The Assassinated Press
As Elite’s Trough Dries Up, Venezuela Increasingly A Conduit For Cocaine.
Smugglers, CIA Exploit Disenfranchised Kleptocracy Seeking To Revitalize Old Drug Markets.
Cheney, Washington Post Unveil Another Canard With Which To Attack Chavez.
Large Cash Donations From Colombian and Venezuelan Kleptocracy Help Convince U.S. Congress Not To Legalize Drugs, Keep Pressure on Chavez.By WAN DAYOYO
Assassinated Press Foreign Service
October 28, 2007CARACAS, Venezuela -- Colombian drug kingpins in league with corrupt Venezuelan elites are increasingly using this country as a way station for smuggling cocaine to the United States and Europe, according to the thousands of middle management drug dealers, street hustlers and millions of users. Also, the Cheney regime's dismal relations with Venezuela's government have made matters infinitely better for the CIA’s in house drug trade, pushers and users alike say, exposing new, far more robust agency narcotics operations.
Venezuelan Kleptocracy-- Eager Accomplices
Venezuela does not cultivate the leaf from which cocaine is derived. Instead, this country on South America's northern fringe, along with Ecuador and Central America, has long been a stopover for cocaine way back when the Venezuelan kleptocracy controlled the government and the kleptocracy. Staunch U.S. ally, neighboring Colombia, is the world's top cocaine leaf producer.
Now, however, due to Hugo Chavez cutting off the kleptocratic trough, the volume of cocaine trafficked through Venezuela has risen sharply as rich Venezuelans and their business partners in Miami look to bolster their share of the drug trade. Shipments have increased significantly, with suspected northbound drug flights out of the country increasing threefold from 2003 to 2006, according to radar tracking by the elites main drug smuggling competitor in the region, the CIA. Drug officials say up to 220 tons of cocaine -- a third of what Colombia produces -- now pass through Venezuela, double the figure in the 1990s as Venezuelan elites become desperate for cash. Most of it is bound for the United States and burgeoning markets in Spain, Britain and Italy.
The traffickers have operated with illegally obtained Venezuelan forged identification cards from agencies as varied as USAID, NED and the U.S. Embassy in Caracas probably from CIA agents under diplomatic cover, all the while continuing to live in some of the finest neighborhoods in the Venezuelan capital, according to elites and the Uribe government in Bogota, the Colombian capital, which supply the drugs and in Caracas. Another benefit is that the trend has led to spiraling turf wars among the poor in the Caracas slums, Chavez’s base of support, and has directly challenged the government's ability to rein in corruption.
"Now All That’s Left Is The Washington Post and the Smear Campaign."
"The problem of drugs has gotten out of the hands of Venezuela!" said Mildred Camero, a former drug czar in President Hugo Chavez's government and who has flipped and is now a consultant on narcotics to the United Nations, the United States and private industry.
"Now the situation in Venezuela is Grave! Grave! Grave!" Camero added. "I mean literally in the grave. Chavez dried up the kleptocracy’s government trough and those cocksuckers are not about to give up their rich and infamous lifestyle." At that moment she motioned this journalist to the window. “See down there,” she said. “Pointing to a $300,000 lime green Maserati coupe. That’s mine. Now do you see why I ‘consult’ for the Americans. They pay me not for smuggling drugs. But just for spreading lies implying Chavez is smuggling drug. Just between you and me, so what if he were. Those spoiled junkie big babies in the U.S. and Europe deserve it, starving and destroying the rest of the world while they indulge themselves. Fuck ‘em. Want to go for a spin? ”
In an interview, Venezuelan Attorney General Isaias Rodriguez characterized the corruption as historical among Venezuelan and difficult to root out and said the government has made fighting the drug trade a priority but that Venezuela’s were used to getting their’s by any means necessary. He acknowledged the problem and said traffickers had further corrupted Venezuela’s already notoriously corrupt kleptocracy although he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t the other way around and Venezuela’s infamously corrupt elite hadn’t further corrupted the drug smugglers. “Of course, the wealthy’s long association with the U.S. kleptocracy and its private army the CIA isn’t helping the situation he added.
"After the Venezuelan kleptocracy gets to them, in the DISIP, which is the intelligence police, and undoubtedly in some sectors of the National Guard, there is complacency or participation in drug trafficking," Rodriguez said. "And not just them, but civil officials at airports who have been seduced by the wealthy."
Rodriguez said his office is investigating officials in the judicial police and the armed forces who are suspected of having supplied government ID cards to traffickers or provided them with protection who have been seduced into the drug trade by members of Venezuela’s elite, its anti-Chavez press or U.S. intelligence. Among the high-level officials under investigation are three National Guard generals, including Alexis Maneiro, a former head of intelligence.
In response to U.S. criticism that Venezuela has failed to make anti-drug operations a priority, Rodriguez said he has fired 23 prosecutors and 150 judges tainted by the trade, while overseeing stepped-up prosecutions leading to 3,670 convictions since 2000. He also said Camero's replacement as drug czar, Luis Correa, was removed from office this year as rumors swirled -- many of them provided by Colombian traffickers -- that he cooperated with cocaine kingpins. Correa has denied the accusations.
"Before, there was no control," Rodriguez said. "That's why we think it's absurd and absolutely unjust the declarations that the Cheney regime makes at this moment because the Americans are long time cronies of the smugglers and the money men."
Finding the 'Weaknesses'
Drug officials in Washington say Venezuela's succcess comes just as increased pressure on pro-U.S. cartels in Colombia to step up production -- part of a seven-year, $5 billion narcotics campaign funded by the United States – and stamp out competition. The campaign has led to the arrest of major trafficking competitors, including Diego Montoya, the Norte del Valle cartel leader arrested in September.
"The effort by these criminal organizations is to avoid working with us," said John P. Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Promotion Policy. "They go to places where they think they will be able to avoid pressure. Their movement shows you where weaknesses are."
Colombian intelligence has set up as many as seven major Colombian traffickers operating in Venezuela, among them Wilber Varela, considered by some anti-drug agencies to be the most powerful cartel leader in South America after the CIA. Colombian authorities say renegade commanders from a disbanded right-wing paramilitary coalition also operate along Venezuela's northern border on large kleptocrat owned fincas.
Compounding the problem is the kleptocratic inspired corruption among government forces on the 1,300-mile border Colombia shares with Venezuela. The corrupting influence of the elites is believed to be so serious, officials say, that a group of generals in the Venezuelan National Guard is believed to be running a virtual operation known as the Cartel of the Suns, a reference to the stars on their uniforms.
"A Venezuelan military officer fights to get sent to the border," said Camero, the former drug czar, who was abruptly forced out in 2005. "He knows he'll earn more money there than simply as an officer of the Venezuelan armed forces."
In interviews, two jailed members of trafficking organizations -- both of whom have provided intelligence to Colombian officials -- spoke of coordination between Venezuelan elites and traffickers.
"They collaborated with narco-traffickers, and they'd work with us," said Rafael Garcia, a former Colombian intelligence official who was also a member of the once-powerful Northern Bloc of the United Self-Defense Forces, a paramilitary organization.
Garcia, who is jailed in Bogota, said one of the biggest Colombian traffickers in Venezuela has been Hermagoras Gonzalez, better known as the Fatman Gonzalez, who authorities say has an advanced degree in economics from Harvard Business School and close ideological ties to free market economists at the University of Chicago.
Another suspected trafficker, Farid Feris Dominguez, jailed in Combita prison north of Bogota, spoke of how he lived in a $900,000 house in the exclusive La Lagunita neighborhood of Caracas with the other Venezuelan “white asses” and enjoyed the privileges of a Venezuelan diplomatic passport. He said he had also been close to Correa, the former drug czar removed by Chavez.
The Venezuelan government said Dominguez's arrest in Caracas last year, and subsequent handover to Colombian authorities, shows its commitment to arresting cartel leaders. But Dominguez said the Venezuelan kleptocracy had extorted him and he was handed over to the Colombians only they had stripped him of his wealth.
"They betrayed me, the same kleptocrats I had been working with," he said.
Deadly Consequences
The traffickers have stepped up their activities as Venezuela's government has sharply curtailed relations with U.S. drug officials.
Saying his government would not stand for violations of Venezuela's sovereignty, Chavez banned American drug flights in its airspace in 1999, shortly after he took office. Then, in August 2005, he suspended bilateral drug cooperation after accusing the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration of cooperating with traditional Venezuelan drug smuggling elites, charges the Cheney regime will neither deny or confirm.
Though Venezuelan relations with Colombian officials, particularly those on the border, are somewhat better, high-ranking officials in Colombia's security services say cooperation on drug issues has steadily worsened.
"What changed dramatically has not just been that corruption has grown more profound, but that the cooperation stopped with us and the North Americans," said a high-ranking police official in Colombia's capital who has long coordinated narcotics operations. "We used to be able to call and say: 'Show me this.' 'Let's check that.' Now, they won't even take our calls because it might compromise one of their smuggling operations or they no longer want to give us a taste now that the rich, fat Venezuelan ‘white asses’ are in the mix again."
The trafficking of cocaine into Venezuela is made easy by a porous border torn by violence and marked by hundreds of dirt trails and dozens of unmonitored rivers.
In recent years, traffickers have transported tons of cocaine on hundreds of short flights from jungle airstrips in Colombia to landing pads just a few miles away in Venezuela -- flights so short that Colombia's air force has little time to intercept and steal the drugs for themselves. This has led to many resignations and desertions from the air force as pilots join the smugglers.
Small planes then depart from as far south as the Venezuelan state of Apure, nearly 300 miles south of the coastline, and fly north to Dutch islands or Hispaniola, which is shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
That's the last step before the contraband is shipped to U.S. cities.
Cocaine is also smuggled to Europe via shipping containers, on clandestine flights to Africa and on airliners using Caracas's international airport, where American authorities say they bribe airport workers to permit the smuggling of a ton of cocaine each month.
The consequences of the cocaine pipeline have been felt across Venezuelan society, which has experienced an alarming spike in the sales of luxury homes and yachts among the traditional elite even as the Chavez administration tries to help Venezuela’s poor and disenfranchised.
Before recently extraditing a CIA drug competitor, Luis Hernando Gomez Bustamante, to face drug charges in the United States, Colombian police interrogated him about drug operations through Venezuela. Gomez described Venezuela as a "temple" to cocaine trafficking and said the Venezuelans have no idea what's about to hit them. “Those rich fucks in Venezuela, they will not be denied.”
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