The Ghost of United Fruit Still Haunts Latin America (Part 1)

A brief note from the author on the accelerated border crisis: In the few months that I was putting together the information for this article, things have spiraled out of control in Texas which is getting the majority of refugees. Texas Governor Greg Abbott in addition to bussing tens of thousands of refugees to sanctuary cities like New York and Chicago has deployed the state National Guard and other state employees to police the border. In revenge for making a mockery of the Democrats ‘lets make President Trump look like a racist’ sanctuary city gimmick, the Biden Administration has used the Supreme Court to over-rule the Governor, remove concertina/razor wire and other barriers that the state has set up and in addition, and has blocked the export of liquified natural gas from ports in Texas which has exacerbated nations like Germany which is suffering from the results of the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline and the switch to liquified natural gas from cheap natural gas from Russia. In response, 25 state governors have backed Gov. Abbott and have deployed their own state National Guard units to assist Texas. As the Texas AG Ken Packton told Tucker Carlson in a recent interview, “we’re in uncharted territory”.

The Ghost of United Fruit Still Haunts Latin America (Part 1)

Of all the campaign issues that conservatives like to be overheard talking about, illegal immigration is among the top 6 or 7th in importance behind boycotting Bud Light, 2nd Amendment issues, and trolling abortion fanatics.

Beyond AOC conducting a staged photo-op crying next to an empty parking lot in order to try and make President Trump look like a racist for separating children from parents, (a policy that was a carry-over from the Obama presidency oddly enough), Democrats tend to avoid discussing the absolute flood of undocumented refugees currently awaiting processing, mostly because they don’t want to upset their sugar daddy George Soros or make President Biden look bad.

For the 12 months ending Sept. 30, 2022, Customs and Border Protection Administration CBP stopped migrants more than 2,766,582 times, compared to 1.72 million times for fiscal 2021, the previous yearly high. The 2022 numbers were driven in part by sharp increases in the number of Venezuelans, Cubans and Nicaraguans making the trek north, according to CBP. The major source of immigration is listed as Brazil, Columbia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela with 1,535,492 so far attempting to enter this year and 2,217,141 last year. LINK

US-run color revolutions and coups, economic warfare, sanctions, narco-terrorism, Communist/Maoist terrorism, natural disasters, and severe poverty caused by policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank all make up the major reasons that people flee their countries of origin.

However, despite the utterly disgusting record of the United States throughout the 20th Century and the 23 years of this century in imposing grinding poverty, usurious debt payments, and virtual colonial economic conditions, too many Americans parrot the “illegal immigrant” line which is the favorite boogeyman scapegoat now that “Muslim terrorism/extremist” is not being repeated endlessly on cable news, or worse, state that “it’s not their concern” as one of my taxi customers stated recently when I described the topic of this article.

A surprising opinion given that there is group of 300 refugees being warehoused at an auditorium in Portland Maine from Algeria who are protesting their conditions and discussions are under way to bring refugees to my locality despite there being absolutely no means of supporting them. A brief glance at the latter half of the 20^th century shows why such opinions are utterly immoral. After WW1, the US has conducted wars, coups, and other military operations of various kinds in the Western Hemisphere mostly using the cover of “fighting Communism.” Because of the complexity of Communist/Socialist/Maoist history, its strange relationship with the old British Empire, and how they fit into the perpetual conflict schemes of various geopoliticans and used to terrible effect on the lives of untold numbers of souls, that subject will be gone over at length in part 2.

For most of the 19th and 20th century up until the passing of statesman James G. Blaine, the assassination of President McKinley, and ascendancy of anglophile freak Teddy Roosevelt, the US policy of support for our “sister republics” via the Monroe Doctrine was subverted into a colonial policy.

One company in particular, exemplified exploitation and looting of Central America and the Caribbean, The United Fruit Company, often called “The Octopus” because of its dominance over entire countries from which the term “Banana Republic” came.

I thought that you should get to see both the approved and sanitized narrative that is generally shown on numerous websites and videos that describe its history and then the ugly reality which brand x historians won’t touch with a hundred foot pole.

Birth of the Octopus

1870: The Boston Fruit Company was established by sailor Lorenzo Dow Baker when he started purchasing bananas in Jamaica.

1899: Minor C. Keith’s company Tropical Trading and Transport Co. merges with rival Andrew W. Preston’s Boston Fruit Co. to form the United Fruit Company. It engaged in the production, transportation, and marketing of bananas, sugar, cocoa, abaca, and other tropical agricultural products. Preston brought to the partnership his plantations in the West Indies, a fleet of steamships, and his market in the U.S. Northeast. Keith brought his plantations and railroads in Central America and his market in the U.S. South and Southeast. Within weeks, UFCo acquires seven independent companies that have been operating in Honduras. Preston is made president and Keith is vice-president. Preston’s lawyer Bradley Palmer is made permanent member of the executive committee and director and from a business point of view, Palmer was United Fruit.

1910:  UFCo rival Samuel Zemurray conspires with the newly exiled General Manuel Bonilla and masterminds a coup d’état against Honduran President Dávila. On Christmas Eve, Samuel Zemurray, U.S. General Lee Christmas, and General Bonilla use Zemurray’s yacht “Hornet” with a gang of New Orleans mercenaries and attacks the ports of Trujillo and La Ceiba forcing President Dávila to step down. Bonilla becomes dictator and awards UFCo tax breaks and huge land grants.

1928: 25,000 banana workers in Columbia went on strike demanding a 6-day work week, payment with money rather than company coupons, compensation for work accidents, & increase in wages for workers earning less than 100 pesos per month. With the bottom line threatened, the strikers are branded Communists and UFCo gets the U.S. Government to threaten to invade, using the U.S. Marine Corps that were stationed off the shores of Ciénaga should the Colombian government not act to protect United Fruit’s interests. Dec. 6, 1928, Columbian troops gun down protesters outside of UFCo headquarters. The number killed is disputed, but a month later, the U.S. Ambassador to Bogotá, Jefferson Caffery, sent a dispatch informing Washington: “I have the honor to report…that the total number of strikers killed by the Colombian military exceeded one thousand.”

1929: After an unsuccessful price war against Samuel Zemurray’s Cuyamel Fruit Company which he had purchased in 1910, United Fruit decides to buy Zemurray out. He eventually becomes its biggest stockholder.

1930: UFCo. has absorbed more than twenty rival firms and is the largest employer in Central America. It owned or leased property in Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Panama, Colombia, Cuba, Jamaica, and numerous other Central American, South American, and West Indies countries.

1933: Members of UFCo’s board of directors vote to name Zemurray general director of the company.

1938: Zemurray becomes President of UFCo.

1947: United Fruit’s net worth is in excess of $250 million, and the company controlled nearly a half-mile of dock space in the Port of New Orleans for loading and unloading of its passengers, bananas and general freight.

June 1954 President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala became the first Latin American leader overthrown in a coup organized by the US government [SIC!]. On taking power, President Arbenz had proposed land reforms that were considered a threat to the interests of United Fruit Company despite the fact that only 15% of their land was being utilized. Arbenz was labelled a communist by Washington and the US company lobbied for his removal. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07d3wkz BBC interview with President Jacobo Arbenz’s son.

1958: UFCo acquires the rights to explore petroleum and natural gas in Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador. During the 1950’s, UFCo. starts acquiring numerous companies such as A&W Root Beer and Foster Grants.

1959: Fidel Castro begins his agrarian reform and seizes the sugar plantations of United Fruit in Cuba.

United Brands (1970–1984)

Corporate raider Eli M. Black bought 733,000 shares of United Fruit in 1968, becoming the company’s largest shareholder. In June 1970, Black merged United Fruit with his own public company, AMK (owner of meat packer John Morrell), to create the United Brands Company.

1974: Central American governments began levying a large export tax on bananas. In September hurricane Fifi hit Central America, wiping out 70% of the company’s Honduran plantations and causing losses of more than $20 million. Rising feed costs puts Morrell $6 million in the hole. Black sells UFCo to Foster Grant for almost $70 million.

1975: Black commits suicide by jumping from his office in the Pan-Am building in New York. The investigations following his death reveal a multi-million-dollar bribery scandal in which Black and United Brands pay off Central American countries in exchange for reduced taxes.

Chiquita Brands International

After Black’s suicide, Cincinnati-based American Financial Group, one of billionaire Carl Lindner, Jr.‘s companies, bought into United Brands. In August 1984, Lindner took control of the company and renamed it Chiquita Brands International. The headquarters was moved from New York to Cincinnati in 1985.

2014 Chiquita Brands International conducts an all stock merger with the Irish Fruit Company Fyffes for $1.07 Billion and controls 29% of the global banana market. As of 2017 Fyffes is owned by the Japanese Sumitomo Corporation.

2019 The company’s main offices leave the United States and relocate to Switzerland.

“Chiquita Brands International operates in 70 countries and employs approximately 20,000 people as of 2018. The company sells a variety of fresh produce, including bananas, ready-made salads, and health foods. The company’s Fresh Express brand has approximately $1 billion of annual sales and a 40% market share in the United States.” Global corporate structure LINK

Corporatism Writ Large In Mountains of Corpses

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

– Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC (retired)

When one brings up terms like corporatism, Mussolini or Hitler is referenced because of the overt relationship between financiers, industrial corporations and the government/ dictatorships. Long before any of that existed, there was the East India Company, a crown chartered company which plundered China and the Indian subcontinent for 300 years from 1600 to 1874 after which it was merged into the British Empire. In America, one finds around the Boston area, very old families that are given the descriptive moniker of blue bloods or Brahmins. LINK Sociologist Harriet Martineau visited Boston in the 1830s and concluded its Brahmins were “perhaps as aristocratic, vain, and vulgar a city, as described by its own “first people,” as any in the world.”

Typically, these were merchant families who got filthy rich off of the slave and opium trade (or clipper trade). Among the American patrician families who have played key roles in both United Fruit and the British East India Company are the Forbes, Higginsons and Lees. Other old-line Episcopalian families involved with UFCo are the Peabodys of Morgan-Peabody, whose patriarch, J. Endicott Peabody, established Groton prep (the American Eton) to brainwash generations of U.S. policymakers in British Empire worship. In 1899, these and other Anglophile families arranged the merger of the Boston Fruit Co.’s “Great White Fleet” with International Railways of Central America (a railroad crisscrossing the region) to form the United Fruit Company. Sons of opium war Perkins Syndicate agent Joseph Coolidge, Thomas Jefferson Coolidge & Thomas Jefferson Coolidge II merged their Old Colony Trust Company with the First National Bank of Boston so that the boards of the Bank of Boston and the UFCo around 1929 were the same.

Also involved was the Swiss Iselin family through Central Trust Bank of New York, controller of railroads from New Orleans up to the midwest. The Bank of Boston will later play a part in helping organized crime take over Hollywood. In 1988 The Bank of Boston was caught laundering $2.5 million of drug money in connection with the infamous Columbian Medellin drug cartel connected BCCI bank, yet, got off with a $500,000 fine because of Attorney General William Weld, whose family also got filthy rich on the China Clipper Trade. LINK

For further information about this long ignored aspect of treason, please consult Anton Chaitkins ground breaking history research in “Treason In America”

The other side of United Fruit came from Sicilians Joseph Macheca and his successor Charles Matranga, the mob bosses of New Orleans, the original organized crime organization in the US beginning in the Civil War era. LINK

Macheca was a protege of Anarcho-Revolutionary Guiseppi Mazzini, who in turn was an agent in the employ of Lord Palmerston, the 19th century architect of Britain’s opium wars. LINK

Macheca owned a small shipping company that shipped cargo from New Orleans to Central America starting in 1874. The Macheca Brothers firm eventually sold its shipping assets to United Fruit. His 1943 obituary lists Matranga as merely a retired stevedore for the United Fruit Company, and for Standard Fruit & Steamship Company but his funeral was attended by the business elite of New Orleans and the corporate board of UFCo.

The aforementioned Samuel Zemurray, also a mobster in New Orleans, had come to the U.S. as part of the same wave of immigration (sponsored by the Baron de Hirsch Foundation) LINK that brought the Bronfmans, Jacobs, Fishers and others to this country. With Rothschild backing from London, they welded together a nationwide organized crime network during Prohibition, and then, in the mid-1930s, shifted their profitable business fronts from bootleg liquor to narcotics. According to past U.S. drug enforcement authorities, an estimated 25 percent of the cocaine that entered the United States annually was smuggled on United Brands’ ships.

To its “credit”, United Fruit in the last century has engineered two Marine invasions of Nicaragua, a war between Honduras and EI Salvador, an attempted Nicaraguan invasion of Costa Rica thirty years ago, and more than a dozen coups d’etat. In the bloodbath that followed the Company’s 1954 coup against the republican Arbenz forces in Guatemala, 35,000 people were murdered by death squads.

In 1929, the Justice Department demanded that Zemurray sell out to UF in order to stave off a war that the two companies had helped foment between Guatemala and Honduras. Another 40,000 to 50,000 have been killed by repressive rampages in EI Salvador and Honduras. When added to the deaths suffered under Anastasio Somoza García, Luis Somoza Debayle and Anastasio Somoza Debayle who ruled Nicaragua from 1933 to 1979, it is safe to estimate that United Fruit’s commitment to preserve “banana republics” and obliterate all potential for the development of sovereign nations modeled on America’s own founding principles has taken hundreds of thousands of lives during the last 100 years alone. This is the story of United Fruit: it is the anathema of everything the American republic ever stood for. It is the story of dope pushers, assassins, and mass murderers hired to keep Central America as a backward fiefdom of an Anglo-American “empire.” A deadly relationship of blue blood families setting policies, mobsters providing the muscle, and ruthless local dictators to keep the slaves in line.

True to its nickname El Pulpo or “The Octopus” one finds central figures like John Foster Dulles, who represented United Fruit while he was a law partner at Sullivan & Cromwell – he negotiated the crucial United Fruit deal with Guatemalan officials in the 1930s and was Secretary of State under Eisenhower; his brother Allen, who did legal work for the company and sat on its board of directors, was head of the Central Intelligence Agency under Eisenhower and Kennedy.

The law firm and both brothers were on the company payroll for 38 years; Henry Cabot Lodge (whose family ancestors were involved in the West Indies slave trade) who was America’s ambassador to the UN, was a large owner of United Fruit stock; Ed Whitman, the United Fruit PR man, was married to Ann Whitman, Dwight Eisenhower’s personal secretary. Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays was hired in 1941 as consultant.

His 1928 book Propaganda argued “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country… It is the intelligent minorities which need to make use of propaganda continuously and systematically. In the active proselytizing minorities, in whom selfish interest and public interest coincide, lie the progress and development of America.” His method was used during the 1954 Guatemala coup by having reporters make up lurid stories of “communist terror” and that Arbenz was “going communist”. With such high powered American interests involved, to say that UFCo. was mixed up in the Bay Of Pigs incident, the Kennedy assassination, was involved in Israeli terrorist organizations, or promoted Malthusian depopulation schemes shouldn’t be a stretch.

In the late 1940s through Sam Zemurray and other employees, UFCo became engaged in a massive project to smuggle weapons to the Haganah and Irgun terrorist groups in Israel using puppet Central American governments. As one result of this project, the Israeli Mossad was created. Israel, in return was among the leading arms suppliers to UFCo’s puppet Central American dictatorships, particularly Anastasio Somoza. For the Haganah project, Sam Zemurray was co-opted by Edmund de Rothschild to the board of the Palestine Economic Commission (PEC) LINK which would shortly evolve into the state sector of the Israeli economy. Co-sponsoring him for this high-level Zionist post was Sen. Herbert H. Lehman of the investment house, Lehman Bros., who headed the U.S. side of the PEC. Lehman Bros., which acquired its initial fortune running cotton and slaves past the Union blockade of Charleston and New Orleans, was the first bank brought onto UFCo’s board. JSTOR Article (you need a password for this or library access)

Dr. Carlos Gutierrez of the post Somoza Government of National Reconstruction (GNR) gave an interview with Executive Intelligence Review about the recent history of Nicaragua in 1979 Q: Doctor Gutierrez, one of the facts we have been able to verify is that Zionism is in many ways supporting Somoza’s dictatorship. It’s well known that Israel supplies arms to Somoza. But that’s not all. United Brands formerly the famous United Fruit – is directed by a Zionist leader and it is known that Zionist networks involved in drug trafficking are intimately associated with Somoza and the National Guard. What can you tell us about that?

A: Well, the United Fruit problem has been reduced somewhat in Nicaragua. Many years ago we were a “banana country”; Nicaragua lived through a sorry experience. It was a country which produced bananas in fearful quantities. It produced tuberculosis in the same proportion. A member of the Group of Twelve made a documentary in the United States which includes 400 photographs showing the history of Nicaragua … with the whole process in which the United States has intervened since William Walker, a Filibuster from New Orleans who made himself president of Nicaragua [for 10 months in 1853- ed.], was recognized in less than 48 hours by the United States, and wanted to annex our territory to the slave states. In some of those photos, we see the homes – if you can call them homes – made of straw, of palm leaves, in the midst of water and mud, belonging to the banana workers.

Truly lamentable conditions of life. … And, on the other side, we see the mansions because they truly were mansions – lived in by the United Fruit executives. The production of bananas in Nicaragua fell as a result of the political ambitions of Somoza and the use of methods of exploiting current production without bothering to replant the banana trees. Naturally we still have plantations. Many, in fact, belong to Somoza and many of the fruit growing and fruit processing activities in Nicaragua are represented by U.S. companies or U.S.-owned companies associated with Somoza.

As far as Israel is concerned, we have simply this to say: it is unimaginable for a nation for which the word “genocide” was invented to be an accomplice in committing genocide. This is a tremendous incongruity and, believe me, I’m not saying that out of hatred, but out of anger. I, personally, and the Nicaraguans in general, cannot applaud the Nazi crimes against the Jewish people in any way. Like all humanity, we condemn them. For civilized man, it is impossible to accept things like that. But, at the same time that we condemn Hitler for his crimes against the Jews, we Nicaraguans have the painful obligation of condemning Israel for complicity in the genocide, in the massacre, of the people of Nicaragua. You know that there have been several proven cases of Israeli support for Somoza – not for Nicaragua, but for Somoza. It ranges from supplies of arms, munitions, rockets, mustard bombs to unconfirmed reports that the Israelis are testing certain arms in Nicaraguan territory.”

When Somoza helped sponsor the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Castro’s Cuba, it was launched from Nicaragua’s Swan Island on land owned outright by UFCo. along with a radio signal tower run by the CIA. Plans for the Bay of Pigs invasion became utterly fantastic: Cuban exiles trained in Guatemala under protection of Castillo Armas were to be transported to Cuba on two United Fruit Co. ships; hit teams trained at a camp provided by the New Orleans mafia were to infiltrate Cuba and assassinate Castro; agents of mobster Meyer Lansky’s casinos and drug rings in Cuba were to proclaim a “national liberation struggle;” and the U.S. Naval fleet was to invade in support of these “patriotic” forces. The entire operation failed miserably because of President Kennedy’s staunch opposition to playing along with the British Empire’s manipulated Cold War intrigue despite the fact that his father Joseph Kennedy had made his initial fortune selling bootleg whiskey from exclusive British liquor franchises to the same gangster elements involved with UFCo.

Historian Anton Chaitkin describes the European groupings that General Lemnitzer inherited upon being fired and joining NATO; “a covert apparatus of Mafia killers, Hitler Nazis, Mussolini Fascists, French colonial diehards, and white mercenaries fuming about the loss of Africa.”

The close connections between the United Fruit Co. and the networks named by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison as being behind Kennedy’s assassination shortly afterward is graphically illustrated in the case of William Gaudet, publisher of the UFCo funded Latin American Report in the 1950s and early 1960s.

At the time of his employment by UFCo, Gaudet worked out of the International Trade Mart (ITM), a New Orleans branch of the Permindex Corp., established in 1958, nominally as an international trading company arranging trade expositions and managing real estate projects housing corporate management offices. The founder of Permindex was Major Louis Mortimer Bloomfield, a personal protege of British Special Operations Executive head Sir William Stephenson. Bloomfield, in addition to having a pivotal position within the FBI Division Five and the Office of Naval Intelligence, was a leading financial conduit for the Meyer Lansky – run International narcotics cartel. Among the leading shareholders in Permindex were mob attorney Roy M. Cohn; George Mantello, an attorney for the Italian Black Nobility House of Savoy; Ferencz Nagy, the former pro-Hitler President of wartime Hungary; and Tibor Rosenbaum, the 1960s director of Israeli Mossad operations in Western Europe (based out of his Meyer Lansky – connected Geneva bank). Permindex had been expelled in 1962 from both Italy and Switzerland, and had also been identified as responsible for trying to organize the assassination of French President de Gaulle. Sharing offices with Gaudet was Lee Harvey Oswald’s “Fair Play for Cuba Committee” and many others named by Garrison as being involved with Oswald in the Kennedy assassination. Among these were Clay Shaw, who headed ITM with Zemurray’s successor in the New Orleans mob, Carlos Marcelo.

Also involved was Edward Bannister, Southeastern Regional Director of Division Five (Counterintelligence) of the FBI, for which Bloomfield served as the chief recruiter and agent-handler at the time of the Kennedy assassination. Bannister was named by Garrison as being in charge of providing Oswald with a credible Communist cover. When Oswald traveled to Mexico on his notorious trip to visit the Soviet and Cuban Embassies there, UFCo agent William Gaudet’s signature appeared directly below his in the registry of the American Embassy during an unexplained side-trip. Curiously, the Warren Commission never looked at Gaudet’s connection to Oswald, nor at Garrison’s other evidence.

At least three Warren Commission members had close personal or family ties to United Fruit Co. primarily the Dulles brothers but also prominent persons like John J. McCloy “Chairman of the Establishment”. An honorary Rockefeller family member, McCloy was chairman of the board of David Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank, a director of the Rockefeller Foundation and United Fruit. His pedigree can be summed up by his attitude on the interning of Japanese-Americans in 1942: “If it is a question of safety of the country . . . why the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.”

McCloy, along with Allen Dulles, Whitney Shephardson, John Foster Dulles, William Draper, and Averell Harriman schemed to purge the wartime and postwar intelligence services and postwar German occupation authority of any Franklin Roosevelt loyalists who were committed to eliminating all forms of colonialism. At the outbreak of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, John J. McCloy, ostensibly a private citizen but still serving as chairman of the President’s Arms Control and Disarmament Board, was abruptly recalled from a business trip in Europe and flown back to Washington. When first briefed on the existence of nuclear-capable missiles in Cuba, McCloy’s response was to call for immediate air strikes to take out the weapons.

Another top Wall Street oligarch, William F. Buckley, Sr., who worked with Standard Oil, Royal Dutch Shell, and Morgan-Lamont interests to stage multiple countercoup attempts against the Mexican Revolution until he was thrown out of the country in 1921 as a “pernicious foreigner” and his oil holdings confiscated. Buckley next moved to Venezuela, where he gained control over two-thirds of the country’s oil deposits as a junior partner of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. Buckley, Sr. personally trained Nelson Rockefeller who worked with him at Standard’s Venezuelan subsidiary, Creole Petroleum, to carry out a series of revolving-door coups that used networks of Buckley, Sr.’s close associate Argentine dictator Juan Peron and Spanish corporatist dictator Francisco Franco. Creole Petroleum was later to provide cover for operations run by the Dulles brothers in the Caribbean, working with the United Fruit Company to orchestrate the 1953 Arbenz coup in Guatamala and the 1963 Bay of Pigs invasion. Coudert Brothers, the law firm for the Buckleys’ estimated $110 million oil empire, also had a fascist pedigree as the legal counsel to Vichy France. LINK

The Buckleys are associated with the Permindex networks. George De Mohrenschildt, a White Russian aristocrat who was assassinated before he could testify on his role as a “controller” of Lee Harvey Oswald, maintained close ties with the family. De Mohrenschildt worked for Nelson Rockefeller, then Coordinator for Inter-American Affairs, during World War II; later, he joined the Buckleys’ Pantepec oil firm in Venezuela which was integrated into Standard Oil’s Caribbean intelligence operations. When De Mohrenschildt left Pantepec, he developed several joint ventures with the Schlumberger Corporation, which is represented by the Buckleys’ law firm, Coudert Brothers. Schlumberger is not only a major part of the United Fruit/Creole Petroleum, private intelligence operation that virtually ran the Bay of Pigs, but Jean de Menil was on the board of Permindex, and his wife was an international sponsor of the Muslim Brotherhood terrorists. You might remember the central role Schlumberger played as Vice President Dick Cheney’s choice for looting Iraq while he was on the board of directors, a major stockholder and receiving $100,000 in deferred salary while his wife Lynne was a senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a recipient of a “charity donation”.

An aside is necessary at this point because of the nature of discussing the Kennedy assassination and the problem of how the majority of historians replicate the methods of Sherlock Holmes when going through the minutia of what the main suspects were wearing, what did they eat for lunch that day, the spot they were standing on the day of November 21 at 3:32pm, and similar distractions. It should be obvious from what is discussed in the material that Kennedy was facing organizations that had no compunction about conducting high level assassinations when economic interests were threatened which was the ultimate theme that played out all during the administration’s existence. An excellent study is Battling Wall Street by Donald Gibson, a unique approach at exposing the fundamental battle between government “of, by, and for the people” and a government that serves selfish private interests before anything else. This has played out throughout our nation’s history whenever presidents have been murdered openly such as Presidents Garfield and McKinley or more secretly as in the case of Presidents Taylor or Harding and the result has been fundamental changes in national and economic policies. LINK Cui bono? Who benefits? LINK LINK Donald Gibson was interviewed by EIR editor Michelle Steinberg in May 5 2000. LINK

“EIR: You go into this in the final chapter in “Assassination Cover-Up” — the Wall Street Journal, Time-Life, Luce, etc. Bitter opposition.

Gibson: When I was finishing the first book, and I was getting a sense that Kennedy was, in fact, in deep conflict with Wall Street and other interests, I then looked at the cover-up process. People involved in creating the Warren Commission were essentially agents of the same powers who opposed Kennedy. So, that really set me off again, in terms of a new round of investigation and research.

EIR: There’s always some opposition. What do you think was so unique about what Kennedy represented, that would have made the Establishment take such drastic steps?

Gibson: What bothered them about Kennedy—Kennedy was aggressively threatening almost all of the broad strategies that the upper class was in the process of adopting, and in fact, he and, especially if his brother had followed him, would have gotten in the way of everything from post-industrialism to globalization. JFK’s nationally oriented, pro-development, pro-growth policies, not only for the United States, but also for other countries, would have been at odds with two of the central thrusts of the last 25 years: that is, the post-industrial society and globalization.”

Gibson interestingly brings up the role of Lord Bertrand Russell and his creation in early 1964, of the “Who Killed Kennedy Committee” LINK LINK months before the Warren Commission issues its report and his friendship with Warren Commission critic Mark Lane and his 1966 book Rush to Judgment, the first of roughly 400 books that have been produced, in which Gibson pinpoints Russell’s role in leading what “became a vast industry of misdirection about the assassination.” Adding to the obfuscation was the 1975 Rockefeller Commission On CIA Domestic Activities that was headed by Nelson A. Rockefeller, LINK which featured Lyman Lemnitzer, the former lunatic head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who was the most vocal for an invasion of Cuba and for suggesting in “Operation Northwoods” that the government use fake Cubans to carry out terrorist incidents in the US in order to terrify the public into supporting an invasion. You can read more about this in James Bamfords “Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency”.

Chief Investigator for the Warren Commission, David Belin, provided Sen. Richard Schweiker (D-Pa.) with CIA documents that implied a possible link between Castro and the Kennedy assassination based upon the statements of a Cuban defector. In leaking the documents to AP, Belin indicated that the Warren Commission had access to the same documents but had ignored them. Ironically, Belin, had just written an absolution of the Warren Commission’s “lone assassin” and magical “single bullet theory” for William F. Buckley’s National Review Magazine of Feb. 6, 1976.

UFCo.’s leading agronomist William C. Paddock became part of a group of neo-Malthusians calling for wartime style “triage measures” for Mexico and Central America in order to radically reduce populations. Paddock received training in plant biology at Cornell and began a career in tropical agronomy in the late 1940s. For the decade of the 1950s he lived in Central America, primarily Guatemala and Honduras, and took frequent trips to Mexico. In the 1960s, he established a private consulting firm in tropical agronomy, Paddock and Paddock, and devoted increasing portions of his time to work with his brother, Paul Paddock, in researching the issue of world population growth.

Paul Paddock (deceased in the early 1970s) was a career State Department officer serving in Mexico in the late 1930s. William served as the President of the Escuela Agricola Panamericana (Pan American Agricultural School), near Tegucigalpa, Honduras LINK. This school, founded by United Brands, has for decades been their flagship “research” center in the area, and is funded to this day by the United Brands Foundation. The Environmental Fund LINK, created in 1973 was to promote forced abortion and sterilization as opposed to the more mainstream family planning groups. Its statement of purpose described it as “an effort to stimulate thinking about the unthinkable.”

Zero Population Growth (now Population Connection LINK PC Critique) and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) LINK were similar population reduction movements Paddock sat on the board of directors of and was a financier. His famous book Famine, 1975! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive? (1967) explicitly calls for coercive family planning, William Hardin, University of Chicago-trained biologist, issued a 1968 manifesto LINK for the American Academy for the Advancement of Science which for the first time openly stated that the voluntary birth control programs were insufficient to halt world population growth and for the urgent need of “lifeboat economics”, and Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb, popularized Paddock and Hardin’s work. It became a national bestseller across the United States. “Many apparently brutal and heartless decisions will have to be made,” Ehrlich wrote. This seminal work by Paddock, Hardin and Ehrlich took place during the same years, under the broad direction of a larger effort: the creation of the Club of Rome by the planning agencies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization NATO.

The Club of Rome, officially created in 1969 based on organizing efforts in which Zbigniew Brzezinski played a prominent role, immediately launched the umbrella concept within which triage and lifeboat ethics found their place: Limits to Growth. Similar themed policy papers such as Global 2000 (1977) which recommends reducing the world population by 2 billion people by the turn of the century, Henry Kissinger’s National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM200) completed in Dec. 1974 specified population reduction as the means of controlling resources, the 1974 Rockefeller led Bucharest Conference on Population from which the global warming lie was birthed, the “controlled disintegration” economic wrecking job of Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, and other measures such as the genocidalist Pol-Pot regime in Cambodia all borrowed from Paddocks theories and made them real. LINK

Out of the Fire and Into the Microwave

Once we reach the 1970s, the UFCo. begins a new chapter with the 1970 takeover by Eli Black, the merger into United Brands, the mysterious “suicide” of Black 5 years later and the ascension of Max Fisher, at the time a junior “Zemurray” as head of both a small Israeli oil refining company (PAZ) and Detroit’s Purple Gang; one of the prohibition eras most violent Jewish extortion and booze smuggling operations in collaboration with the Bronfman family in Canada.

Fisher’s early career was shaped by his association with Purple Gang member Jack Rothberg, who helped him get started in the oil refinery business. If you have a strong enough stomach, you can browse the poorly coded worship website The Max Fischer Archives that has “Respected Leader” and “The Legacy of a World Citizen” at the top. LINK

In February 1975, United Brands (UB) Chairman of the Board Eli Black walked out of a window on the 4th floor of the Pan-American building in New York City. Within two months of his mysterious death, Max Fisher (who had threatened the release of incriminating evidence on Black’s various bribery schemes) was appointed acting chairman of the company, and subsequently became its new Chairman of the Board.

By 1975, Fisher and two of his close associates, Carl Lindner of Cincinnati and Seymour Milstein of New York City, held a total of 48 percent of the stock of UB and its subsidiary companies. Fisher’s appointment was sponsored by two individuals: Sol Linowitz and Donald R. Gant, a Goldman Sachs partner and Henry Kissinger associate. The Carter administration’s special envoy for Panama Canal treaty negotiations, Linowitz was an international policy adviser to Maritime Fruit Company, the Israeli counterpart to United Brands, and sat on the board of Marine Midland Bank, which in 1979 merged with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, long the central clearinghouse bank for the Golden Triangle Far Eastern heroin trade since the Opium Wars. One of Fisher’s first actions as board chairman was to appoint Bert C. Reiss as Vice-President in charge of transportation. Reiss came from National Bulk Carriers Corporation (NBC), a firm involved in shipping and construction throughout Latin America.

NBC was owned by Daniel K. Ludwig, an associate of Meyer Lansky, who was responsible for the harbor-dredging project that led to the building of the scandal-ridden Paradise Island in the Bahamas. Once at UB, Reiss excluded all non-company cargo from United Brands ships and from its New Orleans port facilities, throwing a shroud of total secrecy around the company’s Caribbean/Central American shipping activities. Through his Paz holdings, Fisher next bought into a significant piece of the Israeli state sector, and gained half ownership in Zim Shipping Company, the largest line in the Middle East, one of who’s ships was exposed in 1978 by the Jerusalem Post as carrying millions of dollars worth of liquid hashish into New York. LINK

Between 1959 and the late 1980s, Charles Keating was the business partner of Carl Lindner, the Cincinnati, Ohio-based financier who would be one of the central figures in the $200 billion Savings and Loan collapse and taxpayer bailout in 1989. In 1959, Lindner and Keating co-founded American Financial Corporation (AFC). Keating served as the mortgage and insurance company’s general counsel, and later as vice president. Between 1974 and 1976, Lindner and Keating engineered a series of stock purchases and mergers with some of the leading figures in the Lansky crime syndicate—who had followed the Bronfman family recipe, and gone from “rags, to rackets, to riches, to respectability.”

In 1975, Lindner’s AFC allied with Detroit financier Max Fisher; Detroit real estate developer Alfred Taubman (a Fisher associate); and Paul and Seymour Milstein, to grab a 50% controlling interest in the United Fruit/Brands Company. Drug Enforcement Administration officials had confirmed to Executive Intelligence Review, that United Fruit was a major force in the Latin American cocaine trade—a business that skyrocketed following the Lindner-Fisher, et al. takeover. At the same time that Lindner, Fisher et. al. were grabbing United Fruit, Lindner’s AFC simultaneously allied with a group of other Lansky-linked entities to establish a formidable pool of interlocking companies that would collectively form the core of the infamous 1980’s era of junk-bond raiders, featured in books like Predators Ball by Connie Bruck or the “Money Machine: How KKR Manufactured Power and Profits” by Sarah Bartlett.

As Lindner and Keating were forging their corporate alliances with Steinberg, Tisch, Fisher, Riklis, and Posner, two of the leading Anglo-American financial groups—JP Morgan and the banking and brokerage empire of Baron Edmund de Rothschild Banque Lambert de Bruxelles were sealing their own alliance. These top bankers transformed the relatively small investment bank/brokerage house of Drexel Harriman Ripley, during the 1970s, into Drexel Burnham Lambert. Baron Edmund de Rothschild personified the intersection of the overworld of high finance with the underworld. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, the Geneva-based Rothschild had bankrolled the careers of Max Fisher; pyramid swindler Bernie Cornfeld of Investors Overseas Services (IOS) infamy; pioneer drug-money launderer Robert Vesco; and hedge fund pirate George Soros.

The newly built Drexel Burnham dispatched hotshot bond trader Michael Milken to his newly established Beverly Hills, California office to begin the era of Junk Bonds and hostile takeovers. In 1979, Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker began driving interest rates up over 20%, gutting America’s productive agro-industrial sector.

You almost have to picture the strategic bombing campaign of WW2 to imagine the leveraged buyouts and looting of auto plants, steel companies, foundries, machine shops and similar heavy industries being destroyed systematically and former prosperous cities and towns transformed into drug infested hell holes. The passage of the Staggers Act in 1980, Garn-St Germain in 1982 along with other deregulation measures turned the once productive economy into a post-industrial wasteland that is dominated by the FIRE (Finance Insurance Real Estate) companies and the increasing amount of entertainment and drugs used to keep most of the population who’s living standards were becoming worse and worse, occupied and pacified.

At age 96, Max Fisher died on March 3, 2005, at his home in the Detroit suburb of Franklin. His fortune was estimated at $775 million in Forbes magazine’s annual ranking of the nation’s 400 wealthiest individuals. The fawning picture of a successful businessman and generous philanthropist to important causes is what you find online in Wikipedia WIKI or other websites like The Jewish Historical Society of Michigan website. JHSM “Business and financial success was just part of Max Fisher’s global impact. He firmly believed that his success obligated him to give back to the causes he supported. Fisher became a giant in philanthropy. Education, Jewish and secular, was a priority for his generosity. He focused on Israel and the support available from American Jewry. He became Chairman of the United Jewish Appeal and then the United Israel Appeal. He chaired the board of the Jewish Agency for Israel for many years, serving as a shadow diplomat between the Israeli and U.S. governments. In 1977, President Carter invited Fisher to watch Israel’s prime minister and Egypt’s president sign the Camp David accords.”

Communists, The Invention of Imperialist Mass Murderers

Communist/Maoist movements. The perfect excuse for endless bloodshed. If anyone still remembers the Iran Contra scandal, who would have thought it a good idea to finance a guerilla war against “Godless Communists” with the proceeds of drug sales provided by Narco-terrorists which allow you to imprison large numbers of the poorest sections of society in privatized prisons that double as virtual slave labor camps?

Welcome to the Bizarro world of Cold War logic. The network of Cubans trained by the CIA for the Bay of Pigs invasion was under the supervision of Theodore G. Shackley, who became famous during the Iran-Contra scandal for being the head of the “secret team” charged with ferrying weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras in CIA airplanes, and returning the airplanes with cargos of cocaine from the Medellin Cartel. LINK Apart from Shackley, the “team” was put together by his longstanding aide Thomas Cline and by Gen. Richard Secord. Among the leading Cuban operatives in the project were Rafael Quintero, Felix Rodriguez, and Luis Posada Carriles, former official of Venezuela’s DISIP (the intelligence and counter intelligence agency created in 1969).

In 1960, CIA director Allen Dulles put Shackley in charge of Operation 40, as the plan to invade Cuba was called, and to carry out sabotage and assassination operations with the collaboration of Meyer Lansky, Santos Trafficante, and others, who controlled smuggling and drug-trafficking in the Caribbean. Under Shackley’s supervision, the plan’s name was changed to Operation Mongoose, for which two bases were established, one in Miami and the other in Guatemala, the latter being referred to by Figueres above.

In 1965, Operation Mongoose was closed down, and Shackley and Cline were transferred to Laos. Ted Shackley was named assistant CIA station chief in Laos, and Cline his assistant.

Accompanying them were various Cuban operatives they had trained. The same operation was repeated in Laos: training locals for terrorist operations and to link up with the drug-traffickers to finance their operations. Upon arrival in Laos, they established contact with Vang Pao, an opium trafficker, to whom they provided aerial support. LINK

Pao’s competitors mysteriously disappeared. In 1971, Shackley was transferred to America as chief of western hemisphere operations. In 1973 he returned to Southeast Asia as CIA station chief in Vietnam, where he carried out Operation Phoenix between 1974 and 1975, whose mission was to eliminate the entire administrative elite of Vietnam to prevent its functioning after the U.S. evacuation. During that period, he joined with Richard Armitage who was in charge of the financial operations of the Secret Team. Between 1976 and 1979, various corporations and subsidiaries were established to hide the operations of the Secret Team. In Switzerland three were created: Lake Resources, Inc.; The Stanford Technology Trading Group, Inc.; and the most notorious of all, Compagnie de Service Fiduciaire (CSF), founded by Willard Zucker, also director of the legal department of Investors Overseas Services (lOS) of Bernie Cornfeld and Robert Vesco.

CSF had a Central American subsidiary: CSF Investments, Ltd. In 1978, they went to Central America, beginning their operations, and in 1981, Lt. Col. Oliver North put the Secret Team in charge of support operations for the Nicaraguan Contras.

In that effort, the Cubans Rafael Quintero, Felix Rodriguez, and ex-DISIP commissioner Luis Posada Carriles actively participated.

Cuba: Tierra Del Mal

Since Cuba is central in much of the drama we’ve been discussing, a brief history might be needed. From the time of the landing of Christopher Columbus up until the Spanish American War, Cuba was a Spanish colony.

Freemasonry was abolished in 1824, but secret lodges sprang up nonetheless, to agitate for the island’s phony “independence,” often in collusion with U.S.-based Freemasons, among other things to ensure the continuation of the institutions of slavery and free trade.

In the 1850s, Mazzini’s Young America and Young Cuba movements fomented revolution on the island against Spain, while simultaneously organizing the invasion of mercenaries from New York—the “filibusters”—who hoped to seize control of the island, and annex it to the Union as a slave state. A bloody conflict that would last for 10 years. The career of Filibuster William Walker of New Orleans and the Knights of the Golden Circle which formed the core of what would become the Confederacy and then the Ku Klux Klan in his invasions of Mexico and Nicaragua can be seen as the prelude to the later depredations of United Fruit LINK.

Following the defeat of the Spanish by America in 1898, Cuba became a protectorate and in 1902 is granted independence with Guantanamo Bay base leased to the US. In 1906 with the collapse of the government, the US invaded to defend the sugar plantations and remained as an occupier until 1909. In 1912, the US invades to assist UFCo. in suppressing the Afro-Cuban revolt.

In 1917, the US invades again to defend the sugar plantation system from leftist rebels who were challenging the contested election of President Menocal and remained as an occupying force until 1933 when they gain independence again under President Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy. With the election of  Fulgencio Batista (son of a United Fruit employee) in 1944 and his military dictatorship in 1952, Cuba becomes the headquarters of organized crime, most notably, Meyer Lansky BIO (chairman of the crime syndicate for 50 years), Morris “Moe” Dalitz BIO the mob boss of Cleveland for the Purple Gang, owner of casinos in Las Vegas and Miami, and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel BIO.

Their business: gambling, narcotics, money laundering and sex tourism.

After Fidel Castro ousts Batista in 1959, the Cuban government passes a law to nationalize U.S. businesses in 1960: the Cuban Electricity Company, the telephone company (ITT), petrol refineries, and 36 sugar refineries with an approximate value of 800 million pesos. The mob similarly was forced off the island and Lansky set up operations in the Bahamas with the complicity of British authorities. The US places an embargo on sugar and restricts exports of anything except food and medicine.

After the abortive invasion at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, Castro calls on the Russians to assist in defending Cuba from the United States which leads into the Cuban Missile Crisis.

After 13 terrifying days of a naval blockade, the Russians pull their nuclear missiles out and the US pulls their nuclear weapons out of Turkey. Castro holds the title of Premier until 1976 when Cuba becomes a one party dictatorship with Castro as the sole leader until health concerns made him relinquish power in 2008. However, unlike the popular romantic story told by clueless Commies, Castro and Che didn’t lead a lone revolution in the mountains slowly gathering disgruntled Cubans to his cause until he emerged victorious. Like anything we’ve talked about, the story is far more complicated than is usually told and requires that you suspend your preconceived ideas.

Like Batista, Castro’s father worked a sugar plantation for UFCo. and then owned his own plantation in the Mayari province giving him a relatively decent middle class living standard. Fidel went to Jesuit run schools throughout his youth and upon his 1946 graduation from Colegio de Belén, in Havana Father Amando Llorente wrote “You could see this … That he was to do great things … That he is for great things, not for ordinary things.” [see Appendix A]

In 1947, while in college, Castro began being radicalized by an attempt of the recently formed Caribbean League LINK to overthrow Rafael Trujillo the dictator of the Dominican Republic. The members of the league were ex-communists like Venezuela’s Carlos Andrés Pérez BIO and Rómulo Betancourt; Costa Rica’s Pepe Figueres; Cuba’s Carlos Prío Socarrás; and Peru’s Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. LINK Carlos Prío Socarrás in particular, while using the term Social Democrat, when elected president of Cuba in 1948 gave his full blessing for Meyer Lansky’s takeover and until his death was a board member of Permindex.

It’s estimated that he spent $5 million to finance terrorist operations against Batista and gave $250,000 to Castro’s guerrilla movement. The relationship didn’t last very long however since most of them broke with Castro after 1961. The Caribbean Legion was sponsored at the time by “State Department socialists” like Jay Lovestone, David Dubinsky, Serafino Romualdi, and Adolf Berle – all bankrolled by Nelson Rockefeller. UFCo./UB maintained Figueres as one of their chief assets in the region through the years.

For example, during his second presidential term in the early 1970s, Figueres arranged the amicable government purchase of UFCO holdings in Costa Rica, a deal by which Figueres profited handsomely through his son-in-law, Danilo Jimenez Nevia, who became a UB stockholder according to reliable Central American diplomatic sources. It should also be noted that indicted financier Robert Vesco was granted asylum and residence in Costa Rica during this period-by President Figueres personally, in exchange for Vesco putting money into Figueres’ farm, “La Lucha.” It was during this same period that Figueres also permitted the opening of a large, well-staffed Soviet embassy in San Jose, Costa Rica. Meanwhile Figueres told the New Republic magazine of April 23, 1977: “I did everything possible to involve the United States and the CIA in Central American politics, in an era when the special democrats of the region were threatened by the communists on the one hand, and the military on the other.”

Of particular importance is Peru’s APRA and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre as the spreading of nominally communist leaning terrorist movements throughout central and south America that will be discussed later.

In 1971, Robert Vesco fled the United States to escape embezzlement charges regarding IOS to set up shop in the Bahamas and Costa Rica. He had a new assignment: to direct the founding of a cocaine “cartel,” organizing the disparate operations of traffickers into an integrated, Americas-wide “industry,” operating under centralized production, transport, distribution, financing, and protection.

The results transformed the Western Hemisphere into the greatest drug production region in the world, a region bled by marauding narco-terrorist armies. Media stories that Vesco joined Colombia’s Carlos Lehder and Cuba’s Fidel Castro in the dope trade somewhere along the way, invert reality. In three central areas, Vesco played a critical role in creating the Medelin and associated Cali cartels, as institutions:

• He picked up small-time Colombian thug and ex-convict, Lehder, providing him with the political protection and financial backing he required to set up the cocaine transport pipeline between Colombia and the United States;

• He set up the cartel’s first sophisticated money laundering schemes; and

• He brokered the provision of political and military protection for spreading drug plantations across the region, by Cuba-aligned terrorist forces-protection continued today by the members of the Sao Paulo Forum.

‘New instruments of chance’ When he first fled the United States, Vesco found assured protection in two Caribbean countries which had long served as operations bases for the Meyer Lansky mob and the “men above suspicion” which deployed it: the British Crown Colony and offshore banking center of the Bahamas (whose prime minister, Lynden Pindling, was in Lansky’s hip pocket), and Costa Rica. Vesco went first to the Bahamas, and then in 1972, moved to Costa Rica, where he lived until 1978, under the personal protection of President Jose “Pepe” Figueres. From the time he first seized power in 1948 in a farcical five-week “guerrilla war,” Figueres had run Costa Rica as a regional deployment center for the Caribbean Legion, a Social Democratic political machine linked to the Lansky mob and backed by the Rockefeller and J. Peter Grace interests.

The Legion, using exiled communist fighters from the Spanish Civil War, trained various guerrilla operations over the decades; its most famous operation was its sponsorship of Castro’s 1957 expedition back to Cuba on the Granma. Figueres sent a letter in 1972 to President Richard Nixon, reporting that Vesco “has been visiting Costa Rica with a view to helping us establish some new instruments of finance and economic development.” Figueres promoted Vesco’s financial schemes-which included plans to turn the Caribbean and Central America into a “Hongkong West” arguing that this was vital for regional “development.”

He wrote, “I am impressed by his ideas, his group of business leaders, and the magnitude of the anticipated investments. He may provide the ingredient that has been lacking in our plans to create, in the middle of the Western Hemisphere, a showpiece of democratic development.”

When a new Costa Rican President took office in 1978, he expelled Vesco, who returned to the Bahamas, where he had already established operations. In 1977, Lehder had begun setting up drug transshipment headquarters on a small Bahamian island, Norman Cays, later owned in its entirety by Vesco and Lehder together. Lehder associates, turned government informants, later reported that Lehder considered Vesco a “financial genius,” and told them that Vesco was “schooling him in the use of offshore banks to launder money,” according to the book Kings of Cocaine, by Guy Gugliotta and Jeff Leon (1989). Lehder also bragged that it was Vesco who had introduced him to both Bahamian Prime Minister Pindling and Castro.

When heat from the United States ran him out of the Bahamas in 1981, Vesco began moving between the British colony of Antigua and Sandinista Nicaragua.

By 1983, however, he settled in Havana, Cuba. As an adjunct of the dope trade, Vesco provided the Castro regime aid in smuggling into Cuba high-technology goods banned by the U.S. embargo. On Aug. 4, 1985, Castro made Cuba’s protection of the cartel architect official. He told foreign reporters: “Is it just, that the country where people speak so much of human rights [the United States] … goes after someone said to have evaded paying taxes?” He announced that he had told Vesco, “If you want to live here, live here.”

From the outset of the Medellin cartel, Castro’s most critical role in the transformation of the Americas into a drug empire has not been through the extensive logistical support the cartel has provided on the island of Cuba nor the shipments allowed through Cuban territory. Rather it has been Cuban deployment of narco-terrorism, directing allied terrorist forces in other Ibero-American countries, both to defend the drug trade and to assault government and political forces seeking to suppress it.

Today, despite their protestations to the contrary, Cuba and its allies in the Sao Paulo Forum remain intensely involved in the drug trade. The best known exemplars of Cuban-allied narco-terrorism from the 1980s are Colombia’s M-19 and Nicaragua’s Sandinistas. Lehder’s alliance with the M-19 was publicly hailed by Lehder and M-19 leaders alike. The M19’s most devastating blow for the drug trade was the 1985 seizure and destruction of Colombia’s Justice Palace and the resulting murder of 12 members of the Supreme Court.

Likewise, the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, whose 1978-79 “revolution” was financed in part by Vesco partner Pepe Figueres, were in on the drug trade from the beginning. Vesco was a frequent visitor in Nicaragua throughout the 1980s; U.S. government sources identified Vesco as the boss of Federico Vaughn, the ex-vice minister of the interior filmed by DEA undercover agents in 1984 loading cocaine on a plane waiting at a Nicaraguan military air base. His 1995 arrest for fraud involving Castro’s brother Raul and Richard Nixon’s son Robert over a laboratory experiment to investigate an anti-cancer treatment put him in jail until he passed away in 2007, although his associate, “ex” CIA agent Frank Terpil claims he escaped to Sierra Leone in Africa. LINK  LINK

The reason for Lansky’s and Vesco’s preference for using the Bahamas has to do with the 300-year criminal history which unites all the different strands of money laundering and the drug trade, revealing how the British orchestrate that trade. Its story could be repeated for each of the other exotic offshore British financial centers. In 1973, the Bahamas was granted nominal independence. Even though the country elects a prime minister, King Charles is the head of state of the islands, and the Kings Privy Council’s “say so” is final in all legal matters. The population is impoverished, while banking and tourism constitute a huge portion of the Bahamas’ fragile economy. The Bahamas has a dual function: It is both a drop spot and transshipment point for drugs, and a drug-money-laundering center. The Bahamas is an archipelago of 700 islands, of which the closest is 50 miles away from Florida.

Since only 40 of the 700 islands are populated, the others make perfect drop points for drugs. During the 1980s, according to U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration reports, up to 75% of the drugs that reached the United States from Ibero-America went through the Bahamas first. American authorities, fearful of the drug flow into the United States, forced the Bahamas to take measures to cut back the drug flow.

The June 7, 1996 London Financial Times reported, “It is guessed that no more than 10-15% of illegal drugs shipments to the U.S. now go through the islands.” That may be an underestimation, and the Financial Times admits that the drug flow is increasing, now that U.S. radars to monitor drug trafficking were taken down in Grand Bahamas, Exuma, and Great Inagua, in a cost-saving measure.

This is part of the Bahamas’ historic profile. During the American Revolutionary War (1775-83) and the War of 1812, when Britain invaded America, the British used their colony of the Bahamas as a base for naval assaults on the United States. Because of this, in 1776, the American revolutionaries occupied the Bahamas. After the Revolutionary War, Tory sympathizers fled to the Bahamas, and became part of the establishment. During the British-backed Confederate uprising of the American Civil War, the British used the Bahamas as a base to run ships through the North’s shipping blockade against the South. A successful blockade running voyage could earn $300,000.

During World War II, the pro-Nazi Edward VIII Duke of Windsor was exiled to the Bahamas, but was placed in the very important post of Bahamian governor general. During this time, the duke used Axel Wenner-Gren, the Swedish eugenicist and Nazi agent, to launder money to Mexico. During the 1960s, organized crime godfather Meyer Lansky built the Resorts International casino on Paradise Island (the location of Axel Wenner-Gren’s mansion) as an international money-laundering center. The money-laundering Canadian banks dominate the Bahamian banking scene, hiding behind Bahamian bank secrecy and lax Canadian banking laws to shelter drug money. In the Dec. 24, 1985 Montreal Gazette, in an article entitled, “How Canadian Banks Are Used to ‘Launder’ Narcotics Millions,” William Marsden wrote that drug money is “hauled to Canadian banks [in Nassau, Bahamas] in huge stacks of small bills sometimes millions of dollars at once stuffed into suitcases, duffle bags, paper bags and boxes by narcotics smugglers … Trusted drivers and security guards ensure that their cash gets into the banks safely. And once the money is deposited, laws that forbid Bahamian bankers to disclose bank records ensure that it’s safe from investigation by foreign narcotics and tax agents …”

Canadian banks, which handle 80% of banking business in the Bahamas, have become key instruments in ‘laundering’ illicit money-giving it a clean history-for smugglers hiding hundreds of millions of dollars from U.S. and Canadian narcotics agents. “By taking these huge cash deposits, which is not illegal, the Canadian banks are facilitating criminal activity …” In the past four years, Bank of Nova Scotia twice stonewalled U.S. investigations by refusing to hand over bank records of drug smugglers to a [U.S.] grand jury. The bank finally yielded after paying nearly $2 million in fines.” Under U.S. pressure, the Bahamian banking system has made changes in its money acceptance practices, but during the past decade, the volume of laundered drug money has gone up. LINK

The Caribbean British and Dutch money laundering centers

When we reach the 1980’s and beyond, we now enter the era of globalization and the economic hitman. President Nixon, under the direction of Milton Friedman, George Shultz, and Henry Kissinger brings an end to the gold-reserve fixed exchange rate system of the post WW2 Bretton Woods monetary system in 1973. With currencies fluctuating, it becomes child play for international financiers like George Soros to use vast amounts of money from British offshore money laundering centers to speculate against currencies in combination with pressures from the international lending agencies like the International Monetary Fund IMF and World Bank to make governments devalue their currency, privatize services and sell off national assets.

As John Perkins recalled in his expose “Confessions of An Economic Hitman”, the global debt-masters employ “economic hit men,” like himself, to trap targeted nations in bankruptcy, and then force them to turn over their national patrimony of raw material wealth and labor power. When a particular nationalist head of state resists, the debt-masters next bring in the “jackals,” the professional assassins, to arrange an airplane crash “accident,” or some other convenient “tragedy” to eliminate the misguided leader and serve notice on his successors that such behavior is not to be tolerated.

In the exceedingly rare case in which the jackals fail in their mission, pretexts are arranged and imperial wars of conquest like the 1989 invasion of Panama, and the 1991 and 2003 invasions of Iraq—take place. In the next chapters, we’ll go through the examples of each of the countries listed as sources for much of the immigration/migrants coming into the United States and the role that both the International Monetary Fund and Communist/Maoist linked narco-terrorism have played in the utter disaster of the human tidal wave hitting the United States, due solely to the apathy and disregard for the effects the policies of the United States has on other people.

However, with the mass imprisonment of the narco-terrorist gangs in Nicaragua, the explicit endorsement of Franklin Roosevelts New Deal by Mexico’s president Manuel Lopez Obrador and Daniel Ortega banning the Jesuits from Nicaragua, LINK LINK there are signs of life in addition to the growing number of nations deciding to participate in the international development oriented policies of the BRICS nations. BRICS in Nicaragua.

End Of Part 1
Appendix A:

For those not familiar, The Society of Jesus is a paramilitary order nominally inside the Catholic Church but traditionally operating outside papal control. For a 40 year period beginning in 1763 it was officially condemned by the Papacy. Throughout its history, since its founding as a branch of the inquisition, its hallmark has been a process of indoctrination or brainwashing and the creation, penetration, and deployment of religious cults and of particular note, assassins who swear an oath of loyalty to the order above the Pope or any temporal power. Their most notable feature is their practice of regicide (murder of a king). With funding from United Fruit/United Brands, the Loyala Center in New Orleans became a training center for thousands of labor leaders that showed up as leaders of terrorist gangs on both sides. According to Malachi Martin, Vatican reporter for William Buckley’s National Review “Q: Well I’ve noticed that the Theology of Liberation is very much talked about in certain orders – the Jesuits seem to be very active. M: Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans. But they go much further, I mean, they actually trained the Marxist guerrilla in their military tactics. And we have photographs of nuns in Guatemala shouldering machine-guns in the jungles, in the scrub. They have gone that far.” The influence of the order can be seen during a visit to Chile in 1972, where Castro met for 6 hours with a Jesuit group “Christians for Socialism” claiming an alliance of revolutionary Christians and Marxists could be strategic, a movement known as Liberation Theology of which we’ll hear about later.

The post The Ghost of United Fruit Still Haunts Latin America (Part 1) first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Andrew Laverdiere.