The seal of Central Intelligence Agency in the lobby the headquarters building in Langley, Va., on Sept. 24, 2022. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)
There has long been speculation about the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement with the deadly drug cartels of Mexico. Former Marine Intelligence Officer Scott Ritter weighed in during a recent interview with independent digital media news platform The Convo Couch.
When asked by one of the hosts about the relationship between the CIA and the cartels in Mexico, he answered flat out, “The cartel works for the CIA.”
He went on to explain, “What I can tell you about the CIA is the following. They have no morals; they have no scruples. They would do anything to further what they deem to be the advantage of the United States.”
As far as the connection between the agency and the cartel, Ritter said, “The CIA is able to leverage drug money into control over much of South America, much of Central America, and some people would even speculate, much of America. So, the CIA is behind the scenes doing things.”
Ritter was also a United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) weapons inspector. He served as a junior military analyst during Operation Desert Storm and then as a member of the UNSCOM overseeing the disarmament of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, Salon reported. He later became a critic of the Iraq War and U.S. Middle East policy.
Most recently, Ritter has been outspoken about Western media’s coverage of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, claiming the coverage is biased toward Ukraine.
In 2001, Ritter was the subject of two law enforcement sting operations, which led to his being charged in with trying to set up a meeting with an undercover police officer posing as a 16-year-old girl, CNN reported. He was charged with a misdemeanor crime, but the charge was later dismissed. In 2009, he was arrested again after police said that he exposed himself, via a web camera, to an officer posing as a 15-year-old girl, The New York Times Magazine reported. Ritter claimed he believed the other party was an adult acting out her fantasy as the chat room had an “age 18 and above” policy, which Ritter stated to the undercover officer. Ritter was found guilty in 2011 and was imprisoned from March 2012 to September 2014, when he was paroled. He is a registered sex offender.
Others besides Ritter have made similar claims about the CIA’s involvement with the Mexican cartels.
The CIA and other international security forces “don’t fight drug traffickers”, Guillermo Terrazas Villanueva, a spokesman for the Chihuahua state government in northern Mexico has told Al Jazeera, instead “they try to manage the drug trade.”
“It’s like pest control companies, they only control,” Villanueva said. “If you finish off the pests, you are out of a job. If they finish the drug business, they finish their jobs.”
The CIA brushed off the allegation, but still, others backed Villanueva’s claim.
“The war on drugs is an illusion,” Hugo Almada Mireles, professor at the Autonomous University of Juarez, told Al Jazeera. “It’s a reason to intervene in Latin America.”
Mireles added, “The CIA wants to control the population; they don’t want to stop arms trafficking to Mexico, look at [Operation] Fast and Furious.” He was referencing a botched U.S. exercise where automatic weapons were sold to criminals in what security forces believed would be a way they could trace where the guns ended up. As a result, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms lost track of 1,700 guns as part of the operation, including an AK-47 used in 2010 the murder of Brian Terry, a Customs and Border Protection Agent.
There are even more accounts of the CIA working to assist the cartels.
“The CIA helped kill DEA agent Enrique ‘Kiki’ Camarena,” witnesses claimed of the drug agent’s 1985 murder.
Two former U.S. law enforcement agents and an ex-CIA contractor made the claim to American media. The two charge that Camarena was not tortured and killed by the cartel but rather by CIA operatives. Camarena’s murder took place at the height of the U.S. drug war of the 1980s, Spanish news outlet El Pais reported.
The questions not only arise about the CIA and Mexican cartels, but other drug cartels in Latin America as well.
In August 1996, the San Jose Mercury News published a groundbreaking investigation by journalist Gary Webb that traced the CIA’s involvement in bringing crack cocaine to the U.S. The report, entitled “Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion,” examined the origins of crack cocaine in Los Angeles that devastated the city’s Black community. According to Webb, the Contra rebels in Nicaragua were shipping cocaine into the U.S. In the mid-’80s. The cocaine was turned into crack and was flooded into Compton and South-Central Los Angeles by the government.
The seal of Central Intelligence Agency is seen in the lobby the headquarters building in Langley, Va., on Sept. 24, 2022. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)
