Venezuela
Increasingly A Conduit For Cocaine
Smugglers Exploit Graft, Icy Relations With U.S.
Source: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
Interpol web site
By
Juan Forero
Colombian drug kingpins in league with
corrupt Venezuelan military officers are increasingly using
this country as a way station for smuggling cocaine to the
United States and Europe, according to Colombian and U.S. officials.
The Bush administration's dismal relations with Venezuela's
government have made matters worse, anti-drug agencies say,
paralyzing counternarcotics cooperation.
Venezuela does not cultivate the leaf from which cocaine is
derived. Instead, this country on South America 's northern
fringe, along with Ecuador and Central America , has long been
a stopover for cocaine produced in neighboring Colombia, the
world's top producer.
Now, however, the volume of cocaine trafficked through Venezuela
has risen sharply. Shipments have increased significantly,
with suspected northbound drug flights out of the country increasing
threefold from 2003 to 2006, according to American radar tracking.
Counter-drug officials say up to 220 tons of cocaine -- a third
of what Colombia produces -- now pass through Venezuela, double
the figure in the 1990s. Most of it is bound for the United
States and burgeoning markets in Spain , Britain and Italy
.
The traffickers have operated with illegally obtained Venezuelan
identification cards from agencies as varied as the National
Guard, the DISIP intelligence agency and even the economy ministry,
all while living in some of the finest neighborhoods in the
Venezuelan capital, according to authorities in Bogota, the
Colombian capital, and in Caracas. The trend has led to spiraling
turf wars among drug gangs in Caracas slums and has directly
challenged the government's ability to rein in corruption.
"The problem of drugs has gotten out of the hands of
Venezuela," said Mildred Camero, a former drug czar in
President Hugo Ch¿vez's government and now a
consultant on narcotics to the United Nations, the United States
and private industry.
"Now the situation in Venezuela is grave, grave, grave," Camero
added. "At some moment, we're going to collapse."
In
an interview, Venezuelan Attorney General Isa¿as
Rodr¿guez characterized the corruption as isolated
and said the government has made fighting the drug trade a
priority. But he acknowledged the problem and said traffickers
have corrupted some Venezuelan officials while working hand
in hand with others.
"In the DISIP, which is the intelligence police, and
undoubtedly in some sectors of the National Guard, there is
complacency or participation in drug trafficking," Rodr¿guez
said. "And not just them, but civil officials at airports."
Rodr¿guez
said his office is investigating officials in the judicial
police and the armed
forces who are suspected
of having supplied government ID cards to traffickers or provided
them with protection. Among the high-level officials under
investigation are three National Guard generals, including
Alexis Maneiro, a former head of intelligence.
In
response to U.S. criticism that Venezuela has failed to make
anti-drug operations a priority, Rodr¿guez
said he has fired 23 prosecutors and 150 judges tainted by
the trade, while overseeing stepped-up prosecutions leading
to 3,670 convictions since 2000. He also said Camero's replacement
as drug czar, Luis Correa, was removed from office this year
as rumors swirled -- many of them provided by Colombian traffickers
-- that he cooperated with cocaine kingpins. Correa has denied
the accusations.
"Before, there was no control," Rodr¿guez
said. "That's why we think it's absurd and absolutely
unjust the declarations that the Bush administration makes
at this moment."
Finding the 'Weaknesses'
Counter-drug officials in Washington say Venezuela's failure
comes just as increased pressure on cartels in Colombia --
part of a seven-year, $5 billion counternarcotics campaign
funded by the United States -- is forcing traffickers out.
The campaign has led to the arrest of major trafficking suspects,
including Diego Montoya, the Norte del Valle cartel leader
arrested in September.
"The effort by these criminal organizations is to avoid
pressure," said John P. Walters, director of the White
House Office of National Drug Control Policy. "They go
to places where they think they will be able to avoid pressure.
Their movement shows you where weaknesses are."
Colombian intelligence has detected as many as seven major
Colombian traffickers operating in Venezuela, among them Wilber
Varela, considered by some anti-drug agencies to be the most
powerful cartel leader in South America. Colombian authorities
say renegade commanders from a disbanded right-wing paramilitary
coalition also operate along Venezuela's northern border, while
Marxist rebels have influence to the south.
Compounding the problem is the corruption among government
forces on the 1,300-mile border Colombia shares with Venezuela.
It is so serious, officials say, that a group of generals in
the Venezuelan National Guard is believed to be running a virtual
operation known as the Cartel of the Suns, a reference to the
stars on their uniforms.
"A Venezuelan military officer fights to get sent to
the border," said Camero, the former drug czar, who was
abruptly forced out in 2005. "He knows he'll earn more
money there than simply as an officer of the Venezuelan armed
forces."
In interviews, two jailed members of trafficking organizations
-- both of whom have provided information to Colombian and
Venezuelan officials -- spoke of coordination between Venezuelan
authorities and traffickers.
"They collaborated with narco-traffickers, and they'd
work with us," said Rafael Garcia, a former Colombian
intelligence official who was also a member of the once-powerful
Northern Bloc of the United Self-Defense Forces, a paramilitary
organization.
Garcia, who is jailed in Bogota, said one of the biggest Colombian
traffickers in Venezuela has been Hermagoras Gonzalez, better
known as the Fatman Gonzalez, who authorities say has obtained
credentials from the DISIP.
Another
suspected trafficker, Farid Feris Dom¿nguez,
jailed in Combita prison north of Bogota, spoke of how he lived
in a $900,000 house in the exclusive La Lagunita neighborhood
of Caracas and enjoyed the privileges of a Venezuelan diplomatic
passport. He said he had also been close to Correa, the former
drug czar removed by Ch¿vez.
The
Venezuelan government said Dom¿nguez's arrest
in Caracas last year, and subsequent handover to Colombian
authorities, shows its commitment to arresting cartel leaders.
But Dom¿nguez said Venezuelan authorities had
extorted him and handed him over to the Colombians only after
they'd concluded he'd become a liability.
"They betrayed me, the same agencies I had been working
with," he said.
Deadly Consequences
The traffickers have stepped up their activities as Venezuela's
government has sharply curtailed relations with U.S. counter-drug
officials.
Saying
his government would not stand for what he called violations
of Venezuela's sovereignty, Ch¿vez
banned American surveillance flights in its airspace in 1999,
shortly after
he took office. Then, in August 2005, he suspended bilateral
anti-drug cooperation after accusing the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration of spying, charges the Bush administration strenuously
denies.
Though Venezuelan relations with Colombian officials, particularly
those on the border, are somewhat better, high-ranking officials
in Colombia's security services say cooperation on drug issues
has steadily worsened.
"What changed dramatically has not just been that corruption
has grown more profound, but that the cooperation stopped with
us and the North Americans," said a high-ranking police
official in Colombia's capital who has long coordinated counternarcotics
operations. "We used to be able to call and say: 'Show
me this.' 'Let's check that.' Now, they won't even take our
calls."
The trafficking of cocaine into Venezuela is made easy by
a porous border torn by violence and marked by hundreds of
dirt trails and dozens of unmonitored rivers.
In recent years, traffickers have transported tons of cocaine
on hundreds of short flights from jungle airstrips in Colombia
to landing pads just a few miles away in Venezuela -- flights
so short that Colombia's air force has little time to intercept.
Small planes then depart from as far south as the Venezuelan
state of Apure, nearly 300 miles south of the coastline, and
fly north to Dutch islands or Hispaniola, which is shared by
the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
That's the last step before the contraband is shipped to U.S.
cities.
Cocaine is also smuggled to Europe via shipping containers,
on clandestine flights to Africa and on airliners using Caracas's
international airport, where American authorities say airport
workers are bribed to permit the smuggling of a ton of cocaine
each month.
The consequences of the cocaine pipeline have been felt across
Venezuelan society, which has experienced an alarming spike
in homicides and other crimes in recent years.
Before
recently extraditing Luis Hernando G¿mez
Bustamante to face drug charges in the United States, Colombian
police interrogated him about drug operations through Venezuela.
G¿mez described Venezuela as a "temple" to
cocaine trafficking and said the Venezuelans have no idea what's
about to hit them.
In many neighborhoods of Caracas, residents already know.
The drug trade has meant gangs fighting for control. When they
lose, it can mean death.
One resident, Deivi Alexander Batista, who had hoped to play
professional baseball, was killed on a recent night -- shot
eight times on the street by gang members. His mother, Mercedes
Eloisa Caraballo, rushed to where he had fallen and held him
as he died.
"I saw my son be born, and I saw him die," she said,
crying softly. "I saw him die in a way that was so cowardly."
Juan
Forero is
Washington Post's correspondent specializing
in Latin America. Petroleumworld not necessarily share these views.
Editor's
Note: This commentary was originally published in The
Washington Post Company,
Oct. 28, 2007( Washington
Post Foreign Service Sunday, October 28, 2007; A01).
Petroleumworld reprint this article in the interest of our readers.
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