Venezuela: A safe harbour for terrorists
By John | Reason Over Might
22.01.05 | On 13 December 2004, Venezuelan operatives, acting against the policy
of their government and presumably motivated by a substantial bounty,
captured one of the FARC's
top leaders outside a Caracas café, took him to a town on the Colombian
side of the border and handed him over to Colombian authorities. The
FARC leader, Rodrigo Granda, was known as the Chancellor of the FARC
and acted as a kind of international public relations agent and liaison
to terrorist movements in other countries. (The FARC's official
propaganda website can be viewed here.)
The
Venezuelan government has been left with egg all over its face: not
only was Granda comfortably resident in Venezuela, living in a pleasant
house near Maracay with his family as well as in an apartment in
Caracas, but he was also naturalized as a Venezuelan citizen,
registered to vote in last year's referendum and state elections, and
attended a revolutionary congress staged by the government at the end of the year. The government has
been twisting itself into knots trying to get out of the predicament in
which it finds itself. It has tried both defensive and offensive
tactics.
In its defense, it has variously claimed that there was
no information about Granda having entered the country, or that if he
was indeed in Venezuela, he must have entered the country illegaly
(Minister for Justice and the Interior Jesse Chacon, 28 December 2004),
then, once it became apparent that he had been naturalized, that he
must have been naturalized using false documents. The Miraflores
autocrat personally declared Granda's citizenship null and void in an
attempt to distance himself from the terrorist, but the problem appears
to be stickier than that. The government has not yet seen fit to launch
an investigation into those who naturalized him; I suspect it is
because it was done with the knowledge and consent of the authorities.
In one of the most comical moments in the world's legal history, the
best that Granda's lawyer, Miguel Gonzalez, could come up with in his
defense was that Granda, a top member of Latin America's primary
kidnapping ring, had been kidnapped, that this was a crime against
humanity, and that his client would seek to be returned to the country
of his citizenship, i.e. Venezuela, for trial.
The Venezuelan
government has found it impossible to justify the terrorist kingpin's
presence in the country, and has moved on to the offensive: they first
accused the Colombian government of "violating Venezuelan sovereignty"
until it became clear that Colombian security forces did not actually
act on Venezuelan territory (the issue still appears to be somewhat in
doubt). They then redefined bounty ("recompensa") as bribery
("soborno") and continue to accuse the Colombian government of
violating Venezuelan sovereignty by bribing its officials, which is
curious because the Venezuelan government has also placed bounties
on (non-terrorist!) opponents' heads in the past. The Colombian
government acted with admirable restraint and issued terse communiqués
in response to Venezuela's increasingly emotional demands. Venezuela
overreacted by recalling its ambassador from Bogotá, freezing all trade
and binational treaties with Colombia, hindering cross-border traffic,
and demanding that the Colombian government publicly apologise for its
evil deeds. The government is obviously highly flustered.
Venezuela
claims that Colombia should have used the extradition agreement between
the two countries as a basis for requesting that Granda be handed over,
but presumably Colombia knew that this was going to be an unpromising
route (they'd determined that empirically in two similar cases in the
recent past, those of Vladimiro Montesinos-Peru and José María
Ballestas-Colombia), so they'd decided to act on their own. Consciously
or unconsciously, this might have been a masterly move: Colombia has
now provided Venezuela with detailed information about another 7 top
terrorists living in Venezuela, and the Chávez government is caught in
a quandary: either it delivers the terrorists to prove that the
Colombians should have used the extradition route to get their hands on
Granda (thereby alienating the left wing within the party, as well as
ideological allies abroad), or it keeps them in Venezuela, which will
make it even more difficult to deny charges of offering a safe harbour
for terrorists. Either way, Uribe's government scores points and Chávez
loses face. (Today, he's been trying to distract from his humiliation
by demanding that Colombia deliver some Venezuelan dissidents who are
living as political refugees in Colombia -- dissidents who are not
members of an organisation like the FARC, which employs bombings,
killings, landmines, kidnapping, extortion, hijacking, as well as
guerrilla and conventional military action and uses the drug trade to
finance its operations).
Internationally, the consequences of
the Granda scandal are also unwelcome for the Venezuelan Führer: either
he has to break rank with the international revolutionary movements by
distancing himself from movements such as the FARC, or he risks being
labeled a helper of terrorists in the eyes of the USA, an unpalatable
future considering that country's recent appetite for unilateral action
against terrorists. In any case, the scandal means that some of the
world's attention is back on Venezuela and that another bit of the true
face of the Chávez revolution is being exposed. Chávez is losing some
of the ill-gotten credit he received for being confirmed in August's
referendum, and can feel himself slowly drifting back into the
crosshairs of U.S. foreign policy. From the perspective of ordinary
Venezuelans, this is a good thing because Il Capo tends to be
conciliatory when he feels watched. It will be interesting to see how
events continue to unfold on this story. Together with the
investigation into the Anderson extorsion ring, which appeared to have
links into the top echelons of the Venezuelan government, and the
brewing BBVA scandal
over secret accounts currently being investigated by Spanish star
prosecutor Báltasar Garzon, the pressure on Chávez is currently
mounting from several sides. Let us hope the opposition takes heart and
revives to make the most of this opportunity.
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