Day Three of Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance"
June 30, 2005
Gary Webb - Presente
Please Distribute Widely
With the publication of Day Three of Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" series, the restored Dark Alliance website is now fully
online. Narco News still mourns Gary's death on December 10, 2004, and is pleased to be able to remember him by giving
his masterpiece a permanent home on the Internet. This project has only been possible with the help of Gary's family, as
well as the support of The Fund for Authentic Journalism.
In his third set of reports, published originally on August 20, 1996 and republished today in Narco News, Gary tackles
the racial aspects of his story, asking why the black community has been so disproportionately hit by the crack
epidemic. He writes:
"Nothing epitomizes the drug war’s uneven impact on black Americans more clearly than the intertwined lives of Ricky
Donnell Ross, a high school dropout, and his suave cocaine supplier, Danilo Blandon, who has a master’s degree in
marketing and was one of the top civilian leaders in California of an anti-communist guerrilla army formed by the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency."
While Ross sits in prison, Blandon leads a comfortable, U.S.-subsidized life back in Nicaragua as a member of the new
business class there. Blandon’s white or well-connected, contra-allied associates in both Central and North America also
remain free. Webb ties this in to the widely noted disparity in sentencing between whites and blacks in U.S. courts and
the general trends that have caused African Americans to bear the brunt of the war on drugs in the U.S. The Dark
Alliance story had a particularly strong impact in California’s black community, in large part because of Webb’s ability
to lay out such connections between oppressive U.S. foreign policy in the 1980s and the contemporary problems that
community faced.
Day Three also marks the unveiling (and unleashing) of the full Dark Alliance website, complete with the additional
documentation, multimedia exhibits, reader forums, follow-up stories, and links that made it so ahead of its time.
Read it all here, at the Narco News Bulletin:
From somewhere in a country called América,
Dan Feder
Managing Editor
The Narco News Bulletin