Hector Berrellez — Frontier Partisan Badass

“Hector was an old-school, dedicated and fearless lawman. I’m glad he was on our side.”

– Ed Heath, former Supervisor, DEA, Mexico

An extensive interview with former DEA agent Hector Berrellez just dropped on YouTube in multiple parts. Hector Berrellez is a 100-proof modern-day Frontier Partisan badass — a gunslinger and a truthteller. The truths he tells are some of the darkest and dirtiest in American history: CIA complicity in cocaine smuggling operations into the United States, and the 1985 torture and murder of DEA agent Kiki Camarena.

No matter how hard the Deep State tries to shove this stuff down the memory hole, it won’t go away — because too many solid cops who worked dope and ran into roadblocks thrown up by spooks are willing to tell the truth.

Arizona borderland Sheriff David Hathaway used to be a DEA agent. He debriefed a CIA contract pilot on the murder of Camarena. And, working in Bolivia, his DEA team got crossways with the Agency when they tried to arrest a major trafficker. Give a listen to Hathaway on The Border Chronicle Podcast:

Is the CIA really importing and selling drugs in the US ? Yes! absolutely, and I witnessed it firsthand. And it sounds incredible, it sounds like the thing of a spy novel, a fiction, an action-suspense movie. I really experienced it. I really saw it to be true. So that for me, it took the wind out of my sails. Wait a minute, I work for one branch of the federal government and we are investigating another branch of the federal government, that is you know, smuggling cocaine.

The CIA doesn’t have any end goal. The DEA for all its shortcomings, at least has goal of arresting people, giving them their day in court, prosecuting them, presenting evidence to a jury. But the CIA has no end goal, other than perpetuating their foreign wars and funding them illegally or however they need to do it. So that was a real wake up call for me.

Coincidentally, on Tuesday morning, Jack Carr posted on the anniversary of the 1953 CIA/MI6 coup that toppled the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh. The blowback from that operation led directly to the 1979 Iranian Revolution and four decades of proxy war between the U.S. and Iran. Carr notes that CIA did their best to deny involvement:

The first U.S. government documents related to Ajax were first released in 1981 in response to an ACLU lawsuit and again 1989, but all mentions of CIA involvement were redacted. Then, on August 19th 2013, sixty years after the “successful” coup, the National Security Archives released documents that for the first time publicly confirmed CIA involvement. A further release of documents was scheduled for 2015 but were delayed until 2017 due to negotiations with Iran. It has been confirmed that many documents and telegrams from that period have been destroyed by the CIA to protect “sources and methods.” Many documents related to the 1953 coup were destroyed in the early sixties because CIA safes “were too full.” Upon learning that the agency had destroyed most of the files related to the 1953 coup, former CIA Director James Woolsey called it “a terrible breach of faith with the American people and their ability to understand their own history.” This 1953 coup orchestrated by U.S. intelligence would set the conditions for the 1979 Iranian Revolution and usher in the next 40 years of strained U.S.-Iranian relations in what amounts to a proxy war which continues today. Its reverberations continue to be felt throughout the region, and in the post-World War II era of WMD, the world. Ironically, CIA involvement in the coup was not a secret anywhere on earth other than within the CIA itself – throughout the entire world it is called a “coup.” See no evil. How much do you trust your government? What can we learn from this “legacy of ashes?”

What, indeed?

I really don’t want to go into the weeds of contemporary politics here, but some things must be said: In these strange and polarized times, just about anything you say can be construed as some kind of code word or dog whistle that speaks to one or the other side of a binary political equation. The term “Deep State” is now derided by folks on the left, because it’s a MAGA buzzword. Ironically, the people who were most ardent about exposing the Deep State were once those of the left.

Whose interests does it serve to pretend that a Deep State doesn’t exist? You got it.

The greatest danger to the Republic is the metastasizing of unaccountable power — and the unwillingness to tell the truth about it. That makes the likes of Hector Berrellez and Sheriff Hathaway Frontier Partisan heroes.