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For over two decades, Venezuela has served as a critical outpost for Hezbollah in the Western Hemisphere, with reports detailing the group's entrenchment on Margarita Island and ties to the former regimes of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro. U.S. intelligence assessments and media investigations describe this presence as evolving from fundraising networks among the Lebanese diaspora in the 1980s to sophisticated operations involving training, smuggling, and financial schemes by the 2000s. Margarita Island, once a bustling tourist spot, has been highlighted as a primary hub, surpassing even the Tri-Border Area in Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay for Hezbollah's regional activities. Training...

The devices dropped explosives on members of Colombia's navy and army, who were manning a checkpoint on the Naya River. Four other members of the security forces were injured in the attack. Drone attacks have become increasingly common in recent years in Colombia: in 2024, 115 such attacks were recorded in the country, most of them carried out by illegal armed groups. In January, the government said it was putting a plan into place to prevent such attacks by beefing up its anti-drone technology, in order to better detect and "neutralise" drones. Off-shoots of the Farc rebel group, which refused...

January 21, 2022 With inflation at a record high, millions of its citizens fleeing the country, and a political opposition recognized by most Western democracies as the legitimate government of Venezuela, the regime of Nicolás Maduro seemed to be on the brink of collapse in 2019. But Maduro regime survived, thanks to a number of factors — among them the external support it received from malign state actors such as Russia and China. Moscow and Beijing never wavered in their political support of the Venezuelan regime, or of Maduro himself, including by refusing to recognize the constitutionally mandated interim presidency...

CARACAS, Venezuela, Feb. 8 (UPI) -- When the Organization of American States asked its press freedom expert, Santiago Canton, to report on the state of the independent press in Venezuela, they must have known it was a sensitive mission. President Hugo Chavez's radical populist government does not take kindly to criticism nor does it appreciate outside scrutiny of its internal affairs. It's doubtful, though, that anyone at the OAS expected Canton to fall victim himself to the kind of tactics the Venezuelan press faces every day. Just moments after beginning the final press conference of his four-day visit to ...

One by one, they are singing, the men who used to do dirty deeds for the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro. Nobody knows what’s going to happen, whether the United States will attack, and whether Maduro will fall. But these Venezuelans sniff change in the air. As more countries exit Venezuela’s orbit, more allegations are likely to emerge. Two of the men are in prison here in the U.S.: Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal, the former spy mastermind, and Cliver Alcala Cordones, a former general, both of whom have written letters to President Donald Trump airing...

On the eve of the 2016 Presidential election, Issue #464 of Revolution announced in its headline, “In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America. . .Rise Up. . .Get Into The Streets. . .Unite With People Everywhere to Build Up Resistance in Every Way You Can. . .Don’t Stop: Don’t Conciliate. . .Don’t Accommodate. . .Don’t Collaborate”.Revolution is an online newspaper published by the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), a Maoist group descended from splinters of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In 1969, RCP founder Bob Avakian and fellow Maoist H. Bruce Franklin had cofounded the...

The United States has designated the Cartel de los Soles (Spanish for Cartel of the Suns) - a group it alleges is headed by Venezuela's president, Nicolás Maduro, and senior figures in his government - as a foreign terrorist organisation. Labelling an organisation as a terrorist group gives US law enforcement and military agencies broader powers to target and dismantle it. In recent months, the US has been ramping up pressure on Maduro, saying his government is illegitimate following last year's election, which was widely dismissed as rigged. The designation gives it another way to turn up the heat. But...

VENEZUELAN tyrant Nicolas Maduro is not merely complicit in organised crime — he leads it. From generals to judges, the very top of Venezuela’s political and military elite are deeply embedded in a powerful, sprawling cocaine trafficking network, experts say. Cartel de los Soles, translated as Cartel of The Suns, isn’t a cartel in the traditional sense. It’s a web of Venezuelan military, intelligence and political elites accused of taxing, protecting and moving cocaine with state resources. With parts of Maduro’s government deeply enmeshed in the drug trade, the lines between state power and organised crime have been blurred. Dr...

Just hours after President Donald Trump cancelled all subsidies with Colombia and warned leftist President Gustavo Petro that he would be taking action against drug-trafficking organizations within the country if the Colombian president failed to deal with them, War secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the U.S. Military had carried out a successful strike on a drug-trafficking boat linked to a leftist terrorist group. “On October 17th, at the direction of President Trump, the Department of War conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel affiliated with Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), a Designated Terrorist Organization, that was operating in the...

The United States said it would revoke Colombian President Gustavo Petro's visa after he took to New York's streets on Friday in a pro-Palestinian demonstration and urged U.S. soldiers to disobey President Donald Trump's orders. "We will revoke Petro’s visa due to his reckless and incendiary actions," the State Department posted on X. Petro, addressing a crowd of pro-Palestinian protesters outside the U.N. headquarters in Manhattan, called for a global armed force with the priority to liberate Palestinians, adding, "This force has to be bigger than that of the United States." "That's why from here, from New York, I ask...

Leftists have long held no qualms about assassination against their rivals, and in Colombia, where narcoterrorism is also a problem and left-narco alliances are common, it has started up again.. But at least we have a secretary of state who is wise to what's going on. This week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent a high-level delegation to Bogota after a leading Colombian presidential candidate, conservative Sen. Miguel Uribe, died of his wounds in a June shooting by a criminal known as a 'sicario' or hitman who obviously had a sponsor. Rubio seems to know who that might be, though,...

"I was close to Chavez, but now he wants me dead." The million dollars from Chavez to Al Qaeda is just the tip of the iceberg in a long series of connections between worldwide terrorist organizations and the Venezuelan strongman, according to one of those who knows most about Chavez and the inside of his presidential palace: His former personal pilot. Major Juan Diaz Castillo is the man who flew the equivalent of Air Force One. In this interview with Venezuela's weekly news-magazine Zeta, he reveals formerly unpublished details of the operations that Chavez had him organize. By Maria Angelica...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration on Thursday asked the Supreme Court to strip temporary legal protections from 350,000 Venezuelans, potentially exposing them to being deported.The Justice Department asked the high court to put on hold a ruling from a federal judge in San Francisco that kept in place Temporary Protected Status for the Venezuelans that would have otherwise expired last month.The status allows people already in the United States to live and work legally because their native countries are deemed unsafe for return due to natural disaster or civil strife.A federal appeals court had earlier rejected the administration’s request.President...

A diplomatic row has erupted between Spain and Venezuela after a Spanish judge accused officials in Caracas of plotting with rebel groups to kill Colombian President Álvaro Uribe and other political officials. Spanish National Court Judge Eloy Velasco charged on Monday that the government of Hugo Chávez had been working as an intermediary between the Basque separatist group ETA and the Colombian guerrilla group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The groups were allegedly plotting against prominent political figures living in or traveling through Spain. Venezuelan officials have dismissed these allegations as “biased and unfounded.”

EXCLUSIVE: I've obtained the leaked security briefing that's been provided to Trump national security officials in recent months regarding the criminal group Tren de Aragua and the Venezuela government. President Trump designated Tren de Aragua as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) on January 20th by Executive order because it's “conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions” inside the United States. According to the order: “TdA operates in conjunction with Cártel de los Soles, the Nicolas Maduro regime-sponsored, narco-terrorism enterprise based in Venezuela, and commits brutal crimes, including murders, kidnappings, extortions, and human, drug, and weapons trafficking.” It's not a street...

Thanks to oil, Venezuela was once the wealthiest country in the region — before becoming the continent’s poorest, ravaged by corruption and feckless economic policy. And amid the economic decline, high-ranking government officials became conspicuously wealthy. But how? According to U.S. indictments, former government officials, and regional experts, officials linked to the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah and members of Maduro’s government built a massive drug syndicate — while most of the country increasingly struggled to find food to eat, or medicine to care for the sick. “Venezuela was a narco state several years ago, but it has become darker and...

Local civilians in El Alto, Bolivia, detained three Cuban nationals and handed them over to police on Wednesday, who found evidence that the foreigners were paying people to riot on behalf of the nation’s socialist party. The revelation follows the arrests of several Venezuelan and Cuban citizens among the thousands rioting in El Alto and La Paz, the seat of the executive branch, and the positive identification of a man injured during protests two weeks ago as an Argentine member of the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) terrorist group. Members of anti-socialist groups who organized peaceful protests against...

They were leaving a social event in the south-western department of Huila when their vehicle hit a road mine. They were then shot dead in the ambush, a police spokesperson said. It is the worst attack on security forces since former guerrilla Gustavo Petro was sworn in as Colombia's first left-wing president less than a month ago According to the national police and attorney general's office, three of the officers who were killed were aged 20 or younger. Mr Petro condemned the attack, calling it "a clear act of sabotage against peace" in a tweet. Late on Friday he travelled...

As mayor of Bogota, Gustavo Petro has put forth a ban on carrying guns in public even with a legal permit. Skeptics have countered that criminals will not follow the ban, and the result will only disarm citizens legally carry guns for security reasons. In 2002 Brazil implemented restrictions which made it virtually impossible for citizens to obtain a permit. According to Brazil’s National Confederation of Municipalities as recently as 2008, more than half of the homocides in Brazil were perpetrated with a firearm, despite restrictions on legal ownership of firearms. The nation suffers at three times the global average...

Bout is alleged to have fueled multiple conflicts across the globe through arms dealing, sometimes to both sides ... A senior defense official is concerned that convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, the "Merchant of Death" .. could go back to illegally trafficking weapons, thereby fueling deadly conflicts around the world. "I think there is a concern that he would return to doing the same kind of work that he's done in the past.. Bout was in the middle of serving a 25-year prison sentence in a U.S. prison for several offenses, including conspiring to kill Americans ... Bout, a...