DEA Iran 'Coke' Contra Whistleblower Sentenced To Prison!! Part 1

[Mrs. Sharon B. Hodge]

DEA Iran 'Coke' Contra Whistleblower Sentenced To Prison!! Part 1


American Drug War (part 6 of 12)


GNN CIA Cocaine Empire - Feat former DEA agent Celerino Castillo

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US government finally exacts revenge on Iran/Contra whistleblower Cele Castillo
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Narcosphere
November 1, 2008

Celerino “Cele” Castillo III, a former DEA agent who played a key role in exposing the U.S.
government’s role in narco-trafficking as part of the Iran/Contra scandal, is now a discredited man

At least that is what the office of U.S. Attorney Johnny “House of Death” Sutton in San Antonio, Texas, who is a “dear friend” of President George W. Bush, would like us to believe.
The black mark now affixed to Castillo’s reputation courtesy of Sutton’s office, however, is a thin conceit on the eve of a presidential election that is expected to usher in a sea change in American politics that might well lead to a re-examination of Castillo’s revelations — which also were supported and advanced by legendary investigative journalist Gary Webb and a host of congressional inquiries in subsequent years

“United States Attorney Johnny Sutton announced that in San Antonio yesterday [Oct.
22], 58-year-old former Drug Enforcement Administration agent Celerino “Cele” Castillo, III, of McAllen, Texas, was sentenced to 37 months in federal prison for his role in dealing firearms without a license,” states a press release issued recently by Sutton’s office

In other words, Castillo, a Vietnam veteran (an expert marksman who was awarded the Bronze Star for bravery) will spend the next three years of his life in prison, even though he has no prior criminal record, for the act of selling some firearms (mainly hunting rifles and shotguns at gun shows in South Texas) absent the proper paperwork.
The federal judge in San Antonio ordered that Castillo be committed to a medical facility due to his multiple medical problems, including diabetes and heart problems

“I thought the judge was doing me a favor by sentencing me to a medical facility,” Castillo says. “But I recently talked to someone who just got out of one of these medical facilities and he said there isn’t a day that goes by where someone inside doesn’t die because of a dose of the wrong medication or maybe an overdose of chemo. So maybe it is a death sentence.
I can’t tell you”

For those who have an aversion to guns and the NRA, it’s important to remember that the Second Amendment does protect an individual’s right to possess firearms — as much as the First Amendment protects an individual’s right to protest the Second Amendment.
The government’s role, as the law is now constructed, is to regulate that right to “keep and bear arms” — but the regulations it has created are byzantine in nature and subject to many degrees of nuance in interpretation

For example, the Gun Control Act distinguishes between individuals who sell firearms as a hobby and those who engage in the practice as a business — the latter requiring a license issued by the government

Here is the wording from that act:

The term “engaged in the business” means … a person who devotes time, attention, and labor to dealing in firearms as a regular course of trade or business with the principal objective of livelihood and profit through the repetitive purchase and resale of firearms, but such term shall not include a person who makes occasional sales, exchanges, or purchases of firearms for the enhancement of a personal collection or for a hobby, or who sells all or part of his personal collection of firearms.
[Emphasis added]

The definition above is further rarified by a host of complex case law developed at the expense of accused violators over the years.
So anyone who is charged with a firearms violation is well advised to find good legal counsel, since the law can easily be twisted to the wrong ends by over-zealous federal agents and prosecutors

Castillo is honest about his activity in this case, but whether the government actually had the evidence that he crossed the line into committing a crime is a bigger question.
And even if Castillo did broach that line, the question of the punishment fitting the crime is now a matter of an appeal filed in the case — though Castillo says he is still trying to find the money and an attorney to handle that appeal

Here is what Castillo says about the case against him on his Web Site:

Approximately three years ago, I started to attend the Saxet Gun Show by selling my book, "Powderburns.” I found the experience overwhelming because it turned out to be great therapy for my PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).
To ease my "cutting edge" a bit, I was back to wearing my Vietnam attire for the gun shows

… As time went on I started to collect Vietnam vintage surplus to sell. But before long, I began to do what most of the vendors were doing at the gun show, selling and buying both used and new guns without a license. Over half of the gun show vendors are still doing what I got charged with.
However, I strongly believe that because of my involvement as an "expert witness" and an activist against certain actions of our government, I obviously had become a target

After all, I had been forewarned by a defense attorney, that an AUSA Federal prosecutor had advised him to instruct me that in some way, shape or form, they were going to target me until they got me.
And that they did

Whistleblower

Castillo, while a DEA agent in Central America in the 1980s, during the Reagan/Bush administration, uncovered evidence that the CIA and the White House National Security Council, through San Antonio, Texas, native and national counter-terrorism coordinator Lt. Col. Oliver North and other CIA assets, were carrying out illegal operations at two hangers at Ilopango Airport in El Salvador. Those airport hangars, Castillo contends, served as weapons and narcotics transshipment centers for funding and arming the U.S.
-backed Contra counter-insurgency against the government of Nicaragua

Read The Rest HERE


Mike Ruppert Confronts CIA director about cocaine laundering

watch Mike Ruppert's full video here - THE TRUTH & LIES OF 9/11
http://video. google. com/videoplay?docid=8797525979024486145&q...


News Report: The CIA Brings Drugs into America


Bush and Clinton cocaine connection

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LOS AMIGOS DE BUSH
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http://www. elandar. com/bush/amigos. html

The disturbing ties of some of George W Bush’s Latino advisors

“Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres
Tell me who you side with and I will tell you who you are”
— “George W Bush for President” web site

by Julie Reynolds
Research assistance by Victor Almazán and Ana Leonor Rojo


Those who say that George W.
Bush has scant knowledge of foreign affairs don’t understand his family’s relationship with Mexico

If one event could be said to make that relationship visible, it had to be the state dinner given eleven years ago by President Bush for Mexico’s president, Carlos Salinas. It was an elegant yet boisterous gala, where the biggest movers and shakers in Texas and Mexico congregated and celebrated.
This group was to become W’s Mexican legacy, a gift of ties and connections passed on from the father to his son

What was not visible was that the group included two men with numerous links to drug cartel figures. These men helped George W.
Bush win the Latino vote in Texas Which raises a few questions: How did these guys get into the Bush circle? What else do they do for him? And, to rephrase a famous query, what did the presidential candidate know and when did he know it?

A glance around the fourteen tables at the 1989 dinner showed that pains were taken to arrange them so that no one appeared more important than the others. There was a smattering of celebrities — Anthony Quinn, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Barbara Walters and Larry King.
Bush’s son Jeb and his Mexican wife Columba joined the soirée, too

The Mexican president had spent a long day with President Bush signing trade pacts, the precursors of NAFTA. Salinas brought his so-called Dream Team: his commerce secretary, finance minister, and his personal Machiavelli, Jose Córdoba.
It would later be astounding to see, as the decade unfolded, how many of that administration’s proud men and women fell shamefully from grace — some exiled, some imprisoned and some assassinated

No one knew it then, but many at that banquet would survive to one day help young W beat a path back to the White House. There were loyal “Bushfellas” who were old friends of the family: Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher Sr., General Colin Powell, and George Bush Senior’s ever-present friend, Secretary of State James Baker. Gary Jacobs, whose Texas bank was about to be bought by the son of Mexico’s billionaire-politico Carlos Hank González, was also a guest. Tony Garza, then a young judge, is now a Bush cabinet contender.
Today, all are advisors or contributors to W’s campaign

Hidden among the glitterati were two relative unknowns. They were, however, familiar to the group at hand. They were the loyal “Amigos de Bush” from San Antonio: criminal defense lawyer Roy Barrera Jr. and car dealer Ernesto Ancira Jr. In contrast to the Salinas group, the ties of Barrera and Ancira to drug cartels would remain unnoticed for another decade. Their ties to George W.
would grow stronger



In the Name of the Father

George Bush Sr.
began his family’s relationship with Mexico in the 1960s, when his Zapata Offshore Oil Company was partner in a border-region oil company called Perforaciones Marinas del Golfo (Permargo), with Jorge Díaz Serrano

In 1988, the financial newspaper Barron’s reported that the two Jorges — Bush and Díaz Serrano — used prestanombres (“name-lenders”) to hide Bush’s investment in Permargo from the Mexican government, skirting Mexican foreign-ownership laws.
Barron’s also accused the Securities and Exchange Commission of destroying related documents after Bush became vice president in 1981

Bush Sr. met Carlos Salinas’s father, Raúl Salinas Lozano, back when the latter was Mexico’s commerce secretary. The families’ friendship has continued through the years. Raúl Salinas, the president’s brother, has told investigators that Jeb and Columba Bush joined him three times for vacations at his hacienda Las Mendocinas.
It was the same estate where he reportedly hosted an infamous 1990 party for the cream of Mexico’s drug cartels, which Jeb and Columba did not attend

Twelve years ago presidents-elect Carlos Salinas de Gortari and George Bush Sr.
met in Texas in a meeting that was called “The Spirit of Houston”

“That meeting shaped the relationship between both countries for years to come,” Antonio Ocarranza, former Zedillo aide and president of the consulting firm Public Strategies Inc.(PSI) office in Mexico City told the Dallas Morning News. PSI is owned by several generous George W.
Bush supporters, including Bush pioneer Roger Wallace

Today, as governor of Texas, George W. Bush has assumed the role his father once had as president.
He meets regularly with Mexican officials, from President Zedillo to Secretary of Energy Luis Téllez, to discuss joint energy pacts and trade issues

“I’ve had foreign policy as the governor of Texas, and that is with Mexico,” George W.
Bush said during the New Hampshire primary

While he is in public shaking hands, Bush’s friend Ernesto Ancira works backstage in the international energy sector. Which comes naturally: Ancira’s family and their partners practically own the energy business in Mexico. The Bushes, of course, know everyone in the oil business in the US.
It’s a nice match, the Bushes and the Anciras

Let me make one thing clear: there is no evidence that Ernesto himself runs afoul of the law. Ancira is, rather, a point man in what Mexican journalist Juan Ruiz Healy calls “El Grupo Texano de George W. Bush.” He happens to have quite a few friends who are connected with drug cartels. In addition, there are some disturbing links between Ernesto’s group of friends in San Antonio and the assassination of Mexican politician José Francisco Ruíz Massieu.
Since Ernesto has been a friend and a helper to the man who may be president, I believe they are connections worth exploring


“ERNESTO IS VERY FRIENDLY, very fun-loving,” a real estate agent told me as we cruised Ernie Ancira’s turf, “The Dominion,” a securely-gated San Antonio development where a number of Mexico’s elite have invested in million-dollar homes

Ernie, she said, loves to barbecue. Has money.
Likes to socialize

Ernie — auto dealer Ernesto Ancira, Jr. — is one of San Antonio’s most popular and respected business leaders. Every year, he’s in the lists of top Latino entrepreneurs. Last April, his Ancira Enterprises Inc.
made the number two slot — with $575 million in revenue — in Hispanic magazine’s list of the fastest-growing Latino companies

“My mother was paranoid about her kids’ success,” he once said.
“It’s like there was a tremendous hurry to accomplish”

Truly a binational man, Ernesto Ancira Jr., was born in San Antonio in 1944, but spent his formative years close to his industrialist cousins in Mexico, who are in-laws of the Salinas family. In the 1960s he rose to become the top assistant to his mentor, Claudio X. González, one of the country’s most powerful businessmen.
González later became President Salinas’s foreign investment advisor

Ancira’s family in Mexico has long been part of the power elite.
The Ancira name is prominent in the city of Monterrey; that northern commercial center’s most elegant old hotel bears the name of Hotel Ancira

But in the 1970s, the Ancira family ran into problems back in Texas. Ernie’s father was implicated in a money laundering scandal at his company, San Antonio Foreign Exchange.
The elder Ancira moved back to Mexico, but there he was named by US authorities as a participant in an $8 million tax fraud scheme

Ernie Junior, however, chose to return to Texas and prosper. In San Antonio, he hooked up with an ex-FBI agent and former city manager, Ralph Winton, and in 1972 they started a used car business together.
Within a scant six years, Ancira bought out his partner, and Ancira Winton Chevrolet was earning $150 million and growing

Ernesto became a civic leader and a Republican heavyweight. He chaired the Alamo Bowl and still heads the Southwestern Bell PGA Golf Tournament.
He was LULAC’s 1987 Empresario of the Year, and he received a MALDEF Corporate Responsibility Award the same year

And he met the Bushes. He co-chaired “Adelante con Bush” when George Senior ran for president, and along the way, he befriended George W. He is one of the folks George W.
Bush’s people call his “100 closest friends,” a group that kicked off W’s presidential campaign last year with $1000 donations

Ancira learned to schmooze with politicians big and small, sometimes annoying local Republicans when he supported an occasional Democrat. He paid for a 1994 trip for Congressman Henry Bonilla to meet Mexican officials in Ciudad Victoria. Twice he bestowed travel gifts on Bush’s Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher, Sr. He reportedly piloted his Cessna to host airborne meetings so that Mosbacher and his Mexican counterpart, Jaime Serra, could privately discuss NAFTA. Young Ernie was a millionaire, a friend of the Bushes, and he was literally flying high.
His family — movers and shakers all — would have expected no less


Early Cartel Connections

As he developed business and political contacts, Ernesto Ancira also cultivated friendships with men connected to Mexican drug cartels.
One of the first was financier Guillermo Ávila

As early as 1987, Ávila was part of an Ernesto Ancira troika, a flashy threesome-about-town starring Ancira, Ávila and developer Gustavo García.
The three were often seen together in San Antonio in the late 1980s, until Ávila and his partners were busted for drug money laundering

Ernesto wrote to the US Attorney in the case and said that Ávila was a “responsible individual” who had a “positive impact on our community.
” Their kids even went to the same private school

But Ávila and his partners had transferred $500,000 of supposed drug money — provided by a law enforcement sting — in and out of accounts in the US, Mexico, the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands. In addition, Ávila owned an El Paso house that was raided in connection with the seizure of 21 tons of cocaine from his brother-in-law’s Sylmar, California warehouse, an all-time international record.
The Juarez cartel’s Carlos Tapia Anchondo was living in Ávila’s home, and the drugs belonged to one of the cartel’s top men, Rafael Muñoz Talavera

When he entered the courtroom, Ávila winked at friends and family.
But when the prosecutors played tapes of the defendants accepting “dirty” money, the party was over

Ávila was found guilty of conspiracy to launder monetary instruments on behalf of drug traffickers. Incredibly, he served a little over a year in prison. Afterward, he was banished from the US and moved to San Luis Potosí.
The boss, Rafael Muñoz Talavera, was gunned down on a Juarez street in 1998

Ávila got off easy. He could credit his astute attorney, Roy Barrera Sr., whose son and partner Roy Jr. was a guest of the Bushes at the White House dinner.
“Little Roy” is now a top-notch trial lawyer and a close Bush advisor

Though Roy Senior is a Democrat, Little Roy is a staunch Republican who has been in the trenches with W and Ernesto Ancira ever since they all campaigned for President Bush in the late 1980s, under the banner of “Adelante con Bush”

It was during those campaign years that George Junior bonded with many of his Latino allies in the state and made the friends he would later lean on when his political ambitions got into gear. By and large, the Latino alliances Bush touts so loudly these days are not social workers or school teachers, and they are certainly not working-class.
Like most in W’s circle, they are Texas heavy-hitters who got rich from their astute blending of business and politics

Barrera Jr. quickly got close to the Bush family, and has stayed close. Both Bushes campaigned for him when he ran for state attorney general in 1986. In ‘88, he was part of a group of eight Bush allies called the “Victory Squad.” During the president’s 1992 campaign, Little Roy and Barbara Bush even teamed up and drove a mobile home from Austin to San Antonio to stump for the candidate.
That same year, Barrera became head of the Bexar County (San Antonio) Republican party and has chaired it ever since

Once one of the youngest judges in Texas, Roy now fancies himself as Bush’s right arm. He recently passed business cards around at a national conference of credit unions, saying that he represented the governor’s office.
Last winter, Barrera braved the ice with W to knock on New Hampshire doors before the primary, and this summer he was one of the few Latino delegates at the Republican National Convention

Ernie Ancira was among the friends and fans at Roy Jr.’s fortieth birthday bash at San Antonio’s Macaroni Grill, reported in detail by the San Antonio Express News. The group took turns roasting each other: handsome, charismatic Ernie almost stole the show from Roy. He was jokingly named “the new wet dream of the Republican party, Otto von Ancira,” by Republican Judge Tom Rickhoff. Roy and Ernie, both good-looking, became hot young GOP legends.
They were touted as part of the “Republican Comeback,” said to embody the New Republican: young, wealthy and Hispanic

But old ghosts have repeatedly blocked the course of Little Roy’s political life.
During Barrera’s ill-fated 1986 attorney general’s race, Vice President Bush hailed him as an “outstanding young Texan,” and said Barrera would “stand up to the drug pushers in our schools and in our state”

But the fact is, Roy has earned a slice of his income from the drug pushers’ bosses, and he’s done a decent job of keeping them out of prison, too.
The Barreras, father and son, have a unique distinction: they are among Texas’s best narco-lawyers

And we’re not talking school-yard pushers.
Along with Corpus Christi attorney Tony Canales, the two Barreras represent the cream of criminals from Mexican cartels when they have the bad fortune to get dragged before US courts

Among the choice clients the Barreras have defended are the Juárez cartel’s US “coordinator” Juan Chapa Garza (now serving thirty years for drug trafficking and money laundering), and Mario Alberto Salinas Treviño, a cocaine runner and alleged murderer, whom the FBI also links to the 1985 murder of Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Enrique Camarena.
But there is one Barrera client who stands out as the most fantastic and treacherous of all: the “consigliero” of the Gulf cartel, Enrique Fuentes León



“There are going to be more deaths, eh?”

Fuentes León, the cartel’s lawyer arrived in San Antonio in 1991, a time when, financially and politically, the Anciras were on top of the world.
They were building their empire in Mexico under Salinas and in Texas under the Bushes

Enrique Fuentes León joined the Ancira and Gus García troika, replacing the now-exiled Ávila

It was during this time that Ernesto and his cousins began to invest in luxury real estate, and the others — the Mexican industrial elite — joined him.
Ernesto got in on the new gated golf course development north of San Antonio, The Dominion, where Guillermo Ávila once sat on the board, and Ernie still sits

Behind the imposing stone arch, the Ancira family’s neighbors are a who’s who of Mexico’s corporate and government power structure. The Zambrano-Treviños of the giant cement firm CEMEX bought property there, as did the head of Mexico’s Hotel-Motel Association and half a dozen other big shots. Many of them paid cash.
Even the new President of Mexico’s brother, Rodolfo Zedillo, bought his Dominion house for cash in October 1994, right around the time he started an $8 million business deal funded by the Juárez cartel

But by far the biggest piece of acreage in Dominion was bought by Enrique Fuentes León, a fugitive sought in Mexico for bribing judges on behalf of a rich Acapulco playboy who raped, tortured and killed a six-year old girl. Fuentes León fled to Chile, then Argentina.
Then he arrived in Texas with a visa that said he was an investor

Invest he did.
Fuentes León bought some one hundred-plus acres in Dominion in the early 90s, and he soon acquired over $6 million in San Antonio real estate

The DEA reportedly grew interested in him when he represented Gulf “capo” Juan García Ábrego in a Matamoros trial. Though he was still wanted in Mexico, Fuentes León somehow traveled in and out of the country often, using brand-new Mexican passports.
A law enforcement investigator in charge of Fuentes León’s arrest told me that Ancira sometimes flew Fuentes León in his private plane, but Ancira says he never met him

The investing continued. In 1993, Fuentes León, and a group of investors attempted to purchase the San Antonio Light newspaper, but the Hearst Corporation — or perhaps the Justice Department, which usually looks into major newspaper sales — never accepted the offers. Fuentes León did buy the popular disco Planeta Mexico owned by Ancira’s friend in the energy sector, Rogelio Gasca Jr.
A new partner, Manuel Pacheco, came in on the deal but was later arrested and given a fifteen-year sentence for money-laundering

With his visa about to expire, Fuentes León made fruitless pleas to America’s high and mighty — including George W. Bush, who called his father, the president, on Fuentes León’s behalf (see El Andar Winter ‘99).
Fuentes León was finally arrested, and attempted bribery and drug money-laundering charges were ready to be filed against him, too

The Barreras took the case

At the hearing, a remarkable tape was played, recorded while Fuentes León arranged to bribe an undercover INS agent. The tape was made in the summer of 1994, a few months after the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio. Fuentes León bragged that his son Enrique, also a lawyer, was “one of Zedillo’s people.” In a moment of bravado, Fuentes León told the INS agent, “I know how they killed Colosio.” And he said something even more chilling: “In the end, in August... there are going to be deaths and all that crap, eh? ... There are going to be more deaths”

And so it was: José Francisco Ruíz Massieu, the Guerrero governor who had wanted Fuentes León to face charges in Mexico, was assassinated soon after.
El Financiero columnist Jorge Fernández reported that Ruíz Massieu was scheduled to be killed in August, but because of a problem with one of the would-be hit men, the event actually took place in September

Raúl Salinas, the president’s brother, was eventually convicted for authoring the murder. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) agents insisted that another man wanted for orchestrating the assassination’s logistics was with Fuentes León moments before his arrest in San Antonio. The man, Manuel Muñoz Rocha, simply walked away, because at the time the agents didn’t know he was a fugitive with a $1 million price on his head. The INS official in charge of the arrest, Gary Renick, says that all three agents who were present separately identified Muñoz Rocha from photos.
Now retired, Renick still says he is convinced that Muñoz Rocha was present at Fuentes León’s arrest

An employee of Fuentes León then testified she overheard her boss talking with a man she was sure was Ernesto Ancira’s friend Gustavo García, just a few days after the murder occurred.
The employee said that she believes she heard the men talk about the murder and she is sure that they said they needed to send more money to “Muñoz”

The DEA has reportedly found that a top drug enforcement officer on the Gulf cartel payroll met with Fuentes León and Muñoz Rocha in a “city in the United States” a few weeks before the killing.
And an FBI report noted that one witness told agents that Fuentes León “has a lot of information about Ruiz Massieu”

Manuel Muñoz Rocha disappeared at the very moment of Fuentes León’s arrest, and was never officially seen again.
But one curious footnote to his San Antonio stay lingers: Muñoz Rocha’s visa, which he used to enter and leave the US a few weeks before and after Ruiz Massieu’s assassination, listed a conspicuous address: “The Dominion, San Antonio”.

continued on part 2......