The San Jose Mercury News published Gary Webb's ground breaking three-part investigative series revealing how the CIA allegedly facilitated cocaine importation during the Reagan administration to secretly fund Nicaraguan Contra rebels.
The series, known as the 'Dark Alliance' exposé, sparked significant controversy and raised serious questions about government.
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Gary Webb's groundbreaking "Dark Alliance" series, published in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996, exposed alleged connections between the CIA, Nicaraguan Contras, and the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles.
Twenty years ago this month, on December 10, 2004, former San Jose Mercury News investigative reporter Gary Webb died by apparent suicide, following a stretch of depression.
The subject of the 2014 film 'Kill the Messenger', Webb had left the newspaper in 1997 after his career was systematically destroyed because he had done what journalists are supposed to do: speak truth to power.
In August 1996, Webb penned a three-part series for the Mercury News (8/18–20/96) that documented how profits from the sale of crack cocaine in Los Angeles in the 1980s had been funnelled to the Contras, the right-wing, CIA-backed mercenary army responsible for helping to perpetrate, to borrow Noam Chomsky’s words, “large-scale terrorist war” against Nicaragua.
At the same time, the crack epidemic had devastated Black communities in South Central LA—which meant that Webb’s series generated understandable uproar among Black Americans across the country