“They’re bringing back Operation Condor,” an emerging market bond investor told me casually in October after the Trump administration pledged $40 billion to stabilize the Argentine peso but warned that the money would vanish if Milei’s party lost its majority in the country’s midterm elections. And perhaps it never ended: Earlier this month, the longtime CIA agent Bob Sensi was indicted for conspiracy to commit narco-terrorism alongside a former high-ranking DEA official for laundering $750,000 and agreeing to procure grenade launchers and commercial drones capable of carrying six kilograms of C-4 for a government informant posing as an agent of a Mexican cartel. The duo advised the informant to “create the perception that they are moving fentanyl operations from Mexico to Colombia to divert attention from Mexico” and toward the center-left government of Gustavo Petro. Perhaps notably, the scheme launched just weeks after the November 2024 election.
A memoir titled America at Night by a CIA acquaintance of Sensi’s named Larry Kolb describes the alleged money launderer as a cunning all-purpose fixer who was personally introduced to him by George H.W. Bush in 1985 and said he reported directly to then CIA director Bill Casey. Sensi was at the time deeply immersed in the Middle Eastern back-channel elements of Iran-Contra, in which shadowy operatives and informal surrogates met clandestinely with officials of Hezbollah and Iran to negotiate secret ransoms for various hostages, but was indicted for skimming funds from a “cover” job at Kuwait Airways—and, according to the book, out for revenge ever since. A former intelligence officer predicted to the Prospect that Sensi’s current legal troubles would not last long, because the Trump administration would find him useful, as previous administrations have most Iran-Contra major players who made it out of the early 1990s alive.
Which brings us back to the Tabraue family, who in the 1970s belonged to a sprawling drug trafficking organization associated with Rolls-Royce-driving hairdresser and MRR veteran José Medardo Alvero Cruz. When Cruz and a whole raft of the Tabraues’ collaborators were busted in 1979, a related group of Bay of Pigs vets got involved with Operation Condor’s first big success story of the 1980s, the “cocaine coup” in Bolivia, in which the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie and the Israeli-trained Argentine psyop guru-turned-cocaine trafficker Alfredo Mario Mingolla collaborated in the weeks following the election of a left-leaning presidential candidate to install one of the world’s most unabashed narcocracies. As a right-wing military junta raced to release drug traffickers from prison and even open a cocaine factory that the country’s pre-eminent cartel boss claimed was “controlled by the DEA,” the traffickers raced to collaborate with the new regime, in a cycle that repeated itself the following year with the sudden death of Torrijos and installation of the narco-friendly Manuel Noriega in Panama. But Nicaragua, where the Somoza family had been such accommodating hosts to anti-communist mercenaries throughout the Cold War, had been conquered by the Sandinistas in 1979, and the old MRR rank and file took it personally. To fight the Sandinistas, the CIA and the thriving drug traffickers bankrolled a confederation of anti-communist militias known as the “Contras” with bases in El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Panama, who torched oil storage tanks and planted magnetic mines in the ports and bombed the Managua Airport, all with the idea, as verbalized by one State Department official, of turning Nicaragua into “the Albania of Latin America.” Meanwhile, draconian crackdowns on users and subsistence entrepreneurs sent the prison population surging by 250 percent between 1975 and 1990, permanently traumatizing families and communities.