Celerino Castillo
DEA'S FINEST DETAILS CORRUPTION By John Veit
[2004] Interview of Kevin Booth and Cele Castillo
Book
[1994] Powderburns: Cocaine, Contras and
the Drug War by Celerino Castillo & Dave Harmon
Quotes
"The connections piled up quickly. Contra planes flew north to the U.S., loaded
with cocaine, then returned laden with cash. All under the protective umbrella
of the United States Government. My informants were perfectly placed: one worked
with the Contra pilots at their base, while another moved easily among the
Salvadoran military officials who protected the resupply operation. They fed me
the names of Contra pilots. Again and again, those names showed up in the DEA
database as documented drug traffickers.
"When I pursued the case, my superiors quietly and firmly advised me to move on
to other investigations."
Powder Burns, 1994
With every day spent on the streets, Castillo's hatred for
drugs grew with increasing vehemence. Castillo witnessed addicts of every ilk,
sometimes as young as fourteen, constantly throwing their lives into the toilet
so drug dealers could get rich. It would be a hard slap of reality to later
discover that the United States government was instrumental in saturating
American streets with life destroying drugs.
Working the jungles, although
frustrating for Castillo, was a welcome change from Manhattan's steel maze and
reminiscent of Vietnam. Stymied by the DEA's advisory status in foreign
countries, however, Castillo was unable to probe too deeply into Peru's narco
underworld. The Peruvian military thought their American advisor would be
satisfied torching small labs and shooting down traffickers' planes. Castillo
demanded to bust the big labs, the factories run by the cartels. Peru's military
however, conveniently kept the larger fields and refineries off-limits to
American investigation. The military claimed that the Shining Path (Sendero
Luminoso, the Maoist guerrillas whose reign of terror included cocaine smuggling
and numerous murders of government officials and civilians) controlled the areas
of major cocaine production.
The last thing Peru's government
wanted was to have an American agent killed by Sendero, which would jeopardize
future military aid. Castillo later learned their caution was merely a
smokescreen used to protect Columbian cartel-controlled airstrips and refineries
from American intervention. The military, like most Peruvian governmental
agencies, was largely dominated by Colombia's cartels who were adept at greasing
palms and instilling fear in the hearts of potential drug enforcement heroes.
DEA'S FINEST DETAILS CORRUPTION By
John Veit
Trained at the US' School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, Georgia, Regalado
often bragged of his trigger-man role in the assassination of Archbishop Oscar
Romero, a globally beloved human rights activist, in March 1980. Regalado was
also a torture expert, frequently using his skills as a dentist to extract
information from notable "subversives." Much to Castillo's disgust, the death
squads' most notorious human butchers and drug dealers became his students and
colleagues. While Castillo's classes dealt primarily with surveillance, raid
tactics and firearms training, others detailed explicit torture methods. Deemed
"interview techniques," students were instructed how to use cattle prods and
hoses and to submerge suspects' faces in buckets of water until nearly causing
drowning.
Death squad drug busts made the
Mexican federales seem tame by comparison. Standard procedure involved Castillo
doing the intelligence gathering for a bust, after which the military would
swarm in, interrogating and torturing the traffickers to death before absconding
with a portion of the drugs.
One such bust happened on September
25, 1987, when Castillo's unit busted a cocaine ring run by Guatemalan
Congressman Carlos Ramiro de Paz. 3000 kilos of cocaine, the largest bust in
Central American history, were found. By the time the coke got to headquarters,
however, six hundred kilos were missing. A soldier laughingly admitted to
Castillo that the G2 (Guatemala's elite military unit) had pilfered it.
DEA'S FINEST DETAILS CORRUPTION By
John Veit
The Iran-Contra scandal blared across American television and newspapers, but
drug activity was rarely mentioned. The American public accepted the Reagan
Administration's version of Iran-Contra, which maintained that weapons were
covertly sold to Iran in order to generate funds for Contra mercenary soldiers
seeking to overthrow the Nicaraguan Sandanista government. The money used by US
Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and his entourage from weapons
sales to Iran to fund the Contras was a "drop in the bucket," according to
Castillo. He told the SHADOW, "To the best of my knowledge, most of the money to
fund the contras came through narcotics trafficking."
Tim Ross, a twenty-one year veteran
broadcaster for the BBC in Colombia, connected what he called "Ollie North's
mob" to drug dealing in that country as well. Ross told the SHADOW that "In late
'84, early '85, North brought five Afghani military advisers to Colombia on a
speaking tour, three left, two stayed. The two that stayed were chemists who
introduced heroin manufacturing to Colombia. He also brought in an Israeli
agronomist who helped to cultivate opium poppies."
Ross said that when he started
investigating too deeply for North's comfort, however, he was summoned to the US
Embassy in Bogota and told, "You're going to lay off this story or you are going
to die" by an "ex-marine, the type of guy who used to cut Vietcong throats with
his thumbnail." Ross ran the story anyway, detailing Colombia's growing heroin
epidemic, but North told his superiors that the story was nothing more than
"fabrications, including trumped-up fake Mexican file footage."
DEA'S FINEST DETAILS CORRUPTION By
John Veit