Narconews: Day 3 of Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance"

With the publication of Day Three of Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" series, the restored Dark Alliance website is now fully online. Narco News still mourns Gary's death on December 10, 2004, and is pleased to be able to remember him by giving his masterpiece a permanent home on the Internet. This project has only been possible with the help of Gary's family, as well as the support of The Fund for Authentic Journalism.

In his third set of reports, published originally on August 20, 1996 and republished today in Narco News, Gary tackles the racial aspects of his story, asking why the black community has been so disproportionately hit by the crack epidemic. He writes:

"Nothing epitomizes the drug war’s uneven impact on black Americans more clearly than the intertwined lives of Ricky Donnell Ross, a high school dropout, and his suave cocaine supplier, Danilo Blandon, who has a master’s degree in marketing and was one of the top civilian leaders in California of an anti-communist guerrilla army formed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency."

While Ross sits in prison, Blandon leads a comfortable, U.S.-subsidized life back in Nicaragua as a member of the new business class there. Blandon’s white or well-connected, contra-allied associates in both Central and North America also remain free. Webb ties this in to the widely noted disparity in sentencing between whites and blacks in U.S. courts and the general trends that have caused African Americans to bear the brunt of the war on drugs in the U.S. The Dark Alliance story had a particularly strong impact in California’s black community, in large part because of Webb’s ability to lay out such connections between oppressive U.S. foreign policy in the 1980s and the contemporary problems that community faced.

Day Three also marks the unveiling (and unleashing) of the full Dark Alliance website, complete with the additional documentation, multimedia exhibits, reader forums, follow-up stories, and links that made it so ahead of its time.

Read it all here, at the Narco News Bulletin:

http://www.narconews.com/Issue38/article1370.html

From somewhere in a country called América,

Dan Feder
Managing Editor
The Narco News Bulletin
http://www.narconews.com

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