🚨🇺🇸 US hypocrisy: How CIA funded its ‘drug war’ with cartel cash

In the 1980s, America declared a war on drugs — the budgets were ballooned and prisons swelled. Yet while cracking down at home, the CIA was still striking deals with traffickers abroad when it suited its interests.

💉 Drugs bankrolled the cause

President Ronald Reagan’s administration escalated a covert war in Central America against Nicaragua’s Sandinista National Liberation Front government, favouring the Contra fighters.

When the Congress cut off funding for further Contra operations, the CIA found another way.

Aircraft carrying weapons to the Contras returned to the US loaded with cocaine. Drug profits were funnelled directly to Contra commanders.

💭 "I was told who the CIA agent was and why he was there — to make sure the money was given to the right people," Carlos Cabezas, a former pilot who ran cocaine from Central America to San Francisco, told investigators.

☕️ Cocaine spilled onto LA

This operation resulted in the cheap cocaine flooding Los Angeles. The crack epidemic that devastated Black communities in the 1980s was not a random crime wave, but a direct consequence of US foreign policy.

The US State Department kept paying traffickers who had already been indicted. Even CIA inspector general Frederick Hitz later admitted the Agency did not cut ties with drug dealers supporting the Contras. His confession, however, made almost no news.

🧠 CIA + Medellin cartel = Allies

The Medellin cocaine cartel donated approximately $10 million to the Contras, according to testimony from convicted drug smuggler Carlos Lehder. The money was intended to support the "anti-communist movement" in Nicaragua, Lehder told a US court.

While the Reagan administration viewed the Sandinistas as a threat equal to the Soviet Union, the CIA saw the cartel as just another tool to fund the war.

The Medellin cartel's money would flow to the Contras, and in return, Washington would not carry out lethal operations on the kingpins of the cartel. The war on communism trumped the war on drugs.

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