Peruvian Andes: The Violent Reckoning of Pax Americana

Latin for “American Peace,” the United States’ prevailing doctrine of Pax Americana has been anything but tranquil for Latin America.

His luck had run out.

As the cavernous reports of gunfire slammed off the barrio’s rooftops, one of the world’s most wanted men made a desperate dash toward his getaway vehicle. It was December 2, 1993 in Medellín, Colombia, and after months evading discovery, Pablo Escobar had been flushed from hiding. While accounts of the day differ, many credit two organizations with giving chase: One was a government-affiliated special operations unit known as Bloque de Búsqueda, and the other was Los Pepes, a freelance death squad assembled specifically to wipe the Medellín cartel off the face of the earth.

For over a decade, Escobar had ruled the global cocaine trade, building a sprawling criminal empire from the ground up. The stories regarding the immensity of his illicit wealth read like myths. At the height of his cartel’s power, the supremo reportedly offered to pay off Colombia’s $10B USD national debt if it meant exemption from future prosecution. Later when the walls began closing in on his organization, he was said to have burned $2M USD in cash to keep his family warm while hiding out in the mountains.

Escobar, like other kingpins in the pantheon of crime, amassed his riches through shrewd cunning and copious acts of violence. Estimates are that he murdered thousands, including politicians and judges who stood in his way. The bloodshed made for a multitude of enemies, including officials within the Colombian government and underworld figures like the ones comprising Los Pepes.

Escobar didn’t make it far on his sprint toward freedom – a bullet exploded into his skull, killing him instantly. The assassins that took him down posed for a famous photo with his corpse, smiling as if they had dropped a trophy animal on safari. For several purportedly on the scene, this was personal.

While Bloque de Búsqueda was a state-attached organization, those in the unsanctioned death squad were men that harbored a particularly strong vindictiveness toward the drug lord: The name Los Pepes originated from the Spanish “Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar,” which translates in English to “Persecuted by Pablo Escobar.” Rumors say the group was partially funded by Escobar’s archrivals, the Cali cartel.

Along with government operatives and the obviously vengeful, there was a separate enemy syndicate of the Medellín cartel that left their fingerprints all over Escobar’s years-long pursuit and eventual assassination. They weren’t photographed, and they also weren’t Colombian.

Lending training and support to Bloque de Búsqueda and likely Los Pepes as well, the United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and military special operations and intelligence personnel played an integral role in killing Escobar. Although it was immediately celebrated internationally, the resulting fallout and exponential increase in chaos within the international drug trade makes his death one of the most controversial events facilitated by Pax Americana, a half-quixotic, half-exploitative neo-imperialist doctrine that has tattered modern Latin America.

War of the Sacred Leaf

Soon after you arrive at Choquequirao Wasi, a serviced accommodation in the remote Peruvian Andes outpost of Capuliyoc, the indigenous Quechua locals will likely offer you a glass of chicha. The traditional beverage, served warm and often made alcoholic, traces its origins back at least to the Inca Empire. Before Spanish conquistadors pillaged their riches in the 16th century, royalty of the once great civilization drank chicha out of goblets of silver and gold.

This sweeping mountain vista is on the opening section of the Choquequirao trek in the remote Peruvian Andes. The trail leads to mysterious Inca ruins. Click the icon in the lower righthand corner of the player to expand the video.

There’s another similarly ancient practice among relatives and friends living in the high-altitude villages of Peru. It’s called jalpaykusinchis, which in English translates to “chew the coca together.” The coca leaf is native and was once sacred to this specific region of the world, and the Quechua has used it for medicinal purposes for millennia. Over the past half-decade, however, it has become the most notorious plant in the Americas.

Thousands of miles from the Andes range in 1971, U.S. President Richard Nixon officially began our nation’s “War on Drugs” when he declared the domestic abuse of controlled substances as “public enemy number one.” Two years later, the DEA was established to consolidate existing federal law enforcement infrastructure tasked with mitigating drug abuse. It wasn’t until the 1980s, though, that the agency began realizing its true power.

President Ronald Reagan kicked the “War on Drugs” into high gear, answering America’s crack cocaine epidemic with the gavel of justice. Incarcerations for drug offenses skyrocketed, and, despite all of Reagan’s moral bluster, his administration’s policies clearly had racist underpinnings. Crack and powder forms of cocaine are made from the coca leaf, but the latter is expensive and therefore only accessible to the more affluent.

Both types of cocaine were being abused at an alarming rate in the 1980s. However, it was the low-income users of crack, mostly members of the Black community, who paid the far steeper legal price for their habit. Possessing five grams of crack cocaine warranted a five-year minimum sentence under the new regulations; it took 500 grams of powder cocaine – 100 times the quantity – to trigger the same punishment.

While the federal government began administering this new set of unequal legislation stateside, Latin American drug cartels rode the tidal wave of international demand for their products to underworld preeminence. Escobar’s Medellín cartel was already in business by the time Reagan took office in January 1981, and it didn’t take long for the DEA to justify the need to spread its footprint into South America’s most strategically located nation.

The interventionism, like similar incidences during the current era of Pax Americana, had unintended consequences.

As the screws tightened on Colombian drug organizations, Mexican marijuana cartels added cocaine to their portfolios. The Tijuana cartel emerged in the late 1980s as the dominant drug trafficking group along the U.S. Southern Border, tipping the first domino in a hellish succession of crime. Over the last three decades, a line of increasingly sophisticated and powerful cartels have exerted pseudo-control over the Mexican state, including notable ones like Joaquín ”El Chapo” Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel and Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes’s Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG).

Untold thousands – criminal combatants, members of military and law enforcement, and innocent bystanders – have died or disappeared in Colombia, Mexico and the Central American countries between as the drug trade tumults in a permanently fluctuating struggle for dominance. To pin blame for the cascading violence and regional instability squarely on the DEA and its confederate agencies’ decision to take down the Medellín cartel is far too simple: Labeling it as a seismic inflection point, one that significantly decentralized an already volatile underworld malignancy, is more accurate.

Today, those waging America’s “War on Drugs” play the most dangerous of contests from behind. The ever-evolving Mexican cartels, outfitted with cutting edge technology and unencumbered by stipulations set forth in the rule of law, continue to innovate. In many ways, they resemble a U.S. government agency that has done more damage to Latin America than perhaps any other organization on the planet.

Enter the CIA, Pax Americana’s most destructive force.

Casualties of the Condor

High above the Peruvian Andes, the sacred bird of the Incas cruises the warm air currents, searching for its next meal. The Andean condor, the largest raptor in the world, represented the connection between Earth and heaven in Inca mythology. The civilization believed it carried souls into the afterlife.

Centuries later and much like the coca leaf, the bird’s name has taken on a more sinister connotation in the Americas. And just like with the DEA’s interventionist actions in Colombia, another three-letter U.S. agency was there to help along the narrative.

The CIA was formed in 1947 as the world quickly transitioned from World War II to the Cold War. Six years after its inception, the agency orchestrated the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953. The official reason was to bolster the Middle Eastern nation against potential influence from the Soviet Union. However, some believe the CIA was trying to prop up America’s oil supply by installing supplicant leadership.

Almost immediately afterward, Washington turned its new agency loose on sovereign nations closer to home. A year after the Iranian regime change, the democratic government of Guatemala was replaced by a dictatorship backed by the CIA. A pattern began to emerge: The official reason again was curbing Soviet communist influence. In reality, though, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower sent in the agency to protect the interests of the American-owned United Fruit Company, which controlled much of the land in Guatemala.

World history taught in U.S. classrooms often omits the voices from Central and South America during the cruel Cold War period of American interventionism. It’s important to recognize that citizenries like the one in Guatemala were well aware of what was happening to them.

“Many Latin American nationalists and democrats thought the United States was using the dawning Cold War as a pretext to roll back democracy and directly related the global chill to domestic repression in the United States,” writes Greg Grandin, a Professor of History at NYU, in his book The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War.

Their belief, at least in terms of politically left-leaning Latin societies, was correct.

Following the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the U.S. viewed leftward governments south of its contiguous border as vulnerable to Soviet intrusion. The CIA helped snuff out most of that perceived threat when it indirectly aided military leader Augusto Pinochet’s rise to power in Chile in 1973. Two years later on Pinochet’s 60th birthday in the capital city of Santiago, he convened one of the most infamous meetings of world leaders in human history.

In attendance was intelligence leadership from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. On November 25, 1975, that darkest of days, Operation Condor was put into motion. Many victims of the resulting crimes against humanity are still seeking their justice.

Operation Condor was an orchestrated campaign of political repression that, after Colombia, Peru and Venezuela joined the scheme, encompassed over three-fourths of the South American continent. The tactics of terrorism employed by the participating nations weren’t confined to borders; operatives that murdered, tortured, kidnapped, and assaulted victims did so wherever they liked in and around the so-called Southern Cone. Tens of thousands of liberal citizens died, and hundreds of thousands more were imprisoned. We will likely never know the true extent of the atrocities, which lasted until the early 1980s.

In a landmark discovery, Dr. Martín Almeda unearthed the popularly labeled “Archives of Terror” in 1992 in the Paraguayan capital of Asuncion. The trove of documents detailed military leader Alfredo Stroessner’s savage campaign against citizens seeking social reform and linked his actions with other participants in Operation Condor. Almeda and his wife were two of his victims. She died of cardiac arrest after being forced to listen to his tortured screams for 10 consecutive days.

“The interrogation lasted thirty days, with terrible tortures,” Almeda writes in the foreward to the bookPredatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America by Long Island University Professor of Political Science J. Patrice McSherry. “Finally, they categorized my crime as ‘intellectual terrorism’: for the so-called subversive content of my doctoral thesis; for having promoted the campaign “A Roof of Your Own” for each Paraguayan educator in my capacity as a unionist fighting in the national teachers association; and for having put into practice the methods of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed in the Juan B. Alberdi Institute, where I was director.”

Here in the U.S., Almeda would have been viewed benignly as a freethinking academic. But within the totalitarian realm of CIA-aided Operation Condor, he and his wife were deemed enemies of the bloc. Almeda, a Paraguayan national, spent three years in captivity, and – as an illustration of the blurred borders during the clandestine partnering agreement – he shared a cell with Argentine and Chilean nationals.

Decades after Operation Condor was disbanded, international courts finally began catching up with its masterminds. However, the cogs moved too slowly to prosecute Pinochet and Stroessner. The former Chilean leader died in 2006 awaiting trial for crimes against humanity. Stroessner succumbed to illness the same year in Brazil after Paraguayan authorities spent years trying to have him extradited.

Flash forward to today in the U.S., the structural apparatus that enabled Operation Condor and unwittingly injected additional chaos into the international drug trade churns forward.

Risky Business

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

That was President Eisenhower’s warning to the nation as he left office in 1961. Considering he was the first commander-in-chief to unleash the CIA’s regime change playbook, his words ring both hypocritically and prophetically. True to his prediction, the U.S. military-industrial complex’s prevailing influence over the Americas has had tremendously damaging repercussions for millions in Latin America.

The road to hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions. America’s “War on Drugs,” which began with targeting illicit products made from a once sacred leaf growing in the Peruvian Andes, has now expanded to combating the proliferation of other more potent substances such as opioids and methamphetamines. Billions of defense contracting dollars have been spent in the decades since Escobar’s killing to curb the violence and death. It’s all been in vain.

Then there’s the CIA and its perpetual tendency to exercise Eisenhower’s termed “misplaced power.” The Director of National Intelligence’s office reported the intelligence community budget for Fiscal Year 2022 was somewhere north of $65B USD. How much of that was spent on the CIA’s nefarious activities like Operation Condor? At least for now, it’s an unanswerable question: You and I in the general public almost always find out the slimy, grisly details years after the proverbial curtain has dropped and the climax of unwarranted suffering has long ended.

The CIA isn’t the only organization intentionally exploiting the instability in Latin America, though. Corporations in the private sector, particularly financials, have found their own insidious ways of taking advantage of the chaos.

The Villains Wearing Suits

The overlooks above the San Blas neighborhood in Cusco offer panoramic views of Peru’s most populous Andean city. The Spanish built Cusco atop the Inca Empire’s capital after conquistador Francisco Pizarro and his men desecrated their temples and murdered their leader, Atahuapla. Remains of several Inca structures still exist in the metro, namely Sacsayhuamán and Qorikancha.

Lights twinkle across the city at twilight, prolonging visibility of the surrounding alpine peaks. Somewhere in the encroaching darkness below, the cocaine pipeline continues its never-ending flow toward the Pacific coast to the west and the Bolivian border to the east.

When air transport is unavailable, armed Quechua backpackers carry product for miles from Peru’s main coca-producing valley, the remote and poverty-stricken Valle de los Ríos de Apurímac, Ene y Mantaro (VRAEM). The VRAEM is a short straight-line distance from Cusco and the city’s main attraction, the UNESCO World Heritage Site Machu Picchu. However, it takes backpackers days to make the trek as they traverse dangerous mountainous terrain via ancient trails.

Once arriving in cities like Cusco, the cocaine is loaded into vehicles, accelerating its journey to key distribution points like the European underworld and the U.S. Southern Border. As was discovered by authorities in 2006 and 2012, drug trafficking organizations operating in both regions have been assisted by at least two of the West’s foremost financial institutions.

Wachovia, with $812B USD in assets, was the U.S.’s fourth-largest bank at the beginning of the 2008 financial crisis according to a 2010 report by the Federal Reserve. At the time, though, the institution was also under investigation by the DEA and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for laundering hundreds of billions for Mexican drug cartels.

Criminal charges were levied against Wachovia in 2008, but no specific individuals were mentioned in the indictment. The bank eventually settled out of court in 2010, paying a $160M fine. No one was ever arrested for helping move a staggering $378B for Mexican cartels. The case is now closed.

Before the settlement, Wells Fargo acquired Wachovia at the beginning of 2009. In the worst sort of irony, Wachovia’s new parent company received millions in taxpayer bailout dollars during the onset of the Great Recession. That means in effect, American citizens helped bankroll the organization’s defense against prosecution by our own DEA and IRS.

A few years later in 2012, the Federal Reserve slapped a nearly $2B fine and a 10-year enforcement action on HSBC, Europe’s largest bank, for laundering money for Mexican and Colombian cartels. A report by Reuters says that authorities viewed HSBC as the “preferred financial institution” of drug trafficking organizations in both Latin American countries. The punitive action by the feds was lifted earlier this year, and the bank continues to operate globally.

Villains wearing suits while washing blood money for drug cartels, meddlesome intelligence officers toppling regimes and enabling atrocities, and drug enforcement personnel unintentionally sowing chaos into the Central and South American underworld – the modern era of Pax Americana, Latin for “American Peace,” has been anything but tranquil for Latin America.

Epilogue: It’s All Interconnected

Colonial slavery and imperialist oppression of Black people, the colonial and imperialist annihilation of Indigenous cultures, and the violence and instability in Latin America caused by the neo-imperialist Pax Americana doctrine: These may seem like standalone issues, but, as you have seen throughout this trilogy of features, it’s all interconnected.

The recent bloodshed and suffering in Latin America was the focus of “Peruvian Andes: The Violent Reckoning of Pax Americana,” but the enduring consequences of slavery, Indigenous mistreatment, and racism were also present in the margins. Black communities of the 1980s U.S., many of who were low-income due to generational systemic racism, were unfairly targeted by the Reagan administration’s drug enforcement policies. As I detailed in “Jamaica: The Road to Redemption,” Blacks in the Americas have been valiantly struggling for centuries for equality, and their fight continues to this day.

The plight of Indigenous peoples, which I featured in “Alabama: The Mystery of the Welsh Caves,” was also an integral part of this narrative. The Quechua, direct descendants of the Spanish-decimated Inca Empire, are native to the Peruvian Andes. Their number includes those living in the impoverished and crime-ridden VREAM, the poorest region in Peru. Many there smuggle cocaine purely out of desperation, a hazardous gamble to provide their families a better life.

Reflecting on the destitution that grips millions of Indigenous, Blacks, and Latinos in the Americas, I will begin the conclusion to my epilogue. This series has been largely told in the past tense, an interweaving of tragic historical events that has led to our present. With all the pieces now put together, a question remains: What do we do now with the completed puzzle?

The answer lies in my website’s first series of features, which highlighted imminent threats facing the Western world. Much like this one, it addressed three cornerstone issues. The first is inequality, detailed in “Seattle: An Indictment of American Plutocracy.” The second and third threats are the rise of authoritarianism and internal dissension within Western nations caused by nationalism. Those factors were analyzed in “Lisbon: A Warning to the Free World.”

In the Lisbon feature, I made the most crucial of cases – maintaining the West’s rules-based world order. We must at all costs keep the present framework of dominant free societies intact. Otherwise, the human dominion will plunge into a dark age of prevailing authoritarianism. And although the structure is essential, it is also imperative that we make major edits to our systems of government to ensure the viability of freedom’s future.

The most important of those edits is mitigating inequality. The social malevolency has only recently begun to significantly impact the white race: However, it has been a debilitating factor for Indigenous, Black, and Latino communities in the Americas for centuries. Here and now, all races have to be factored into a collectively developed solution; the ties that bind us together in the free world depend on it.

Relative to marginalized nations like Jamaica and Peru in the Western Hemisphere, we must also do more in the U.S. and the greater West to foster their development. There’s a saying: If you aren’t getting better, then you’re getting worse. While extinguishing the spread of authoritarian regimes is essential, creating more healthy free societies is also crucially important. As you read in this feature, interventionist actions like Operation Condor have weakened many of our hemispherical neighbors to this day. We should work to make amends, extending our hand as respectful yet empowering allies.

Lastly, for the Indigenous peoples, Blacks, and Latinos in the Americas, the most concerning threat facing their future progress is the growing specter of nationalism. The white race, particularly in the U.S., has a festering problem – Many who are suffering from the maladies of increasing inequality or are generally prone to racist tendencies have begun actively working against minorities, particularly through radical far-right politics.

In the extremist, alternate-reality realm of the nationalist U.S., the ideal of strength is essentially like the Inca’s condor: sacred. Here’s Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, one of the most ideologically dangerous members of the American news media, during a recent telecast in which he defended the colonialist and imperialist history of Great Britain:

“Strong countries dominate weak countries. This trend hasn’t changed.”

Considering the oft-racist verbiage of Carlson, the word “countries” could have just as easily been substituted with “peoples.” In either case, he and his nationalist brethren are just fine with the historical status quo.

The rest of us, meanwhile, are charged with driving forward positive change. That is the central point of this series of features: If we can see the past from the perspectives of the afflicted, we lucidly perceive the challenges facing our present. And once we really understand today, we can effectively start working on tomorrow.

Related Content
– Click to browse my travel guides for the area of Cusco, Peru.
– Click to browse my high-resolution photo collection from Cusco, Peru.
– Click to read my feature article “Teotihuacán: Down the Avenue of the Dead” for an in-depth look into the mysterious history of the ancient ruins near Mexico City.