Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

January 25, 2018 By Fausta

Venezuela: The eight armies behind Maduro

With a vested interest for the status quo,

According to Otero, there are eight armed groups that make up the Maduro administration’s muscle:

  • Armed civilian militias that are uniformed and trained by the army
  • The Bolivarian National Guard (Guardia Nacional Boliviariana — GNB)
  • The Bolivarian National Police (Policía Nacional Bolivariana — PNB)
  • The Bolivarian National Armed Forces (Fuerza Armada Nacional Bolivariana — FANB)
  • Cuban military advisors surrounding Maduro
  • “Colectivos,” the pro-government paramilitary organizations that operate throughout the country
  • The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia — FARC)
  • Colombia’s National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional — ELN)

Read it at InSight Crime,

The Eight Criminal Armies Supporting Venezuela’s Maduro Administrationhttps://t.co/BslLQlUQek pic.twitter.com/D78xycD0YP

— InSight Crime (@InSightCrime) January 22, 2018

In other Venezuela news,
Venezuela has just announced an election — and it’s terrible news for democracy

Colombia evicts over 200 homeless Venezuelans from sports field squat

How Much Worse Can it Get for Venezuela’s State Oil Firm PDVSA?
Venezuela’s Most-Wanted Rebel Shared His Story, Just Before Death

——————————————————————

I’m getting over a flu. Juliette filled in for me yesterday at DTGB, Who Can Investigate the Investigators?

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Filed Under: Colombia, Cuba, FARC, Fausta's blog, Venezuela Tagged With: ELN, Oscar Pérez, PDVSA

January 4, 2018 By Fausta

Colombia: Odebrecht and elections

Luke Taylor reports on how The Odebrecht Corruption Scandal Is Already Shaking Up Colombia’s Presidential Vote

In August, Colombia’s Supreme Court called on President Juan Manuel Santos and several former ministers to testify about Odebrecht bribes to the Colombian government that the attorney general’s office says exceed $27 million. Investigations have already revealed that both of Santos’ election campaigns, in 2010 and 2014, received money from Odebrecht.

In December, the Democratic Center party led by Santos’ predecessor and key opposition figure, Alvaro Uribe, was also implicated when a former vice minister of transportation, Gabriel Garcia Morales, was sentenced to prison for taking $6.5 million in bribes in exchange for awarding Odebrecht a road construction contract in 2010 worth more than $1 billion. Morales has promised to testify against other Colombian officials, according to the attorney general’s office.

These scandals have discredited some of Colombia’s biggest political figures, including both the Santos and Uribe administrations, and could have significant effects on the upcoming presidential election, which will take place in two rounds in March and May.

As a result,

The fallout from Odebrecht has created the space for an unlikely leftist coalition. The image of many mainstream politicians has reached an all-time low, and polls show that corruption is currently the single biggest political issue for Colombian voters.

Taylor examines the coalition in the article.

How the elections turn out remains to be seen, but without a doubt, Odebrecht’s bribery machinery, a.k.a. the smoothly-run Division of Structured Operations, with its own hierarchy, its own accountants, and its own off-the-books communications system, called Drousys, kept a finger on the pulse of Latin American corruption.

In other election news,
FARC’s Political Party to Deploy Network of Militias throughout Colombia.

Timochenko said that the guidelines for FARC policies will be made through the creation of Tactical Units of the People throughout the country that will be responsible for spreading their propaganda in which he will collect men and women from amongst the common people.

What could possibly go wrong?

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Filed Under: Alvaro Uribe, Colombia, elections, FARC, Fausta's blog Tagged With: Juan Manuel Santos, Odebrecht, Timochenko

December 21, 2017 By Fausta

Obama administration allegedly covered up for Hezbollah in Latin America

Long-time readers of this blog will remember that I have blogged about Hezbollah‘s inroads in our hemisphere for the last decade (for additional posts see also Hizballah Hizbollah).

Josh Meyer’s fascinating report, The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook, highlights the connections between the drug trade and terrorism:

Over the next eight years, agents working out of a top-secret DEA facility in Chantilly, Virginia, used wiretaps, undercover operations and informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies.

They followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.

And

The untold story of Project Cassandra illustrates the immense difficulty in mapping and countering illicit networks in an age where global terrorism, drug trafficking and organized crime have merged, but also the extent to which competing agendas among government agencies — and shifting priorities at the highest levels — can set back years of progress.

And while the pursuit may be shadowed in secrecy, from Latin American luxury hotels to car parks in Africa to the banks and battlefields of the Middle East, the impact is not: In this case, multi-ton loads of cocaine entering the United States, and hundreds of millions of dollars going to a U.S.-designated terrorist organization with vast reach.

What did the Obama administration do about it?

They killed a probe of the terror group to get the Iran deal (emphasis added)

After 9/11 the DEA launched investigations into Venezuelan crime syndicates, links between Colombian drug-traffickers and Lebanese money-launderers, and the “suspicious flow of thousands of used cars” from the U.S. to Benin, Mr. Meyer explains. The U.S. military was also investigating links between Iran and Shiite militias with improvised explosive devices that killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers. “All of these paths eventually converged on Hezbollah,” he writes.

By 2008 the DEA had “amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself” into a global crime syndicate “that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking and money laundering,” Mr. Meyer reports. DEA’s Project Cassandra was born to take down the Hezbollah operation by busting its “innermost circle.”

For instance,

Alleged Venezuelan drug kingpin Hugo Carvajal was arrested in Aruba in 2014. Venezuela’s close alliance with Iran is no secret and reeling in “the chicken,” as Carvajal was known, would have generated key intelligence about cocaine trafficking to the U.S. and North Africa. The Netherlands mysteriously intervened and returned him to Venezuela.

When Colombia arrested Walid Makled, a Syrian-born Venezuelan who was alleged to be shipping ten tons of cocaine to the U.S. each month, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos refused U.S. extradition requests and sent him to Venezuela. Mr. Obama repaid Mr. Santos by backing his amnesty for the FARC, the largest drug cartel in the Americas.

Additionally, (back to Meyer’s article),

As a result, some Hezbollah operatives were not pursued via arrests, indictments, or Treasury designations that would have blocked their access to U.S. financial markets, according to Bauer, a career Treasury official, who served briefly in its Office of Terrorist Financing as a senior policy adviser for Iran before leaving in late 2015. And other “Hezbollah facilitators”arrested in France, Colombia, Lithuania have not been extradited — or indicted — in the U.S., she wrote.

Billions of drug trade money funding terrorists. Tens of thousands of lives ruined. Read The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook.

This warrants a most rigorous congressional investigation.

Related: “Venezuela looks like a failed economy. In fact, it’s Iran’s frontier in the Americas”

Cross-posted at WoW! Magazine.

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Filed Under: Barack Obama, cocaine, Colombia, FARC, Fausta's blog, Hizballah, Hizbollah, Iran, Venezuela Tagged With: Ayman Joumaa, Hezbollah, Hugo Carvajal a.k.a. ""el Pollo, Walid Makled

October 18, 2017 By Fausta

Colombia: Just how many FARC members abandoned the peace process? UPDATED

InSight Crime raises the question, Is Colombia Underestimating the Scale of FARC Dissidence?

InSight Crime estimates that there are approximately 1,000 to 1,500 dissidents who have abandoned the peace process for various reasons, accounting for around 15 percent of the total number of FARC ex-combatants.

Many of the dissidents identified by InSight Crime have returned to their past strongholds to regain control of highly profitable criminal activities, mainly tied to drug trafficking, though there are a range of reasons why former fighters are abandoning the peace process.

The government’s numbers are fractions of the above figures.

Alvaro Uribe tweeted on a dissident FARC faction shooting at a government helicopter,

Disparan contra helicóptero del Ejército https://t.co/JnRTFPMSGK

— Álvaro Uribe Vélez (@AlvaroUribeVel) October 17, 2017

UPDATE

Next we’ll hear how the “peace” will take a very long time. Can’t expect it overnight. Great consolation to the victims. https://t.co/8PkvHjgTh5

— MaryAnastasiaO'Grady (@MaryAnastasiaOG) October 18, 2017

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Filed Under: Alvaro Uribe, Colombia, crime, FARC

August 29, 2017 By Fausta

Colombia: FARC’s listed assets fall short

The declared inventory included broomsticks, orange squeezers, mugs, talcum powder, dentistry equipment and industrial tools, but The FARC’s Riches: List of Assets Fails to Reveal Guerrillas’ Total Wealth.

InSight Crime reports, that, for instance,

Much of the real estate listed by the FARC, which amounts to around half of all its assets, lacks any official registration, “which frankly makes it useless and inadmissible” to the inventory, Martínez wrote. As the ownership of these properties cannot be legally identified, the Attorney General’s Office has stated that “for now, none of the FARC’s real estate is immune to being seized” by authorities.

In the inventory, the FARC also “accepted as [their] own” any assets that state prosecutors may have uncovered in their investigations into the rebel group, without actually identifying these themselves. Authorities have already started seizing FARC assets worth nearly $580 million dollars, according to Martínez’s letter.

The term smoke screen comes to mind.

Looks like the Colombian authorities could use several independent forensic accountants: Estimates published by The Economist in 2016 suggested that the FARC’s total assets could surpass $11 billion, but the list only declared some $332 million (Datawrapper version of the summarized inventory here).

If you go by the inventory, the FARC has a measly US$450,000 cash on hand.

Walter White would put them to shame.

The FARC will be laughing all the way to the bank while the Colombian government spends $39+ billion pesos (US$13+ million) to finance the FARC’s political party.

Estado destinará más de $39 mil millones para financiar el partido político de Farc https://t.co/iwYdCP5Rbx via @BluRadioCo

— MaryAnastasiaO'Grady (@MaryAnastasiaOG) August 24, 2017

But don’t worry; Santos gets to keep his Nobel Prize.

Cross-posted at WoW! Magazine.

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Filed Under: Colombia, FARC, Fausta's blog, terrorism, terrorism. Latin America Tagged With: Juan Manuel Santos

August 16, 2017 By Fausta

Colombia: Yesterday was FARC disarmament day

InSight Crime asks, What’s Next?

August 15 is the final day of the historic disarmament of Colombia’s FARC rebels, paving the way for the next crucial part of the peace process: successfully reintegrating them into society. But the former combatants are vulnerable and tensions are high. Will the government be able to prevent the deterioration of Colombia’s security situation and ensure that demobilized fighters do not return to crime?

Read the InSight Crime analysis, and consider that senator and former president Uribe reported  yesterday on “Strong fights between Army and FARC dissidents in Jamundí.”

Fuertes combates entre Ejército y disidencias de Farc se libran en Jamundí via @elcolombiano móvil https://t.co/vBzWQXzwPx

— Álvaro Uribe Vélez (@AlvaroUribeVel) August 16, 2017

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Filed Under: Colombia, FARC, Fausta's blog

July 3, 2017 By Fausta

Colombia: Timockenko has a stroke

Luckily for him, he was in Colombia and didn’t have to make-do with “free Cuban healthcare.”

Colombian Rebel Leader Hospitalized After StrokeTimochenko’s illness comes just days after FARC handed over the last of its individual weapons as part of peace deal

The top commander of Colombia’s largest rebel movement was hospitalized Sunday following a stroke and remains in intensive care, just days after his group handed over the last of its individual weapons as part of a historic peace deal.

Rodrigo Londoño, better known by his nom de guerre Timochenko, checked himself into a hospital emergency room in the city of Villavicencio shortly after 8 a.m. with slurred speech and numbness in his arm, doctors said in a news conference. They said he remains in intensive care as a precautionary measure, but his speech and mobility have already recovered 90% from what they described as a temporary blockage of blood to his brain.

In other news,

Howes, Stansell and Gonsalves were rescued from the FARC nine years ago.

Celebrating nine years of freedom today. Thanking God and the Colombian Army for Operación Jaque. pic.twitter.com/Yxvx7dToX9

— Marc D Gonsalves (@marc_gonsalves) July 2, 2017

Thanks to president @AlvaroUribeVel you and so many others came back alive. https://t.co/I4TqSbjXkQ

— fairwitness8 (@fairwitness8) July 2, 2017

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Filed Under: Colombia, FARC, Fausta's blog Tagged With: Keith Stansell, Marc D. Gonsalves, Thomas R. Howes, Timochenko

June 15, 2017 By Fausta

Colombia’s pro-FARC land reform

Pres. Santos’s May 29th land redistribution decree is “right out of Cuba’s totalitarian playbook,” writes Mary O’Grady:
Colombia’s Chávez-Style Land Reform. Ranches can be taken if they are not in the social and ecological interest. (emphasis added)

To implement it, the Santos-controlled Congress granted him rule-by-decree powers much like what Chávez got from his National Assembly.

The land reform is the product of those powers and will advance the full FARC takeover of the country’s institutions. As FARC leader Iván Márquez asserted in an October 2012 speech in Oslo, “The concept of land is inextricably linked to territory.” They “are an indivisible whole that go beyond the mere agrarian aspect and touch vital strategic interests.”

Those interests are eventual iron-fisted control of the country. It is why the FARC demanded, in Havana, that the government claim arbitrary powers to expropriate land and redistribute it. Under Mr. Santos’s decree the state will rule on whether there is an illegal concentration of land and local committees will decide when the use of private property is not meeting social or ecological interests. Courts are sidelined; property is taken administratively.

And how does that advance “the full FARC takeover of the country’s institutions”?

The rural areas where FARC has concentrated for transition to civilian life are also areas where there will be new property titling. Those same zones are slated to become congressional districts, where newly-minted FARC politicians, flush with weapons and cash, probably will be the only ones on the ballot.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE

Here’s Santos yukking it up with his FARC buddies,

“How shameful!
“So much laughter with and homage of terrorists from @JuanManSantos and his administration, while Colombians ask to be heard.”

¡Qué vergüenza!
Cuanta risa y pleitesía de @JuanManSantos y su Gobierno con el terrorismo, mientras los colombianos piden ser escuchados. pic.twitter.com/OCC3qmG9KL

— Óscar Iván Zuluaga (@OIZuluaga) June 14, 2017

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Filed Under: Communism, Cuba, FARC, Fausta's blog, Venezuela

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