The Longest Romance

by Humberto Fontova

  “If our government and responsible partners in Latin America fail to act,” Noriega added, “I believe there will be an attack on U.S. personnel, installations or interests in the Americas as soon as Hezbollah operatives believe that they are capable of such an operation without implicating their Iranian sponsors in the crime.”

  The arrest of a Hezbollah member tasked with setting up a cell in Tijuana was confirmed in a memo from the Tucson Police Department in April 2010. “Many experts believe Hezbollah and drug cartels have worked together for decades.” wrote U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC) to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “Hezbollah operates almost like a Mafia family in Northern Mexico, often demanding protection money and ‘taxes’ from local inhabitants.” She also noted that lately gang tattoos of many prisoners in Arizona jails are written in Farsi.

  According to Sheriff “Sigi” Gonzalez of Zapata county, Texas, the practice of beheading enemies is relatively new to the Mexican gangs and ma have been inspired by Middle Eastern terrorists traveling through Central America and Mexico.

  Perhaps related to this issue, in September 2011 the Italian daily Corriere della Sera reported that Hezbollah was setting up a base of operations in Cuba in order “to extend its ability to reach Israeli targets in Latin America.” According to the Tel Aviv daily Yedioth Ahronoth, three members of Hezbollah had already arrived in Cuba to set up the cell, which will allegedly “include 23 operatives, hand-picked by Talal Hamia, a senior member tasked with heading the covert operation.” The clandestine terror operation was reportedly called The Caribbean Case, and was mainly a base for logistics purposes, including “intelligence collection, networking and document forgery.”21 (my emphasis)

  For years the KGB and East German Stasi (Cuba’s intelligence and police mentors) were the recognized experts in document-forgery. As mentioned, “El Boris’” operation in Cancun also specialized in document-forgery.

  Meanwhile, as of 2012, deaths in this Mexican civil war surpass those on all sides in Afghanistan. More than 50,000 people have been killed since 2006 in Mexico’s drug wars, mostly at the hands of Zetas. “The Zetas have obviously assumed the role of being the #1 organization responsible for the majority of the homicides, the narcotic-related homicides, the beheadings, the kidnappings, the extortions that take place in Mexico,” according to Ralph Reyes, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency’s chief for Mexico and Central America. They’re “the most technologically advanced, sophisticated and dangerous cartel operating in Mexico.”22

  Indeed, from the KGB to the Medellin cartel to the FARC to Los Zetas, the Castro regime has picked its partners in crime with a penchant for extreme terror. Yet every media mention of Cuba and organized crime still refers exclusively to Meyer Lanksy, Batista and a few slot machines.

  COMING TO A NEIGHBORHOOD NEAR YOU

  Some perspective: Castro’s guerrilla war, plus the urban insurgency against Batista in Cuba that saw the U.S. State Department issue travel warnings and evacuate Americans from the island, cost a grand total of 898 Cuban casualties on both sides, including all collateral damage.

  When this writer secured the first U.S. interview with Honduran interim president Roberto Micheletti in July 2009, the U.S. State Department was issuing travel warnings on Honduras and American Airlines had cancelled all flights to Tegucigalpa. An utterly bloodless and scrupulously constitutional coup had triggered these jitters among U.S. officialdom.

  But the wholesale slaughter along our Mexican border triggers nothing of the sort. In March 2011, Janet Napolitano, standing on the very Bridge of the Americas that joins El Paso, Texas with Juarez, Mexico (where over three thousand people were murdered last year, far surpassing the murder rate of Mogadishu or Baghdad), attempted to allay any and all jitters. With cameras rolling and surrounded by mikes, the chief of Homeland Security clarified that, although “there is a perception that the border is worse now than it ever has been, security along the U. S.-Mexican border is better now than it ever has been. The so-called spillover violence is not yet a serious issue.”23

  This perception generally issues from Americans who currently live and work along that border, instead of in Washington D.C. “Mexican drug gangs literally control parts of Arizona,” says Sheriff Paul Babeu of Pinal County, Arizona. “This is going on here in Arizona—30 miles from the fifth-largest city in the United States. And these gangs are armed with radios, optics and night-vision goggles as good as anything we have. We are outgunned, we are outmanned and we don’t have the resources here locally to fight this. President Obama’s promise of 1,200 troops spread out among four border states will fall short. What is truly needed is 3,000 soldiers for Arizona alone.”24

  In March 2010 the same U.S. State Department that seems so complacent regarding our border with Mexico forced U.S. government employees at six border-area U.S. consulates to evacuate their families for safety’s sake. The six consulates are in the border cities of Tijuana, Nogales, Juarez, Nuevo Laredo, Monterrey and Matamoros.

  The State Department evacuation order was prompted by the murders of Lesley Enriquez, 35, a U.S. consulate employee in Juarez, and her husband Arthur Redelfs, 34, a prison guard. The couple, driving their vehicle (sporting Texas license-plates) home to El Paso, were chased through the streets of Juarez by another vehicle and finally cornered when they crashed into a sreetlight pole and murdered in a hail of automatic fire behind Juarez’ City Hall. When local cops opened the bullet-riddled car they found the murdered couple’s three-month-old daughter in her baby chair on the back seat, bawling but unharmed.

  If the border is secure, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security forgot to tell the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. “Warning! You are Entering Active Drug and Human Smuggling Area!” declare signs recently posted along a stretch of Interstate 8 east of Phoenix, more than 100 miles north of the “secure” Mexican border. “Danger in this Area of Encountering Armed Criminals and Smuggling Vehicles Traveling at High Rates of Speed!”

  A Pinal County sheriff’s deputy expertly ducked some shots aimed at him in the area but others weren’t as fortunate. “There’s been some homicides recently with some of the smugglers,” explained Kathy Pedrick from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management about the warning signs.

  Gilbert Meehl of the BLM explains that “those who pull off the road [Interstate 8] from another state to take their picture with a cactus and they travel down one of these roads, there’s no telling what they can run into.” The signs also warn people to stay away from trash, clothing, backpacks, abandoned vehicles, or “anyone looking suspicious.” And to call 911 upon any hint of trouble with any of the aforementioned objects or personages.25

  According to Texas sheriff Sigifredo “Sigi” Gonzalez, “Those of us who live and work along the border know they’re already here. Our own country needs to stop them at the border. We know they’re coming, we just don’t want to admit it. Instead, we continue to say the border is more secure than ever, when we all know that is absolutely not true.”26

  By “they” Sheriff Gonzalez refers primarily to Castro’s partners, the Zetas. As mentioned, much of the Zetas’ so-called ingenuity refers to the frequency and gusto with which these mobsters employ the traditionally low-key measure of last resort among mobsters: the hit.

  Amazingly, the same U.S. Homeland Security Department that declares the border “safe and secure” admits that Mexican drug cartels, including the Zetas, have infiltrated 276 U.S. cities and represent the nation’s “most serious organized-crime threat.”27

  In August 2008, police in Columbiana, Alabama, found five bodies with their throats slit, and surrounded by the paraphernalia of electric torture. An FBI investigation determined that the victims owed a debt of $400,000 to the Zetas. A month earlier, a stakeout by Atlanta cops had ended in a furious firefight with a Zeta gunman who thought he’d be picking up a $2 million kidnap ransom at the setup. Upon discovering the ruse the Mexican mobster went into Tony-Montana-at-the-end-of Scarface mode. But he was the only one ki
lled in the fusillade.28

  In September 2008, students at Tijuana’s Valentin Gomez Farias Elementary School were presented with twelve mutilated bodies lined up prominently near this elementary school’s entrance. “The victims were naked, or partially dressed, and all of them had been tortured,” reads the story in The New York Times. “Most had their tongues cut out. This was a message sent directly to children, something for them to think about as they consider their future lives in the community: Don’t talk too much. ‘It was a warning, and it means what it means,’ said the head teacher, Miguel Angel Gonzalez Tovar.”29

  Granted, there are few areas to “sleep with the fishes” in the northern Mexican deserts. But on top of eschewing the traditional mobster chivalry, these Mexican cartels would never send a simple dead fish as notice. After their victims die—often more horribly than Luca Brasi—they make sure to spread not only the news, not only the proof, but also the gruesome details of the murder.

  A recent report lays out the symbolism of the gang’s violence in stark detail. “If a tongue is cut out it means the victim has talked too much. A person who has given up any information on a cartel, no matter how minuscule, has his finger cut off and put into his mouth upon his death. This is because a traitor is known as a”dedo“—a finger.... If you are castrated it means that either you have slept with a cartel member’s woman or you have, in the case of a government official, police or the military, become too boastful about battling the cartels. Severed arms mean you stole from your consignment of illegal goods or skimmed profits. Severed legs mean that you tried to walk away from the cartel.

  Decapitation, however, is something altogether different. It is a statement of raw power, a warning to all, like the public executions of old.“30

  Disappearing an enemy in the traditional manner of Latin America’s “dirty wars” would defeat the purpose of this dirtiest of wars now being waged on our very southern border.

  Though most of the Mexican mob’s drugs are U.S.-bound, the major border cities have lately become major markets themselves. Tijuana and Juarez have an estimated 20,000 drug retailers each. In consequence, rehab centers are sprouting. And ever alert to their market base, the cartels have started terrorizing the rehab centers. Last year hit-men entered the Barrio Azul rehab center in Juarez and randomly machine-gunned a dozen patients and staff to death, making sure their deed was well-publicized. Customer retention, at least for now, is sought differently on the U.S. side. Imagine Al Capone’s St. Valentine Day’s massacre, not against his rum-running rivals but against an AA meeting.

  “While it gets harder for us to infiltrate them,” explains special agent Butch Barrett of Douglas, Arizona, “they will use relatives and friends to infiltrate us. There’s going to be a situation where you have [an American in law enforcement whose] cousins are across the border. And he’s going to get a call saying, ‘Hey, we’d like you to join the customs service and do as you’re told’—let this car through or turn a blind eye there. And that’s going to be said by your cousin on the other side, and it’s going to be an offer you can’t refuse. And that’s happened, because I know it has.”31 Helping buttress agent Barrett’s case: Transparency International estimates that Mexicans paid $2.75 billion in bribes to police and other officials last year. Ninety-five per cent of violent crimes in Mexico go unsolved. Perhaps related to this, Fidel Castro’s vice-nephew “El Boris” Del Valle was released from jail last year.

  Our “vital energy interests,” some say, explain our media-government obsession with Mideast events but in fact Mexico is our second-biggest source of oil—bigger than Saudi Arabia, ten times bigger than Kuwait, where America certainly perceived a vital interest in 1990. Nowadays the official state-sponsor-of terrorism that came closest to nuking the U.S. and sits 90 miles from U.S. shores has partnered with a criminal cartel that virtually rules over portions of America’s second-biggest source of oil up to our very borders; it terrorizes much of Mexico and has cells in 276 U.S. cities.

  You’d really think this issue would garner more interest. Among the few to show interest is Rep. Michael McCaul, Texas Republican, who recently introduced legislation to designate six Mexican cartels, including the Zetas, as “foreign terrorist organizations” or FTO’s on the official U.S. list. And why not? Since 1982 the U.S. State Department has listed their partner, Cuba, as a state sponsor of terrorism, alongside Iran, Syria and Sudan.

  “They won’t just cut off your ear. They’ll cut off your head and think nothing of it. They enjoy killing—they want to terrorize communities,” says professor Grayson. “They’ve gone down Mexico’s east coast and they have virtually taken over Guatemala, which is a failed state, and they have penetrated deeply into El Salvador and Honduras.”32

  CHAPTER 12

  How Barack Obama Tried to Lose Honduras to the Dictators

  Cocaine isn’t produced in Mexico. The heart of cocaine production lies in Colombia. Instead our southern neighbor serves as the jugular for the drug’s flow into the U.S.; 90 per cent of the flow, according to the DEA. Central America, including Honduras, also provides several way-stations. The same DEA report estimates that this storage, courier and security service nets the Mexican cartels $323 billion a year, an amount equal to a third of Canada’s GDP.

  That $323 billion also exceeds the combined GDP’s of Colombia and three of the six Central American nations. But it’s an old story that middlemen make all the money.

  A DEA report attributes half of the world’s cocaine supply to Colombia’s FARC (“Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia”), the largest, oldest and most murderous terrorist group in our hemisphere, whose death-toll dwarfs that of al-Qaeda and the Taliban combined and includes many murdered U.S. citizens. This same FARC is in debt to Fidel Castro for its immense fame and fortune. “Thanks to Fidel Castro,” boasted the late FARC commander Tirofijo in a 2002 interview, “we are now a powerful army, not a hit-and-run band.”1

  A report from Colombia’s military intelligence DAS, obtained by the Colombian newspaper El Espectador, revealed that the FARC maintains a major office in Havana. The report also described a recent visit by FARC officers Hermes Aguilera and Olga Marin to Cuba for some brainstorming with Castro’s DGI (the Cuban CIA). The report mentions that this very Olga Marin “receives a $5,000 monthly stipend through the Cuban bank-account of a Venezuelan government office.”2

  Hardly known is that one of the most important U.S. military bases in the Western Hemisphere is in Palmerola, Honduras. But for the so-called coup of June 2009 that removed Manuel Zelaya from the presidency of Honduras, the U.S. might have lost this vital base to Zelaya’s drug-running friends. The so-called coup was at once denounced by the Obama State Department.

  “That Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing!” snapped Honduran foreign minister Enrique Ortez on July 4. “He doesn’t know anything about anything!” continued Ortez. “He probably can’t even find Tegucigalpa on a map.”3

  As Hondurans saw it, the action labeled as a “coup” by Obama’s administration was a democratic uprising to uphold the constitution and thwart the creation of a client narco-state for the Chavez-Castro axis. In late June 2009, after Manuel “Mel” Zelaya’s relentless trashing of Honduras’s democratic constitution, that nation’s Supreme Court voted unanimously to oust the serial outlaw from the presidency. The Honduran legislature voted 125-5 to do the same. The five contrarian legislators belonged to Honduras’s Communist party, long known as dutiful water-carriers for Papa Fidel.

  The Obama State Department promptly fell in line with the five card-carrying Communists. “We don’t recognize Roberto Micheletti as the president of Honduras,” declared State Department spokesman Ian Kelly in June 2009. “We recognize Manuel Zelaya.”

  The Honduran minister, Enrique Ortez, knew full well what had been at stake. On the day before his legal ouster, Zelaya had led a Chavez-funded mob to break into an army barracks and steal ballots for an illegal referendum. Ortez also knew the meticulously legal procedure
his countrymen had followed and was quite understandably, if also quite undiplomatically, blowing his cool at the U.S.

  The Honduran constitution mandated that the nation’s president of Congress, Roberto Micheletti, replace Zelaya. One of President Micheletti’s first official acts was to fire minister Ortez for his insulting comments regarding the U.S. president. Not that Honduras’ de jure president didn’t know full well how his nation’s legal machinery had functioned in the nick of time to save both his nation’s and the U.S.’s interests by ousting Zelaya.4

  The Obama State Department showed its gratitude by cutting millions in aid for Honduras, cutting visa services for her citizens and by yanking President Micheletti’s own U.S. visa. Today it’s easier for a Cuban DGI agent to travel to Washington than for a Honduran textile-salesman to visit New Orleans for a convention. Indeed, Roberto Micheletti was denied a U.S. visa to testify at a U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs hearing in June 2011.

  By contrast, in May 2012 Raul Castro’s daughter Mariela was issued not only a U.S. visa but a security detail from the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security (at an estimated cost to U.S. taxpayers of $50,000) for a U.S. visit. This apparatchik of the only regime in the Western Hemisphere to herd thousands of men and boys into forced labor camps under Soviet bayonet for the crime of fluttering their eyelashes, flapping their hands and talking with a lisp was granted a U.S. visa and security entourage in order to lecture Americans on “Gay Rights.” The venue for Stalinist Cuba’s first daughter to lecture Americans on freedom and civil rights was a panel on “sexual diversity” at a conference organized by the Latin American Studies Association in San Francisco, May 23-27, 2012.