Narco-Nicaraguan Case Study

North also helped a Honduran general, José Bueso Rosa, receive a drastically reduced sentence after he was busted in 1984 by the FBI for a $40 million cocaine shipment. Rosa had been heavily involved with the Contras and he planned to use parts of the drug profits to assassinate the liberal Honduran President Roberto Suazo Córdoba. That plan was later described by the Justice Department as the “most significant case of narco-terrorism yet discovered.”
On the other hand, Oliver North submitted the name of Jack Terrell, a military trainer of the Contras, to the FBI as a potential terrorist after Terrell informed investigators about the drug shipments at John Hull’s ranch. John Hull, an American who owned a ranch in northern Costa Rica near the Nicaraguan border, wasn’t some American expatriate pensioner. Instead, he received $10,000 a month from North’s payroll as an intelligence operative. Various sources corroborated that Hull’s ranch was a primary transit point for Contra pilots/drug traffickers. In fact, the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations heard testimonies of Costa Rican law enforcement officials who said they were pressured to not investigate the Contras operations along the northern border.
Costa Rican authorities eventually investigated the drug and gun running activity on

couldn’t arm the Contra rebels, but an exemption was granted for providing “humanitarian aid.” Hence, the State Department established a Nicaraguan Humanitarian Aid Office (NHAO). However, Oliver North supervised the program and the NHAO served as a cover for shipping weapons to the rebels. Plus, the NHAO contracted those services to various companies, many of which were fronts for drug traffickers. For instance, Frigorificos de Puntarenas, a Costa Rican shrimp company, was paid $237,000 to transport $27 million of humanitarian aid. One of the principles of the company was Ramon Milian Rodriguez, a top accountant for the Medellín