In the Wake of Last Year’s “Soft Coup” against Paraguay’s President, Will a New Narco-Dictatorship E
In the Wake of Last Year’s “Soft Coup” against Paraguay’s President, Will a New Narco-Dictatorship Emerge?
by Tom Burghardt / April 28th, 2013
Paraguay’s April 21 election of Horacio Cartes, a dodgy “tobacco magnate,” rancher and banker, whose Banco Amambay has been accused of laundering drug money, tax evasion and other crimes, raises the specter of “state capture” by powerful drug cartels linked to US intelligence agencies.
In the context of US efforts to manage not eliminate, the multibillion dollar global trade in illegal narcotics, Cartes electoral victory might very well be a shot in the arm for certain three-lettered US intelligence agencies, eager beavers always on the lookout for new allies–and an endless supply of black funds–to carry out hemisphere-wide dirty ops against leftist governments. The current US destabilization campaign targeting Venezuela’s newly elected president, Nicolás Maduro and the Bolivarian revolution, is instructive in this regard.
A key factor driving US regional operations is control over the narcotics market. As researchers Oliver Villar and Drew Cottle revealed in Cocaine, Death Squads and the war on Terror: “Paraguay was the first country in Latin America to be publicly exposed for its involvement in the drug trade. Paraguay in the early 1970s was a vital center for the Corsican mafia, leading to the development of a vast heroin-trafficking network supplied from Turkey, and based in Marseille, the infamous ‘French Connection.’ Corsicans coordinated the transport of heroin from Marseille to the United States via Paraguay. The CIA,” Villar and Cottle averred, “used such networks as transit stops in transporting Asian heroin to the United States with the help of corrupt high-ranking government and military officials.”
“Later,” journalist Vicky Pelaez disclosed in The Moscow News, “cocaine trafficking was added. It was transported through Chaco’s wild and rough terrain. Chaco is a vast, semi-arid and semi-humid region in western Paraguay, where there are at least 900 covert airplane runways and where between 60 and 70 tons of cocaine circulate annually, according to former Interior Minister Carlos Filizzola.”
“Curiously,” Pelaez averred, “there are two US bases in that region. One is located in the city of Pedro Juan Caballero, in the Amambay province, and is operated by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). The other, run by the Pentagon, is part of the Mariscal Estigarribia airport, in the Boquerón province, and boasts a 3,800-meter long runway.”
More:
http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/04/in-the-wake-of-last-years-soft-coup-against-paraguays-president-will-a-new-narco-dictatorship-emerge/
