SEPTEMBER 9, 2011
U.S. Sanctions Venezuela Officials, Citing Drug Ties
By JOSE DE CORDOBA
The U.S. added a Venezuelan general, two legislators and a top intelligence official to a kingpins list for their alleged involvement in drug dealing and arms trafficking with Colombian guerrillas, the U.S. Treasury said Thursday.
The action spotlights what U.S. officials say are President Hugo Chavez's close links to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC. "Today's action exposes four Venezuelan government officials as key facilitators of arms, security training and other assistance in support of the FARC's operations in Venezuela,' said Adam Szubin, director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Treasury unit that levied the charges.
In response, Venezuela's foreign minister, Nicolas Maduro, told Venezuelan television, "We repudiate it." He called the U.S. a "sick society" as the "cause of this sickness of narco trafficking," and said it pretends to be "a kind of global police to judge decent citizens of our country."
A spokeswoman for Colombia's foreign affairs ministry said the government declined to comment.
The U.S. Treasury added Gen. Cliver Alcala, who commands one of the Venezuelan army's most important units, and Freddy Bernal, the former mayor of Caracas, now a ruling-party congressman, to the blacklist. The U.S. said Gen. Alcala organized an arms-for-drugs route for the guerrillas and Mr. Bernal facilitated arms sales to the communist guerrillas.
Mr. Bernal, in a comment on his twitter account, said the U.S. action "was an aggression against the Fatherland."
Amilcar Figueroa, known as Tino, who is a member of Venezuela's delegation to the Latin American Parliament, a regional, advisory group, was also placed on the list. The Treasury said Mr. Figueroa served as a primary arms dealer for the guerrillas.
Ramon Isidro Madriz Moreno, known as Amin, a key officer in Venezuela's intelligence service known as SEBIN, was also added to the list. The U.S. said he has coordinated security for the FARC.
U.S. citizens are prohibited from engaging in transactions with individuals or organizations on the blacklist.
The FARC, Latin America's oldest and largest guerrilla organization, funds much of its activity by drug smuggling and kidnapping. The U.S. and the European Union have long considered it a terrorist group.
The four men join three other top Venezuelan officials on the U.S. Treasury blacklist. They are Venezuela's top general, Gen. Henry Rangel Silva; Gen. Hugo Carvajal, head of Venezuela's military intelligence; and Ramón Rodriguez Chacin, Venezuela's former interior minister.
Silke Pfeiffer, the Colombia/Andes project director for the International Crisis Group, said she wasn't surprised by the latest sanctions. "The complicity of individual senior officials of the Venezuelan security forces with organized crime is an open secret," she said. "And it could hardly exist without the president's silent consent."
The alleged links between Mr. Chavez and the FARC were dramatically exposed when a Colombian cross-border military raid into Ecuador in 2008 killed Raúl Reyes, a top FARC commander. As a result of the raid, the Colombians captured Mr. Reyes' computers, which yielded a wealth of information about Venezuelan support for the guerrillas. At the time, Mr. Chavez denied the accusations of support and said the captured computer files were phony.
Among the emails recovered from the Reyes documents was a report of a meeting between Gen. Alcala and a top FARC commander in Venezuela in 2006. The FARC commander recounted to his colleagues Gen. Alcala's offer of obtaining shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles and shipping the arms to the guerrillas through the port of Maracaibo, which he would soon control. In the same email, Mr. Figueroa suggested to the FARC commander that weapons to the guerrillas could be piggybacked through Maracaibo aboard shipments of weapons the Venezuelan government was acquiring from Russia.
"This would provide the perfect cover for any purchase that we make," wrote FARC commander Ivan Marquez to his colleagues.
The Reyes correspondence also appears to show Mr. Bernal arranging for the FARC to give explosives training to members of pro-Chavez paramilitary groups he controlled in Caracas. Mr. Bernal, according to the correspondence, also offered the FARC help in obtaining arms from Croatia through an Arab arms dealer.
Since then, Mr. Chavez appears to have scaled back his support of the FARC as he has pursued a rapprochement with Colombia's new president, Juan Manuel Santos.
The FARC, which once numbered close to 17,000 men and who a decade ago were at the gates of Bogota, were driven back into Colombia's jungles and mountains by former President alvaro Uribe's aggressive military policies, strongly backed by U.S. aid. The guerrillas, who have seen many of their top leaders killed, are now believed to number about 8,000 fighters.
Over the past year, the FARC has changed its tactics and mounted a counterattack of ambushes of army patrols and bombings of Colombia's oil pipelines. The FARC counterattack this week prompted Mr. Santos to replace his defense minister and announce a massive increase in military spending.
--Ezequiel Minaya in Caracas and Dan Molinski in Bogota contributed to this article.