Chavez appoints radicals to head Venezuelan passport agency - reports of Arabs otaining ID documents

President Hugo Chávez's appointment of two radicals to run the passport agency raises eyebrows partly because of reports of Arabs obtaining Venezuelan ID documents.

CARACAS -- Already facing allegations that Muslim extremists have obtained Venezuelan identity documents, President Hugo Chávez has put the country's passport agency in the hands of two radicals -- one a supporter of Saddam Hussein.

Hugo Cabezas and Tareck el Aissami were appointed last month as director and deputy director of the Identification and Immigration Directorate, in charge of border controls and issuing passports and national ID cards. The agency also works with electoral authorities on voter registration.

Both were top student leaders at the University of the Andes in the western city of Merida, described by senior school officials as a virtual haven for armed Chávez supporters and leftist guerrillas.

When El Aissami served as president of the student body from 2001 to 2003, his armed supporters controlled the university's dormitories, said Oswando Alcala, a professor and director of student affairs.

Cabezas and El Aissami declined several Herald requests for interviews. Calls to the Information Ministry in Caracas also failed to elicit an official response.

Their appointments to the passport office raised eyebrows both because of the reports of Arabs obtaining Venezuelan ID documents and the possibility of fraud in an ongoing drive for a referendum to recall Chávez. His popularity stands at less than 40 percent.

''These appointments raise suspicions,'' said Pompeyo Marquez, a former Cabinet minister for border issues and an opponent of Chávez opponent. ``The risk is that they can play tricks both as regards elections and with identity cards.''

Allegations that Chávez's leftist government issued ID documents to Islamic radicals surfaced most recently in the newsweekly U.S. News and World Report. ''Venezuela is providing support -- including identity documents -- that could prove useful to radical Islamic groups,'' the magazine reported last month, quoting senior U.S. military and intelligence officials.

Chávez has strongly denied previous opposition allegations of links to Islamic radicals and leftist guerrillas from neighboring Colombia. Following the U.S. magazine's report, he accused the U.S. ''extreme right'' of trying to justify his ouster by ``anything: an assassination, a coup d'etat, an invasion.''

Some senior U.S. officials have dismissed the allegations as rumors spread by Chávez opponents. Others say the State Department and the Pentagon are downplaying them to avoid a confrontation with Venezuela, which sells the United States more than 1.3 million barrels of oil products per day.

Chávez was the only head of state to visit Hussein in recent years -- in 2000. He bitterly opposed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and tried to have a postwar Iraqi delegation banned from OPEC meetings.

Cabezas, 30, and El Aissami, 28, both lawyers, are strong Chávez supporters. Cabezas is now the fourth-highest-ranking official in Chávez's Fifth Republic Movement, serving as secretary general of its National Tactical Command.

El Aissami, talking to reporters in Merida on March 27 before he traveled to Caracas to see Baghdad's ambassador to Venezuela, denounced the U.S. invasion of Iraq ``because today a noble, unarmed and peaceful people is being attacked.''

Born in Venezuela of Syrian parents, El Aissami is the son of the president of the Venezuelan branch of Hussein's once-ruling Baath Party, and nephew of Shibli Al Aissami, a top-ranking Baath Party official in Baghdad whose whereabouts are unknown.

Tareck El Aissami's father, Carlos, defended him in an interview with The Herald as an outstanding student and said he was not a member of the Baath Party.

In an article the father wrote after the Sept. 11 terror attacks and showed to The Herald, he called President Bush ''genocidal, mentally deranged, a liar and a racist,'' and al Qaeda's leader ``the great Mujahedeen, Sheik Osama bin Laden.''

During Tareck El Aissami's tenure as president of the university's student body, his supporters are alleged to have consolidated their control of the Domingo Salazar student dormitories and turned them into a haven for armed political and criminal groups.

A report by the vice-rectorate of academic affairs, states that of 1,122 people living in the eight residences, only 387 are active students and more than 600 have no university connections.

''There's always weapons there,'' said Alcala, the student affairs director. ``This is something you see in the movies.''

Venezuela's Gathering Marxist Storm - Who Is Protecting Hugo Chavez? ***Last year a popular but disorganized opposition movement in Venezuela threatened the government of Hugo Chavez, the self-styled populist who has taken that nation's battered political economy on a strange journey into social chaos after gaining power in 1999. In March of last year, Insight predicted the ouster of Chavez and he was forced out of office. But a bizarre combination of factors returned this protégé of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro to power.

More than a year later, experts on Latin America tell this magazine that Washington's soft line on Chavez in Venezuela adversely is affecting U.S. security and the stability of the entire region. This hands-off policy toward Chavez seems to originate from the highest levels of the Bush administration, these foreign-policy specialists say, and has evolved to the point of negligence of a crisis that already constitutes the greatest threat to regional stability since Castro took power in Cuba in 1959. Indeed, even as Congress has been intent upon removing travel restrictions to Castro's island prison, say these regional specialists, the Cuban leader is working with Chavez to destabilize governments in the region.

A senior U.S. official who worked in Venezuela during the rise of Chavez speaks with grudging admiration of the Venezuelan leader's classic Marxist-Leninist approach to expanding power: two steps forward, one step back. "Chavez is constantly underestimated by people who do not understand his patient, methodical approach to recruiting and strategy," says this retired Army officer. "Chavez never provokes the U.S. or other nations, but instead works obliquely to erode the position of his enemies."

As an example of Chavez's successful approach, the official cites U.S. Ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS) John Maisto, a former ambassador to Venezuela and Nicaragua. He reports that Maisto was the chief exponent of what the source calls the absurd argument that Chavez is a democrat at heart and that the United States should not "push" Chavez into the arms of Castro. "Maisto did the same thing in Nicaragua," says the official, "until Washington lit a fire under him." In fact, this observer says, Chavez has been a radical all his life, influenced by Marxist and authoritarian political theorists, and has been expanding his influence in the region using his links to Cuba and terrorist groups in the Middle East [see "Fidel May Be Part of Terror Campaign," Dec. 3, 2001, and "Fidel's Successor in Latin America," April 30, 2001]. ***

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