Kill the Messenger (2014 movie)

[Daddy-YO]

Flashback to NicaLiving where ol’ Fyl claimed the CIA sold coke to bankroll the Contras in the Nicaraguan Civil war that followed the Sandinista revolution. I doubted that was true, having never heard the story. (While working & raising a family, I was oblivious to the rest of the world.) Everyone knew the CIA were selling arms to Iran for the same purpose, and to circumvent the US Congress’ direct prohibition on funding rebels (trying, in vain, to dampen covert ops).

When I arrived in Nicaragua in 2006 Ortega was running for president after a long stretch of being out of office. I distinctly remember Ollie North visiting Nicaragua then and making a speech against Ortega at the MGA airport. (It surprised me cause he hadn’t been in the news since the 80’s as a central player in the Iran-Contra 'scandal’. He didn’t stay long. And Ortega got elected, rewrote the constitution, and has remained as president ever since.)

The movie was well made and entertaining, despite its depressing ending. I watched it on NetFlix. Wiki calls it a biographical crime thriller, based on the book of the same name by Nick Schou and the book Dark Alliance by Gary Webb.

A minor journalist at a newspaper in San Jose, CA, uncovers the story and becomes obsessed with exposing the truth. He goes to Managua to verify the "drugs for guns" scheme. The CIA prevents the newspaper from publishing more of the story after it went nationwide and forces the editors into a public retraction. They totally shut down his career as a journalist. But he stubbornly continues on the crusade. The crime was the CIA’s distribution of huge amounts of cocaine throughout the US, mainly in cities, almost single-handedly upsetting Nancy Reagan's ‘Just Say No’ effort in the War on Drugs. The movie hints that the CIA essentially destroyed inner-city black communities. His death at the end leaves the viewer wondering whether it was suicide, as publicized, or the CIA contracted a hit on this pesky messenger, as the title suggests.

[cookshow]

Fydel was a kook, but he was not far off base on the Coke, or Langosta Blanco as called on Coast.

[Jonh]

I'm pretty much convinced the drug trade in the US is CIA-run. Why else would the government seem so uninterested in stopping it?