Terror Threat from Venezuela: Al Queda Involved***During the last few weeks, Chavez has moved to control the military high command with his closest acolytes. Gen. Luis Garcia Carneiro, who has been leading the Caracas-based 3rd Infantry Division in operations to disarm the metropolitan police, is now the effective head of the army. Arab terrorists and Colombian narcoguerrillas are being protected by DISIP, which has come under the control of Cuba's DGI, according to members of the Venezuelan security agency. European diplomatic officials in Caracas confirm that Cubans are operating DISIP's key counterterrorist and intelligence-analysis sections. According to a variety of sources, 300 to 400 Cuban military advisers coordinated by Havana's military attaché in Venezuela, navy Capt. Sergio Cardona, also are directing Chavez's elite Presidential Guard and his close circle of bodyguards. As many as 6,000 Cuban undercover agents masquerading as "sports instructors" and "teachers" also are reported to be training the Circulos Bolivarianos and even operating naval facilities.
"I quit my job when I got tired of doing dirty work for Chavez with the Cubans looking over my shoulder," Marcos Ferreira says, while showing proof that former Interior Minister Rodriguez Chacin and other presidential aides repeatedly pressured him to launder the identities of terrorists and narcotraffickers transiting through Venezuela. He also was ordered to deceive U.S. authorities on the activities of a Hezbollah financial network whose files were requested by the FBI following the Sept. 11 attacks. Chavez gave instructions to destroy records on 10 suspected Hezbollah fund-raisers conducting suspicious financial transactions in the islands of Margarita, Aruba and Curaçao, and the cities of Maracaibo and Valencia, according to Ferreira. The Venezuelan president then dissolved key military counterterrorist units by firing 16 highly experienced, U.S.-trained intelligence officers at the time of the terrorist plane attacks in New York City and Washington. Circulos Bolivarianos leader Lina Ron celebrated the event by burning an American flag in the center of Caracas.***
Thousands of people march in Caracas, Venezuela asking for early elections or President Hugo Chavez resignation, Friday, Dec 20, 2002. (AP Photo/Estaben Felix)
Colombian `peace lab' erupts into violence*** VISTA HERMOSA, Colombia -- Sensing a guerrilla ambush, the soldiers stealthily crept toward an abandoned sport utility vehicle parked on the outskirts of this southern Colombian town. Inside the SUV, they found the body of a 14-year-old boy. His throat had been slit, his body wrapped in explosives. "Those SOBs," says Maj. Oscar Fugueredo as he recounts the grisly discovery and shows photos of the teenager who had been slain by Marxist guerrillas. "They made a child bomb!" The killing was among 133 homicides that have been committed in Vista Hermosa and nearby towns since February, when Colombian troops reclaimed a 16,000-square-mile area from rebels after the collapse of peace talks. Officials believe most of the slayings were politically motivated.
Then-President Andres Pastrana pledged that government forces would protect the region's estimated 96,000 residents when he ordered the soldiers to move into the zone. But the hellish facts on the ground show that life in the area has become more perilous. The murder rate has jumped, and some peasant families have been uprooted from their lands. "Although the guerrillas committed numerous acts of violence ... when they controlled the region, the levels of violence have increased since the army retook the zone," says a recent report by Amnesty International, the independent human-rights group. "Civilians have been the victims of systematic attacks."
For more than three years, Vista Hermosa was part of a so-called "peace laboratory." The town sits in a vast region of jungle and plains that was ceded by the Colombian government to the nation's largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, in late 1998 in an effort to promote peace talks and end a civil war that began in 1964. The rebel-held area became known as the "despeje" -- Spanish for the "clearing" -- because Pastrana had ordered all government forces to withdraw. The zone was one of the few areas in Colombia free of combat, because just one side was in control.
But peace talks between the government and the rebels broke down in February, and Pastrana ordered the military to retake the region, which is roughly the size of Switzerland and covers about 4 percent of Colombia's territory. At the time, it was widely feared that outlawed right-wing paramilitary groups -- which, in addition to government forces, are fighting the rebels -- would move into the zone and go on a rampage against accused guerrilla collaborators. But in an odd twist, most of the 133 slayings reported in the region over the past 10 months have been blamed on the FARC. ***
