Fear of violence spreads across Venezuelan border

Posted on Tue, Jun. 15, 2004



Fear of violence spreads across Venezuelan border

BY ALFONSO CHARDY

achardy@herald.com


UREÑA, Venezuela -- Cars and trucks clog the streets of this town on the border with Colombia almost daily as thousands of Colombians come to take advantage of a weak Venezuelan currency that makes prices so much cheaper on this side.

But beneath the veneer of normalcy, fear of leftist Colombian guerrillas who regularly operate on this side of the border permeates this farming region of western Venezuela.
(snip)

Most residents say they're not certain whether the Colombian rebels are alone responsible for the recent rise in kidnappings, extortions and murders. Colombian paramilitaries fighting the guerrillas, they say, may also be involved.

But they agree on one thing: that the lack of aggressive border patrols by Venezuelan security forces since leftist President Hugo Chávez was elected in 1998 has opened the doors to increased Colombian guerrilla movements here.
(snip/...)

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/8924123.htm
(Free registration required)

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I thought this article had an amazing hard-right swing, as does most of the junk from the current Miami Herald, so I took a look for something on the writer, Alphonso Chardy:

Chardy, Alfonso


Alfonso Chardy was born April 14, 1951, in Mexico City. He joined The Miami Herald in 1980 and covers the Cuban exile community in South Florida.

Prior to coming to The Herald, Chardy worked at The Associated Press from 1972 to 1973, and The Mexico City News from 1972 to 1973.

In 1987, he shared The Pulitzer Prize for national reporting awarded to The Miami Herald staff for coverage of the Iran Contra affair.

Chardy attended Indiana University journalism school on a foreign student's exchange scholarship from the U. S. State Department.
(snip/)

http://www-new.latinosandmedia.org/jawards/bios/author-ChardyAlfonso.html



The only thing which could get the Herald its credibility back would be to get a new publisher, and new columnists, and some really hard work cleaning it up.

It is Colombia that is fucked up with a 40 year long civil war.
That asshole Uribe is "negotiating" with the AUC again too.
:puke:

Alfonso Chardy was born April 14, 1951, in Mexico City. He joined The Miami Herald in 1980 and covers the Cuban exile community in South Florida.
He covers the CUBAN EXILE community. AKA the Cuban Right-Wing Criminal Mafia exile community. The more you know about these guys, the more you understand why Castro thru them out. It's just to bad we got stuck with the bastards.

to make this an anti-Chavez piece rather than an article about the disaster in Columbia: "the lack of aggressive border patrols by Venezuelan security forces since leftist President Hugo Chávez was elected in 1998 has opened the doors to increased Colombian guerrilla movements here."

The lack of patrols has fueled allegations by U.S. and Colombian government officials and Venezuelan opposition leaders that Chávez is deliberately helping the guerrillas.

There's a brutal civil war in Columbia, and they're blaming the neighboring country that refugees are fleeing to? Chavez is supposedly helping FARC to kidnap and kill his own citizens and create a humanitarian problem in Venezuela? :crazy:

Maybe this is a more reasonable explanation (from the very bottom of the page): "However, one senior military officer on the border...insisted, however, that was due to a shortage of resources and personnel for patrols, not support for the rebels." I would think that given the coup and the political tensions, Chavez may want to keep the military closer to home.

I'm visiting Venezuela next month, and had planned on spending a couple of days in Puerto Ayacucho on the upper Orinoco, right across the river from Columbia. But after hearing of the cross-border raids, I decided it was unwise to go anywhere within a hundred miles of Columbia.

Columbia is a sad case -- what started as a legitimate rebellion over a disputed election has become bloody standoff. And FARC has devolved from the old romantic IRA fighting the British occupation to the modern discredited IRA blowing up innocent civilians. It's a direct result of the type of hard-line policies Uribe is pushing now with American support.

--though I'm not sure if this is the greatest example of it. I do think the reporter fails to offer context, in that he doesn't seek out the history of such incidents prior to Chavez's presidency. Thus, the reader has no way to compare the current claims with the past. The border has faced incursions, cattle rustling, kidnapping, etc... throughout the 40 years of Columbian civil war. Could Chavez do more? Perhaps. Has he done as much or more than his predecessors did? That's difficult to ascertain from any individual piece, or even group of pieces on the matter. Is this reporter biased? Perhaps. Is he biased anymore than his counterparts at any journalistic outlet? It would be difficult to argue that he is, IMHO. Is he lazy? Perhaps. When one compares the stories one reads in the papers today to those of 30 years ago, it's quite disturbing. Slant or no slant, there would have been more of an attempt to compare the claims of the residents with the past, at least much of the time. Alas, this no longer occurs at any outlet very often.

Anyway, here's a slight bit from a long piece that appeared in the New Yorker a few years ago. It shows that this problem goes back to before Chavez, at the least.

The Revolutionary
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/?020422fr_archive03

"Marulanda said that since Chávez has been in office, relations along the border have improved, but, in fact, Venezuelan cattle ranchers still complain of harassment by Colombian guerrillas who cross over to steal their livestock and extort money from them. Like ranchers whose land has been invaded by organized peasant groups elsewhere in the country, the ranchers on the border say Chávez has done nothing to protect them, and some have resorted to vigilante tactics. In the town of San Cristóbal, I met a man named Otto Ramírez, who claims to be starting up a Colombian-style paramilitary death squad to fight the guerrillas. Ramírez is a small, balding former veterinarian in his late fifties who says that he turned to vigilante tactics two years ago, after guerrillas invaded his ranch and murdered his caretaker. Ramírez, who came out of hiding for our interview, claims that he is in contact with Colombia's paramilitary warlord, Carlos Castaño, whom he greatly admires. He hinted that Castaño had sent him some fighters to "help out." Castaño has an eight-thousand-man army that is known for torturing its victims and decapitating them with machetes. Ramírez boasted that he and his "boys" were active. When I asked him what he meant, Ramírez said, "A few eliminations, mostly low-profile stuff"—of guerrilla messengers and liaisons. He winked and grinned, and said he could say no more. He wasn't worried about being arrested. "When the time is right, I'll cross over to Colombia," he said. He could direct his operations from there.

In El Nula, a small border town a few hours' drive south of San Cristóbal, I met with a woman named Elizabeth (a pseudonym) who works as a liaison for the farc and who one assumes would be a target for Otto Ramírez's boys. She was an active-duty farc guerrilla from the age of twelve, but three years ago she was arrested by the Venezuelan Army at a roadblock outside of town. Until then, she had been the farc's local tax collector and had led a gang of young men who had, at times, roved deep inside Venezuela to carry out their duties. On the day she was captured, Elizabeth was on her own and was unarmed, but she had a balaclava in the car, which was all the evidence the Army needed. "I got caught because I was stupid," she said. After taking her into custody, the Army tortured her. Elizabeth's hip was permanently damaged, and she walks with a limp. A military tribunal sentenced her to twenty-eight years in prison for "military rebellion," but last year she was freed in an amnesty.

"The farc and Chávez have an understanding," Elizabeth said. Since Chávez came to power, she explained, the farc had agreed to cease its money-raising operations inside Venezuela proper, but it still exercised power and acted as an arbitrator in problems that cropped up along the porous border. "It's mostly problems over horses and cows and land," she said. Recently, for instance, a wealthy rancher had asked her to have the farc get rid of some land invaders for him. "He came to us rather than the Venezuelan Army," Elizabeth said proudly. "He's rich and educated and goes to Miami a lot, but he prefers us; he says he trusts us more." She had gone to the farc on his behalf, and three fighters came to chase off the land invaders. Several Venezuelans I spoke with in El Nula confirmed Elizabeth's story, and credited the guerrillas with making El Nula a much safer place to live than most other Venezuelan towns. Santos Moncada, who owns a cattle ranch outside town, said that in his opinion the guerrillas were fair, on the whole, in their dispensation of justice. "Because of the authority of the farc, people can leave their cars unlocked and walk around with jewelry on without worrying about it," he said. "You could never do that in Caracas."

Elizabeth doesn't like the term "narcoguerrillas," which is used to describe the farc. "I never saw any drugs in my life until I went to prison," she claimed. "The farc doesn't traffic in drugs; it just makes the traffickers pay a tax to raise funds for the boys, who don't receive salaries, to buy them boots, uniforms, and food." The money for the war effort had to come from somewhere. Elizabeth said she had only one regret, which was that her injury had ruined her chances of being a guerrilla comandante. "I believe I was born to be a leader," she said. I asked her if she worried about being arrested again. "There's nothing the Army or the police can do to me," she replied in a sassy way. "All I do is carry messages back and forth, which isn't a crime. And, besides, I have a Presidential pardon." I asked what she thought of President Chávez. "I like him," she said. "He wants equality between the social classes." She paused, and then, a big smile spreading on her face, she added, "He's a guerrilla, that's what he is."

for many of us for the first time. Here's more on this psychopath/terrorist/right-wing tool:

Reinventing Carlos Castaño

by Garry Leech

The U.S. Justice Department timed its request for the arrest and extradition of Colombian paramilitary chief Carlos Castaño on drug trafficking charges to coincide with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's arrival in Washington. Undoubtedly, the White House wanted to use the issuing of the extradition request and the "anti-terrorism" pow-wow between President Bush and Uribe as evidence that Washington and Bogotá are combating right-wing paramilitaries as well as leftist guerrillas in Colombia. But while this charade was clearly a public relations ploy, what's not so obvious is the reasoning behind Castaño's announcement that he is willing to cooperate with the extradition request and face justice in the United States. One possible explanation is that the Bush administration has entered into some kind of Faustian deal with Colombia's notorious death squad leader.

Castaño, a former army scout and associate of drug lord Pablo Escobar, took over the reins of Colombia's largest paramilitary force, the Self-Defense Forces of Córdoba and Urabá (ACCU), in 1994 after his older brother Fidel disappeared. The ACCU and other regional paramilitary groups in Colombia worked hand in glove with the U.S.-backed Colombian military, which routinely provided them with intelligence, weapons and transportation so they could effectively target suspected rebel sympathizers including labor leaders, community organizers and human rights activists. With funding from drug traffickers, wealthy landowners, and the business community, Colombia's paramilitaries grew dramatically during the 1990s from an estimated 850 paramilitary fighters at the beginning of the decade to approximately 12,000 today. In 1997, Castaño oversaw the merging of the regional paramilitary forces into one national organization, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC).

AUC fighters routinely induced fear in the rural population by entering villages and rounding up the residents in the town plaza. They would then brutally kill a handful of villagers, often dismembering them with machetes and chainsaws, before ordering the rest of the people to leave the region. By forcibly displacing the rural population in this manner, the paramilitaries hoped to eliminate local support for the guerrillas. This strategy has aggravated the already grossly inequitable distribution of arable lands as large landowners, as well as multinational corporations interested in oil, coal and natural gas resources, have taken over much of the abandoned land. More than 2.5 million rural Colombians have been displaced by the conflict in the past 15 years, many of them fleeing to the impoverished shantytowns that are rapidly encircling many of Colombia's cities.
(snip/...)

http://www.colombiajournal.org/colombia133.htm



Thanks for posting that article.