Category Archives: Southern theater

Chavez Working with Hezbollah to Prepare Terrorists for Asymmetrical Warfare with United States

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Fausta translated an article detailing the Chavez government’s program to build a Latin American Hezbollah wing controlled by the radical Socialist PSUV. The goal is to produce a group with the ability to wage an asymmetrical campaign against the U.S. and perhaps Columbia similar to Hezbollah’s campaign against Israel. To that end Chavez is sending Venezuelans to Southern Lebanon to train with Hezbollah.

From Fausta’s translation Patricia Poleo:

Tarek el Ayssami, Venezuela’s vice-Minister of the Interior, along with others affiliated with Hezbollah, such as Lebanon-born Gahzi Nasserddine currently the Business Liaison at the Venezuelan embassy in Damascus, along with [his brother by surname] Ghasan Atef Salameh Nasserddine (a) Abu Ali, are in charge of recruiting young Venezuelan Arabs affiliated to the PSUV [Chavez’s own Venezuelan Socialist Party], to be sent to South Lebanon for combat training in Hezbollah camps.

The purpose of the training is for preparing the youths for asymmetrical war against the United States.

Once back in Venezuela, the youths are welcomed by two members of the Islamic Center of Venezuela, who were previously involved in illegally bringing Hezbollah Lebanese through the area of Margarita with fake passports. During February 2002, one of these men brought a group of Hezbollah members who came from Brazil, from Margarita, and then sheltered at the Islamic Center in El Paraiso.

Once the Venezuelas return from their training in Lebanon they meet with radical youths from the PSUV affiliated with UNEFA [the university run by the Armed Forces] and the Unversidad Bolivariana de Venezuela [Venezuelan Bolivarian University].

These groups and individuals are closely affiliated with the Hezbollah Organization in Venezuela, along with al-Qaeda Iraqis currently living in Venezuela. They are also related to the Palestinian Democratic Front, headed by Salid Ahmed Rahman, whose “official” office is located in Caracas’s Central Park.

Read the rest of the report, which also accuses Chavez of harboring Al-Qaeda. This is not the first time we’ve heard about a Chavez/Hezbollah connection. I wonder how the Chavez worshiping left in this country will react when a Chavez funded Hezbollah is launching Katyusha rockets into San Diego and Tuscon?

I’m sure they’ll cheer.

Chavez Claims to Have Arrested D.E.A. Agent

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If true, this is obviously Chavez’s attempt to provoke Bush into conflict. But like most things he says it’s probably false. From N.T.A.:

There has been no confirmation of this story from U.S. sources.

Venezuela said on Thursday it arrested a man who identified himself as a U.S. anti-drugs agent, which if confirmed could inflame tensions between the United States and one of its biggest oil suppliers.

President Hugo Chavez in 2005 ended cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), saying the agency was spying on him. The United States denied the charge and says Chavez does too little to stop trafficking from neighboring Colombia, the world’s largest cocaine exporter.

Gen. Gabriel Oviedo said the man was acting suspicious when he was detained close to the border with Colombia while bearing Canadian and French passports and a Venezuelan identity card.

“The official at the scene proceeded to interrogate him and he said he was a DEA agent,” Oviedo told state television.

The U.S. Embassy in Caracas said it had no knowledge of the arrest.

Relations have deteriorated since a failed 2002 coup against Chavez that Washington initially welcomed.

So far there hasn’t been much on this, I’ll keep digging.

Update: More details from ABC:

CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuela said on Thursday it arrested a man who identified himself as a U.S. anti-drugs agent, which if confirmed could inflame tensions between the United States and one of its biggest oil suppliers.

President Hugo Chavez in 2005 ended cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), saying the agency was spying on him. The United States denied the charge and says Chavez does too little to stop trafficking from neighboring Colombia, the world’s largest cocaine exporter.

Gen. Gabriel Oviedo said the man was acting suspicious when he was detained close to the border with Colombia while bearing Canadian and French passports and a Venezuelan identity card.

“The official at the scene proceeded to interrogate him and he said he was a DEA agent,” Oviedo told state television.

The U.S. Embassy in Caracas said it had no knowledge of the arrest.

Relations have deteriorated since a failed 2002 coup against Chavez that Washington initially welcomed.

Tensions increased this month. The United States said new evidence of Chavez’s ties to Colombian rebels was troubling, while the leftist charged a U.S. military jet that entered Venezuelan airspace was spying on the OPEC nation.

The story doesn’t sound quite right to me.

Interpol Announces Congressman James McGovern Worked for Narco-Terror Group F.A.R.C.

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james-mcgovern-traitor.jpg

The Massachusetts Democrat has been working diligently to sever American ties with Columbia where F.A.R.C. has led a violent Marxist insurgency for decades. McGovern’s work to undermine the wildly popular President Uribe is a criminal act that should be prosecuted and now Interpol has certified that evidence found in a F.A.R.C. laptop implicating him in dealing with the group for political gain is true it is time the Department of Justice arrested this traitor and sent a strong message to people who would side with the enemies of freedom and prosperity.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Mr. McGovern’s press office says the Congressman is merely working at the behest of families whose relatives are held as FARC kidnap hostages. However, his go-between’s letters reveal more than routine intervention. The intervenor with the FARC is James C. Jones, who the Congressman’s office says is a “development expert and a former consultant to the United Nations.” Accounts of Mr. Jones’s exchanges with the FARC appeared in Colombia’s Semana magazine on March 15. This Mr. Jones should not be confused with the former Congressman and ambassador to Mexico of the same name from Oklahoma.

“Receive my warm greetings, as always, from Washington,” Mr. Jones began in a letter to the rebels last fall. “The big news is that I spoke for several hours with the Democratic Congressman James McGovern. In the meeting we had the opportunity to exchange some ideas that will be, I believe, of interest to the FARC-EP [popular army].”

Mr. Jones added that “a fundamental problem is that the FARC does not have, strategically, a spokesman that can communicate directly with persons of influence in my country like Mr. McGovern.” Semana reports that in the documents Mr. Jones “rules himself out as the spokesman but offers himself as a ‘bridge’ of communication between the FARC and the congressman.” Semana says when it spoke with Mr. Jones, he verified the letter and explained that “he made the offer because the guerrillas need interlocutors if they want to achieve peace and that it is a mistake to isolate them.”

But communications among FARC rebels suggest the goal was to isolate Colombia’s government. A letter that Reyes wrote to top FARC commander Manuel Marulanda on October 26 reads: “According to [Jones’s] viewpoint, [President Álvaro] Uribe is increasingly discredited in the U.S. . . He believes that the safe haven [for the rebels] in the counties can be had for reasons mentioned. Congressional Democrats have invited him to Washington to talk about the Colombian crisis in which the principal theme is the swap.”

Semana reports that Mr. Jones made some proposals to the FARC, including a Caracas meeting with representatives of Venezuela, Colombia, the FARC, other South American countries, U.S. Congressmen and the Catholic Church. “It would be almost impossible for Uribe to reject such a meeting,” Mr. Jones wrote, “without burning himself a lot, nationally and internationally. If he persists in being against it, I have understood that there are ways to pressure him from my country [the U.S.].”

In a letter to Semana, Mr. Jones said his words were taken out of context. He says he is not in favor of the “violent methods of the guerrilla” or “the military solutions” of the government. He had only a professional relationship with the FARC and had to address them as he did because he had to build trust. Mr. McGovern’s office says it knew what Mr. Jones was doing and engaged with him because “we need to find an interlocutor who could discuss these things including the safe haven” for the guerrillas.

We think the documents reveal something else entirely: Some Democrats oppose the Colombia trade deal because they sympathize more with FARC’s terrorists than with a U.S. antiterror ally.

What would J.F.K. say is he knew his party was dealing with Marxist insurgents? I’d say he was rolling over in his grave now but he already is given his brother’s treasonous relationship with the Soviet Union which was aimed at undermining the presidential campaign of Jimmy Carter of all people.

What is it about violent Marxists who rape, steal and kill that tugs at the modern leftist’s heart? Immature hero worship or the secret desire of White liberals to kill large numbers of people because they feel otherwise powerless? We may never know, but why don’t we start looking for answers with Jim McGovern? Here are his Washington office numbers:

Phone: (202) 225-6101
Fax: (202) 225-5759

Vcrisis has a post up about the Interpol report as does The Real Cuba.

Gateway Pundit has been following the F.A.R.C/Democrat connection for weeks, so a big tip of the hat goes to him.

Chavez Looking for Pretext for War in Latin America

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Hugo Chavez, the hidden hand behind Marxist narco-terror group F.A.R.C. has released a statement warning of possible war in Latin America if Columbia allows the U.S. launch drug operations there. From Fox News:

CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chavez on Wednesday warned Colombia not to allow a U.S. military base on its border with Venezuela, saying he would consider such an act an “aggression.”

Chavez said he would not permit Colombia’s U.S.-backed government to establish an American military base in La Guajira, a region spanning northeastern Colombia and northwestern Venezuela.

The Venezuelan leader said if Colombia allows the base, his government will revive a decades-old territorial conflict and stake a claim to the entire region.

“We will not allow the Colombian government to give La Guajira to the empire,” Chavez said, referring to the U.S. during a speech to a packed auditorium of uniformed soldiers. “Colombia is launching a threat of war at us.”

He said Washington’s top diplomat in Bogota, U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield, recently suggested that a U.S. military base in Ecuador could be moved to La Guajira.

Chavez urged his Colombian counterpart, Alvaro Uribe, to “think it over well” before making such a decision because Venezuela will do “whatever it takes” to ensure that a U.S. military base is not built on the peninsula in the Caribbean Sea.

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa — a close Chavez ally — has repeatedly said that he will not renew a 10-year lease on the base in the Pacific port of Manta when it expires next year.

Manta is the United States’ only military base in South America. Surveillance flights the U.S. runs from there are responsible for about 60 percent of drug interdiction in the eastern Pacific.

Diplomatic relations between Caracas and Bogota have been rocky for months. They worsened last week when Colombia unveiled documents allegedly showing that Chavez sought to arm and finance Colombian rebels. Chavez denies the claim.

Colombian officials say they found the documents in laptops recovered after a March 1 cross-border raid in Ecuador that killed rebel leader Raul Reyes and 24 other people.

International police agency Interpol is analyzing the documents and plans to present its findings on Thursday in Bogota.

“The Colombian government will surely announce tomorrow that the documents retrieved from Raul Reyes’ computer are authentic and, therefore, Chavez supports terrorism,” Chavez said.

No doubt Chavez’s saber rattling is meant to distract the world from his criminality, but will he be willing to go all the way and start a war in Latin America?

Hot Air has a report that shows just how irrational Chavez and his puppet government in Ecuador is being on this issue:

Currently we have an agreement with Ecuador that runs out in November 2009 that allows us to use Eloy Alfaro Air Base to stage drug-interdiction flights throughout the region. We have as many as 475 military personnel stationed at the bas, and the base primarily looks for drug-runners in boats coming out of Colombia. In 2007, the Manta base caught 200 such transports in approximately 1200 missions.

The US does not want to end this program and surrender to the cartels, but Manta simply won’t be available. Ecuador’s Rafael Correa has refused to negotiate an extension, not surprisingly given his ties to Chavez, but it will be akin to cutting off his nose to spite his face. The US base pumps almost $7 million into the local economy and spent over $70 million refurbishing Eloy Alfaro Air Base. Correa offered a deal: he’d extend the lease if we allowed an Ecuadorian military base in Miami. Bush passed on that offer.

Correa want the U.S., and our millions of dollars, out of the country no doubt as part of a larger scheme by Chavez to build a new soviet bloc. Bush isn’t going to let that happen and he won’t leave Columbia high and dry (though the Democrats most certainly will) so he’s got to tie up these loose ends quick. I think he’ll rush a deal through to station American troops in Columbia, and that will be all the pretext Chavez needs to start try military action.

Drug Cartels Destabilizing Mexico

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Mexico is in a losing battle with drug cartels whose escalating violence is providing cover for Marxist insurgents to become active. The newest cartel offensive raises troubling questions about the ability of the Mexican government to provide safety and security for its citizens, and heralds a future of bloody anarchy if officials cannot regain control of the streets. From WaPo:

MEXICO CITY, May 8 — Gunmen assassinated Mexico’s national police chief Thursday, blasting him with nine bullets outside his home in the capital and dealing a significant setback to the government’s campaign against drug cartels.

Edgar Eusebio Millán Gómez, the public face of Mexico’s offensive against drug cartels, became the highest-ranking law enforcement official to be killed since the launch of the effort 17 months ago. The assassination could give new confidence to drug cartels blamed for 6,000 killings in the past 2 1/2 years, and embolden other anti-government groups in this violence-plagued nation.

“This could have a snowball effect, even leading to the risk of ungovernability,” Luís Astorga, a Mexico City-based sociologist and drug expert, said in an interview. “It indicates terrible things, a level of weakness in our institutions — they can’t even protect themselves.”

Mexico’s drug and violence problem now engulfs the entire country, swamping cities along the U.S.-Mexico border and rugged drug cartel redoubts in the western mountains, and piercing into the heart of national power in Mexico City. The capital, once relatively immune to such brazen drug killings, has been the scene of four assassinations of high-ranking federal police officials in about a week.

[…]

The capital is also on edge because the once-dormant People’s Revolutionary Army, a rebel group that bombed oil pipelines last year, has been demanding the release of several jailed members. The rebels could see the killing of Millán Gómez as a sign of weakness, Astorga, the sociologist, said.

Federal police forces are stretched thin across Mexico, chasing an ever-growing number of suspects in drug killings. Last week, for instance, at least 17 people were killed in an attack on a ranch in the western state of Guerrero. This week, the military was engaged in a major battle with suspected cartel assassins in the central state of Zacatecas. That incident left three dead.

Fingers are pointing at the powerful Sinaloa Cartel which has its own military wing and has been known to contract MS-13 and Mexican Mafia to kill rivals. The Sinaloa Cartel has pushed well into the American southwest and has increasingly shown a willingness to engage Mexican forces and rival cartels in open firefights on the streets.

Mexico’s inability to maintain order has direct implications for American security, and this violence will spill into our country eventually. It’s only a matter of time.