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WASHINGTON (Reuter) - Two former Nicaraguan rebel leaders, testifying at an emotional hearing on charges that have roiled black communities, said Tuesday they knew of no CIA complicity in drug trafficking in the United States.
Former Contra leader Adolfo Calero and Eden Pastora, former leader of the so-called Southern Front in Nicaragua, testified at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing interrupted by shouted statements, applause and jeers from the audience.
The committee and high government officials are investigating charges made in a series of newspaper articles in August purporting to trace the origins of the U.S. crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles and other cities to a pair of Nicaraguan drug dealers linked to U.S.-backed Contra rebels.
The allegation in California's San Jose Mercury News, fingering convicted drug trafffickers Danilo Blandon and Norwin Meneses, created a furor in America's black community, which has been devastated by crack.
Committee chairman Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, said Blandon told the committee in closed testimony Monday that at the suggestion of Meneses he trafficked drugs to Los Angeles to help the Contras, at first sending the profits to Meneses.
But Specter said Blandon testified he had never had any contact with the CIA and that Pastora and Contra Leader Enrico Bermudez had no knowledge of his drug trafficking.
Pastora, known as Commandante Zero during the Nicaraguan civil war, acknowledged receiving two contributions of $3,000 each from Blandon, whom he met met three or four times in the mid-1980s and who presented himself as opposed to Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government.
Blandon later gave him two pickup trucks to help him out when he was in financial difficulties as a fisherman in Costa Rica after quitting the war in Nicaragua. He had also lived in a house in Costa Rica owned by Blandon.
"I did not know he was a drug trafficker but I did know he was a good friend," Pastora said. He also said he received two helicopters from Cuban exiles in Miami and found out only later that they were donated by drug traffickers.
Asked about any CIA complicity in drug trafficking, Pastora said, "I have no knowledge of anything of the sort."
Calero said he met Meneses in San Francisco in the early 1980s in connection with a gathering of Nicaraguan exiles. He said he had received "not one cent" from Meneses but had been told by a laughing Bermudez that Meneses had traveled to Honduras taking a crossbow for use by the Contras.
"I had no idea he was engaged in drug traffic," Calero said. He added that he had never heard of CIA officials "looking the other way" on trafficking. "I would say that all of this story ... rather than about crack, is about crap."
Calero's statement brought cries of "Coverup!" from spectators in the hearing room, many of them African Americans. Black leaders including Los Angeles Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters were in the front row.
Specter ordered police not to interfere when two spectators rose to make speeches amid repeated applause. He also invited Waters to sit with the committee and question the two witnesses.