its advisors had drawn from the war in Vietnam. Basing itself upon the murderous theory that the only way to combat guerrilla resistance was to "empty the sea" in which the guerrillas swam, the army set about to commit genocide upon the indigenous population, who chose a struggle against oppression.
Despite the ongoing reign of terror against the peasants, the dollars kept coming. A republic the size of Massachusetts absorbed $1.5 million a day in U.S. aid - more than $100 for every man, woman and child - yet the military government still could not exterminate the guerilla networks.
In an attempt to communicate the structure of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, I need to touch on the history of these units that scorched the earth. History has revealed them as some of the worst human rights violators in the Western Hemisphere; more significantly, history will also reveal that U.S. government agencies were complicit in drug trafficking, assassinations, gun trafficking, and the birth of the "escuadrones de la muerte," death squads.
In third world countries the United States government has supported dictatorships like Gen. Augusto PINOCHET in Chile and Ngo Dinh DIEM in Vietnam. In Central America we used the death squads in part of U. S. interest. U.S. companies like Del Monte, and Libby took land by force in Latin America and used it for their profits. This was done with the assistance on the death squads.
In September 1987, an airstrip in the U.S. company's properties (Hopi, Guatemala) was used by international drug trafficking organizations. These drug cartels had paid off the administrators of the banana farms. We conducted surveillance on the clandestine cocaine laden aircrafts that landed at the farms. The rail road cards, mostly used for transportation of banana shipment to the port of Puerto Barrios, was used to transport over 2,000 kilos (seized) of cocaine from Hopi to Puerto Barrios. CIA agent Randy CAPSITER once told me that in these third world countries, "the U.S. had bought and paid for the countries". We chose the presidents, scheduling elections when the previous puppet wore out their welcome. Most of the time the ruling elite and the military have a chokehold on the republic that no mere politician could pry loose.
The Unites States also had always supported Gen. Manuel Antonio NORIEGA, Panama's dictator. But when he refuses to train the CONTRAS in Nicaragua, the U.S. government had him arrested and extradited to the U.S. These are just a few reasons how our government built these third world counties, so called democracies.
In El Salvador, from 1961-1979, the death squads were initiated within a new vigilante organization called Democratic National Organization ("La Orden", which means "to keep order"). This became known as "La Mano Blanca," literally translated "a hand with a white glove that cleanses the country." The CIA, the Department of Defense, the State Department, and the DEA violated U.S. laws. One law in particular, the third of five Boland Amendments prohibiting U.S. assistance to the CONTRA rebels had been in effect for a year at that point and in April, 1985, the House of Representatives had rejected $14 million in non-military aid to the Contras, despite President Reagan's energetic lobbying for his favorite Rebels. The other law was a violation of the Neutrality Act, a joint resolution providing for the prohibition of the export of arms, ammunition, and implements of war to belligerent countries; the prohibition of the transportation of arms, ammunition, and implements of war by the United States for the use of belligerent states.
The Republic of Nicaragua v. The United States of America was a case heard in 1986 by the International Court of Justice which ruled in favor of Nicaragua and against the United States. As part of its judgment, the International Court of Justice awarded reparations to Nicaragua. The International Court of Justice found that the U.S. had violated international law by supporting Contra guerrillas in their war against the Nicaraguan government and by mining Nicaragua's harbors. The Court ruled in Nicaragua's favor after the States lost the argument that the ICJ lacked jurisdiction to hear the case.
The President's Intelligence Oversight Board (1980s IOB) found that even after the end of the Cold War, the CIA in Central America continued to see the War on Communism as their top priority. The report reveals that station officers continued to view communist insurgents who seemed to threaten a more democratic government as the primary enemy, and they viewed government and security services as partners in the fight against the common foe and against new threats such as narcotics trafficking. In my opinion, the communist in our "back yard" was a myth, a pretext to gather support from the American people to fight bogus wars. As we know today, most of Latin America has gone "left," as they say, because the United States government has never implemented a true democracy in Latin America. Recently, the FLMN won the presidential elections in El Salvador.
As I traveled through Central America for five years, I kind of figure out that the only way that I was going to do my job, was to step on toes of the White House. There were already several serious violations that our government had been implicating in from drug trafficking, arms trafficking, or human rights violations. Upon my arrival in Central America I was forewarned by my boss Bob STIA that what was happening in Central America were covert operations that had been green lighted by the White House.
At first, when I was exposed to these atrocities, I felt that an explanation would be coming soon, as how the end justified the means. And when that didn't happened, I was in a state of denial. I could not understand why one arm of our government were putting their lives on the line, while the other, was sleeping with the evil doers. I was so confused because we had just lost (murdered) DEA agent Kike Camarena in Mexico, and yet here we were dancing with the enemy. STIA had also warned me that if I continue to report these atrocities that I would be send back to the states, as a persona non grata. This was not what I had joined up for; I was looking for a job when I had found this one. But I also had to be realistic, that because of my continuing actions, no other government agency would hire me. I also knew that my days were numbered, so I decided not to wait for the beast, but to chase it.
Surprisingly, I received another warning from my ex-wife. She warned me, "your country is not going to stand by you, for embarrassing them." I smiled with an expression of concerns. I have never run from anything in my life, and so I did what my father had always taught me to do, do the right thing. I continued to keep journals and take lots of pictures of the good, the bad, and the ugly. I had a feeling that one day, I would use these materials and here I am writing this story.
It did not surprise me that most of my life, I was always the first to get to an accident as a police officer, the first to go through the door on a drug raid, or the first out of an assault helicopter into a cocaine lab. I was realizing, I was still looking for the bullet with my name that I had evaded in Vietnam. The beast had become the hunted. Here I was wearing several hats as a special agent of my government; I was training the death squads, running covert operation for my government, conducting undercover assignments against corrupt governments and drug cartels. When the military of a third world government wanted to dispose of a General or Colonel, I was used to entrap him into whatever they wanted. I kept asking myself, is this my government, which 58,000 Vietnam veterans gave their lives for?
CIA agent Randy CAPISTER, who worked with me for approximately five years in Latin America, once said to me that Central America was a suitable place for CIA operatives to prove themselves. From the very beginning he attempted to get close to me, to spy on me. As I later learned, he had my telephones tap because I had one of the best intelligence networks in Latin America. I could be trusted by my sources. He also warned me that I could write all the reports I wanted, that history would show that this was business as usual in Latin America AND that no one was going to stop the CIA of doing what they did best. He even put a little smile on his statement. In 1994, we were both subpoena to testify before a federal grand jury in Washington D.C., as to our knowledge of what occurred in Central America during the 1980s. Not surprisingly, our testimony was sealed for National Security purposes.
U.S. Army Col. James STEELE, (MILGROUP COMMANDER) had been in El Salvador for a couple of years, before I arrived in Central America. As documented, he was the primary advisor to the death squads in that country. He was also in charged with smuggling weapons to the CONTRA operation in Nicaragua. He took it upon himself to lie, in protecting higher ups, about his involvement to the Senate Intelligence Committee. This was well documented in the Final Report of the Iran/Contra Special Prosecutor Report. Col. STEELE was a soldier's soldier. Every time I met with him, he wore his Vietnam jungle fatigues, heavily starched and spit-shined boots.
Col. James STEELE surprisingly indicated to me when I first met him, that El Salvador was the training grounds for the U.S. military to see if our special units had what it took to be a soldier's soldier. In the early 1980's, a U.S. Army Ranger unit was deployed covertly into El Salvador on a "search and destroy" mission. This was an illegal act by the U.S. government to send U.S. troops into a combat zone in a foreign country, without the approval of Congress and Senate. This was not the first time that the U.S. military invaded a third world country in conducting covert operations. The civil wars were an excellent place to run operations without any check and balances. The Ranger unit was ambushed by the guerrillas (Gs) and took heavy losses. Soon after, the body bags of the casualties were placed into a U. S. military cargo plane (C-130) and transported to a U.S. military base in Georgia, where a helicopter accident was staged to justify their deaths. Several years back family members of the Ranger units went to the media in an attempted to ascertain what really happened to their love ones. They were not satisfied with the government's version of what had occurred. This incident was reported in the media in one of the Rangers' family out of Seattle, Washington. At one time I had a newspaper clipping of the story, but misplaced it in thousand of newspaper clippings that I had gather over the years. However, this information was revealed to me by U.S. Lt. Col. Albert Adame, who worked under Col. James STEELE in El Salvador.
In one particular case I came to Col. STEELE because an American Walter Grashien was hanging around hangers 4 & 5 at Ilopango, El Salvador. He immediately denied that he had anything to do with him. I gave him some intelligence that this individual was documented in FBI files and DEA files as a bad guy. He said that GRASHIEN might be a CIA asset. At the end of the day, no one would claim him. When I raided his house in El Salvador, he had weapons, radios, and vehicles belonging to Col. James STEELE. It was revealed that he was part of a covert operation at Ilopango who supported the CONTRAS.
The co-founder of El Salvador's death squads was a former major with the Salvadoran Military. His followers addressed him as "Mi Mayor" Roberto D'AUBUISSON. He conducted selective assassinations of community leaders, labor organizers, human rights workers, rural activists and others. These assassinations replaced wholesale massacres. He was also instrumental in planning and carrying out the assassination of Archbishop Romero. Roberto D'AUBUISSON was a graduate of the notorious the School of the Americas (SOA), now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC), which has an extensively documented history of training some of the hemisphere's worst human rights abusers. It acquired its nickname the "School of Assassins" for obvious reasons. D'AUBUISSON was also on the payroll of the CIA, like most Salvadoran Military Command. While I was in El Salvador, the DEA received information that the El Mayor was involved in drug trafficking utilizing his shrimp company. He requested a meeting with me to explain that the drug trafficking had been approved by the U.S. government. He wanted to assure me that he was going to deny the DEA allegation, but on the other hand, he wanted to let me know, that he had a green light by the CIA, and that there was nothing I could do about it. This was just another way of supplementing his income for covert operations.
A U. S. advisor, Lt. Col. Alberto Adame, a fellow Texan, recommended one of his friends as a firearms instructor for the newly formed DEA drug task force in El Salvador. When he introduced the short, middle-aged man, the name clicked in my head immediately. Dr. Hector Antonio REGALADO was a household name in the country's power corridors. I was shaking hands with "Dr. Death," as he was known in U.S. political circles, the man reputed to be the Salvadoran death squads' most feared interrogator. On the surface, REGALADO was a friendly, genteel man. Underneath his gentle demeanor, though, he was the type who would shoot a man between the eyes, then spit on him to make sure the point got across.
In El Salvador, he was known simply as "El Doctor." REGALADO'S prestige among the right wing stemmed from his ability to extract teeth - and information - without anesthesia. He was also the right hand man of "Mi Mayor". I wanted no part of "El Doctor". I asked the Colonel if the embassy had approved REGALDO as an advisor. He said Col. James STEELE had given REGALDO his blessing. Because the task force funding was by way of the CIA, I had to use him as the firearms instructor. At first, I contacted Jack MACAVET, CIA chief of station in El Salvador. As I closed the door to his office, I saw him open the top drawer of his desk and pulled a bundle of money, $45,000.00. Before, I could ask any question he said, "Go buy yourselves some cars." I signed a receipt and gave it to him. At the end, I took my concern to my boss Bob STIA, who shrunk his shoulders and said, in broken Spanish, "Que sera, sera!" He was not about to make any waves in Washington. It was a fact; REGALADO had been green lighted before he had come to me.
REGALADO turned out to be one hell of a shooter. In a demonstration to the young cadets, he pulled his .45 from its waxed holster, removed the clip, and smiled at the eager faces around him. Without saying a word, he ran straight at the wall, his eyes fixed on an imaginary assailant to his left. The click-click-click of the empty .45 echoed in the room as REGALADO ran up the wall and snapped into perfect back flip, landing on his feet. The recruits looked at each other, grinning. El doctor knew how to get his point across. He was amazing.
After a couple of years working with him, he realized that he could trust me. After the attempts on his life became frequent, because for the first time, the guerillas were fighting back. He called me one day and asked me to meet me at his office. The fact that he could trust me was no indication that I trust him. I had learned later in life that I trusted no one, not even myself at times. I decided to bring along with me a DEA source (Ramiro Guerra) who had worked with me for a while. We picked the doctor up and drove around El Salvador for the whole day. He literally showed us, "where the bodies were buried". This were not quite the "killing fields" of Cambodia, but were of los desaparcidos (the disappeared). Most of the time, the death squads' victims were never found. Unless they wanted them to make their point and dropped you in front of the victim's homes, as an example of what was to come to those who opposed oppression. Some of the burials later turned out to be mass graves. I took notes and drew sketches of the burial sites as we drove. I found Dr. Death to be a very intelligent individual who was able to remember dates and names of some of the victims. Since this intelligence information was more of a CIA issue, so I thought. It never really crossed my mind that maybe the CIA participated in these atrocities. I delivered the intelligence to Janis Elmore, CIA political officer at the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador. Well, needless to say, she turned out to be a CIA agent, whose cover was to be a political officer. The CIA had their whole operations pretty well covered at the U.S. embassy, incase information like mine was ever revealed to U.S. personnel.
In 1989, I was in San Salvador when members of the death squads killed six Jesuit priests. A Salvadoran Military Major had been assigned to the task force to give and gather intelligence. He came to me and asked to meet him at a local hotel. He stated that he had received intelligence on some rebels that were gathering at some church grounds. I asked him why he was coming to me, when this had nothing to do with drug trafficking. He stated that members of the Milgroup would be assigned to this operation. Of course, by this time I knew something was not right and my instinct turned out to be right. I became involved in the initial planning of the operation as too who from the task force would take part in this operation. However, I advised him that I would need to get approval from my supervisor. I did not need approval but that was the excuse I had to give him. At the end, I pulled the group out of it and sure enough, it was a massacred. As I found out later, the plot was to blame the guerillas for the murders backfired because a U.S. advisor on the operation blew the whistle after returning to the states a couple of days later. What the Major was attempting to do was to get as far away from the Salvadoran military so that others would take the fall for the massacred, but at the end, he had to use his own people and did what they did best, kill innocent people. The Salvadoran officers involved in the killings were, without surprise, graduates of the School of the America. The United States government had a sure thing with the factor of producing these American made home grown terrorist. Between 1989 and1990, while I was in El Salvador, Joya MARTINEZ testified about the role played by U.S. officials in death squad killings carried out by the U.S. trained first infantry Brigade's intelligence unit. His unit performed 74 executions between April and July 1989. He said his first brigade unit was attached to a U.S. trained ATLACATL battalion, which slaughtered the Jesuit priests.
In 1987, Times Magazine reported that Central American death squads were operating in the Los Angeles, CA area. The death squads had taken their assassinations into the U.S. The death squads were now gunning for Salvadorans who were speaking against the Salvadoran Military in the United States of America. These death squads members were attending protest rallies in Los Angeles and taking pictures of their targets. There were several cases where there were actual civil suits filed against members of the Salvadoran Military Generals. At the request of the CIA agent Randy CAPISTER, I was able to obtain from one of my sources in the Guatemalan government some "blank" Guatemala passports. According to CAPISTER these passports were going to be used by assets of the CIA to travel abroad. CAPISTER later stated that passports were use by the death squads to enter the U.S.
In Guatemala, the former Vice-President of Guatemala, Mario SANDOVAL-ALARCON, became the grandfather of the death squads. For several years, SANDOVAL was the driving force behind the Guatemalan government and became the legitimized of his paramilitary operations. Ronald REAGAN once praised SANDOVAL for declaring war against communists in Latin America at any cost. SANDOVAL once boasted to the media that he had a private army of three thousand and the ability to put thousands more paramilitary troops into action on short notice. For his efforts, President REAGAN invited SANDOVAL to attend his inaugural ceremonies. This information is well documented in the REAGAN archives.
Guatemala Military Gen. Francisco "Paco" ORTEGA- MENALDO ran the death squads for SANDOVAL. Former G-2 agents described ORTEGA'S program of surveillance backed by a web of torture centers and clandestine body dumps. On several occasions, I traveled with G-2 to a Guatemalan base in Huehuetenango, where they maintained their own crematorium and "processed" abductees by chopping off limbs, singeing flesh and administering electric shocks. When I was stationed in Guatemala, the DEA was instructed to work with Gen. ORTEGA. Even though the General was on the CIA payroll, DEA agent Larry HOLIFIELD paid the General $10,000.00 of trafficker's funds. The U.S. government had also assigned other individuals to train these units. The CIA assigned CIA agent Randy CAPISTER and CIA asset, Victor RIVERA, a Venezuelan, to work hand in hand with the Guatemalan G-2. CIA agent Randy CAPISTER supported financial assistance and logistics. CAPISTER was known to develop bombs out of letters and books. Most of these explosives ended up in the hands of individuals who opposed the Guatemalan government. The recipients were mostly professors, politicians, activists, and students. These two individuals would travel with me all over Central America in Delta Force, American's Special Forces unit on Counter-Intelligence.
I was also instrumental in the training of Guatemala's notorious Special Forces counterinsurgency Unit, LOS KAIBILES. The unit is known for its grueling jungle-survival training. The unit was given birth in the 1970s and named after an insurgent Mayan prince, Kaibil Balam. The KAIBILES unit became notorious in the early 1980s, where tens of thousands of indigenous people were slaughtered as the unit swept across rural Guatemala, systematically destroying villages. There was a civil war in Guatemala and the military was always targeting the oppressed. Most of the guerilla movement was made of indigenous people.
In the late 1980s, the head of this unit was Guatemala Col. Julio Roberto ALPIREZ, also another graduate of the School of the Americas and on the CIA payroll. Col. ALPIREZ was later implicated in the murders of a Guatemalan guerrilla leader Efrain Bamaca Velasquez and in the murder of a U.S. citizen Michael Devine who resided in Guatemala.
In 2005, American newspapers and Mexico's Attorney General confirmed that the KAIBILES had been hired by a Mexican drug trafficking organization for their counterinsurgency operations. The reports identified that 30 KAIBILES had found employment with the ZETAS, a group of ex-elite Mexican soldiers.
Even though the education you have just received is appropriate to understand the failed U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. I offer as further evidence the following DEA cases, just some of the injustices committed by U.S. agents. Though these atrocities were covered up, I will furnish pictures of the murder victims as evidence of what DEA commits in Latin America.
In 1987 CIA agent Randy CAPSITER and I, conducted one of many operations that we worked together on. During these operations, we knew before hand that individuals (some Americans) were going to be murdered. On September 25, G2 picked up a conversation on their illegal wiretap of a Guatemalan Congressman, Carlos Ramiro Garcia de Paz's phone. The Colombians planned to fly to Puerto Barrios, a port on the Guatemala's eastern coast, to drop off a large cocaine shipment. The mother vessel Daring cruised into the quiet waters of Puerto Barrios. The next morning the G-2, Capister and I detained the Colombians and Mexicans. In the Guatemala DEA case file, TG-86-0005, the CIA assets raped, tortured, and murdered several of the Colombians and Mexicans. These atrocities were green-lighted by the CIA agent Randy CAPISTER. The victims were identified as Jose Ramon Parra-Iniguez, Mexican passport A-GUC-043, and his two daughters Maria Leticia Olivier-Dominguez, Mexican passport A-GM8381. The other passport with the other girl's name has been misplaced. Also, included among the dead were several Colombian nationals: Adolfo Leon Morales-Arcilia "a.k.a." Adolfo Morales-Orestes, Carlos Alberto Ramírez, and Jiro Gilardo-Ocampo. CIA agent CAPISTER witnessed the torture and murder of these individuals and recorded the events on a camcorder. These individuals were taken to the end of a run way where they were placed in cargo container. CAPISTER was videotaped their interrogation. I decided to leave because I knew what was coming to them. Several Americans were arrested in the mother vessel but were not killed. We ended up seizing approximately 2,200 kilos of cocaine. In 1989, these murders were investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility, DEA Senior Inspector Tony RECEVUTO, who determined that the Guatemalan Military was responsible for these murders. This was always a way to protect the U.S. agents by blaming the atrocities on other groups in Latin America.
In another DEA case, on Dec. 03, 1988, several DEA agents, Larry HOLIFIELD, Tuffy VON BRISIAN and I, seized 356 kilos of cocaine in Tiquisate, Guatemala (DEA case file number TG-89-0002); file name Hector SANCHEZ. The DEA agent Larry HOLIFIELD green lighted the torture and murder of several Columbians that were apprehended by the G-2.
In a well publicized story, Sister Dianna Ortiz, an American nun who was working with poor indigenous children, was kidnapped, gang-raped and tortured by a unit of the Guatemalan G-2. An American, who she believes was linked to the U.S. Embassy, initiated her torture. This American was later identified as CIA agent Randy CAPISTER. Diana Ortiz also identified a Guatemala G-2 Capt. Guillermo FUENTES-ARAGON, as one of her assailants. On November 1989, Capt. FUENTES attended a DEA International Narcotics Enforcement Management Seminar in a school in the United States for drug enforcement. Capt. FUENTES was involved in the two DEA cases mentioned above.
The goal of every investigation in the DEA was to get the drug trafficker out of Central America and into a U.S. court for trial. Unfortunately, we too often turned our handcuffed prizes over to a Byzantine system. Central American justice had a way of misplacing well-connected narcotics violators or releasing them for lack of evidence. The locals saw the drug trade as a huge cash pipeline that could be tapped into almost at will, and it was standard practice in many countries to hold drug cartel operatives and their cargo of drugs for ransom.
Counterintelligence experts in Belize maintained an illegal wiretap on Johnny ZABANEH, a DEA fugitive and banana baron living in Orange Walk, Belize. ZABANEH was a heavy weight Lebanese and the biggest marijuana trafficker in Belize. The U.S. government wanted him for conspiracy to import and distribute marijuana. Belize DEA agent Russ REINA had been trying to bust him for a year. Without an extradition treaty, we had to wait for him to leave Belize and go into another Central America country. Finally, in November 1985, the Belizean eavesdroppers heard ZABANEH planning a trip to Guatemala to purchase some sort of equipment. As ZABANEH arrived at Aurora Airport in Guatemala City, REINA had the Guatemalan police detain him at the airport; he ordered them to kick him out of the Guatemala back to Belize. In Guatemala, the government could force an undesirable citizen back to his own country. And, with ZABANEH, it was not different, except that the next flight to Belize was via Houston, Texas. I was instructed to travel with him on the flight. As we were on final approach into Houston, I placed Johnny ZABANEH under arrest for the outstanding warrant. Soon after that, the DEA in Guatemala was best known as the "Body Snatchers of Latin America."
Our government continues with these travesties all over the world. History will show that from Southeast Asia, to Latin America, and now to the Middle East the United States of America continues to bury its bayonets in all corners of the world.
Under REAGAN, John NEGROPONTE was the U.S. ambassador to Honduras in the early 1980s, where he played a major role in U.S. efforts to topple the Nicaraguan government. The political history of John NEGROPONTE shows a man who has had a career bent toward generating civilian death and widespread human rights abuses and promoting sectarian and ethnic violence. In Honduras, he earned the distinction of being accused of widespread human rights violations by the Honduras Commission on Human Rights. He worked as a tough cold warrior that enthusiastically carried out President Ronald REAGAN'S strategy." NEROPONTE received lots of advice from School of the Americas graduate Colonel Gustavo ALVAREZ in establishment of Honduran's military's infamous death squad Battalion 316, patterned after Argentine death squads to eliminate "subversives." In August 2001, an excavation at a U.S. military base in Honduras best known as El Aguacate revealed 185 corpses, including two American missionaries. In May 1982, a nun, Sister Laetitia Bordes, went on a fact-finding delegation to Honduras to investigate the whereabouts of thirty Salvadoran nuns who fled to Honduras in 1981. The death squads savagely tortured her. While in Honduras in 1985, I also helped train Battalion 316 with the help of Col. ALVAREZ. Several operations were conducted in San Pedro Azul on drug traffickers who were also murdered by these death squads. In the capital of Honduras, I initiated several cases on members of Juan Ballesteros' drug cartels.
President Bush later rewarded NEGROPONTE by promoting him to be the first National Director of Intelligence. He later became Deputy Secretary of State under the Bush administration.
Under the "Salvador Option," Col. STEELE did such an effective job in the training of the death squads that his blueprints were implemented on to the Iraq War. In Iraq, Col. STEELE became an advisor to the U.S. ambassador, John NEGROPONTE. NEGROPONTE was U.S. ambassador in Honduras when Col. Steele was posted in El Salvador. Col. STEELE'S title in Baghdad was Counselor for Iraqi Security Forces. He supervised the selection and training of members of the Badr Organization and Hehdi Army, the two largest Shia militias in Iraq. Ironically, another American agent became Col. STEELE'S right hand man in Iraq. The senior U.S. advisor in the Ministry of Interior was no other then Steve CASTEEL, who job was the operational control over the commandos. Agent CASTEEL was a former top official in the DEA who spent much of his professional life immersed in the drug wars of Latin America. It is no secret that veterans of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam transferred their skills and attention to Latin America. The Phoenix Program was initiated by CIA agent William COLBY, a career professional on covert operation at its highest order. He came to command of the CIA's station in Saigon in the 1960s. He ran all U.S. "intelligence" operations in the Vietnam War theater, including Operation Phoenix, A Stalin-like program that fingered and assassinated an estimated forty thousand South Vietnamese civilians. Except for the inevitable cases of wrong identification, the assassination victims were local revolutionary leaders. These skills of assassinations and torture continued to be taught at the School of the Americas as late as the 1990s.
The phrase "business as usual" describes how our foreign policy works in Latin America. There is no "check and balances" system with any of the U.S. government's agencies. What makes this worse is the massive cover-up that our government conducts when atrocities are exposed. Blowback has come back to haunt the United States by way of 9-11 and the tortures in Iraq. Blowback is a term used in espionage to describe the unintended consequences of covert operations. Blowback typically appears random and without cause, because the public is unaware of the secret operations that provoked it. In its strictest terms, blowback was originally informative only and referred to consequences that resulted when an intelligence agency participated in foreign media manipulation, which was then reported by domestic news sources in other countries as accepted facts. In looser terms, it can encompass all operational aspects. In this context, it can thus mean retaliation as the result of actions undertaken by nations.
The phrase is believed to have been coined by the CIA, in reference to the harmful effects to friendly forces by the enemy. These operations would later lead to confrontation with the United States. In the 1980s, blowback became a central focus of the debate over the, REAGAN Doctrine which advocated militarily supporting resistance movements opposing Soviet-supported, communist governments. In one case, covert funding of the CONTRAS in Nicaragua would lead to the Iran-Contra Affair. While covert support led to a World Court ruling against the United States in Nicaragua v. United States. Critics of the REAGAN Doctrine argued that blowback was unavoidable, and that, through the doctrine, the United States was inflaming wars in the Third World. Doctrine advocates, principally at the conservative Heritage Foundation, responded that support for anti-communist resistance movements would lead to a "correlation of forces," which would topple communist regimes without significant retaliatory consequence to the United States, while simultaneously altering the global balance of power in the Cold War.
We must always keep in mind that our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole world by its example. Crime is contagious. If our government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in this administration of the criminal law, the end justifies the means has brought terrible retribution to this country.
Celerino "Cele" Castillo, 3rd Former DEA agent Vietnam Veteran Author of Powderburns: Cocaine, Contras & The Drug War
Celerino "Cele" Castillo, 3rd 2709 North 28 1/2 Street McAllen, TX. 78501 956-345-5770 powderburns.info |