continuing with Gary Webbs 'Dark Alliance'

[.... When they found Dr. Hugo Spadafora in September 1985, they found everything but his head. The rest of him had been tied up in a U.S. mail sack and dumped under a bridge on the border of Costa Rica and Panama.

His body bore evidence of unimaginable tortures. The thigh muscles had been neatly sliced so he could not close his legs, and then something had been jammed up his rectum, tearing it apart. His testicles were swollen horribly, the result of prolonged garroting, his ribs were broken, and then, while he was still alive, his head had been sawed off with a butcher's knife.

The horrors of Hugo Spadafora's death brought thousands of people into the streets of Panama City, where they formed a miles-long human chain of outrage and lament. The dashing young doctor had been a hero to many Panamanians— an unusual mix of revolutionary warrior and middle-class professional.

When he was murdered, Spadafora had been fighting for the Contras in Costa Rica, at the side of his old friend Eden Pastora. They had fought together in the 1970s against the Somoza dictatorship, with Spadafora leading an international brigade of jungle fighters—the Brigada Internacional Simón Bolívar—in support of Pastora's southern forces. After the Sandinistas became too oppressive for Pastora's liking, he joined the CIA and took over command of a Contra army in Costa Rica. Hugo Spadafora gave up his medical practice in Panama and, with his wife Winy, moved to Costa Rica to take up arms with Pastora once again— this time against their old Marxist comrades....

.....It didn't take DEA agent Celerino Castillo III very long to discover that something very strange was going on at Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador. Two days into his new job at the DEA's regional office in Guatemala City in October 1985, Castillo said the agent-in-charge, Robert Stia, took him aside and told him that the U.S. government was running a covert operation at the air base. Castillo should be careful not to interfere with it.

It struck the former Texas policeman as odd advice. Why would a DEA field agent need to be warned about interfering with a legitimate government operation? Castillo was there to fight drug dealers. Whatever they were doing at the military airfield outside San Salvador couldn't possibly concern him. At any rate, it wasn't as if he was going to be spending a lot of time in El Salvador. Though he was the country's only DEA agent, Castillo lived and worked in neighboring Guatemala and had duties there also.

Besides, El Salvador in late 1985 had all the makings of a very sorry posting. The war-torn country produced no drugs, and as far as anyone knew there were no major drug rings operating there. It was of such little concern to the American government that the DEA never opened an office in the country. If El Salvador was anything, it was a resting place for cocaine mules on their way north....]
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2019/07/part-8-dark-alliancethis-guy-talks-to.html