"As an international money laundry, the Church tapped into the capital flight havens of Latin America. Escaping the scrutiny of American and European investigators, the Church could now funnel money into banks in Honduras, Uruguay and Brazil, where official oversight was lax or nonexistent."
Moon expanded his network of friends when Barbie helped pulled together a right-wing alliance of Bolivian military officers and drug dealers for the Cocaine Coup. WACL associates, such as Alfredo Candia, coordinated the arrival of some of the paramilitary operatives from Argentina and Europe who would help out in the violent putsch.
Barbie, then better known as Altmann, was in charge of drawing up plans for the coup and coordinating with Argentine intelligence. One of the first Argentine intelligence officers to arrive was Lt. Alfred Mario Mingolla.
"Before our departure, we received a dossier on Barbie," Mingolla later told German investigative reporter Kai Hermann. "There it stated that he was of great use to Argentina because he played an important role in all of Latin America in the fight against communism. From the dossier, it was also clear that Altmann worked for the Americans."
The Cocaine Motive
As the coup took shape, Bolivian Col. Luis Arce-Gomez, the cousin of
cocaine kingpin Roberto Suarez, also brought onboard neo-fascist
terrorists such as Italian Stefano della Chiaie who had been working
with the Argentine death squads. [See Cocaine Politics by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall]
Still a committed fascist, Barbie started a
secret lodge, called Thule. During meetings, he lectured to his
followers underneath swastikas by candlelight.
On June 17, 1980, in nearly public planning for the coup, six of
Bolivia's biggest traffickers met with the military conspirators to
hammer out a financial deal for future protection of the cocaine trade.
A La Paz businessman said the coming putsch should be called the
"Cocaine Coup," a name that would stick. [See Cocaine Politics]
Less than three weeks later, on July 6 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, U.S. undercover drug enforcement agent Michael Levine said he met with a Bolivian trafficker named Hugo Hurtado-Candia. Over drinks, Hurtado outlined plans for the "new government" in which his niece Sonia Atala, a major cocaine supplier, will "be in a very strong position." [See Levine's Big White Lie]
On July 17, the Cocaine Coup began, spearheaded by Barbie and his neo-fascist goon squad which was dubbed the "Fiancà ©s of Death."
"The masked thugs were not Bolivians; they
spoke Spanish with German, French and Italian accents," Levine wrote.
"Their uniforms bore neither national identification nor any markings,
although many of them wore Nazi swastika armbands and insignias."
The slaughter was fierce. When the putschists stormed the national
labor headquarters, they wounded labor leader Marcelo Quiroga, who had
led the effort to indict former military dictator Hugo Banzer on drug
and corruption charges.
Quiroga "was dragged off to police
headquarters to be the object of a game played by some of the torture
experts imported from Argentina's dreaded Mechanic School of the Navy,"
Levine wrote.
"These experts applied their 'science' to Quiroga as a lesson to the
Bolivians, who were a little backward in such matters. They kept Quiroga
alive and suffering for hours. His castrated, tortured body was found
days later in a place called 'The valley of the Moon' in southern La
Paz."
To DEA agent Levine back in Buenos Aires, it was soon clear "that the primary goal of the revolution was the protection and control of Bolivia's cocaine industry. All major drug traffickers in prison were released, after which they joined the neo-Nazis in their rampage.
"Government buildings were invaded and trafficker files were either carried off or burned. Government employees were tortured and shot, the women tied and repeatedly raped by the paramilitaries and the freed traffickers."
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