The
Contra-Cocaine exposes of the 80s laid bare a nefarious govt.
orchestrated scheme. Big media outlets have attacked it ever since.
December 3, 2013
In the insular world of Manhattan media, there’s
much handwringing over
the latest blow to print publications as New York Magazine scales back
from a weekly to a biweekly. But the real lesson might be the commercial
failure of snarky writing, the kind that New York demonstrated in its
recent hit piece on “conspiracy theories.”
What was most stunning to me about
the article,
pegged to the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, was
that it began by ridiculing what is actually one of the best-documented
real conspiracies of recent decades, the CIA’s tolerance and even
protection of cocaine trafficking by the Nicaraguan Contra rebels in the
1980s.
Author Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes: “The wider the aperture around
this theory, the harder its proponents work to implicate Washington, the
shakier it seems: After several trials and a great deal of inquiry, no
one has been able to show that anyone in the CIA condoned what Blandon
was doing, and it has never been clear exactly how strong Blandon’s ties
to the contraleadership really were, anyway.”According to New York
Magazine, the Contra-cocaine story – smugly dubbed “the last great
conspiracy theory of the twentieth century” – started with the claim
by ”crack kingpin” Ricky Ross that he was working with a Nicaraguan
cocaine supplier, Oscar Danilo Blandon, who had ties to the Contras who,
in turn, had ties to the CIA.
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