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Gary Webb was a news reporter for the Mercury News. He also set an allegation against the CIA, which potentially could be the most damaging accusation it had ever faced. Webb’s story portrayed a CIA that for a good decade had allowed Contra drug trafficker to create a crack cocaine market in African-American neighborhoods in order to have funding for a guerrilla war in the Nicaraguan jungles.
Time reported that Webb had described a Contra-run drug operation outside of the San Francisco Bay area that was moving loads of drugs into the hands of Cripps and Bloods street gangs, and those profits went towards the Contra war effort. The CIA was not only responsible for the inner-city spread of crack; it was also responsible for the existence of the “Uzi-toting 'gangstas' of Compton and South-Central Los Angeles."
CIA working with the Contras?
Within the same Time article, Abraham Miller stated, “Without the CIA, there might not have been the wholesale warehousing in America's penal system of the better part of an entire generation of young, black males, victims of the drug wars. Every ghetto gun battle, drive-by shooting, and innocent child fallen to a stray bullet in a gang-related incident was now in some measure the CIA's responsibility.” According to Miller, Abraham H. Those African-Americans who bought and distributed the drugs and also bought the automatic weapons that flowed at the end of the Contra pipeline were also victims of the “CIA-orchestrated conspiracy designed to use the black community as pawns in the Reagan and Bush administrations' attempts to dislodge the Sandinistas' revolutionary, Marxist government.”
