Posted on 05/10/2008 11:49:52 AM PDT by The_Republican
Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez has been accused of many things: squandering his country's petroleum income, suppressing opposition media, using his army to intimidate the citizenry, compromising the populace's access to food and even exporting his brand of authoritarian socialism to neighbouring countries by means of publicity and under-the-table cash. Now documents recovered by Colombian soldiers from computers belonging to FARC, Columbia's drug-funded Leninist insurgency, suggest that Chávez may be actively undermining the sovereign government of his western neighbour. If that is the case, the Western Hemisphere may be about to gain its first internationally designated state sponsor of terrorism.
Rumours about the content of the file trove have been circulating in the world news media for the past month, but specific details were scarce until The Wall Street Journal went to press Thursday with a front-page story. In it, U.S. intelligence sources provided with copies of the electronic documents claim that they appear to be authentic and that they contain damning details of high-level cooperation between Chávez and FARC.
Colombia is still awaiting the results of a forensic audit of the files by Interpol, which is due to be handed down next week. But as José de Córdoba and Jay Solomon point out in their WSJ cover story, at least some of the publicly known content of the document trove has been confirmed: Costa Rican police used it to bust a FARC safe house in their country, and the interior minister of Ecuador has confirmed details of a secret meeting described in memoranda on the captured laptops.
In a particularly absurd twist, FARC chose to disavow the existence of high-level contacts with the Venezuelan government … by issuing a communiqué on the website of the Venezuelan information ministry. The guerrillas claim that no computer data could possibly have survived the March raid on a FARC encampment in Ecuador. This is interesting in view of this week's unrelated news that a team of American physicists recently completed an experiment using information recovered from a grotesquely toasted hard drive retrieved from the wreckage of the space shuttle Columbia. If magnetic storage media can literally fall from outer space and still be readable, it hardly defies belief that they could survive an earthbound firefight, however violent.
The activities described in the Colombian FARC files should arouse the highest indignation wherever the ideal of non-intervention between sovereign states is still taken seriously. Certainly it would take a great deal of nerve on the part of Chávez supporters on the North American left, who have been screaming continually about the sacred inviolability of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, to ignore the revelations. An e-mail from 2005 confirms the long-suspected presence of a FARC operations base inside Venezuela, one that supported 370 insurgents and was led by a senior FARC commander. Other emails apparently describe Venezuelan intelligence efforts to smuggle shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles and rocket-propelled grenades into FARC hands. Chávez's personal interest and involvement is confirmed throughout, and one document contains a reference to a quarter-billion-US-dollar Venezuelan government loan to FARC, payable upon the movement's accession to power in Colombia.
The beneficiaries of all this red solidarity are formally considered a terrorist organization under the laws of Canada, the United States and other senior democracies. Founded in 1964, FARC has a black history of atrocities that includes IRA-style urban terrorism against civilians (sometimes perpetrated with the assistance of the actual IRA), execution-style killings of hundreds of peasants, air hijackings, highway robberies, assassinations of elected legislators, kidnappings, torture and the use of landmines to hold off the Colombian army in FARC-held territory. The group is, in short, an incorrigible enemy of democracy and order in Colombia, and of the human race generally. Providing aid, comfort, and weaponry to FARC would be the most sordid crime to date in the annals of Chavismo. If Interpol confirms what the Wall Street Journal has reported, the legitimacy of the Venezuelan government will immediately climb to the top of the agenda for both Canadian and U.S. lawmakers.
...
First state sponsor of terrorism in this hemisphere?
Shouldn’t that be Cuba?
First? What about Cuba, Nicaragua...?
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