" wheresover the CIA putteth in its meathooks upon the world"

July 3, 2002

Jungle Fever
Bush's Bolivian Mercenaries

by Chris Floyd

[...] There, the Bush Regime is paying--lock, stock and barrel--for a band
of local mercenaries taking part in Bolivia's campaign to eradicate coca
production in the jungle region of Chapare, the Washington Post reports
this week.

The mercenaries are attached to regular army units, so they are not,
officially, "paramilitaries." But the many human rights charges they've
spawned--murders, beatings, rapes, torture, illegal detentions--sound like
that old sweet song of yesteryear, when Reagan-Bush proxy armies prowled
the Latin American night, killing tens of thousands of innocent people to
keep Yankee investments and American-backed elites safe from riff-raff.
[...]

http://www.counterpunch.org/


Another effect -- to which Pynchon seems to allude in Vineland -- is that
the coke and heroin traffickers who are not targeted by US forces wind up
with new business opportunities, sort of like corporate welfare for the
underground economy you might say, that not-altogether-invisible hand
shaping markets and bringing order out of chaos, or, as Washington says in
M&D, "Markets appearing, with their unwritten Laws, upon ev'ry patch of
open ground, power beginning to sort itself out" (M&D 281), which is, by
the way, a direct reference to the Ohio Company with "our own Army" with a
charter, "Out in the wild Anarchy of the Forest, we alone had the coherence
and discipline to see this land develop'd as it should be" (281), although
that makes it sound even more like US intervention in cocaland punishing
one and helping another trafficker, to my ears anyway.

"Harken unto me, read thou my lips, for verily I say that wheresover the
CIA putteth in its meathooks upon the world, there also are to be found
those substances which God may have created but the U.S. Code hath
decidedto control. Get me? Now old Bush used to be head of CIA, so you
figure it out."
--Vineland, p. 354

This is the lead in to an oft-repeated theory that Bush with his former CIA
connections was helping to manipulate the coke market, in part to reward
death squads and other anti-Communist paramilitaries in Central America.
I'm not claiming this is true, but it is true that a lot of people believe
it to be true, and maybe that amounts to the same thing in Pynchon's world.

"that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we
risk, each day, losing our forbears in forever,-- not a Chain of single
Links, for one broken Link could lose us All,-- rather, a great disorderly
Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the
Mnemonick Deep, with only their Desitnation in common."
-M&D, p. 349