aide Ollie North’s diaries were riddled with sinister notes—“wanted aircraft to go to Bolivia to pick up paste, want aircraft to pick up 1,500 kilos”—and the trail stopped just short of Bush himself.^[3]to pick up 1,500 kilos." Aug. 9, 1985: "DC_6 which is being used for runs (to supply the Contras) out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into the U.S." July 12, 1985: "$14 million to finance Supermarket [a weapons storehouse in Honduras] came from drugs."    Then came the revelation that Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega had been on the CIA payroll throughout his brutal career.  When Noriega was indicted in the U.S. for turning Panama into a free trade zone for drugs, Bush was hard pressed to explain the photos of himself and Noriega chatting it up in Panama at a time when Bush had to know the general was up to his ears in the cocaine trade.^[4]

Both Dole and Dukakis hammered Bush for his drug war failures throughout the ‘88 campaign, and since that turned out to be one of the few issues that struck a chord, the debate fueled public anxiety, which in turn animated Congress.^[5] When a CBS-New York Times poll showed half the people said drug traffic was the number one international problem, Democrats and Republicans alike tried to outbid each other in an orgy of breast-beating.^[6]  By the time of the party conventions in August, Congress had offered up some 250 new anti-drug bills.^[7] 

But as Bush’s triumphant motorcade moved up Pennsylvania Avenue that winter afternoon, the seeds of destruction for his latest anti-drug campaign were already taking root in the Peruvian jungles. Three thousand miles to the south, where the headwaters of the Amazon spring from the Andean Cordillera, an aging Vietnam-era Huey was choppering through the jungle haze, and in the doorway, like a haunting snapshot of another era, a DEA agent in green fatigues cradled an AR-15 automatic as he scanned the undulating landscape. “Where you see fires burning,” he shouted, “that’s where they’re going to plant coke.”^[8]  Ahead, half-a-dozen plumes of blue smoke rose from the dense canopy as the cocaleros down below slashed and burned fresh clearings in the jungle.  And as far as the eye could see, dappling mountain slopes and deep ravines, the fields of mature coca plants stood out like lime-colored pieces of a jigsaw puzzle on a green felt table. Peruvian officials estimated they were losing