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AMID THE COLLAPSED buildings of Nicaragua’s capital, Managua—many structures remain in ruins after a devastating earthquake in 1972—rises the city’s largest statue, an iron figure with his outstretched arm thrusting skyward, defiantly gripping an AK.
Because of his exaggerated muscle-rippled chest, this statue of a Sandinista guerrilla was dubbed the Incredible Hulk by locals, who employ the comic-book hero’s name to direct tourists, telling them to “take a right at the Incredible Hulk.” At the base of this landmark, erected to honor the freedom fighters who drove out the Somoza-family dictators, are inscribed the words of General Augusto Sandino, for whom the Sandinistas are named: In the end, only the workers and peasants will remain.
Sandino got it partly right.
Along with the workers and peasants are tens of thousands of unaccounted-for AKs left over from the country’s forty years of strife that spilled over into neighboring Honduras and El Salvador and caused Kalashnikov Cultures to spring up in Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. Like Kalashnikov Cultures in the Middle East, these are just as ingrained and just as deadly.
In Nicaragua’s capital of Managua, this statue of a Sandinista guerrilla thrusting an AK skyward was erected to honor the freedom fighters who drove out the Somoza-family dictators. Because of its exaggerated muscle-rippled chest, the locals dubbed it the Incredible Hulk after the comic-book hero. © 1999, James Lerager
Despite government initiatives to disarm citizens and destroy weapons, most are still around, and with new weapons pouring into the region daily from around the world, parts of some Central and South American countries remain gun-heavy and dangerous.
Unlike Africa, where AK-toting, poorly disciplined gangs mainly engaged in small-time subsistence looting, pillaging villages and supporting despots like Charles Taylor in his gun and blood-diamond trade, the Latin American scene evolved from violent civil wars between rebel groups and government forces to powerful, well-trained and disciplined drug cartels that operate under the guise of political ideology.
These groups are so rich and powerful that they mimic small countries, maintaining order in their strongholds, taxing drug farmers, and keeping government forces at bay. Their political ideologies, both right- and left-wing, exist mainly as the glue that supports a social, economic, and cultural infrastructure focused on growing, smuggling, and profiting from illegal drugs such as cocaine and heroin. (Afghanistan remains the largest producer of heroin, its exports reaching the United States through drug smuggling routes established and protected by South American drug cartels.)
As these groups grew stronger, they were able to purchase larger weapons—one Colombian drug cartel even had a submarine on the drawing board to smuggle cocaine—but their work-horse remains the AK, which is often paid for with drugs instead of money. This barter was so institutionalized that a de facto exchange rate of one kilo of cocaine sulfate per AK was established. (Cocaine sulfate is produced by mashing coca leaves with water and dilute sulfuric acid. This produces an easily transportable paste that is an intermediate step to producing cocaine hydrochloride—common street cocaine.)
As the civil wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala petered out in the 1990s because of exhaustion by the combatants, tens of thousands of small arms, mainly AKs, remained in the hands of former rebels and government soldiers who used them in criminal acts ranging from robbery and homicide to protection for South American drug cartels that employed Central America as a waypoint for contraband heading north to the United States. Currently, more than 70 percent of the cocaine entering the United States comes through the Central America-Mexico border, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, and governments weakened by civil wars and ensuing domestic violence often are powerless to stop the traffic.
These civil wars, fueled by AKs supplied by the two superpowers, have left Central America as one of the most violent regions in the world, with crime rates more than double the world average. These crime rates not only impede democratic processes but have locked the region in widespread poverty. The Inter-American Development Bank estimates that Latin America’s per capita gross domestic product would be 25 percent higher if the crime rate were more in line with the world average.
LIKE AFGHANISTAN, NICARAGUA became its hemisphere’s premier entry point for AKs. In almost parallel fashion, the U.S. government, wanting to fight pro-Soviet regimes, covertly armed Nicaraguan Contra fighters with AKs manufactured by Warsaw Pact countries. The Soviets did the same for their comrades.
Drugs, AKs, and political dogma are so tightly bound together in this region of the world that they may never be unwound. Unless they are, however, the three will feed on each other as Latin American nations remain mired in the chaos of government corruption, violence, and severe urban poverty.
This deadly triad in Central America can be traced to U.S. intervention in Nicaragua in the 1850s when the conservative elite of the city of León invited American adventurer William Walker to fight against their rivals, the liberal elite of Granada. Remarkably, Walker was elected president in 1856, but forces from neighboring Honduras and other countries drove him out and later executed him.
From 1912 through 1933, except for one nine-month period, U.S. Marines were stationed in Nicaragua; the U.S. administrations said they were needed to protect American citizens and property. From 1927 to 1933, Sandino led a revolt against the conservative regime and their U.S. supporters, and U.S. troops finally left in 1933, but not before they had set up the National Guard, a militia designed to look after U.S. economic interests after the marines’ exit. Anastasio Somoza Garcia was put in charge of the National Guard, and he ruled the country along with Sandino and President Carlos Alberto Brenes Jarquin, a figurehead politician. Half a century later, the fragments of this National Guard would became the focal point of U.S.-supplied AKs.
With U.S. support, Somoza Garcia took full control of the country, and the National Guard assassinated Sandino in 1934. The Somoza clan held dictatorial power through torture, intimidation, and military force until 1979. During the family’s reign, which was passed along to sons and brothers, they built an enormous fortune through bribery, exports of coffee, cattle, cotton, and timber, and by accepting financial and military aid from the United States—as long as they remained anti-Communist. Like Charles Taylor in Liberia, the Somozas ran Nicaragua for their own personal benefit.
Opposition was building, however. Buoyed by the success of the Communist revolution against Cuban dictator General Fulgencio Batista in 1961, Sandinista forces backed by Cuba staged raids from Honduras and Costa Rica against Somoza’s National Guard troops. Although Cuba did not produce AKs, it received them from the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries as well as North Korea and supplied them to rebel forces in Nicaragua. Aside from hunting rifles and other scrounged firearms, the AK became the Sandinistas’ main weapon. Cuba had previously backed pro-Communist rebels in Angola with weapons, funding, and troops and was doing the same for the Sandinistas despite protests from the United States.
U.S. officials were torn. On one side was a dictatorship that was growing more brutal as the revolutionaries became more active. On the other side was the specter of the Soviet Union gaining a foothold in Nicaragua as it had done in Cuba. The United States continued to support Somoza with funds and weapons until December 1972, when an earthquake destroyed much of Managua, killing ten thousand people, leaving fifty thousand families homeless, and ruining about 80 percent of the city’s commercial buildings.
Instead of keeping order, Somoza’s National Guard joined much of the looting that followed the earthquake, but what happened next shocked and horrified the international community even more than the soldiers’ behavior.
With millions of dollars in relief aid pouring into Nicaragua, Somoza took advantage of the situation, keeping most of the money that was intended for victims. Funds earmarked to purchase food, clothing, and water and to rebuild Managua were diverted into Somoza’s personal bank account. By 1974, his wealth was estimated at more than $400 million. Even his supporters were sickened by the dictator’s actions, and opposition within the business community, one of his strongest allies, was rising.
The Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) grew during this time as anti-Somoza sentiment grew throughout the country. Somoza responded with even more repression, prompting President Jimmy Carter to make military assistance contingent upon human rights improvements. Somoza stepped up his oppression. Street protests continued, and the country was in a state of siege. Strikes were commonplace and the economy was in ruins. Somoza relied on foreign loans, mainly from the United States, to prop up the country’s finances.
Somoza’s eventual downfall was precipitated by the assassination in January 10, 1978, of Pedro Joaquin Chamorro Cardenal, outspoken publisher of the newspaper La Prensa and leader of the Democratic Liberation Union (UDEL). A massive nationwide strike paralyzed the country for ten days, and Sandinista attacks on government forces continued—but Somoza clung to power.
In 1978, the United States stopped military assistance to Somoza, forcing him to buy weapons on the world market. In one instance, no longer able to purchase M-16s from the United States, Somoza’s National Guard bought Israeli Uzi submachine guns and the Galil, that country’s version of the AK, first introduced in 1973. Because of his outlaw behavior, many countries refused to sell arms to Somoza. Israel was among them, at first, but the Israelis succumbed to pressure from pro-Somoza entities within the U.S. military, fearing that refusal would cut off their own U.S. funding.
The Israelis had built the Galil, named for its inventor, Israel Galili, in response to the poor performance of their standard-issue FN-FAL during the 1967 Six-Day War. (Israel Galili is often confused with Uziel “Uzi” Gal, the inventor of the Uzi submachine gun.) Having seen the reliability of the AKs used by Arab nations in battle, the Israelis realized that their rifles were not tough enough for desert conditions. In addition, the Israeli army was overwhelmingly a conscript force with most troops considered reservists available for a call-up during emergencies only. With little ongoing training, these soldiers could be hard on their weapons—leaving them in the dirt during bivouac, for example, something a professional soldier would never do—and the AKTYPE rifle could withstand abuse. (In an odd but practical concession to these unprofessional, part-time fighters, the bipod stand included with the weapon sported a bottle-cap opener. This would keep Israeli soldiers from damaging the flanges on their magazines by opening bottles with them.)
For Somoza, a major draw of the Galil was that it fired the 5.56mm round, the same as the M-16, so his army could use the tons of U.S.-supplied ammunition it still had on hand. The rifle was also inexpensive, less than $150 each.
As Somoza’s popularity waned, the National Guard became even more brutal in their attacks, including widespread bombing of León after the Sandinistas had taken control of that city. Still, Somoza would not yield to pressure for inclusion of the Sandinistas in the government.
The country continued to deteriorate. High unemployment, violence, inflation, food and water shortages, and massive debts racked the nation. In February 1979, the Sandinistas formed a junta combining several anti-Somoza groups that garnered a broad following. By March, the FSLN, now better equipped with small arms, launched a final assault on many areas, and by June these AK-wielding soldiers had secured most of the country.
In July, Somoza finally resigned, and with U.S. help fled to Miami and then to Paraguay, where he was murdered the following year, reportedly by leftist Argentine guerrillas.
Faced with a debt of $1.6 billion, an estimated 50,000 citizens dead and 120,000 homeless, the Sandinista administration was doomed from the start despite an optimistic citizenry. But even with widespread disease and lack of food and water, for many people the situation was still better than under the brutal Somoza regime.
With no cohesive government in charge, FSLN leaders formed coalitions, and finally in 1980 a government incorporating large numbers of Nicaraguans was formed. Not everyone embraced the new regime, however. President Jimmy Carter tried to work with the FSLN, but his successor Ronald Reagan, who took office in January 1981, immediately began to isolate and vilify the new government, claiming it was arming pro-Soviet guerrillas in El Salvador.
Nicaraguan problems aside, Carter had lost the election in part because Americans blamed him for not securing the release of fifty-two U.S. hostages held by Islamic fundamentalists at the American embassy in Tehran. The hostages were released twenty minutes after Reagan’s inauguration, leading to speculation that a secret deal now known as the “October Surprise” had been reached between Reagan’s campaign officials, notably William Casey, and Iranian officials to hold the hostages until after the election, thus ensuring that Carter would not win. In return, Iran would receive military and funding support to help fight their war with Iraq that had been ratcheting up for years and fully commenced on September 22, 1980, when Iraqi troops invaded Iran. This covert involvement of the United States in the Iran-Iraq war would later become a crucial element in the spreading of AKs a half a world away in Nicaragua.
As the Sandinistas took hold, the Reagan administration supported opponents with funds and military aid. The core of these were remnants of Somoza’s original National Guard, who operated hit-and-run raids from camps in Honduras where many of them had fled after the dictator’s fall from power. These Contras (from contrarevolucianarios) grew in strength as Nicaraguans became less enamored with the slow economic progress of the Sandinista government. Because they had to spend more and more of their budget on fighting the Contras, the Sandinistas were left with less for social reform. In addition, they grew less tolerant of legitimate opposition groups and began employing intimidation tactics against those who did not believe in the revolutionary movement. Even La Prensa, once ardently anti-Somoza, voiced its concern over the tactics of the Sandinistas, who, during a state of emergency declared in 1982, censored the newspaper.
As hostilities grew, small arms rushed into Nicaragua. The Sandinistas received support from the Soviet Union, mainly through Cuba and the Warsaw Pact nations. The Sandinista army at first was poorly equipped and ill managed. Their weapons consisted of some AKs from Cuba and whatever was left behind when Somoza’s National Guard fled the country. This hodgepodge was gradually replaced by AKs only. The Contras had very few weapons save some hunting rifles, shotguns, and pistols. This changed immediately after they began to be funded by the United States beginning in 1981 when William Casey, newly appointed CIA director, suggested to Reagan that he support $19 million for the agency, which Congress later approved, to establish opposition to the Sandinistas. In 1982, the CIA created Contra bases in Honduras. In southern Nicaragua and northern Costa Rica, CIA-supported Contra camps were established under the leadership of a former Sandinista commander with the colorful moniker of “Commandante Zero.”
Congress was becoming increasingly uneasy about the conflict, however, and the situation came to a head when the CIA illegally mined one of Nicaragua’s harbors, sinking a Soviet freighter. In December, Congress unanimously passed the Boland Amendment to the 1983 military budget bill, which made it illegal for the CIA to continue funding the Contras. This did not stop the Reagan administration. They continued to fund the Contras through third parties, other countries, and through other U.S. government agencies that, the White House maintained, were legally outside the Boland Amendment’s edict.
In August 1985, the Contras received a shipment from Poland of ten thousand Polish-made AKs worth about $6 million. Polish officials denied they would ever directly sell weapons to a group opposed to the Marxist Sandinistas. Polish embassy official Andrzej Dobrynski said publicly, “It is so preposterous, it is undignified even to deny it.” Indeed, Nicaraguan president and Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega was a guest of honor at ceremonies in Warsaw commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II.
U.S. officials claimed that the Contras had hijacked the Polish shipment, intended for an unspecified Latin American country, but government critics suggested that the United States had bought the AKs for the Contras despite the congressional prohibition. They said that although it did seem preposterous, Poland needed the money so badly that it was willing to go against its political ideology for cold cash.
Neither side budged from their accusatory position until late 1986 when Sandinista soldiers monitored a camouflaged Vietnamera C-123 cargo plane that had taken off from a field outside of San Salvador and was nearing the Nicaraguan town of San Carlos. As the plane flew down to twenty-five hundred feet, preparing to drop its load, a nineteen-year-old soldier fired his shoulder-mounted surface-to-air missile. Direct hit. The plane spiraled, trailed smoke, and crashed, but not before a single parachute opened, safely lowering Gene Hasenfus of Marinette, Wisconsin, to the ground.
When soldiers reached the wrecked plane, they discovered seventy AKs, 100,000 rounds of ammunition, rocket grenades, jungle fatigues, boots, and two dead Americans. One of the dead crew members, William J. Cooper, carried an ID card from Southern Air Transport, a Miami company once owned by the CIA and still thought to have ties to the agency. The plane had previously been used in 1984 as part of a government sting, filmed by the CIA, showing the Nicaraguan interior minister involved in selling cocaine. Reagan had publicly displayed a still photograph from the film months earlier to bolster the administration’s position that the Contras should be supported to fight the Sandinistas, who were now drug dealers. He could not have known that the photo later would provide solid evidence of his illegal connection to the Contras.
Any doubt about the CIA’s involvement in funding the Contras, including the AK shipment from Poland, disappeared as the captured Hasenfus spilled the beans on the entire operation, telling about flying missions for the CIA, bringing weapons and supplies to the Contras. Even Reagan supporters felt betrayed at the disconnect between the administration’s public rhetoric denying aid to the Contras in violation of law and the mounting evidence to the contrary. The fact that the plane carried Soviet-style AKs added a more sinister veneer to a situation that was growing more disturbing every day.
In November 1986, the scandal grew even larger when the Lebanese magazine Ash Shiraa reported that the United States had been selling weapons to Iran. Profits from the arms deals were being used to buy weapons and for direct funding of the Contras. These weapons sales to Iran reportedly funded Hasenfus’s ill-fated flight.
During congressional testimony about the Iran-Contra affair—which only covered activities from October 1984 to 1986—investigators uncovered more details about arms shipments. For example, investigators learned that White House aide Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North had shredded documents pertaining to the arms sales shortly after Hasenfus’s plane was shot down. Contra leader Adolfo Calero offered documents showing that he had established a financial structure to funnel aid to the Contras. North, who was at the National Security Council, had set up dummy corporations and bank accounts to transfer money to Calero’s organization. Two former military officers, Major General Richard V. Secord and Major General John K. Singlaub, were also involved in the ruse.
Calero testified that Secord and Singlaub were particularly pleased at the bargain prices the group had received. The Contras paid half of the going rate for ammunition, about nine to twelve cents a round, and $145 for AKs, which normally cost $230 on the open market. He went into great detail about the $6 million Poland deal, handled by Singlaub, that netted several thousand AKs and millions of rounds of ammunition.
Calero also testified that Secord said that he had not profited from the total $11.4 million arms deals, but he later learned that Secord had lied and doubled the price of the AKs that he sold to the Contras.
Further media investigations revealed that the CIA maintained stateside warehouses of Soviet bloc weapons, mainly AKs, as did the Defense Department. In several instances, records showed that these AKs entered the United States from Eastern Europe and landed at the port of Wilmington, North Carolina. Many had their serial numbers removed so they could not be traced to their country of origin.
The televised hearings from May to August 1987 captured the attention of Americans as they watched North and others endure hours of probing questions. When Congress issued its findings on the Iran-Contra scandal, they said that North had been the main negotiator of the deals despite his pleas that he was only following orders from superiors. In May 1989, he was convicted of obstructing Congress and destroying government documents. His conviction was later overturned.
The results of the Iran-Contra probe—the full report was issued in January 1994, seven years after it began—never uncovered the entire story, because CIA officials refused to disclose the full extent of their involvement with the Contras. North, the principal dealmaker, also refused to answer many questions put to him, invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The report concluded, “The underlying facts of Iran/contra are that, regardless of criminality, President Reagan, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the director of central intelligence and their necessary assistants committed themselves, however reluctantly, to two programs contrary to congressional policy and contrary to national policy. They skirted the law, some of them broke the law, and almost all of them tried to cover up the President’s willful activities.”
While this was a low point in U.S. history, the real legacy of the Iran-Contra scandal was that it brought tens of thousands of AKs to Nicaragua. These arms have spread throughout Central and South America, wreaking havoc and devastation not only in these countries but also in the United States, which has become a final destination for drugs produced there.
BY 1989, EXHAUSTION WAS SETTING in among the Nicaraguan combatants, but as happens in many postwar situations, like Afghanistan and in Sierra Leone, the large number of cheap leftover arms gave people a way to survive amid the chaos. As in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other Middle Eastern countries, the weapons became a way to make a living. As the war wound down, there were widespread reports of soldiers and former soldiers armed with AKs hijacking government trucks for food. Citizens bought rifles for protection against such gangs, while others set up firing ranges so well-to-do people could fire these plentiful weapons safely, for a fee, in a convivial setting. Still others, seeking to obtain hard currency, sold caches of leftover AKs to rebels in other countries such as El Salvador.
By 1989, the civil war in El Salvador was already a decade old. The country had been ruled by a string of dictatorships since the 1930s, but the seventies saw the growth of more active guerrilla movements, most notably Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), which opposed the oppressive right-wing government. Between 1979 and 1981 about thirty thousand people were killed by government death squads, and the moderate presidency of José Napoleon Duarte from 1984 to 1989 failed to end the war. Instead, it grew even more violent.
During this time, the FMLN had received large shipments of AKs to bolster their struggle against the U.S.-backed right-wing regime. President George H. W. Bush publicly stated that the weapons were coming from Soviet-backed groups in Cuba and Nicaragua, mainly the Sandinistas. These were not trivial shipments. According to U.S. ambassador William Walker, the entire guerrilla force of six thousand to eight thousand was now reequipped with AKs and ready to renew its efforts against the government.
Walker claimed that these weapons came from Cuba, which turned out to be wrong. The White House later amended his statement, saying that the weapons were from Soviet bloc nations but the ammunition came from Cuba through Nicaragua.
As the days progressed, the story changed again. The U.S.-backed government in El Salvador never blamed the Nicaraguans, and the White House offered scant evidence to back its own claim of a Nicaraguan connection.
As it turned out, the weapons came from an unexpected source. Honduran military officials, hoping to cash in on the debris of Nicaragua’s civil war, had raided weapons caches left over by the CIA in their country. These arms originally were intended for the Contras as Congress was preparing to cut off funding. When the Contras faded from the scene, the weapons lay unused but secured. With the assistance of professional arms dealers, they found their way to left-wing rebels in El Salvador.
This influx of AKs bolstered the rebels’ morale and offered them greater firepower over the Salvadoran army, which was outfitted with M-16s from the United States. The FMLN even changed their battle tactics to take advantage of the AK’s intermediate round—7.62 × 39mm models were and are still manufactured in many Warsaw Pact countries like Romania, as well as China—which was heavier and traveled farther than the smaller M-16 round. On election day in March 1989, for example, one battle of a coordinated nationwide push by AK-armed rebel forces held government helicopters at a distance in the village of San Isidro, keeping them just out of range from supplying air support to their ground troops. This tactic was repeated throughout the country.
This and subsequent guerrilla attacks were so successful that the government had no choice but to accept a peace accord that included the FMLN and was brokered by the United Nations in 1991. A nine-month cease-fire took effect on February 1, 1992, and has held since. The last remnants of the FMLN’s military structure were dismantled as it became a legitimate political party and integrated into the government. Unfortunately, El Salvador, like its Central American neighbors, still suffers from domestic violence, gangs, street crime, and high homicide rates as AKs and other weapons remain plentiful despite arms collection and destruction programs.
In a ceremony intended to symbolize a more peaceful era for the region, Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro in September 1990 gave President George H. W. Bush an AK cut in half by a blowtorch. The weapon had been taken from a citizen as part of the country’s efforts to destroy the large numbers of small arms that still existed. (Many of these weapons were distributed wholesale by Sandinista leaders when Chamorro in 1990 beat their candidate, Daniel Ortega.)
Other countries, including Guatemala and Honduras, had similar programs to de-arm their nations, but they, like Nicaragua, met with less than stellar results. Small arms possess too much utility to be turned in. Not only can they be used for hunting and self-protection against domestic crime, but also as a hedge in case of renewed civil war or an oppressive regime taking power. The tradition of people holding small arms and the prestige associated with it was just so strong in the region; government decommissioning programs could not overcome it.
To Chamorro, a disabled AK was the perfect icon of the country’s efforts to stem violence, but despite this gesture, the cold war had left Central America awash in weapons, which were now heading southward to countries like Venezuela, Peru, and Colombia where they were slowly replacing the Belgian FN-FALs that had for decades been popular among rebel groups because of their availability. In addition, because of the now weakened and lawless condition of Central American nations, illegal arms shipments from Europe were streaming through these countries on their way to South America.
Just as it had done in the Middle East and Africa, the indestructible and cheap AK worked its way from country to country, turning small conflicts into large wars.
THESE NEWLY IMPORTED AKS were ending up in the hands of groups like the antigovernment Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the Western Hemisphere’s largest guerrilla group; the left-wing National Liberation Army (ELN); and the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), the largest federation of right-wing paramilitaries. These groups have been accused of human rights abuses, kidnappings, bombings, assassinations, drug trafficking, airline hijackings, and extortion.
FARC is by far Colombia’s largest and best-equipped guerrilla group, with almost twenty thousand members. It was formed in 1966 by survivors of a U.S.-supported raid on a Communist Party-inspired cooperative calling itself the Independent Republic of Marquetalia. It controls of about half of the country, mainly in the southeastern jungle areas and plains surrounding the Andes. FARC reached a peak of power in 1999, and the president of Colombia, Andres Pastrana, had offered to give the group a huge tract of land twice the size of New Jersey if it would end its violent activities. These negotiations broke down and fighting between government forces and FARC continued. Although FARC originally received assistance from the Soviet Union and its satellite countries, it now finances itself through kidnapping, drug dealing, and extortion. FARC often uses child soldiers, many impressed against their will, armed with AKs.
ELN was founded in 1964 by Cuban-trained Colombian students inspired by the Cuban revolution. Currently the group has fewer than four thousand members and has been dealt military setbacks by right-wing paramilitary groups such as AUC. ELN finances itself by kidnapping and holding for ransom wealthy Colombians. It has also extorted from oil companies by threatening to bomb their pipelines and facilities. It is estimated that FARC and ELN take in $200 to $400 million annually, at least half of it from drug dealing, including protection money paid by growers and other dealers.
The last major group, AUC, grew from the consolidation of other right-wing paramilitary groups in 1997, expanded rapidly to about eight thousand members, and is still growing. The group has a stronghold in northern Colombia, where it receives funding from wealthy landowners and drug traffickers, but operates throughout the country. The AUC engages in drug smuggling itself. It attacks leftist guerrilla groups as well as trade activists and human rights organizations. It often recruits from citizens who have been victims of attack from left-wing groups. Although Colombia’s army does not officially support AUC, various human rights groups have documented ties between them.
The one thing that all these groups have in common is their need for more inexpensive weapons, mainly AKs, which now are the preferred firearm because of their low cost and durability in jungle conditions. Unlike the mujahideen in Afghanistan, South American fighters and their counterparts in Central America have favored the heavier 7.62mm bullet instead of the lightweight 5.56mm or 5.45mm rounds because it tends to penetrate jungle foliage better and has a longer range to fend off government helicopters. Culturally, these fighters have been “brought up” on the larger round and are used to it.
The illegal trade in AKs and ammunition in Latin America offers intriguing views of how difficult it is to stop small-arms smuggling because of the layers of middlemen and corrupt government officials. The deals are further obfuscated by the inclusion of legal elements of arms purchases that turn illegal at some point in the transaction. By then, however, it often is too late to stop the deal. While the vast majority of illegal arms deals go unnoticed by authorities, some well-documented cases have been made public, and they offer a glimpse into the shady world of gun-running.
One incident in October 1999 began simply and legally enough but evolved into the illegal transfer of three thousand AKs and two and a half million rounds of ammunition from official Nicaraguan government warehouses to the AUC guerrilla group in Colombia. Originally a deal was cut for the legitimate transfer between the Nicaraguan National Police and a private Guatemalan arms dealer, Grupo de Representaciones Internacionales S.A., known as GIR S.A. GIR S.A. offered to trade new Israeli pistols and Uzi submachine guns for five thousand surplus AKs and two and a half million rounds of ammunition. This was a good deal for the Nicaraguan police, because they wanted the pistols and Uzis, which were more useful for police work than the AKs.
GIR S.A. found Shimon Yelinek, an Israeli arms dealer based in Panama, to buy the AKs. Yelinek said he was representing the Panamanian National Police, but his papers later turned out to be forgeries. After inspecting the weapons, Yelinek decided that the weapons were not satisfactory and threatened to scuttle the deal. After some negotiation, Yelinek and Nicaraguan army officials decided to exchange the 5,000 weapons that Yelinek deemed unsatisfactory for 3,117 AKs. Yelinek arranged for a Panamanian cargo company to pick up the weapons in Nicaragua on their ship the Otterloo, whose manifest stated it was sailing to Panama.
Instead of sailing to Panama, the ship landed in Turbo, Colombia, in November 2001—customs officials conveniently disappeared for several days while it was unloaded—and the arms ended up in the hands of the AUC, which controlled the area. The ship’s captain disappeared, and the company was dissolved several months later. The ship was later sold to a Colombian citizen.
Not knowing about this diversion, GIR S.A. started another deal with Yelinek using the same purchase order, but when authorities discovered that the first shipment had gone astray they organized a sting operation to find those responsible. GIR S.A. officials learned about the first shipment and canceled the deal before any sting could take place.
Panamanian authorities arrested Yelinek and tried him for arms diversion. His case was thrown out, though, because the court determined that his actions did not harm Panama; they took place in Nicaragua, outside of their jurisdiction.
This is a classic example of what is known as the “gray market” in small-arms trading, which rests, as you might expect, between white- and black-market arms sales. White-market trading is the legal and transparent sale of small arms. Documentation is honest and official and includes state-to-state sales as well as private sales to individuals. Black-market trading is the extreme opposite. These are completely illegal sales with no accountability or documentation and often with individuals or groups who are prohibited from buying arms under local laws or government or UN sanctions. In gray-market trading, two legitimate parties may arrange what they think is a legitimate sale—in this case the Nicaraguan National Police and GIR S.A.—but the weapons were diverted through forged documents and a series of confusing but seemingly benign tangent deals.
What makes the above example even more intriguing is that the whole operation would have remained hidden except that Carlos Castano, head of the AUC, boasted in April 2002 to a reporter from the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo that he bought the guns carried by the Otterloo from Nicaragua. In fact, he said he bought even more weapons. “This is the greatest achievement by the AUC so far,” he bragged. “Through Central America, five shipments, 13,000 rifles.” The other shipments were never discovered.
This incident of arms smuggling signaled a new, more terrible era for South America that continues today. Previously, arms imported to Colombia had been arriving in small shipments, tens or hundreds of rifles at a time, often on board private fishing vessels, speedboats traveling through swamps and rivers, or by light planes landing on dirt fields or dropping containers filled with arms. This bulk shipment proved that the combatants were becoming more sophisticated in their gun procurement, intent on rearming current members and adding recruits.
Many of these new recruits were children. More than eleven thousand child soldiers have been fighting in Colombia’s conflicts, one of the highest totals in the world, according to Human Rights Watch. At least one of every four was under eighteen, and thousands were younger than fifteen, the minimum age permitted for armed forces recruitment under the Geneva Conventions (still below the minimum age for many countries). About 80 percent of child soldiers belong to FARC or ELN, with AUC using fewer children. Most children join voluntarily, although many were recruited by force, drugged into enlistment, or saw no other opportunities for safety, food, and shelter.
A major difference between African guerrilla forces that used children and those in Colombia was the high number of girl combatants, comprising as many as one-quarter to one-half of guerrilla units, especially in FARC. Some were as young as eight years old. The reasons they joined were similar to those of boys, with sexual abuse at home being an additional factor. (A guerrilla group with an even higher girl population is the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam of Sri Lanka.) One reason why girls were acceptable in combat was that Marxist ideology (as practiced in South America) embraced equality of the sexes and female liberation, which extended to the armed revolutionary struggle.
These left-wing groups, children and all, became the seeds of large-scale narcoterrorists that today control large swaths of South America, especially in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Brazil, and threaten the stability of the Western Hemisphere.
One impetus for the increased interest among these groups in larger arms shipments during this particular time frame may have been Plan Colombia, a multibillion-dollar U.S. initiative begun in the spring of 2000. The plan had been in the works for some time and everyone knew it would be instituted. Its intention was to help Colombian authorities eradicate drug cultivation and smuggling. Insurgents considered this as a threat to their trade and began seeking larger AK purchases and increasing recruitment.
Despite its size, this instance was relatively simple compared to another case that occurred around the same time and had further-reaching implications. This involved the CIA’s top asset in Peru—that country’s chief intelligence officer—who planned to funnel AKs to FARC rebels in Colombia with the help of one of the world’s largest arms dealers. This broker was the same man who supplied weapons to Saddam Hussein during his war with Iran at the behest of the Reagan administration. The incident involved the sale of ten thousand AKs—a huge shipment for the time—and eventually led to the downfall of Peru’s government and the exile of its president to Japan.
GROWING IN SIZE AND SCOPE, FARC wanted to standardize their rifles. The group owned a mixture of weapons including different versions of AKs and FN-FALs. By outfitting most of their eighteen thousand fighters with one type of weapon, they hoped to save money by buying only one type of ammunition. Even a few pennies per round translated to big savings.
FARC had no experience handling such large shipments, so they sought help through intermediaries from Vladimiro Montesinos, commonly known as “Peru’s Rasputin” for his puppetmaster control of President Alberto Fujimori. Montesinos began his career in the army in 1965 as a cadet and studied at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas (now Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) at Fort Benning, Georgia. The school, dubbed the “School of Assassins” by its opponents, had long been criticized as a training ground for military officers of repressive right-wing Latin American nations who used techniques they learned from U.S. instructors to torture and kill political foes.
In September 1976, Montesinos stole a blank army travel form and visited the U.S. embassy in Lima, where he received a free flight to the United States. Saying that he was an aide to Prime Minister General Guillermo Arbulú, he met with State Department and CIA officials. A Peruvian general saw him give a talk at the Inter-American Defense College and reported him. Upon his return to Peru, authorities immediately arrested Montesinos, and he was placed in prison for one year for desertion and lying.
Shortly after his release in February 1978, Montesinos enrolled at San Marcos University to study law. Only a few months later, using a forged degree, he registered as a lawyer with the Superior Court of Lima and became a member of the Colegio de Abrogados de Lima, an organization similar to a bar association. His clients were Colombian drug dealers, and he became involved in the trade himself through ownership of warehouses and manufacturing facilities used by drug dealers. He also sold classified documents in 1984 to Ecuador about Peru’s weapons purchases from the Soviet Union.
Montesinos achieved a reputation as the “go-to lawyer” for anyone involved in high-level crime and corruption, and this is how he met Alberto Fujimori, a candidate in the 1990 elections accused of underpaying his taxes by undervaluing real estate sales. The accusations were so massive that the attorney general was preparing criminal charges against him. Through Montesinos’s contacts and influence, at least one witness was persuaded to change his testimony, and files that would have indicted Fujimori were altered. Montesinos also helped Fujimori produce a birth certificate proving that he was born in Peru and not Japan so he could run for president.
When Fujimori was elected president, Montesinos became his right-hand man and was secretly put in charge of the Servicio de Inteligencia Nacional (SIN), Peru’s intelligence service. By convincing Fujimori that his life was in continual danger from enemies of the state, Montesinos fed the president’s paranoia and did away with opponents who stood in their way. Through a death squad known as Grupo Colina, he solidified his position, eventually controlling Peru’s military. He undoubtedly became the most powerful person in Peru and arguably all of South America.
Montesinos went into business with the country’s drug dealers, offering them protection. At the same time, the CIA put him on their payroll at $1 million a year for ten years to fight drug trafficking. Curiously, a 1996 U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration document showed that the administration knew that Montesinos took protection money from Peruvian drug dealers, but the CIA continued to deal with him.
FARC officials figured that if anyone in the region could handle their AK purchase, it was Montesinos. Through a Miami contact, he got in touch with Jordanian officials who could fill such a large order. Montesinos showed them purchase documents signed by Peruvian army officials giving the deal the appearance of a white-market transaction. Jordanian authorities chose Lebanese-born arms broker Sarkis Soghanalian, who had worked with the CIA during the cold war, to handle the details. At the request of the Reagan administration, Soghanalian had helped Saddam Hussein purchase weapons for his war with Iran, the same weapons that were later turned against American GIs during the Gulf wars.
Jordanian authorities contacted the CIA’s chief in Amman to make sure this sale was vetted because of the close military relationship between the two countries. Soghanalian, too, who considered the United States a major customer, made certain that the CIA signed off on the sale. They did.
Even though FARC requested ten thousand AKs, the purchase order was for fifty thousand. The price came to about $75 a rifle—$55 for the weapon, $10 for shipping, and $10 for packing and handling. Soghanalian readied the first shipment of ten thousand AKs but thought it odd that the Peruvians wanted the cargo airdropped to troops near the Colombian border. Nevertheless, since Montesinos had suggested further weapons sales, for a lot more money, he went along. Later, he denied knowing that the weapons would end up in the hands of Colombian rebels, but as he was an experienced arms dealer, and a follower of world hostilities, it’s difficult to believe that he didn’t have an inkling about their final destination.
From December 1998 through April 1999, five Hungarian-registered cargo planes carried ten thousand AKs from Amman, through Algeria, Mauritania, and Cape Verde to the Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Tobago or Grenada. From there, the rifles were flown to Iquitos, Peru. The airdrops occurred in full view of U.S. radar systems and spy satellites, which were always scanning for drug traffickers. U.S. and Colombian authorities never hindered these shipments.
The plan was discovered in July 1999, when Colombian troops found AKs with East German markings. They traced them to Jordanian stockpiles, and the scheme unraveled. Soghanalian claimed that he learned from his U.S. contacts that the rifles had been sold to FARC after Montesinos missed a payment, and the arms dealer had stopped further shipments pending his inquiry.
As more details emerged about Montesinos’s arming of Colombian rebels, Fujimori’s administration began to fall apart. In public statements, Montesinos said he did not know how the weapons ended up in Colombia, and even boasted that his office had arrested Peruvian army officers involved in the airlifts. But by then it was too late. Two days after videos emerged showing Montesinos bribing a congressman to support the president, Fujimori announced his intention to resign, and Montesinos fled to Venezuela. He was later extradited to Peru, where he was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years on various charges including bribing TV executives to support Fujimori. Authorities charged him in connection with the AKs sale, but he has not yet been tried. Fujimori escaped to Japan, faxed his resignation, and vowed to return someday to run again for president.
Why would Montesinos, a staunch anti-Communist, sell AKs to left-wing Colombian rebels? In public, he and Fujimori often complained that the Colombian government was too soft on rebel groups.
Several theories have been suggested, with the simplest being greed. Although Montesinos had already amassed a fortune estimated at more than $260 million, he could probably make a decent profit selling fifty thousand AKs. The other possibility, put forth by critics of the CIA, is that a well-armed FARC presented an increased danger to U.S. interests. Seeing this new threat, Congress would be obliged to pass the budget for the controversial Plan Colombia. These funds would benefit CIA and CIA-connected private contractors who would be used for some of the work. Montesinos had been on the CIA payroll for some time and was a cooperative operative.
A more intriguing possibility, one that embraces all the others, hinges on the configuration of these particular East German AKs and the rounds they fired. The surplus rifles were an AK version known as MpiKM that used the 7.62 × 39mm ammunition as opposed to the 7.62 × 51mm, which was more common in South America and therefore less expensive. At the time, a 7.62 × 39mm bullet cost about 5,000 Colombian pesos ($2 U.S.) and the 7.62 × 51mm cost about 1,000 pesos (42 cents). Some people suggested that Montesinos had perpetrated the perfect deal. Not only would he have made a personal profit, he would have curried favor with his CIA handlers, and as a bonus he would have weakened FARC’s financial and strategic position by forcing them to buy more expensive and hard-to-get ammunition in the future.
The fact that the Colombian army began finding these weapons only a few months after the last drop bolsters this scenario, as they knew through their surveillance, perhaps supplied by Montesinos and U.S. intelligence sources, where and when the packages were dropped. With Montesinos involved in domestic scandals now made public, the CIA was perfectly willing to turn him out. This clandestine scheme injured FARC, but it also helped to destroy Fujimori’s administration.
Without ever being used in battle, these AKs brought down a government and changed the face of South America.
With Montesinos and Fujimori gone, Peru is undergoing democratization. The executive branch is becoming more transparent and the Congress is acting as a counterbalance. Both branches are working to weed out corruption and hold accountable the judicial branch of government. Unfortunately, the rebels are also getting stronger and more efficient in their drug smuggling, as evidenced by the price of cocaine, which wholesaled in the United States for $38 a gram in 2003, down from $48 in 2000 and $100 in 1986.
The only bright spot for the Colombian government is that the rebels are running low on 7.62 × 39mm ammunition. In June 2004 former political commandante of FARC Carlos Ploter spoke before the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., and noted, “FARC brought great quantities of AK-47s for which there is no ammunition.” He also testified before a congressional committee that week about FARC’s narcoterrorist activities, saying that drug money was distracting many in the group from pursuing their fight for social justice. In other words, politics was taking a backseat to profits.
THE AK WILL ONCE MORE CHANGE the face of South America. In February 2005, Venezuela’s Marxist president Hugo Chávez confirmed the largest small-arms purchase in South American history. Having survived a 2002 coup, which he claimed was supported and instigated by the United States, Chávez said his government would buy one hundred thousand AKs and ammunition from Russia.
While U.S. officials expressed immediate concern when the deal was announced—Venezuela’s standing army was only thirty-two thousand troops and about thirty thousand national guard—it wasn’t until they learned the exact type of AK that they became truly alarmed. Once again, the technical aspects of the weapon played an important role in changing the political landscape.
Venezuela’s military planned to purchase AK-103s and AK-104s, which were manufactured as part of Russia’s plan after the breakup of the Soviet Union to export small arms to raise hard currency. Desperately in need of money, the Russians wanted to capitalize on their expertise and brand recognition. The AK-100 series, as it was known, featured only minor improvements on the AKM, but it offered several benefits. The Russians had hoped that by producing about a half dozen models with different ammunition choices, Rosoboronexport, Russia’s state exporter, could penetrate new markets worldwide, including NATO nations, with its AK-108, for example, which shoots the 5.56mm NATO round, the same as the M-16. The marketing plan was largely a failure, however, because the Warsaw Pact countries, which were once the largest customers of Soviet arms, had already upgraded their plants and were producing their own AKs. In addition, because of the AK’s almost indestructible nature, and the recent unleashing on the world of Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union arsenals, the market was flooded, at least for the time being. Most of the 100-series models were relegated to storage.
This situation produced a windfall for Chávez, because the Russians had stockpiled thousands of these weapons that they could not get rid of and were willing to sell cheap. Chávez’s interest in the 103s and 104s, which used 7.62 × 39mm ammunition, was at first a surprise to military observers, because the country had a history of using FN-FALs, which shoot the more easily obtained and cheaper 7.62 × 51mm round, the so-called full-sized NATO round. With this large a purchase, he obviously planned to replace the country’s entire arsenal.
But why?
It only took a few days for small-arms experts to suggest that Chávez also was planning to supply FARC, which was desperately seeking this specific ammunition for their AKs. Not only was Chávez sympathetic to FARC’s Marxist ideology, but relations between his country and the Colombian government had been at an all-time low since December 2004, when Colombian troops snatched FARC leader Rodrigo Granda from inside Venezuela. Chávez was incensed that neighboring Colombia would violate his country’s sovereignty.
The 7.62 × 51mm ammunition was used by NATO rifles such as the FN-FAL and often was easier to acquire in regional black markets, but it also was a proxy for Western nations and ideology. By moving FARC toward a bona fide Soviet-style round, the 7.62 × 39mm, Chávez was helping FARC make a true anti-Western statement, a nuance not lost on U.S. military analysts.
Relations between the United States and Venezuela were becoming strained as well, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld saying that he thought the purchases would destabilize South America and lead to a regional arms race. Chávez insisted that the weapons would be used by the regular army and planned “citizen militias” to defend the nation against its enemies. As tempers flared, Chávez’s government unexpectedly ended a long-standing military exchange program with the United States. U.S. military advisors were told to leave the country. Chávez also said that he would cut off oil to the United States—which imported 15 percent of its supply from Venezuela—if the U.S. government attempted to force him out of office.
U.S. officials paid less attention to other items on Chávez’s shopping list, including fifty MiG29 jets from Russia and Tucano jets from Brazil. The Pentagon considered these legitimate purchases, because they could be used for border protection and other sovereignty-related activities. Not worried that these large armaments could be turned against the United States or its allies, one State Department official said, “We [can] shoot down MiGs.”
The AKs were a different matter. After decades of underestimating the importance of AKs and focusing on larger weapons, U.S. officials appeared to be reversing their ingrained notions. The “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia may have been a factor. They acknowledged privately the devastating effect that AKs could bring to a region and how difficult it was for conventional armies like that of the United States to fight against soldiers armed with them. Even if Chávez intended to deploy them within Venezuela’s borders, Rumsfeld and others expressed concern that they could end up in the hands of drug dealers and other criminals. Speculation also arose and was later confirmed that Chávez was planning to build a factory to produce 7.62 × 39mm ammunition.
Rumsfeld discussed the AK purchase in every public forum available, hoping to draw out specific answers from Chávez about his intentions. At a news conference in Brazil during a hastily organized visit to South America, Rumsfeld said, “I can’t imagine what’s going to happen to 100,000 AKs. I can’t imagine why Venezuela needs 100,000 AKs. And I just personally hope [the sale] doesn’t happen, and I can’t imagine that if it did happen, that it would be good for the hemisphere.”
Chávez did not immediately respond, but Kalashnikov felt compelled to counter Rumsfeld’s official U.S. position. While attending the 2005 IDEX international arms exhibition in Abu Dhabi, an annual trade show that brings together the world’s buyers and sellers of all kinds of weapons from small arms to tanks and fighter jets, Kalashnikov said, “We have been blamed and will be blamed for many things. We need to treat these accusations critically, as they are, as a rule, prompted by the Americans’ desire to bar us [Russia] from entering new markets. I believe we need to continue to promote our Russian weapons on foreign markets, because they must safeguard peace and friendship between nations.”
For his entire life, Kalashnikov had purposely kept his distance from politics. He disliked politicians, blaming them for the misuse of his weapon. However, the importance of this mammoth sale to the Russian economy drove the usually nonpolitical Kalashnikov to denounce American foreign policy.
What a change this was from the naive, less sophisticated Kalashnikov who had visited the United States in 1990, the first time he had ever been allowed to travel outside of Russia.