Reagan-Bush Drug Legacy in CentAm

By Robert Parry
March 6, 2007

Two grisly mass executions in Guatemala – one involving three Salvadoran legislators and the second the four policemen who confessed to killing them – suggest that the Reagan era’s ideological tolerance of right-wing drug traffickers remains a corrupting legacy in the region.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush saw Central America as a Cold War battleground and thus downplayed evidence that right-wing paramilitary operatives in El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Nicaraguan contra movement were deeply implicated in cocaine trafficking.

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