It seems as if every cozy little town contains a deep, dark secret that most residents don’t know or choose to ignore. My home town, Bryant, has secrets of its own. The secrets revolve around the murder of two Bryant seniors, Kevin Ives and Don Henry, and drug smuggling in the eighties. The two deaths have remained unsolved, but have sparked public interest in the morals and intentions of those we elect to represent and protect us.

I grew up listening to the stories my mom told me of her two friends who were run over by a train 29 years ago. Sheltering me from what the truth might be, my mother never told me about the conspiracy behind the deaths. Up until last year when I did a research project about the incident, I never thought twice about what happened to those boys. I realize now why everyone needs to know what happened to them.

I’ve been to Mena one time to go hiking with my dad. It’s a small town, and there isn’t much to see besides trees and hiking trails. So when I saw that there was a movie filming called “Mena,” starring Tom Cruise, I was shocked.

“American Made,” the new title for the film, is about a pilot who lands work for the CIA as a drug runner. According to IMDB, Cruise plays Barry Seal, a notorious drug runner of the eighties.

Known as the “Fat Man,” Seal was said to be smuggling about 1000 pounds of cocaine out of Mena at the height of his career, as reported by the Louisiana Voice. By 1982, Seal was making regular runs on behalf of the Medellin Cartel from Columbia, bringing tons of cocaine into the U.S. before moving his operations from Baton Rouge, La. to Mena.

Seal used the Mena airport along with double agents, who were attempting to tie Bill Clinton to drug smuggling conspiracies, especially during his first four years as President.

According to the documentary “The Mena Connection,” Clinton was approached by prosecutor Charles Black, who wanted to fund an investigation about the Mena criminal activity.

Clinton promised Black that he would get a man on the case, but never did. Clinton also denied ever speaking with Black when confronted about it.

The “Fat Man” was arrested in Florida in 1984 for money laundering and smuggling quaaludes. Sentenced to ten years in prison, Seal pulled some strings and met with two members of Vice President George Bush’s drug task force.

In the meeting, according to Spartacus Educational, Seal promised that the Medellin Cartel he ran for made a deal with the Marxist Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The cartel gave a cut of their drug profits to the Sandinistas, members of the socialist Nicaraguan political organization and militarily opposed by the US, so they could access a Managuan airstrip to run drugs.

In exchange for this information, Seal’s sentence was reduced to six of months probation, and he was enlisted as an undercover informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

At the time, President Ronald Reagan was paranoid about another communist government rising in the western hemisphere, so Seal’s information was music to Reagan’s ears.

Seal purchased his own plane, and as a part of the deal with the DEA, he rigged it with a hidden camera. On one of his trips, he was able to capture a photograph of Pablo Escobar, a Colombian drug lord and drug trafficker, helping Nicaraguan soldiers load cocaine for shipment to the U.S. at the Managua airport.

The picture made President Reagan ecstatic, and he went on national television with the photograph condemning the Sandinistas as“drug smugglers corrupting American youth.”

Seal continued to smuggle drugs into the U.S. as an undercover agent until 1986, when he was gunned down by the Colombian Medellin Cartel.

According to the L.A. Times, almost a year after Seal’s death, Sandinista patrol shot down a cargo plane that was supplying weapons to the Contras, right-wing rebels in Nicaragua supported militarily by the U.S. The Nicaraguan Contra were essentially the enemies of the Sandinistas. Eugene Hasenfus, who flew for the CIA, was the sole survivor of the crash, out of four men.

Hasenfus was captured by the Sandinistas and confessed to them that the CIA was providing the Contras with weapons to fight the Sandinistas. He was sentenced to 30 years in a Nicaraguan prison, but was replaced by a spy after serving only a few months.

The cargo plane carrying weapons that was shot down was the very plane that Barry Seal used to fly drugs in and out of the U.S. before he was killed. This was not a coincidence. The plane was ultimately sold to a company after Seal died that had connections to the CIA and was shot down soon afterwards.

The story of Barry Seal reveals that the CIA, DEA and State Department have each been implicated in various drug trafficking operations that were used to illegally supply countries with weapons internationally.