The departments of Justice and Homeland Security are covering it up.

Congress has buried its collective head (or possibly another body part) in the sand and refused to investigate the cover-up because it offers no political favor.

And the mainstream media has chosen to avoid any mention of this cover-up — which conceals the U.S. government’s role in torture and murder — because it does not fit nicely into their pro drug-war script.

But despite this wall of silence, the victims in the House of Death mass murder continue to reach out from the grave and bang on the door of justice.

Recently, fellow journalist and Narco News compadre Dan Feder contacted me to bring to my attention a very interesting news report that popped up on a TV station in Bogotá, Colombia.

Dan provides the following translation of the article from the TV station’s Web site:

Over the past 17 years since its creation, probably no other initiative has done more in seeking to coordinate the resources of federal, state and local law enforcement in the so-called War on Drugs than the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) program.

HIDTA, which operates offices across the United States, is a federally funded program with an annual budget of some $225 million that is administered by the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). Its mission is to enlist the power of law enforcement “teamwork” to fight drug trafficking in key areas of the United States.

But this idyllic model of law enforcement camaraderie focused on disrupting the bad boys of the narco-trafficking world appears to have more than a few bad apples of its own — stemming from the same vice that fuels the illegal drug trade: the quest for the easy buck.

In a Congressional hearing today marking the height of hypocrisy in Washington, Senators on both sides of the aisle beat their chests over the long prison terms doled out to two Border Patrol agents who shot a drug smuggler in the rump and then covered up evidence of the shooting.

The U.S. Attorney on the hot seat for the prosecutions today was Johnny Sutton, who also helped to spearhead the cover-up of the U.S. government’s complicity in a dozen murders in Mexico – a case dubbed the House of Death. The victims, with the help of a U.S. government informant, were tortured, murdered and then buried in the backyard of a house in Juarez.

But the House of Death was not on the agenda today in the hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Instead, this was a day to feign bipartisanship (likely as part of some pre-arranged barter involving pork-related votes). And it was a day to make political hay on the immigration issue — an opportunity for Republicans and Democrats alike to wave the flag over border security. In that context, asking questions about the U.S. government’s complicity in the mass murder of Mexican citizens doesn’t send the right signals, I suppose.

Three anti-immigrant groups joined forces to bring their white-privilege road show to the city of San Antonio on Saturday afternoon, June 30. They assembled their troops in the Alamo City to stage a street protest in front of the offices of U.S. Attorney Johnny “House of Death” Sutton.

 

As the immigration reform legislation reaches a critical circuit in the U.S. Senate, it is not inappropriate to raise an important question that all Senators must consider when they vote.

Over the past year, there have been numerous federal operations, carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), where thousands of immigrants have been rounded up in surprise workplace raids — a number of them likely not even reported in the national press.

In many of those cases, the children of the immigrants, a number of them U.S. citizens, were at school or in daycare when the raids came down.

Their parents were whisked off to immigration detention centers around the country and many have since been deported back to their native countries.

But what has happened to the children — again, some certainly born in the United States and legally U.S. citizens? The mainstream press doesn’t seem to have connected all those dots — nor have most of our political leaders.

Fear mongering is a trick of the trade in the battle to suppress the human rights of immigrant populations. It has long been that way.

As an example, check out this doozy from one of our former U.S. presidents:

The laws should be rigidly enforced which prohibit the immigration of a servile class to compete with American labor, with no intention of acquiring citizenship, and bringing with them and retaining habits and customs repugnant to our civilization. - Grover Cleveland, First Inaugural Address (Wednesday, March 4, 1885)

Sound strangely familiar to the venom now being spewed forth by the anti-immigration forces of today?

Following the inner-workings of the Mexican narco-trafficking business is like playing in a three-card Monte tournament in a dark back alley of a very tough neighborhood. Only the dealers know where the real cards are at any given time, despite press and law enforcement reports to the contrary.

I’ll be the first to admit I fall into the same trap in this game. It’s very difficult, likely impossible, to know where the right cards are at any given time, and that is by design. The great outlaws of the narco-trafficking shadow lands, enigmatic figures like Vicente Carrillo Fuentes and Joaquin "el Chapo" Guzman, have attained notorious folk-hero status in Mexico and beyond for that very reason.

But another factor in the difficulty of following the cards is the reality that the alliances in the narco-trafficking business are constantly shifting, because so much is at stake — power, money and life itself. But there are some clues that can be examined to help us to better follow the dealers’ hands.

I’ve been covering the House of Death mass murder story for more than three years now, and along the way ran across a little subplot called the Bogotá Connection. Both stories revolve around the misuse of U.S. government informants and the treachery that characterizes their activities.

Both stories also reveal the inner workings of the real drug war, not the script sold to us by the mass-narcotic media, and both stories demonstrate that the toll of that war is measured in blood, corpses and government indifference to, if not outright complicity in, corruption.

But I have long past the point of believing my reporting on these matters will, or even can, change anything in a fundamental way, particularly our own government’s insane drug policy, which seems to reward, even encourage, the corruption and death, from the top levels of power down to the street. The allure of money seems to trump justice and integrity in almost all cases.

Rarely do we get a front row seat in the theater of power when the curtain is pulled back to reveal the set design as it is under construction.

But, occasionally, despite the best efforts of the show’s producers, some of the stage hands do, quite by mistake, pull back that curtain a bit as they are moving around the sets on the stage, and the plain truth of the grand theater illusion is revealed.

In the case of the House of Death mass murder and cover-up, which has been the subject of critical reviews by Narco News over the past three years, the role of the bumbling theater hands in this latest act happens to be played by two top DEA officials — who were charged with helping to clean up the stage in the wake of the mayhem in Juarez, Mexico.