VENEZUELA BORDER CONFLICT MIXES DRUG TRAFFICKING AND REGIME-CHANGE
By W. T. Whitney, Jr., Orinoco Tribune.
April 17, 2021 | EDUCATE!
Above photo: Venezuelans fleeing crisis at home have now become victims of
armed conflict in Colombia. Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images.
Beginning in mid-March, Venezuelan army units have been attacking and
expelling Colombian operatives active in Apure state. These have long used
Venezuelas border region to prepare cocaine arriving from Colombia and ship
it to the United States and Europe. The fighting has subsided; eight
Venezuelan troops were killed. Seeking safety, 3,500 Venezuelans crossed the
Meta Riveran Orinoco tributaryto Arauca in Colombia.
The bi-national border is unmonitored and long enough, at 1367 miles, to
encourage smuggling and the undocumented passage of cross-border travelers,
in this instance the embattled Colombians in Apure.
Among these are armed paramilitaries, bands of former FARC-EP insurgents and
narcotraffickerspilots, truckers, laboratory workers, and more. Also
involved are Colombias Army, Mexican drug cartels, U.S. policymakers in
Washington and DEA officials in Colombia.
Los Rastrojos are also in the area. They are paramilitaries who make up
Colombias largest drug cartel. Paramilitaries in Colombia are the products
of advice from U.S. Army consultants in the 1960s who claimed that
paramilitary capabilities are essential for defeating leftist guerrillas.
Colombias military has long had charge of paramilitary operations, as
verified recently by the prototypic paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso.
He was testifying virtually before a Colombian judge from a U.S. prison.
The former FARC-EP insurgents active in Apure are combatant groups known by
the name of their leader, Gentil Duarte. Having in 2016 rejected the
forthcoming peace agreement that the FARC-EP would sign with the Colombian
government, theyve taken up narcotrafficking. Other ex-FARC-fighters who
dissented took up arms again in 2019. They call themselves the Second
Marquetalia and are not involved in Apure.
As the fighting there took shape, the Colombian Army transferred 2,000
troops to the Colombian side of the border. U.S. Secretary of State Anthony
Blinken spoke with Colombian President Iván Duque by telephone on April 5.
They discussed their shared commitment to the restoration of democracy and
rule of law in Venezuela. U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela James Story, who is
stationed in Bogota, held meetings from February 19 to 26 with Venezuelan
opposition leaders Leopoldo López, Julio Borges, Manuel Rosales, and others.
They comprise the Venezuelan Presidential Commission.
The U.S. Air Force on March 30 and 31 flew four C-17 Globemaster troop and
equipment-carrying planes to airports in Colombia. Colombias Semana
newspaper anticipates that the U.S. Congress will soon authorize the sale to
Colombia of fighter aircraft worth $4.5 billion. The report laments the
worrisome picture of the Colombian Airforces capabilities in comparison
with those of Venezuela.
In late February, Colombian President Iván Duque announced the creation of
the Special Command against Narcotrafficking and Transnational Threats.
This will be a 7,000-person elite military force with air assault
capabilities. Its certain objective, according to the Communist Partys
website, is assault on Venezuela.
There are ample precedents for Colombia being the base for paramilitaries
trying to destabilize Venezuelan governments. Organization for the seaborne
Operation Gideon attack of 2020 took place in Colombia. Plotters in Colombia
were allegedly among those who arranged for a drone attack against President
Maduro in 2018. The U.S. and Colombian governments in February 2019 tried
unsuccessfully to deliver humanitarian aid across the border at Cucuta,
Colombia in order to divide Venezuelas military.
The outcome of the fighting in Apure is unclear. Maybe the Colombian and
U.S. governments would utilize any humanitarian crisis in order to
destabilize Venezuelas government. Maybe military intervention is on the
cards.
What is certain is that in the Biden era, the U.S. government continues to
seek the overthrow of the Maduro government in Venezuela. Equally certain is
that the reactionary Colombian government is at the beck and call of the
U.S. And its true also that the U.S. capitalist hierarchy has its eye on
Venezuelas massive reserves of crude oil, in excess of 550 billion barrels.
But the role of drug-trafficking in serving interventionist purposes, as in
Apure, is underappreciated. According to a 2019 United Nations report,
Colombia produced 70 percent of the cocaine consumed in the world.
Colombias cocaine production remains high, even though U.S. military aid
under Plan Colombia, which began in 2000, was supposed to have reduced
narco-trafficking.
Some 70 percent of Colombias cocaine heads to the United Statesthe worlds
leading consumervia the Pacific Ocean route. But much of the remainder does
pass through through Venezuela. The United States uses that reality to serve
its regime-change purposes.
The Western Hemisphere Drug Policy Commission is an independent, bipartisan
entity serving U.S. policymakers. Its December 2020 report noted that:
Traffickers operate freely in large swaths of the countrys territory [and]
The U.S. State Department is offering rewards of $15 million for information
leading to [President] Maduros arrest and $10 million for information on
four other top officials.
And the U.S. Fourth Naval Fleet monitors Venezuelan waters and air space for
supposed Venezuelan drug-trafficking.
There is great public-relations value in trumpeting about the war on drugs.
Nobody likes drug dependency. The United States suffered some 70,000
drug-overdose deaths in 2019. Its an easy sell to promise to stem the flow
of drugs into the United States at the cost of regime-change activities in
Latin America.
Public support for U.S. Plan Colombia was similar. After 2000, U.S. taxpayer
money readily flowed into what was billed as a war on narcotics. The real
purpose was military assistance to the Colombian military as it attempted to
defeat leftist FARC-EP guerrillas.
Writing in 2007 about Plan Colombia, Jaime Caycedo, secretary general of the
Colombian Communist Party, explains: For the purposes of strategy, its
essential to have it understood through continued propaganda that the
guerrillas are associated with narcotrafficking and understood too that the
war is being fought precisely because of that characteristic. Drugs, he
suggests, become a demonic phenomenon [and] imperialist military
intervention figures as something natural (Colombia en la Hora
Latinoamericana, Ediciones Izquierda Viva).
The imperialists offer no tie to history or realities that might explain
things, with the result that, violence in the form of daily manifestations
of repression and super-exploitation of workers appears simply as a
consequence of narcotrafficking.
The capitalists like drug-trafficking for another reason. Selling cocaine
yields such vast amounts of money that, once laundered, becomes a major
source of liquidity for their financial system.
Former director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Antonio
Maria Costa, writing in 2009, claimed that, In many instances, drug money
is currently the only liquid investment capital. According to the Samuel
Robinson Institute, the events in Apure show off Venezuela
as a threat,
but only in what has to do with allowing the (narco)metabolism of the West
to continue functioning. Journalist Roberto Saviano is cited. He noted
that, Cocaine is a safe asset
an anticyclical asset
. Cocaine becomes a
product like gold or oil, but more economically potent than gold or oil.
[Without] access to mines or wells, its hard to break into the market. With
cocaine, no.
W.T. Whitney Jr. grew up on a dairy farm in Vermont and now lives in rural
Maine. He practiced and taught pediatrics for 35 years and long ago joined
the Cuba solidarity movement, working with Let Cuba Live of Maine, Pastors
for Peace, and the Venceremos Brigade. He writes on Latin America and health
issues for the Peoples World.
