Important information to the Democratic posters who are always looking for facts!

[Judi Lynn]

This baby was posted by DU'er struggle4progress and you've got to see it. It will make your day!

Remember how some ooze has insisted on babbling here about his claim Hugo Chavez allows FARCs to live freely in Venezuela? On a thread in LBN, struggle4progress has taken the time to list a cluster of articles which describe Colombian death squad killers stomping around in Venezuela. What makes one of them so damned interesting is that it was written in 1993, which was years before Hugo Chavez was elected as Venezuela's President.

Please take the time to review this one:

VENEZUELA: Peasants march against paramilitaries

17 November 1993

Coral Wynter & Jim McIlroy, Caracas

The June 20 Diario Vea reported that more than 4000 campesinos (peasants) marched in the town of Guasdualito, in Apure state, near the border with Colombia. The protesters alleged that right-wing paramilitaries are infiltrating Venezuela from across the border and are responsible for a campaign of terror against campesinos.

In May, Luis Tascon, a deputy in the National Assembly, said that paramilitaries had been responsible for killing 1700 people in the country’s south-west. Paramilitary forces in Colombia are backed by the country’s armed forces, which receive millions of dollars of funding from the US government. Right-wing Colombian paramilitaries have been detained inside Venezuelan territory.

The march, which was organised by the Ezequiel Zamora National Campesino Front, was against paramilitary violence; in defence of Venezuela’s national sovereignty; and in support of the Bolivarian revolution, the radical process of social change that is gripping the country. This process has included an ambitious land reform program that is redistributing idle land from large landowners to previously landless peasants. This has angered large landowners, who have been accused by campesinos and the government of collaborating with the paramilitaries to defend their interests.

A protester claimed that the area the protest was held in was the “theatre of operations chosen by the Colombian paramilitaries, on behalf of US imperialism, in order to destabilise and overthrow the Bolivarian revolution ... We campesinos have decided to take this concrete action to confront this terrible threat.”

http://www.greenleft.org.au/2006/673/6344

In order to see the rest of struggle4progress's links, check post #20 at this thread:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x3775063#3775416

That's what we're talking about! :woohoo:

[Bacchus39]

1. amazing. you posted to a link where you got the facts wrong n/t

s

[Judi Lynn]

2. More information for serious Democratic readers on the same subject:

VENEZUELA: Guns, drugs and thugs: the threat from Plan Colombia

17 November 1993

Jim McIlroy & Coral Wynter, Caracas

National and state governments are attempting to tackle the threat posed to Venezuela by right-wing paramilitary groups that have infiltrated the regions of the country bordering Colombia, particularly the state of Tachira.

From December 2005, when Venezuelan army colonel Heber Aguilar assumed leadership of the Tachira state police, there has been a drastic change in the situation, with a greater police presence in the streets. Aguilar told the July 13 Ultimas Noticias, “The job has not been easy. First, we must fight and keep fighting against internal corruption. More than 80 police have resigned, and some have been dismissed for being involved in crimes. Many of those collaborate directly with paramilitary groups ...”

More than 150 police out of a total of 2500 in Tachira are being investigated for alleged involvement in crime. Aguilar added that they had created special groups to operate in the municipalities near the border — the Tactical Group for Joint Actions and the Rapid Response Group.

Tachira’s governor, Blanco la Cruz, claims “Plan Colombia” has increased the penetration of the paramilitaries into Venezuela. Plan Colombia is the Washington-funded counterinsurgency war against left-wing guerrilla movements in Colombia, especially the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — the FARC — under the cover of waging a “war on drugs”. The Center for International Policy estimates that the US government spent US$631.6 million on military and police assistance programs for Plan Colombia last year.

The Colombian armed forces that are the beneficiaries of Washington’s largesse have long been known to be linked to right-wing paramilitary groups.

In 2001 Human Rights Watch reported that many Colombians told its researchers “that paramilitaries are so fully integrated into the army’s battle strategy, coordinated with its soldiers in the field, and linked to government units via intelligence, supplies, radios, weapons, cash, and common purpose that they effectively constitute a sixth division of the army ... certain Colombian army brigades and police detachments continue to promote, work with, support, profit from, and tolerate paramilitary groups, treating them as a force allied to and compatible with their own.”

La Cruz told UN that Plan Colombia is used to justify the paramilitary presence in Venezuelan territory, and that this forms part of the strategy of the US government to confront Venezuela’s left-wing President Hugo Chavez, whose Bolivarian revolution threatens US imperialism in a region long-considered Washington’s “own backyard”.

Some Venezuelans believe that Plan Colombia is being used as part of a military “pincer” movement against Venezuela to destabilise Bolivarian democracy and eventually force Chavez from power.

La Cruz said: “The zones that suffer this problem most intensely are south of Lake Maracaibo in Zulia, Alto Apure, and, obviously, Tachira. In these states, the paramilitaries, helped by the Colombian government, have taken control of various areas, buying up farms with the money from extortion, kidnapping and, principally, drug-dealing.”

In Tachira the most frequent crime is extortion, which is almost never denounced publicly, allowing the paramilitaries to act with impunity. In the first six months of 2006, kidnappings markedly decreased, in comparison to the previous three years, but they are still a major problem.

Laws have been presented to the National Assembly to specifically deal with the border security situation. La Cruz said that his administration was having meetings with the Supreme Court’s president to find ways of protecting judges who act against the paramilitaries. The July 18 UN reported that he said: “We are also having a meeting with the attorney-general of the republic, as well as the president, to talk about this issue, as it has implications on a national level.”

The Venezuelan people have mobilised against the paramilitary threat. On June 17, thousands of campesinos (peasants) from six states arrived in Guasdualito, in Apure state, for a march against Plan Colombia and “against the paramilitaries who are aiming to destabilise the Bolivarian revolution”, a spokesperson stated. This was the first protest of such breadth to occur on the border.

More than 150 campesinos have been murdered over the last four years, with the killers believed to be paramilitaries and other thugs in the employ of large landowners who feel threatened by Chavez’s radical land reform program, which has confiscated some large estates and handed them over to landless peasants.

http://www.greenleft.org.au/2006/673/6344