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American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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Venezuela: Maduro’s relatives conspire to bring cocaine into the U.S. UPDATED

Today’s Capt. Louis Renault moment brought to you courtesy of the Venezuelan regime:
U.S. Indicts Relatives of Venezuelan President on Drug Charges. Pair accused of conspiring to smuggle cocaine, expected to appear in N.Y. court (emphasis added)

In a bare-bones indictment unsealed Thursday, the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office alleged the two men conspired to import at least five kilograms of cocaine to the U.S. through Honduras.

The two men, Efraín Antonio Campo Flores and Francisco Flores de Freitas, were first arrested in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Tuesday by local police, turned over to U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents and flown the same day to New York in a DEA jet, according to people familiar with the matter. They are expected to appear in New York federal court Thursday afternoon, another person said.

Mr. Campo Flores, 29 years old, identified himself on the DEA plane as a stepson of the president, according to the people familiar with the matter. He was raised by his aunt, Cilia Flores, who is Mr. Maduro’s wife. A U.S. document said the other man identified himself as a nephew of Ms. Flores.
. . .
The two men contacted a DEA confidential informant in Honduras in October and asked for help in trafficking 800 kilograms of cocaine through the airport in the country’s Caribbean island of Roatán, according to one of the two people familiar with the case.

NYT:

The two men, Efraín Antonio Campo Flores and Francisco Flores de Freitas, are nephews of Cilia Flores, the wife of Mr. Maduro, the person with knowledge of the matter said. Mr. Maduro, a leftist, calls Ms. Flores the country’s “first combatant” rather than its first lady. Ms. Flores is one of the most powerful people in the upper echelons of government and is frequently seen at her husband’s side.

More:

The men allegedly were in the process of smuggling cocaine – just under a ton, roughly about 1,700 lbs. – into the United States when they were arrested in Port-au-Prince, where their plane arrived, and brought by authorities to New York.

The young men told authorities that they had diplomatic immunity, but police found no basis for their claim, Spanish news outlet ABC said.

They told the DEA that they were acting in connection with Diosdado Cabello, speaker of the National Assembly, as well as with a governor, Tarck el Aissami, who is the former Venezuelan Minister of the Interior.

They said that the high-ranking officials had helped with the drug shipment.

Miguel Octavio calls it 800 Kilograms Of Arrogance Arrested In Haiti

Caracas Chronicles: Dos Florecitas: Major Drugs Bust Hits Venezuela’s First Family. Efraín Antonio Campo Flores and Francisco Flores de Freitas – two flowery nephews – busted in Haiti on big-time drug-trafficking charges. It’s all true.

VN&V: Flowers and letters: no romance for the revolutionary corpse

ABC Spain (in Spanish) reports that in the past, Cilia’s son and Nicolas’s son, along with Hugo Chavez’s son, allegedly flew drugs into Cuba using PDVSA-owned planes. The drugs were later distributed into the U.S. through Cuban networks.

El Tiempo has more (also in Spanish) on the Cartel de los soles.

UPDATE
AP reports they’re being held without bail.

———————————

In other, unrelated, Venezuelan news, Caracas City Hall inaugurated a monument to Yasser Arafat,

“Yasser Arafat is now located in front of the house where Simón Bolívas [sic] started his education.”

[Post redone to correct HTML]

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Former aide admits Arafat founded Black September

Former aide admits Arafat founded Black September

The PLO always used Black September for plausible deniability, claiming that the deadliest BSO attacks had nothing to do with them. Although many historians had already made the connection between the two groups, the US State Department wrote a confidential memo in 1973 (released in 1981) showing connections between the groups, and the State Department also had linked Fatah and Arafat directly to the Khartoum murders, this appears to be the first confirmation by someone in Arafat’s inner circle that it was Arafat himself who was the founder of Black September and personally in charge of operations.

And we know that the current Palestinian Arab President Mahmoud Abbas was also involved in Black September, specifically in the Munich massacre.

The Beeb, of course, will never refer to any of them as terrorists, since the word is “too judgemental”. If you click on the above photo, you’ll see that the BBC captioned it as “Yasser Arafat: Craved martyrdom”, and says things like “was a powerful grassroots activist”. What bullshit.

Don’t expect the Beeb to be reporting on the Arafat-Black September any time soon.

(h/t: Alcibiades)

Related
Fatah Shows What It Means to Be “Moderate”

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School with beauty parlor, school without; and today’s other items

Forty-five years before Oprah…
Before Oprah went to South Africa to open a girls’ school with a beauty parlor,

While a beauty salon may be an unorthodox addition to the traditional educational experience, it is in keeping with the Oprah gospel of empowerment through self-love.

a group of Americans founded in 1961 the first multi-racial private college in Kenya, which is now co-ed, Strathmore University. Next week I’ll be interviewing my friend Tom Pyle, director of the Strathmore University Foundation.
While Strathmore doesn’t have a beauty parlor on campus, it has been training scholars, women and men, for leadership positions for decades.

Mona Charen reviews Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student

“Unprotected” is a hard slap at the sexual free-for-all that prevails on American campuses and throughout American life. The author, revealed since publication as Dr. Miriam Grossman, a psychiatrist at the student health service at UCLA, was hesitant to put her name on this book. The orthodoxy within the academic world is a strict one, and those who transgress often pay with their jobs. Let’s hope for her sake, but particularly for her patients’ well being, that she is not punished for her heterodox views.

It boggles the mind to read that a physician with her qualifications fears for her job for telling the truth.

Mary Katherine looks at the right deficit

Via Darleen, Congress is going to be about the children:

ACLU Condemns Vote to Advance Marriage ‘Discrimination’; Vows to Redouble Efforts to Force It On The People

From Maria
An act of moral hygiene
Children see, children do:

Also via Maria, a beautiful video about Lorenzo’s horses

From Larwyn
Talking about the longest running big lie

First, the murders of Noel and Moore (and the Belgian diplomat who was murdered in the incident) were performed in the most brutal possible manner. The victims were raked with machine gun fire starting from the feet and going up to the head in order to inflict the maximum amount of suffering. Second, the Fatah paymaster who cut the checks for all such operations (including the Black September operation at the Munich Olympics in 1972) was Mahmoud Abbas, Yasser Arafat’s right-hand man, the current Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority.

Pork Soup is Not Racist in France

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Reid to Bolivia, grim milestones, and other items

Reid to Bolivia
Elephants in Academia emailed with this news, Sen. Harry Reid Traveling to Bolivia This Week

Incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will join a bipartisan delegation on a trip that includes stops in Bolivia and Ecuador, two members of Latin America’s recently emerging left. International trade and anti-drug efforts are among the topics on the senators’ agenda.

As Academic Elephant said,

I’m sure Amauris Sanmartino is top on their agenda.

Amauris Sanmartino’s the Cuban dissident critical of President Evo Morales’ ties to Havana. Even when he’s a permanent resident in Bolivia, he was arrested and will be deported to Cuba. Babalu has where to contact Harry Reid on behalf of Dr. Sanmartino. (Update: Dr Sanmartino’s going to Gitmo)

Harry will miss the funeral

Grim milestones
Barcepundit says, WHAT A MORONIC REPORT. Go read about it.

Moral exhibitionism
Dr. Sowell writes,

Progressives are in the business of complaining and denouncing — as a prelude to seeking sweeping powers to control other people’s lives, in the name of curing the ills of society. The last thing they want is to discover and discuss how millions of people rose out of poverty by entirely different methods, often by freeing economies from the control of people with sweeping power over other people’s lives. Poverty and economic disparities are the raw materials from which the political left manufactures a sense of moral superiority, self-importance and political power. Against that background, it is understandable how they strive to keep poverty alive as an issue, even as they claim to want to end poverty, by playing lady bountiful to the poor. Even as they define deviancy downward, many of the progressive intelligentsia define poverty upward, so that people with amenities that even the middle class could only strive for, two generations ago, are still called “the poor” or the “have-nots.” Except for people who can’t work or won’t work, there is very little real poverty in the United States today, except among people who come from poverty-stricken countries and bring their poverty with them. Talk about “the working poor” still resonates in politics, but most of the people in the bottom 20 percent of American households are not working full-time and year-round. There are more heads of household who work year-round and full-time among the top 5 percent of American heads of households than among the bottom 20 percent. The left has striven mightily to make working no longer necessary for having a claim to a share of what others have produced — whether a share of “the nation’s” wealth or “the world’s” wealth. They have also striven mightily to inflate the number of people who look poor by counting young people with entry-level jobs, who are passing through lower income brackets at the beginning of their careers, among “the poor,” even though most of these young people have incomes above the national average when they are older. The real obsession of the left is in gaining power or, at the very least, engaging in moral exhibitionism.

Peace Prize, you ask?
Via Larwyn, Arafat’s Orchestration of 1973 Murders Acknowledged by State Department

How much different would the history of the Middle East be if the world had been forced to face the reality of Arafat’s involvement in the murder of American diplomats over 30 years ago?

Update Doug Ross has The Friends of Terror Scrapbook

Two podcasts
Louisiana Conservative interviewed Wild Bill. You can listen to the podcast here

If you haven’t listened to it yet, go to Eternity Road and listen to Francis Porretto’s wonderful tale fo the Census taker

Last, but not least
a truly beautiful post.

Update
Edwards Enters Race

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