X Gonzalez Quotes

At those airfields, cocaine was reportedly loaded onto planes to be later dropped near an “Atlantic coast port,” where it was concealed on shrimp boats and ultimately unloaded in Miami. U.S. officials who monitored drug traffic from Colombia to the United States through Central America told the AP that they began receiving “reliable” reports of the operation as early as November 1984 after a Contra leader named Sebastian Gonzalez Mendiola was arrested and indicted in Costa Rica for drug trafficking. Another Contra leader, unnamed in the AP’s investigation, reportedly informed U.S. authorities that he had been approached by Colombian traffickers and offered $50,000 to guard a one-hundred-kilo cocaine shipment. In exchange for turning in the Colombian smugglers, he asked for $50,000 from the U.S. Embassy. When the request was rejected, he reportedly went forward with the smuggling arrangement and faced no consequences from U.S. authorities.

While the men at Attica hoped that powerful people such as State Senator John Dunne still might do something on their behalf, there was little consensus regarding what to do if this effort also failed to bring some meaningful improvements to their facility. The disparate political factions in the yard had been talking about this very question for some time now—activists like Sam Melville from the Weather Underground (a revolutionary organization committed to fighting racism and imperialism), Black Panthers like Tommy Hicks, Black Muslims like Richard X Clark, and men like Mariano “Dalou” Gonzalez from the Young Lords Party (a grassroots activist organization working in cities like New York and Chicago to improve conditions for Puerto Ricans).1 Still, no new strategy had been agreed upon. By early September 1971, however, and after Oswald’s taped message, all of them could agree on one crucial point: most men at Attica were now at a breaking point. Just about anything might cause this place to explode.