The CIA’s Deadly Drug-Running Operation

In an article I wrote last August entitled “The Torture and Execution of Kiki Camarena,” I recommended a Netflix documentary entitled The Last Narc. It revolves around the torture and execution of a DEA agent named Kiki Camarena, who was operating out of Guadalajara, Mexico. (Yes, the DEA enforces America’s drug war in foreign countries.) 

While it was the Guadalajara drug cartel that kidnapped, tortured, and executed Carmarena, the documentary provides extremely persuasive evidence that the CIA participated in — and perhaps even orchestrated — the entire operation. The evidence presented in the documentary included statements from former Mexican police officials who were in the room when Camarena was being tortured. They stated that there was a CIA official in the room when Camarena was being tortured.

A few days ago, a Substack page entitled “The Border Chronicle” published an interview with David Hathaway, the elected sheriff in Santa Cruz County in Nogales, Arizona, which is located on the U.S.-Mexico border. While the primary purpose of the interview was to discuss border issues, surprisingly Hathaway provided a confirmation of what The Last Narc posited — that the CIA was, in fact, involved in the Camarena operation. 

You can listen to Part 1 of the Hathaway interview here. Part 2 will be posted later. By the way, “The Border Chronicle” provides excellent analyses of border issues in the context of America’s system of immigration controls.

Hathaway stated that he was a former DEA supervisory agent and spent several years working for the DEA. He stated: “When we talk about the failure of the war on drugs, it kind of took the wind out of our sails — all the investigators on that team — when we realized we were investigating our own government’s drug-smuggling operations.”

Hathaway said that when he first joined the DEA, he was stationed at the DEA office in Calexico, California. That was the city where Camarena was born and raised. Hathaway said that he was assigned to work for Operation Leyenda, which was an investigatory effort to get to the bottom of who had kidnapped, tortured, and executed Camarena. Hathaway stated:

I remember sitting in my office in Calexico, California, and a contract pilot for the CIA came into my office and he said he wanted to be debriefed and tell the real story of what happened to Kiki Camarena. So, I wrote it down and documented it, and I was a newbie back then. It was so incredible it was almost unbelievable. He said that what was really happening is Kiki Camarena stumbled upon the CIA’s drug-smuggling operation where they were sending drugs to the Contras in Nicaragua and sending guns to the Contras and in return sending cocaine to the U.S. to fund the drug purchases….

And he was killed and interrogated and tortured to death. His torture session was recorded by the CIA and on those recordings, you can hear the CIA agent asking him: What do you know about CIA involvement in drug smuggling? What do you know about the CIA’s involvement with the Contras in Nicaragua?

Hathaway then details what is set forth in The Last Narc documentary, including the fact that the leader of the investigatory team, a DEA official named Hector Berrellez, went into Mexico with his team and found people who were inside the room where Camarena was being tortured who verified that there was a CIA official present during the torture session.

As I stated in my article last August, “After Berrellez figured out what was really going on, he was taken off the case. Watch The Last Narc to see why.” In fact, to get a much better context of the Camarena case, I recommend first watching the excellent Netflix series Narcos: Mexico. It revolves around the Camarena case.

Don’t count on the CIA ever being investigated or brought to justice by Congress or the Justice Department for this. As we all know, the CIA is way too powerful for that. There is no way that any member of Congress, any U.S. Attorney, or any federal judge in the land is going to go after the CIA. In fact, no president since John Kennedy has dared to take on the CIA, and we all know what happened to him. Torturing and killing of American officials and foreign officials have been the modus operandi of this malignant agency since its inception in 1947. Everyone who could do something about it, including the mainstream press, is scared to death to do so. It’s just one more example of what the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state has done to our nation. 

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.