$1M for Al Qaeda to fight against the United States
But Chavez did not stop at merely praising the attacks and having his support groups burn the American flag. He wanted to do more. He wanted to help Al Qaeda and the Taliban in their coming war against the United States. Juan Diaz Castillo from Venezuela's Air Force, was given that job. The private pilot of Hugo Chavez, Major Diaz Castillo has since defected and has started to talk. As the trusted insider who flew the president's Airbus, he was an eye-witness to secret meetings between Chavez and some of the top dictators in the world. He was also in charge of organizing one million dollars worth of assistance from Chavez to Al Qaeda.
" - Chavez trusted me completely. So right after 9/11, when he decided to help Al Qaeda, he turned to Jorge Oropeza and to me. Jorge was my boss in the presidential air support unit, but he is just a political appointee, so I did all the actual work." The work, as ordered by Chavez, was to help Al Qaeda but to make it look like he was helping the Taliban, using humanitarian grounds as the excuse.***
Such fighting talk is characteristic of the frail 65-year-old. He is a former guerrilla fighter, reputedly one of the last to lay down his arms at the end of Venezuela's small-scale leftwing insurgency of the 1960s. Forty years later, Mr Rodríguez faces perhaps his most challenging struggle: to restart what a month ago was the world's fifth-largest oil exporter but is now a virtually paralysed network of derricks, pipelines and oil terminals. "Armed guerrilla action is one form of combat I've left behind, but this is a war to save democracy," he says as he reaches up with his cane to tap the pilot's window of the executive jet on the runway of an abandoned airfield near the refinery. A long-time friend of Cuba's Fidel Castro, Mr Rodríguez likens the tightening economic noose that is the oil strike with the long-time US-imposed trade embargo on the Caribbean island.***