Socialist Affiliated Transnational Advocacy Networks: The Thread Linking New Curriculum Trends to Red Foreign Governments

February 22, 2021 speech by Nicolás Maduro

Key Takeaways

  1. Secessionist and socialist parties in the United States view control over school curriculum as a strategy to help them achieve political revolution.
  2. Revolutionary political parties advocating black nationalism, indigenous revanchism, and socialism that are affiliated with Venezuela and Cuba have formed a United Front to subvert American institutions.
  3. Elected officials and citizen groups in the U.S. must exercise greater vigilance and diligence over state employment.

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Curriculum and teaching styles recently being promoted in many American K-12 classrooms and colleges is remarkably similar to those implemented in Venezuela after socialist dictator Hugo Chávez came to power.

Controversies about adoption of critical race theory (CRT), liberated ethnic studies (LES) and social justice education (SJE) have overlooked the affiliations of advocates for and practitioners of CRT, LES, and SJE with the United Socialist Party of Venezuela and the Cuban Communist Party.

In what follows, we show how Cuba and Venezuela’s goal of colonizing Latin America has led them not only to ally militarily and economically with Russia, China, and Iran, but also politically with Socialist Affiliated Transnational Advocacy Networks with members employed in the American education field.

The “Matrix of Afro-Indigenous-Socialism” and the Subversion of High School Curriculum

ormer Venezuelan ambassador to New Orleans and professor Jesus “Chucho” Garcia explaining in an interview at North Carolina Central University on August 27, 2015 how the São Paulo Forum functions as a place to plan and implement subversive activities by exploiting identity politics.

Evidence of Venezuelan influence in America’s education system can be seen in the recent controversy surrounding California’s ethnic studies program.

In the minutes of an August 24, 2021 Orange County Board of Education Special Meeting Elina Kaplan of the Alliance for Constructive Ethnics Studies describes how the curriculum proposed by the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium (LESMCC) and advocated for by the Association of Raza Educators(ARE) includes teaching about “154 role models of color of whom the preponderance are neo-Marxist and/or violent figures.” One such role model proposed student curriculum includes Oscar Lopez Rivera, “the leader of the Marxist-Leninist organization that carried out over 130 bombings in the U.S.”.

What Mrs. Kaplan, the plaintiffs of a recent lawsuit against the passage of this curriculum in California, the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, as well as other critics and commentators on Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum and American schools have not addressed is that one of the principal advocates for the passage of such curriculum is affiliated with the Venezuelan government.

ARE is repeatedly described by Union del Barrio (UdB) – a self-avowed revolutionary organization whose first plank of their political program is “…to advance the liberation and reunification of Mexico under a revolutionary government, immediately accountable to the people.” – as the teachers wing of their organization. Extensive overlaps in membership and activities, confirms this claim.

Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium, the group which proposed LESMC to California, was founded by Lupe Carrasco Cardona, a UdB member and Praxis chair of ARE’s Los Angeles Chapter and advisor Theresa Montano is a Board Member of ARE.

CastroChavistas in the Classroom

Left to Right: Facebook post with Union Del Barrio saying they “help the Bolivarian Revolution and the combative people of Venezuela”; news coverage of Union del Barrio’s anti-policing activities; Benjamin Prado being interviewed by TeleSUR at a political conference in Caracas, Venezuela.

UdB describes Ernesto Bustillos, their former General Secretary, traveling to Havana and Caracas to discuss strategy and collaboration and describes his work as a middle school teacher as follows: “Between teaching periods, compa Neto could often be found in his classroom talking politics… [he was] constantly pivoting back and forth between revolutionary teacher and teacher of revolution.” and describes.

A presentation at the 2003 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies conference raises the possibly that an Aztlán state – consisting of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and California –could be achieved through a functional political alliance with Venezuela and Cuba. In a 2008 speech Bustillos upon receipt of an award from ARE, he stated that “You can’t call yourself an educator if you are not part of some kind of revolutionary struggle!”

In July of 2010 Union Del Barrio, as well as the American Federation of Teachers local 3267, American Federation of Teachers local 1936, Union California Faculty Association sent representatives to Caracas, Venezuela to attend the third conference of Encuentro Sindical Nuestra América (ESNA) – a transnational union network founded by Hugo Chavez to coordinate political activities. Since at least 2012 Union Del Barrio has been a member of the Coordinating Group of ESNA.

On August 27, 2016, Secretario General of Union Del Barrio, Rommel Díaz declared in a speechcommemorating UdB’s “35th year of continuous struggle for raza liberation” that:

“The emancipatory project of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – Trade Treaty of the Peoples (ALBA-TCP), created in 2005, by Presidents Fidel Castro of Cuba and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela… represents one aspect of the future liberation of our peoples.”

On January 24, 2017 Union Del Barrio signed an “eternal commitment to the legacy of the undefeated Commanders Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez.” and in June of 2022 UdB declared their commitment to – amongst other action items – advocating for leftists convicted of money laundering, terrorism, narcotics trafficking, and murder to be released from prison.

CastroChavismo and American College Professors

UdB is not the only group with a revolutionary nationalist orientation that is affiliated with the Cuban Communist Party and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela working within the professional ranks of the American education system.

Several months before Hugo Chávez launched ESNA, the Bolivarian government hosted the International Meeting of Left Parties in Caracas on November 19th-21st, 2009. This event brought together socialists from all over the world to develop strategic plans to be implemented in the countries in which they live.

Dr. Ann Robertson, a former professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University, and member of Workers Action – a Revolutionary Socialist Organization –  and current member of the Democratic Socialist of America – San Francisco Education Organizing Circle published an article in December of 2009 on the website Venezuela Analysis titled Hugo Chavez’s Call for a Fifth Socialist International. In Dr. Robertson’s commentary she states that by: “joining such an international, socialist parties [in the United States] will be able to translate their aspirations for a better world into a framework that can realistically hope to achieve revolutionary change. It has the potential to forge the indispensable link between theory and practice.”

The theory and practice to which she refers to, per her writings advocating for an “undistorted” Revolutionary Marxist Party, includes the development of curriculum that seeks to indoctrinate youth with anti-capitalist and anti-Constitutional values – as critical race theory (CRT), liberated ethnic studies (LES) and social justice education (SJE) do. The DSA is open about their goals, stating on their website that “There is a growing national network of educators in DSA working to transform our schools, our unions, and our society. Being a member of DSA means there is a pre-existing network of fellow socialists you can tap for support as you undertake this work.”

Rounding out the political groups linked to a matrix of “black indigenous socialism” we can turn to New Afrikan People’s Organization (NAPO)and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) – two groups that both define themselves as being a Nation engaged in struggle against the “occupation” of the U.S. government – they seek independence over a region including parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkanasa and Tennessee – and that has participated extensively in the Black Lives Matter protests and related organizing activities.

One of the MXGM’s founders, Nehanda Abiodu, fled to Cuba to avoid being charged with conspiracy and racketeering for her role in helping Assata Shakur escape from prison in 1979, and her role in a 1981 Brink’s armored truck robbery – which involved the murder of three people. Another of the groups co-founders is Dr. Akinyele Umoja, a professor of Africana studies at Georgia State University.

Dr. Umoja has travelled to Venezuela several times to speak with Nicolás Maduro and invited Venezuelan Jesus “Chucho” Garcia  to speak on a 2020 MXGM panel discussion on International Solidarity: Connecting Struggles for Self-Determination, an academic conference at Georgia State University, and the 2015 memorial service for the former legal representation of the Black Liberation Army, Chokwe Lumumba.

“Chucho” – notably – has also networked with pro-secessionist activists at the 2016 Southern Human Rights Organizing Conference, spoken on a 2016 panel hosted by Black Alliance for Justice Immigration -– a network which assists immigrants that entered the U.S. illegally – that was moderated by Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi and former senior advisor for Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign, Phillip Agnew; given presentations in 2018 on the National Council of Black Studies: International Committee, on how Venezuela is “providing leadership for the organization of Black Left networks across the Americas, [and] linking and organizing Black radicals in the U.S. and throughout Latin America and the Caribbean”. Chucho is even an advisory board member of the Walter Rodney Foundation – one of over a dozen school-related programs which promotes education directed at developing revolutionaries amongst college and K-12 students.

MXGM members operate daycares, schools, youth programs, and give presentations at professional teachers conferences.

The International Context of Critical Race Theory

Parents and politicians are increasingly aware that something is rotten in the state of American education.

What is currently at stake, however, is not merely a conflict over ideas, but a geopolitical struggle lead in the U.S. by socialist affiliated transnational networks working in the education system.

The recent rise in advocacy for new critical race theory (CRT), liberated ethnic studies (LES) and social justice education (SJE) curriculum is evidence of the success of the “matrix of afro-indigenous socialism” in the United States.

While this particular coalition is new, the practice is, notably, just a modern iteration of the historic United Front policies of the U.S. Communist party when being directed by the Soviet Union and reflects what Hugo Chávez proposed at his meeting to form a Fifth International: a “united front that would include the supporters of the struggle against imperialism, from radical nationalism to revolutionary socialist currents”.

The cases described above, which represent a small fraction of such activities, shows how organized cadres have sought to use the educational system to undermine the rule of law, the U.S. constitutional order, and America’s national security, sovereignty, and economic prosperity in order to further their agendas – agendas that are, notably, linked to the geopolitical goals of a designated state-sponsor of terrorism (Cuba) and a state whose officials assist narcotics trafficking groups to maintain control over that state (Venezuela).

Paths for Corrective Action

While American’s right to believe in and preach the benefits of adopting policies is sacrosanct even if they are anti-Constitutional, it is folly for state and local governments to give those with subversive intentions employment and administrative authority over a captive audience.

The boldness with which political activists have used public institutions to forward their goals is testament to the poor oversight of school administrators and citizens organizations.

Many States have Educator Certification Requirements which mandate that educators not use their position as a public servant to indoctrinate youth in a manner that is subversive.

In Chapter 1012.56 of Florida Statues , for example, it describes how each prospective teachers must: “File an affidavit that the applicant subscribes to and will uphold the principles incorporated in the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Florida and that the information provided in the application is true, accurate, and complete.”

 Participating in organized secessionist and revolutionary political groups affiliated with a foreign state does, in our non-legal expert opinion, meets that criteria and thus justifies the firing of educational professional and that use their position for political proselytization. 

While the constitutionality of firing teachers for their political affiliations is open for debate, parents are not prohibited from to submit appeals to their State Department of Education for the decertification or disqualification of such employees and to submit appeals to the U.S. Department of Education to stop providing grants to academic institutions that employ professors affiliated with foreign governments.

Review of Cuba’s Intervention in Venezuela: A Strategic Occupation with Global Implications

Maria C. Werlau is the Executive Director of Cuba Archive – a non-profit organization incorporated in 2001 in Washington, D.C., whose mission is to promote human rights through research and information about the Communist Party takeover of Cuba and its subsequent oppression of political opposition. In her book Cuba’s Intervention in Venezuela: A Strategic Occupation with Global Implications Werlau provides a theoretical framework and extensive documentation with which to justify her claim that that “revolutionary” Cuba essentially occupied Venezuela. This occupation occurred through asymmetric measures rather than a conquering military force, i.e. the strategic placement of assets which could be used to monitor, command and control Venezuela’s security forces, economy, information, communications, and society in general. It also explores the evolution of a longstanding ambition of Fidel Castro’s – to unite Central America, South America and the Caribbean into a confederation under his leadership and how the political alliance with Hugo Chavez and their regional integration project, ALBA, operating in conjunction with an international criminal network organized to support their political goals supports this end goal. Cuba’s Intervention in Venezuela, along with other books such as Why Cuba Matters: New Threats in America’s Backyard, La Franquicua Cubana: Una Dictradura Cientifica and others, shows how  Cuba, with its smaller population and economy, was able to take over Venezuela thanks to a highly trained intelligence community and a unique methodological tool kit first transferred by the Soviets and refined through decades of operations in Cuba and abroad. As the book implies by the title, Werlau also shows how implications of this occupation is not just regional, but global.

The book’s first chapter covers Fidel Castro’s dream of a united Latin American and details plans enacted by the Cuban Communist Party to establish armed political fronts, training of foreign political operatives in support roles for the Cubans, as well as developing collaborative relationships with the leaders of Socialist and Communist parties in Venezuela as well as other parts of Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. Citing an interview with former Captain of Cuba’s General Directorate of Intelligence, Enrique Garcia, Cuba efforts financed by the Soviet Union included espionage, penetration of organizations, and buying influence via substantial cash payments to presidential candidates all throughout these regions.

Chapters two through six cover an incredibly large number of diverse and detailed examples of the legal, economic, military and political cooperative agreements, accords, treaties and charters between Venezuela and Cuba as well as their social impact. Coverage of this judicial, economic, political, technological, national security and social intertwining takes a hundred pages. It shows how Cuban advisors in the military, economy, and social fields has come to play huge roles in both monitoring and managing the country. Reading these chapters makes the calls by the Venezuelan opposition for the expulsion of all Cuban contractors from Venezuela more than understandable – several thousand people in key roles are able to function as an occupying force when they are able to collude with a domestic party, the PSUV, that wishes to have their country turned into Cuba. Citing Lt. Col Juan Reinaldo, who for 17 years was a member of Fidel Castro’s personal security detail, she shows how there is no doubt that Cuba’s expertise in totalitarian social control was transferred to the PSUC via training and placement of advisors throughout Venezuela’s armed forced and key social and economy sectors.

Chapter 7, A Post-Cold War Continental Project, opens with warnings by General Guaicapuro Lameda, the former president of PDVSA, published shortly after a trip to Venezuela intended to indoctrinate him into the Fidel Castro’s plans for ensuring Hugo Chavez and the PSUV would stay in power and radically transform the content over a period to last no less than 30 years. Fidel’s recipe for Venezuela included:

  1. Let those who dislike the revolution leave
  2. Keep people busy covering their basic needs and repressed
  3. Burn non-essential oil money to buy loyalties and disable opponents
  4. Find or create a credible and powerful enemy
  5. Keep the poor impoverished but hopeful
  6. Corner the opposition
  7. Establish a parallel/dual economy: one for the government’s purposes (for the poor), the other one, unattainable and unbearable, for the opposition
  8. Implant terror: among supporters, the fear of losing what the government gives; among opponents, the fear of losing what they have, including their life and freedom
  9. Make it difficult to do things legally in order to keep people tied up, compromised, dominated, and disabled
  10. Galvanize hope through elections

This blueprint for the creation of a new historical block appears inspired by Antonio Gramsci, the political philosopher and founder of the Italian Communist Party, who Chavez stated that he had “an excellent knowledge of” and is frequently cited within PSUV materials such as their Red Book. Venezuela’s transformation into the barrack-style Communism of Cuba with ‘more frills’ was the first big step towards their post-Cold War Continental Transformation Project called Nuestra America.

In addition to these policies which increased political polarization, marginalized parties organized around traditional democratic values, attitudes and beliefs, Venezuela’s educational model transformed to align with based on Cuba’s indoctrination/education system. More than 20 million books for all levels of the Venezuelan education system were published in Cuba that taught a Marxist worldview and highlighted how Simon Bolivar, the greatest Venezuelan, had a Cuban nursemaid.

Chapter 8, A Criminal Network with Extra Regional Ties, continues where the last pages of Chapter Seven began to address – the numerous political and criminal groups that have come to partner with the Chavez/Maduro/Castro governments. One of the admirable qualities of this book is its citation of sources – from personal interviews to judicial proceedings, memoirs published by Cuban and Venezuelan regime insiders, etc. In this section highlighting how Cuba helped make Venezuela into a mafia state through support of narco-trafficking, the rich source list here is worth the cost of the book.

In this section, Werlau links the interests of transnational criminal organizations with the political policies promoted by the Foro de Sao Paulo. Embezzlement of public funds, drug proceeds and disruptive targeting by media and criminal actors enables high public officials, prosecutors, judges, journalists to be bribed or threatened. Targets are, basically, given the choice of plata (money) or plomo (bullets). Some of the highlighted acts include state-sanctioned bribery rings, money laundering rings, schemes to sell passports, overbidding, underperforming, direct and indirect kickbacks, and providing safe haven for designated terrorist organizations.

Links with non-national organizations, such as Hezbollah, IRA, ETA, and others are covered along with Iran, China, and Russia – which provide loans that somehow never make it to the national accounts. She describes complex networks that use a diverse criminal portfolios to undermine the rule of law, democratic governance, and US alliances throughout the Western Hemisphere.

Chapter 9, Cuba’s Core Competency: Soft Power on Steroids, links together the activities described in the preceding chapters and explains how they all demonstrate a comprehensive effort at organizational and political technology transfer. What’s been ongoing since the first election of Hugo Chavez – just as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez admit in their published statements – is an effort from the outside in to transform Venezuelan society.

Werlau summarizes this as follows:

“Cuba’s core competency, or comparative advantage, is rooted in the centralized command-and-control totalitarian nature of the system, unconstrained by judicial, ethical, and moral boundaries or by term limits, balance of powers, transparency, accountability, and bureaucratic-institutional rules and restraints that characterize even the weakest democracy. The Cuban Politburo and Communist Party leadership has absolute power to strategize with great consistency as well as ample flexibility to use even the most unsavory tactics. It can act very quickly without a need for consultation and it can plan for the long term as well as wait patiently, as its power is enduring, it does not have to face electoral challenges or term limits.

Werlau notes that Cuba is an innovator in this field, as this all predates Russia’s Gerasimov Doctrine of 2013 –  which states that the rules of war have changed and the military should embrace hybrid and asymmetrical actions and nonmilitary means to achieve military and strategic goals, combining the use of special forces with information warfare to create a permanently operating front through the entire territory of the enemy state. I would, however, disagree with this assessment as this is a variation of the same sort of tactics that the Soviets/Russians first developed following the professionalization of the CCCP and they were the ones that transferred their knowledge to Cuba.

Citing interviews from a Cuban Intelligence Officer that defected, Werlau describes how Cuba’s Directorate of Intelligence systematically penetrates governments, international organizations, media, academia, and all of society in select countries – particularly the United States. She highlights a number of these organizations – such as the ICAP, Prensa Latina, and organizations targeted for influence such as LSA and CLACSO. Highlighting the role of U.N. in facilitating these activities, she highlights how Cuba has the second highest per capita number of people given diplomatic credential, credentials which enable ambassadors and their staff to engage in espionage and recruitment in other countries with a ‘get out of jail free’ card.

Following further details on similar events, Werlau highlights how Venezuela has come to enact policies that function as asymmetrical warfare, such as forced migration as state policy, creation of export-based criminal networks, and a state-supported human trafficking business.

Chapter Ten, The International Response, highlights how as a result of such an extensive intelligence apparatus that the international response to Cuba’s occupation of Venezuela at the invitation of Hugo Chavez and then Nicolas Maduro has largely been muted. It’s all the more understandable given the large number of individuals, networks, groups, companies, and countries involved. Werlau’s book, however, does a great job in organizing this material to present a holistic picture of just what asymmetric warfare can accomplish – the takeover of a state government without military battle and only military-supported intelligence agents.

Notes on The Threat Closer to Home: Hugo Chavez and the War Against America

Michael Rowan is the author of The Threat Closer to Home: Hugo Chavez and the War Against America and is a political consultant for U.S. and Latin American leaders. He has advised former Bolivian president Jaime Paz Zamora and Costa Rican president Oscar Arias. Mr. Rowan has also counseled winning Democratic candidates in 30 U.S. states. He is a former president of the International Association of Political Consultants.

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Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela, is a much more dangerous individuals than the famously elusive leader of al-Quaeda. He has made the United States his sworn enemy, and the sad truth is that few people are really listening.

“I’m still a subversive,” Chavez has admitted. “I think the entire world should be subverted.”

 

Hugo Chavez to Jan James of the Associated Press, September 23, 2007

 

 

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One cannot discount how much Castro’s aura has shaped Chavez’s thoughts and actions.

 

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There are many who harbor bad intentions towards the United States, but only a few who possess the capability to do anything about it. Chavez is one of these few because:

 

His de facto dictatorship gives him absolute control over Venezuela’s military, oil production, and treasury.

He harbors oil reserves second only to those of Saudi Arabia; Venezuela’s annual windfall profits exceed the net worth of Bill Gates.

He has a strategic military and oil alliance with a major American foe and terrorism sponsor, the Islamic Republic of Iran

He has more soldiers on active and reserve duty and more modern weapons – mostly from Russia and China – than any other nation in Latin America

Fulfilling Castro’s dream, he has funded a Communist insurgency against the United States, effectively annexing Bolivia, Nicaragua, Dominica, and Ecuador as surrogate states, and is developing cells in dozens of countries to create new fronts in this struggle.

He is allied with the narcotics-financed guerrillas against the government of Colombia, which the United States supports in its war against drug trafficking

He has numerous assocaiions with terorrists, money launderers, kidnappers, and drug traffickers.

He has more hard assets (the Citgo oil company) and soft assets (Hollywood stars, politicians, lobbyists, and media connections) than any other foreign power.

 

 

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Chavez longs for the ear when there will be no liberal international order to constrain his dream of a worldwide “socialist” revolution: no World Bank, no International Monetary Fund, no Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, no World Trade Organization, no international law, not economic necessity for modernization and globalilzation. And perhaps more important, he longs for the day when the United States no longer policies the world’s playing fields. Chavez has spent more than $100 billion trying to minimize the impact of each international institution on Latin America. He is clearly opposed to international cooperation that does not endorse the Cuba-Venezuela government philosophy.

 

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According to reports from among its 2,400 former members, the FARC resembles a mafia crime gang more than a Communist guerrilla army, but Chavez disagrees, calling the FARC, “insurgent forces that have a political project.” They “are not terrorists, they are true armies… they must be recognized.”

 

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Chavez’s goal in life are to complete Simon Bolivar’s dream to united Latin America and Castro’s dream to communize it.

 

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Since he was elected, Chavez’s public relations machinery has spent close to a billion dollars in the United States to convince Americas that he alone is telling the true story.

 

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There are a number of influential Americans who have been attracted by Chavez’s money. These influde the 1996 Republican vice-presidential candidate Jack Kemp, who has repaed large dees trying to sell Chavez’s oil to the U.S. government; Tom Boggs, one of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington D.C.; Giuliani Partners, the lobbying arms of the former New York mayor and presidential hopeful (principal lobbyists for Chavez’s CITGO oil company in Texas); former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s Bain Associates, which prospered by handling Chavez’s oil and bond interests; and Joseph P. Kennedy II of Massachusetts, who advertises Chavez’s oil discounts to low-income Americans, a program that reaches more than a million American families (Kennedy and Chavez cast this program as nonpolitical philanthropy).

 

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Chavez’s schoolteacher parents could not afford to raise all of their six children at home, so the two older boys, Adan and Hugo, were sent to live with their grandmother, Rosa Ines. Several distinguished Chavez-watchers, including Alvaro Vargas Llosa, have theorized that his being locked in cloastes at home and then sent away by his parents to grow up elsewhere constituted a seminal rejection that gave rise to what Vargas Llosa called Chavez’s “messianic inferiority complex” – his overarching yearning to be loved and his irrepressible need to act out.

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Chavez began living the life of a Communist double agent. “During the day I’m a career military officer who does his job,” he told his lover Herma Marksman, “but at night I work on achieving the transformations this country needs.” His nights were filled with secret meetings of Communist subversives and co-conspirators, often in disguises, planning the armed overthrow of the government.

 

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In 1979, he was transferred to Caracas to teach at his former military academic. It was the perfect perch from which to build a network of officers sympathetic to his revolutionary cause.

Chavez also expanded the circle of his ideological mentors. By far the most important of these was Douglas Bravo, an unreconstructed communist who disobeyed Moscow’s orders after détente to give up the armed struggle against the United States. Bravo was the leader of the Party of the Venezuelan Revolution (PVR) and the Armed Forces of National Liberation. Chavez actively recruited his military friends to the PVR, couching it in the rhetoric of Bolivarianism to make it more palatable to their sensibilities.

 

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From 1981 to 1984, a determined Chavez began secretly converting his students at the military academy to co-conspirators; ironically his day job was to teach Venezuelan military history with an emphasis on promoting military professionalism and noninvolvement in politics.

 

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Chavez emerged from jail in 1994 a hero to Venezuela’s poor. He had also, while imprisoned, assiduously courted the international left, who helped him build an impressive war-chest – including, it was recently revealed, $150,000 from the FARC guerrillas of Colombia.

 

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John Maisto, the US ambassador to Venezuela, at one point called Chavez a “terrorist” because of his coup attempt and denied him a visa to visit the United States. In reply, Chavez mocked Maisto by taking his Visa credit card from his wallet and waiving it about, saying, “I already have a Visa!”

 

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Corruption made a good campaign issue for Chavez, but when it came time to do something about it, he balked. Chavez initially appointed Jesus Urdaneta – one of the four saman tree oath takers – as anticorruption czar. But Urdaneta was too energetic and effective for the President, within five months he had identified forty cases of corruption within Chavez’s own administration. Chavez refused to back his czar, who was eventually pushed out of office by the very people he was investigating. Chavez did nothing to save him.

 

In 1999 Chavez started a give-away project called “Plan Bolivar 2000.” Implemented by Chavez loyalists organized in groups known as Bolivarian Circles, the project was modeled after the Communist bloc committees in Castro’s Cuba The plan was basically a social welfare program that mirrored the populist ethic…. In eighteen months, Bolivar 2000 had become so corrupt that it had to be disbanded.

 

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Independent studies estimate that the amounts taken from Venezuelan poverty and development funds by middlemen, brokers, and subcontractors – all of whom charge an “administrative” cost for passing on the funds – range as high as 80 percent to 90 percent. By contrast, the U.S. government, the World Bank, nongovernmental organizations, and international charities limit their administrative costs to 20 percent of project funds; the Nobal Peace Prize winning Doctors without Borders, for example, spends only 16 percent on administration.

 

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Between 1999 and 2009, Chavez has spent some 20,000 hours on television.

 

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Hugo Chavez is implementing a sophisticated oil war against the United Sates. To understand this you have to look back to 1999, when he asked the Venezuelan Congress for emergency executive powers and got them, whereupon he consolidated government power to his advantage. His big move was to take full control over the national oil company PDVSA. Chavez replaced PDVSA’s directors and managers with military or political loyalists, many of whom knew little to nothing about the oil business. This action rankled the company’s professional and technical employees – some 50,000 of them – who enjoyed the only true meritocracy in the country. Citgo…. Later received similar treatment.

 

Chavez in effect demodernized and de-Americanized PDVAS, which had adopted organizational efficiency cultures similar to its predecessors ExxonMobil and Shell, by claiming that they were ideologically incorrect. Chavez compared this to Haiti’s elimination of French culture under Toussain L’Ouverture in the early 1800s.

 

The president’s effort to dumb down the business was evident early on. In 1999 Chavez fired Science Applications International Corporations (Known as SAIC), an enormous U.S.-based global information technology firm that had served as PDVSA’s back office since 1995 (as it had for British Petroleum and other energy companies).

 

SAIC appealed to an international court and got a judgement against Chavez for stealing SAIC’s knowledge without compensation. Chavez ignored the judgement, refusing to pay “one penny”.

 

Stripped of SAIC technology and thousands of oil professionals who quit out of frustration, PDVSA steadily lost operational capacity from 1999 to 2001. Well maintenance suffered; production investment was slashed, oil productivity declined; environmental standards were ignored; and safety accidents proliferated. After the 2002 stroke that led to Chavez’s brief removal from power, PDVSA sacked some 18,000 more of it’s knowledge workers. Its production fell to 2.4 million barrels per day.

 

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After Venezuela’s 2006 presidential election, Chavez…told three American oil companies – ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron – to turn over 60 percent of their heavy oil exploration [which they had spent a decade and nearly $20 billion developing] or leave Venezuela.

 

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Oil has caused a massive shift in the wealth of nations. All told, $12 trillion has been transferred from the oil consumers to the oil producers since 2002. This is a very large figure – it is comparable to the 2006 GDP of the United States – and it has contributed greatly to our unprecedented trade deficit; a weakening of the dollar; and the weakness of the U.S. financial system in surviving the housing mortgage crisis.

 

Two decades ago, private companies controlled half the world’s oil reserved, but today they only control 13 percent… While many Americans believe that big oil is behind the high prices at the gas pump, the fact is that the national oil companies controlled by Chavez of Venezuela, Ahmadinejad of Iran, and Putin of Russia are the real culprits.

 

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When Chavez’s plane first landed in Havana in 1994, Fidel Castro greeted him at the airport. What made Hugo Chavez important to Castro then was the same thing that makes him important to the United States now: oil. Castro’s plan to weaken America – which he had to shelve when the Soviet Union collapsed and Cuba lost its USSR oil and financial subsidy – was dusted off.

The Chavez Castro condominium was a two-way street. Chavez soon began delivering from 50,000 to 90,000 barrels of oil per day to Castro, a subsidy eventually worth $3 billion to $4 billion per year, which far exceeded the sugar subsidy Castro once received from the Soviet Union until Gorbachev ended it around 1980. Castro used the huge infusion of Chavez’s cash to solidify his absolute control in Cuba and to crack down on political dissidents.

 

 

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Chavez’s predatory, undemocratic, and destabilizing actions are not limited to Venezuela.

 

Chavez is striving to remake Latin America in his own image, and for his own purposes – purposes that mirror Fidel Castro’s half-aborted but never abandoned plans for hemispheric revolution hatched half a decade ago.

 

(81)

 

Hugo Chavez sees himself as leading the revolutionary charge that Fidel Castro always wanted to mount but was never able to spread beyond the shores of the island prison he created in the Caribbean. Ye four decades after taking power, Castro found a surrogate, a right arm who could carry on the work that he could not.

 

(82)

 

[Chavez] routinely uses oil to bribe Latin American states into lining up against the United States, either by subsidizing oil in the surrogate state or by using oil to interfere in other countries’ elections.

 

For instance, in 1999 Chavez created Petrocaribe, a company that provides oil discounts with delayed payments to thirteen Caribbean nations. It was so successful at fulfilling it’s real purpose – buying influence and loyalty – that two years later Chavez created PetroSur, which does the same for twenty Central and South American nations, at an annual cost to Venezuela’s treasury of an estimated $1 billion.

 

(83)

 

From 2005 to 2007 alone, Chavez gave away a total of $39 billion in oil and cash; $9.9 billion to Argentina, $7.5 billion to Cuba, $4.9 billion to Ecuador, and $4.9 billion from Nicaragua were the largest sums Chavez gave…

 

At a time when U.S. influence is waning – in part owing to Washington’s preoccupation with Iraq and the Middle East – Chavez has filled the void. The United States provides less than $1 billion in foreign economic aid to the entire region, a figure that rises to only $1.6 billion in foreign economic aid to the entire region… Chavez, meanwhile, spends nearly $9 billion in the region every single year. And his money is always welcome because it comes with no strings. The World Bank and IMF, by contrast, require concomitant reforms – for instance, efforts to fight corruption, drug trafficking, and money laundering – in return for grants and loans.

Consequently, over the course of a handful of years, virtually all the Latin American countries have wound up dependent on Venezuela’s oil or money or both. These include not just resource-poor nations; in Latin America only Mexico and Peru are fully independent of Chavez’s money.

One consequence: at the Organization of American States (OAS), which serves as a mini-United Nations for Latin America, Venezuela has assumed the position of the “veto” vote that once belonged to the United States.

 

(84)

Since Chavez has been president of Venezuela, the OAS has not passed on substantive resolution supported by the United States when Chavez was on the opposite side.

In all, since coming to power in 1999, Chavez has spent or committed an estimated $110 billion – some say twice the amount needed to eliminate poverty in Venezuela forever – in more than thirty countries to advance his anti-American agenda. Since 2005, Chavez’s total foreign aid budget for Latin America has been more than $50 billion – much more than the amount of U.S. foreign aid for the region over the same period.

Many of these expenditures have been hidden from the Venezuelan public in secret off-budget slush funds.The result is that Chavez now, by any measure, the most powerful figure in Latin America.

(85)

During Morale’s first year in office, 2006, Chavez contributed a whopping $1 billion in aid to Bolivia (equivalent to 12 percent of the country’s GDP). He also provided access to one of Venezuela’s presidential jets, sent a forty-soldier personal guard to accompany Morales at all times, subsidized the pay of Bolivia’s military, and paid to send thousands of Cuban doctors to Bolivia’s barrio health clinics.

(86)

After his political success in Bolivia, Chavez has aggressively supported every anti-American presidential candidate in the region. U.S. policymakers console themselves by claiming that Chavez’s favorites have mostly been defeated by pro-American centrists. The truth is more complex. Chavez came close to winning every one of those contests, and lost only when he overplayed his hand. More troubling, U.S. influence and prestige in Latin America is at perhaps its lowest ebb ever; today, being considered America’s ally is the political kiss of death.

 

(91)

 

Since turning unabashedly criminal, the FARC has imported arms, exported drugs, recruited minors, kidnapped thousands for ransom, executed hostages, hijacked planes, planted land mines, operated an extortion and protection racket in peasant communities, committed atrocities against innocent civilians, and massacred farmers as traitors…

 

A long-held ambition of the FARC’s leadership is to have the group officially recognized as a belligerent force, a legitimate army in rebellion. Such a designation – conferred by individual nations and under international law – would give the FARC rights normally accorded only to sovereign powers.

(93)

Uribe, a calm and soft-spoken attorney, set out methodologically to finish what Pastrana had begun.

 

To Chavez, any friend of the United States is his enemy, and any enemy of a friend of the United States is his friend – even a terrorist organization working to destabilize one of his country’s most important neighbors.

 

(94)

The relationship [between Chavez and the FARC] began more than a decade and a half ago, in the wake of Chavez’s failed coup. In 1992, the FARC gave a jailed Chavez $150,000, money that launched him to the presidency.

(95)

Perhaps the most sinister aspect to Chavez’s relationship with the FARC is the help he has provided to maximize its cocaine sales to the United States and Europe. British journalist John Carlin, who writes for The Guardian, a newspaper generally supportive of Chavez, secured interviews with several of the 2,400 FARC guerrillas who deserted the group in 2007. One of his subject told him that “the guerillas have a non-aggression pact with the Venezuelan military. The Venezuelan government lets FARC operate freely because they share the same left-wing, Bolivarian ideals, and because FARC bribes their people. Without cocaine revenues, the FARC would disappear, its former members assert. “If it were not for cocaine, the fuel that feeds the Colombian war, FARC would long ago have disbanded.”

(104)

Iran and Venezuela are working together to drive up the price of oil in hopes of crippling the American economy and enhancing their hegemonies in the Middle East and Latin America. They are using their windfall petro-revenues to finance a simmering war – sometimes cold, sometimes hot, sometimes covert, sometimes overt – against the United States.

(105)

As Chavez told Venezuelans repeatedly, Saddam’s fate was also what he feared for himself.

 

(119)

Hugo Chavez’s first reaction after the attack on the camp of narcoterrorist Raul Reyes was to accuse Colombia of behaving like Israel. “We’re not going to allow an Israel in the region,” he said.

 

Actually the parallel is not far off. Like Colombia, Israel is a state that wishes to live in peace with its neighbors, but they insist on destroying it. Israel’s fondest wish would be for the Palestinians to be capable of building a peaceful and prosperous nation with which Israel could establish normal relations.

 

(123)

American officials have also submitted some 130 written requests for basic biographical or immigration-related information, such as entry and exit dates into and out of Venezuela, for suspected terrorists. Not one of the requests has generated a substantive response.

(126)

***

 

Michael Rowan talked about the book he co-wrote, The Threat Closer to Home: Hugo Chavez and the War Against America, on C-SPAN. Former U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela Otto Reich joined him to comment on the book. Ray Walser moderated. Discussion topics included the global geopolitical impact of Venezuela’s decreasing economic and personal freedoms and what the U.S. can do. Then both men responded to questions from members of the audience.

Notes from Transnational Organized Crime, Terrorism, and Criminalized States in Latin America – An Emerging Tier-One National Security Priority

Douglas Farah is an American journalist, national security consultant, a Senior Fellow of Financial Investigations and Transparency at the International Assessment of Strategy Center and also an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Farah served as United Press International bureau chief in El Salvador from 1985 to 1987, and a freelance journalist for The Washington Post, Newsweek, and other publications until being hired as a staff correspondent for The Washington Post in 1992.

These are notes from his monograph published by the Strategic Studies Institute Monograph Transnational Organized Crime, Terrorism, and Criminalized States in Latin America – An Emerging Tier-One National Security Priority in August of 2012.

NOTES

The emergence of new hybrid (state and nonstate) transnational criminal and terrorist franchises in Latin America poses a tier-one security threat for the United States. These organizations operate under broad state protection and undermine democratic governance, sovereignty, growth, trade, and stability.

Leaders of these organizations share a publicly articulated doctrine to employ asymmetric warfare against the United States and its allies that explicitly endorses the use of WMD as a legitimate tactic.

illicit forces in Latin America within criminalized states have begun using tactical operations centers as a means of pursuing their view of statecraft. That brings new elements to the “dangerous spaces” where nonstate actors intersect with regions characterized by weak sovereignty and alternative governance systems. This new dynamic fundamentally alters the structure underpinning global order.

Being capable of understanding and mitigating this threat requires a whole-of-government approach, including collection, analysis, law enforcement, policy, and programming. The traditional state/nonstate dichotomy is no longer useful for an adequate illumination of these problems. Similarly, the historical divide between transnational organized crime and terrorism is becoming increasingly irrelevant.

TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZED CRIME, TERRORISM, AND CRIMINALIZED STATES IN LATIN AMERICA: AN EMERGING TIER-ONE NATIONAL SECURITY PRIORITY

INTRODUCTION AND GENERAL FRAMEWORK

The Changing Nature of the Threat.

The purpose of this monograph is to identify and discuss the role played by transnational organized crime groups (TOCs) in Latin America, and the inter- play of these groups with criminalizing state structures, “stateless” regions, extra-regional actors, and the multiple networks that exploit them. It particularly focuses on those areas that pose, or potentially pose, a threat to U.S. interests at home and abroad; and, it can be used as a model for understanding similar threats in other parts of the world.

This emerging combination of threats comprises a hybrid of criminal-terrorist, and state and nonstate franchises, combining multiple nations acting in concert, and traditional TOCs and terrorist groups acting as proxies for the nation-states that sponsor them. These hybrid franchises should now be viewed as a tier-one security threat for the United States. Under- standing and mitigating the threat requires a whole- of-government approach, including collection, analysis, law enforcement, policy, and programming. No longer is the state/nonstate dichotomy useful in illuminating these problems, just as the TOC/terrorism divide is increasingly disappearing.

These franchises operate in, and control, specific geographic territories which allow them to function in a relatively safe environment. These pipelines, or recombinant chains of networks, are highly adaptive and able to move a multiplicity of illicit products (cocaine, weapons, humans, and bulk cash) that ultimately cross U.S. borders undetected thousands of times each day. The actors along the pipeline form and dis- solve alliances quickly, occupy both physical and cyber space, and use both highly developed and modern institutions, including the global financial system, as well as ancient smuggling routes and methods.

This totals to some $6.2 trillion— fully 10 percent of the world’s GDP, placing it behind only the United States and the European Union (EU), but well ahead of China, in terms of global GDP ranking.1 Other estimates of global criminal proceeds range from a low of about 4 percent to a high of 15 percent of global GDP.

Latin American networks now extend not only to the United States and Canada, but outward to Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and Asia, where they have begun to form alliances with other networks. A clear understanding of how these rela- tionships evolve, and the relative benefits derived from the relationships among and between state and nonstate actors, will greatly enhance the understand- ing of this new hybrid threat.

 

There is no universally accepted definition of “transnational organized crime.” Here it is defined as, at a minimum, serious crimes or offenses spanning at least one border, undertaken by self-perpetuating associations of individuals who cooperate transnationally, motivated primarily by the desire to obtain a financial or other material benefit and/or power and influence.3 This definition can encompass a number of vitally important phenomena not usually addressed by studies of TOC:

  • A spectrum or continuum of state participation in TOC, ranging from strong but “criminalized” states to weak and “captured” states, with various intermediate stages of state criminal behavior.
  • A nexus between TOCs on the one hand, and terrorist and insurgent groups on the other, with a shifting balance between terrorist and criminal activity on both sides of the divide.
  • Recombinant networks of criminal agents, potentially including not only multiple TOCs, but also terrorist groups as well as states and proxies.
  • Enduring geographical “pipelines” for moving various kinds of commodities and illicit profits in multiple directions, to and from a major destination.
  • We have also crafted this definition to be broadly inclusive: It can potentially encompass the virtual world of TOC, e.g., cybercrime;
  • It can be applied to other regions; the recombinant pipelines and networks model offers an analytical framework which can be applied to multiple regions and circumstances.

 

The term criminalized state” used in this mono- graph refers to states where the senior leadership is aware of and involved—either actively or through passive acquiescence—on behalf of the state in trans- national criminal enterprises, where TOC is used as an instrument of statecraft, and where levers of state power are incorporated into the operational structure of one or more TOC groups.

New Actors in Latin American TOC-State Relations.

Significant TOC organizations, principally drug trafficking groups, have posed serious challenges for U.S. security since the rise of the Medellín cartel in the early 1980s, and the growth of the Mexican drug trafficking organizations in the 1990s. In addition, Latin America has a long history of revolutionary movements, from the earliest days of independence, to the Marxist movements that sprouted up across the region in the 1960s to 1980s. Within this context, these groups often served as elements of governance, primarily to advance or defeat the spread of Marxism in the region. These Marxist revolutions were victorious in Cuba and Nicaragua, which, in turn, became state sponsors of external revolutionary movements, themselves relying on significant economic and military support from the Soviet Union and its network of aligned states’ intelligence and security services.

With the end of the Cold War, the negotiated end to numerous armed conflicts (the Farabund Marti National Liberation Front [FMLN] in El Salvador; the Contra rebels in Nicaragua; the Popular Liberation Army [EPL], M-19, and other small groups in Colom- bia), and the collapse of Marxism, most of the armed groups moved into the democratic process. However, this was not true for all groups, and armed nonstate groups are again being sponsored in Latin America under the banner of the “Bolivarian Revolution.”4

Other states that traditionally have had little inter- est or influence in Latin America have emerged over the past decade, primarily at the invitation of the self- described Bolivarian states seeking to establish 21st- century socialism. This bloc of nations—led by Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, also including Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Evo Morales of Bolivia, and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua—seeks to break the traditional ties of the region to the United States. To this end, the Bolivar- ian alliance has formed numerous organizations and military alliances—including a military academy in Bolivia to erase the vestiges of U.S. military training— which explicitly exclude the United States.

Over the past decade, China’s trade with Latin America has jumped from $10 billion to $179 billion.11 With the increased presence has come a significantly enhanced Chinese intelligence capacity and access across Latin America. At the same time, Chinese Triads—modern remnants of ancient Chinese secret societies that evolved into criminal organizations—are now operating extensive money laundering services for drug trafficking organizations via Chinese banks.

China also has shown a distinct willingness to bail out financially strapped authoritarian governments if the price is right. For example, China lent Venezuela $20 billion, in the form of a joint venture with a company to pump crude oil that China then locked up for a decade at an average price of about $18 a barrel. The money came as Chávez was facing a financial crisis, rolling blackouts, and a severe liquidity shortage across the economy.12 Since then, China has extended several other significant loans to Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia.

The dynamics of the relationship between China and the Bolivarian bloc and its nonstate proxies will be one of the key determinants of the future of Latin America and the survival of the Bolivarian project. Without significant material support from China, the economic model of the Bolivarian alliance will likely collapse under its own weight of statist inefficiency and massive corruption, despite being richly endowed with natural resources.

Chinese leaders likely understand that any real replacement of the Bolivarian structure leadership by truly democratic forces could result in a significant loss of access to the region, and a cancellation of existing contracts. This, in turn, gives China an incentive to continue to support some form of the Bolivarian project going forward, even if ailing leaders such as Chávez and Fidel Castro are no longer on the scene.

While there have been criminalized states in the past (the García Meza regime of “cocaine colonels” in Bolivia in 1980, and Desi Bouterse in Suriname in the 1980s, for ex- ample), what is new with the Bolivarian structure is the simultaneous and mutually supporting merger of state with TOC activities across multiple state and nonstate platforms. While García Meza, Bouterse, and others were generally treated as international pariahs with little outside support, the new criminalized states offer each other economic, diplomatic, political, and military support that shields them from international isolation and allows for mutually reinforcing structures to be built.

Rather than operating in isolation, these groups have complex but significant interaction with each other, based primarily on the ability of each actor or set of actors to provide a critical service while profiting mutually from the transactions.

While not directly addressing the threat from criminalized states, the Strategy notes that:

  • TOC penetration of states is deepening and leading to co-option in some states and weakening of governance in many others. TOC net- works insinuate themselves into the political process through bribery and in some cases have become alternate providers of governance, security, and livelihoods to win popular support. The nexus in some states among TOC groups and elements of government—including intelligence services and personnel—and big business figures, threatens the rule of law.
  • TOC threatens U.S. economic interests and can cause significant damage to the world financial system by subverting legitimate markets. The World Bank estimates that about $1 trillion is spent each year to bribe public officials. TOC groups, through their state relationships, could gain influence over strategic markets.
  • Terrorists and insurgents increasingly are turn- ing to crime and criminal networks for funding and logistics. In fiscal year (FY) 2010, 29 of the 63 top drug trafficking organizations identified by the Department of Justice had links to terror- ist organizations. While many terrorist links to TOC are opportunistic, this nexus is dangerous, especially if it leads a TOC network to facilitate the transfer of WMD material to terrorists.17

Stewart Patrick and others correctly argue that, contrary to the predominant thinking that emerged immediately after September 11, 2001 (9/11) (i.e., failed states are a magnet for terrorist organizations), failed or nonfunctional states are actually less attractive to terrorist organizations and TOC groups than “weak but functional” states.18 But there is another category, perhaps the most attractive of all to TOC and terrorist groups they are allied with: strong and functional states that participate in TOC activities.

The Unrecognized Role of the Criminalized States.

While it is true that TOC penetration of the state threatens the rule of law, as the administration’s strategy notes, it also poses significant new threats to the homeland. Criminalized states frequently use TOCs as a form of statecraft, bringing new elements to the dangerous spaces where nonstate actors intersect with regions of weak sovereignty and alternative governance systems.19 This fundamentally alters the structure of global order.

As the state relationships consolidate, the recombinant criminal-terrorist pipelines become more rooted and thus more dangerous. Rather than being pursued by state law enforcement and intelligence services in an effort to impede their activities, TOC groups (and perhaps terrorist groups) are able to operate in a more stable, secure environment, something that most businesses, both licit and illicit, crave.

Rather than operating on the margins of the state or seeking to co-opt small pieces of the state machinery, the TOC groups in this construct operate in concert with the state on multiple levels. Within that stable environment, a host of new options open, from the sale of weapons, to the use of national aircraft and ship- ping registries, to easy use of banking structures, to the use of national airlines and shipping lines to move large quantities of unregistered goods, and the acquisition of diplomatic passports and other identification means.

Examples of the benefits of a criminal state can be seen across the globe. For example, the breakaway republic of Transnistria, near Moldova, known as “Europe’s Black Hole,” is a notorious weapons trafficking center from which dozens of surface-to-air missiles have disappeared; it is run by former Russian secret police (KGB) officials.

The FARC needs to move cocaine to U.S. and European markets in order to obtain the money necessary to maintain its army of some 9,000 troops. In order to do that, the FARC, with the help of tra- ditional drug trafficking organizations, must move its product through Central America and Mexico to the United States—the same route used by those who want to move illegal aliens to the United States, and those who want to move bulk cash shipments, stolen cars, and weapons from the United States southward. All of these goods traverse the same territory, pass through the same gatekeepers, and are often inter- changeable along the way. A kilo of cocaine can be traded for roughly one ton of AK-47 assault rifles before either of the goods reaches what would normally be its final destination.

Though the presence of a state government (as op- posed to its absence) is ordinarily considered to be a positive situation, the presence of the state is beneficial or positive only if it meets the needs of its people. If the state, as it is in many parts of Latin America and many other parts of the world, is present but is viewed, with good reason, as corrupt, incompetent, and/or predatory, then its presence is not beneficial in terms of creating state strength or state capacity. In fact, where the state is strongest but least accountable for abuses, people often prefer nonstate actors to exercise authority.25

This has led to an underlying conceptual problem in much of the current literature describing regions or territories as “governed” or “ungoverned,” a frame- work that presents a false dichotomy suggesting that the lack of state presence means a lack of a governing authority. “Ungoverned spaces” connotes a lawless region with no controlling authority. In reality, the stateless regions in question almost always fall under the control of nonstate actors who have sufficient force or popular support (or a mixture of both), to impose their decisions and norms, thus creating alternate power structures that directly challenge the state, or that take the role of the state in its absence.

The notion of ungoverned spaces can be more broadly applied to legal, functional, virtual, and social arenas that either are not regulated by states or are contested by non-state actors and spoilers.26

THE NATURE OF THE THREAT IN THE AMERICAS

Old Paradigms Are Not Enough.

Control of broad swaths of land by these nonstate groups in Latin America not only facilitates the movement of illegal products, both northward and south- ward, through transcontinental pipelines, but also undermines the stability of an entire region of great strategic interest to the United States.

The traditional threat is broadly understood to be posed by the illicit movement of goods (drugs, money, weapons, and stolen cars), people (human traffic, gang members, and drug cartel enforcers), and the billions of dollars these illicit activities generate in an area where states have few resources and little legal or law enforcement capacity .

As Moisés Naim wrote:

Ultimately, it is the fabric of society which is at stake. Global illicit trade is sinking entire industries while boosting others, ravaging countries and sparking booms, making and breaking political careers, desta- bilizing some governments and propping up others.27

The threat increases dramatically with the nesting of criminal/terrorist groups within governments that are closely aligned ideologically, such as Iran and the Bolivarian states in Latin America, and that are identified sponsors of designated terrorist groups, including those that actively participate in the cocaine trafficking trade.

While Robert Killebrew28 and Max Manwaring29 make compelling cases that specific parts of this dangerous cocktail could be defined as insurgencies (narco-insurgency in Mexico and gangs in Central America, respectively), the new combination of TOC, criminalized states, and terrorist organizations presents a new reality that breaks the traditional paradigms.

While Mexico is not the focus of this monograph, the regional convulsions from Mexico through Central America are not viewed as a narco-insurgency. Instead, this hybrid mixture of groups with a variety of motives, including those engaged in TOC, insurgencies, and criminalized states with a declared hatred for the United States, is something new and in many ways more dangerous than a traditional insurgency.

The New Geopolitical Alignment.

The visible TOC threats are only a part of the geo- strategic threats to the United States emerging from Latin America’s current geopolitical alignment. The criminalized states are already extending their grip on power through strengthened alliances with hostile outside state and quasi-state actors such as Iran and Hezbollah. The primary unifying theme among these groups is a deep hatred for the United States.

they have carried out a similar pattern of rewriting the constitution to concentrate powers in the executive and to allow for unlimited reelection; a systematic takeover of the judiciary by the executive and the subsequent criminalizing of the opposition through vaguely worded laws and constitutional amendments that make it illegal to oppose the revolution; systematic attacks on independent news media, and the use of criminal libel prosecutions to silence media critics; and, overall, the increasing criminalization of the state. These measures are officially justified as necessary to ensure the revolution can be carried out without U.S. “lackeys” sabotaging it.

The Model: Recombinant Networks and Geographical Pipelines.

To understand the full significance of the new geopolitical reality in Latin America, it is necessary to think in terms of the geopolitics of TOC. Because of the clandestine nature of the criminal and terrorist activities, designed to be as opaque as possible, one must start from the assumption that, whatever is known of specific operations along the criminal-terrorist pipeline, or whatever combinations of links are seen, represents merely a snapshot in time, not a video of continuing events. Moreover, it is often out of date by the time it is assessed.

Nonstate armed actors as treated in this mono- graph are defined as:

  • Terrorist groups, motivated by religion, politics, ethnic forces, or at times, even by financial considerations;
  • Transnational criminal organizations, both structured and disaggregated, including third generation gangs as defined by Manwaring;35
  • Militias that control “black hole” or “stateless” sectors of one or more national territories; Insurgencies, which have more well-defined and specific political aims within a particular national territory, but may operate from out- side of that national territory.

“In some cases, the terrorists simply imitate the criminal behavior they see around them, borrowing techniques such as credit card fraud and extortion in a phenomenon we refer to as activity appropriation. This is a shared approach rather than true interaction, but it often leads to more intimate connections within a short time.” This can evolve into a more symbiotic relationship, which in turn can (but many do not) turn into hybrid groups.38

While the groups that overlap in different networks are not necessarily allies, and in fact occasionally are enemies, they often can and do make alliances of convenience that are short-lived and shifting. Even violent drug cartels, which regularly engage in bloody turf battles, also frequently engage in truces and alliances, although most end when they are no longer mutually beneficial or the balance of power shifts among them.

Another indication of the scope of the emerging alliances is the dramatic rise of Latin American drug trafficking organizations operating in West Africa, for onward shipment to Western Europe. Among the drug trafficking organizations found to be working on the ground in West Africa are the FARC, Mexican drug cartels, Colombian organizations, and Italian organized crime. It is worth bearing in mind that al- most every major load of cocaine seized in West Africa in recent years has been traced to Venezuela as the point of origin.

This overlapping web of networks was described in a July 2010 federal indictment from the Southern District of New York, which showed that drug trafficking organizations in Colombia and Venezuela, including the FARC, had agreed to move several multi-ton loads of cocaine through Liberia en route to Europe.

The head of Liberian security forces, who is also the son of the president, negotiated the transshipment deals with a Colombian, a Russian, and three West Africans.

On December 8, 2011, it aired footage of the Iranian ambassador in Mexico urging a group of Mexican university students who were hackers to launch broad cyber attacks against U.S. defense and intelligence facilities, claiming such an attack would be “bigger than 9/11.”

Geographical “Pipelines.”

The central feature binding together these disparate organizations and networks which, in aggregate, make up the bulk of nonstate armed actors, is the in- formal (meaning outside legitimate state control and competence) “pipeline” or series of overlapping pipe- lines that these operations need to move products, money, weapons, personnel, and goods. The pipelines often form well-worn, customary, geographical routes and conduits developed during past conflicts, or traditionally used to smuggle goods without paying taxes to the state. Their exploitation by various communities, organizations, and networks yields recognizable patterns of activity.

The geography of the pipelines may be seen as both physical (i.e., terrain and topography), and human (i.e., historical and sociological patterns of local criminal activity).

These regions may develop their own cultures that accept what the state considers to be illicit activities as normal and desirable. This is especially true in areas where the state has been considered an enemy for generations.

The criminal pipeline itself is often a resource in dispute, and one of the primary sources of violence. Control of the pipeline can dramatically alter the relative power among different trafficking groups, as has been seen in the ongoing war between the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels in Mexico.47 Because of the lucrative nature of control of the actual physical space of the pipeline, these types of conflicts are increasingly carried out in gruesome fashion in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

These states are not collapsing. They risk becoming shell-states: sovereign in name, but hollowed out from the inside by criminals in collusion with corrupt officials in the government and the security services. This not only jeopardizes their survival, it poses a serious threat to regional security because of the trans-national nature of the crimes.

CRIMINALIZING STATES AS NEW REGIONAL ACTORS

While nonstate actors make up the bulk of criminal agents engaged in illicit activities, state actors play an increasingly important yet under-reported role. That role pertains in part to the availability of pipeline territory, and in part to the sponsorship and even direction of criminal activity. TOC groups can certainly exploit the geographical vulnerabilities of weak or failing states, but they also thrive on the services provided by stronger states.

There are traditional categories for describing state performance as developed by Robert Rotberg and others in the wake of state failures at the end of the Cold War. The premise is that that “nation-states fail because they are convulsed by internal violence and can no longer deliver positive political goods to their inhabitants.”52 These categories are:

  • Strong, i.e., able to control its territory and offer quality political goods to its people;
  • Weak, i.e., filled with social tensions, the state has only a limited monopoly on the use of force;
  • Failed, i.e., in a state of conflict with a preda- tory ruler, with no state monopoly on the use of force;
  • Collapsed, i.e., no functioning state institutions and a vacuum of authority.

This conceptualization, while useful, is extremely limited, as is the underlying premise. It fails to make a critical distinction between countries where the state has little or no power in certain areas and may be fighting to assert that control, and countries where the government, in fact, has a virtual monopoly on power and the use of force, but turns the state into a functioning criminal enterprise for the benefit of a small elite.

The 4-tier categorization also suffers from a significant omission with regard to geographical areas of operation rather than criminal actors. The model pre- supposes that stateless regions are largely confined within the borders of a single state.

 

State absence can be the product of a successful bid for local dominance by TOC groups, but it can also result from a perception on the part of the local population that the state poses a threat to their communities, livelihoods, or interests.

 

 

A 2001 Naval War College report insightfully described some of the reasons in terms of “commercial” and “political” in- surgencies. These are applicable to organized criminal groups as well and have grown in importance since then:

The border zones offer obvious advantages for political and economic insurgencies. Political insurgents prefer to set up in adjacent territories that are poorly integrated, while the commercial insurgents favor active border areas, preferring to blend in amid business and government activity and corruption. The border offers a safe place to the political insurgent and easier access to communications, weapons, provisions, transport, and banks.

For the commercial insurgency, the frontier creates a fluid, trade-friendly environment. Border controls are perfunctory in ‘free trade’ areas, and there is a great demand for goods that are linked to smuggling, document fraud, illegal immigration, and money laundering.

For the political insurgency, terrain and topography often favor the narco-guerilla. Jungles permit him to hide massive bases and training camps, and also laboratories, plantations, and clandestine runways. The Amazon region, huge and impenetrable, is a clear example of the shelter that the jungle areas give. On all of Colombia’s borders—with Panama, Ecuador, Brazil, and Venezuela—jungles cloak illegal activity.

The Weak State-Criminal State Continuum.

One may array the degree of state control of, or par- ticipation in, criminal activity along a spectrum (see Figure 2). At one end are strong but criminal states, with the state acting as a TOC element or an important component of a TOC group.

In Latin America, the government of Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana) in the 1980s and early 1990s under Desi Bouterse, a convicted drug trafficker with strong ties to the FARC, was (and perhaps still is) an operational player in an ongoing criminal enterprise and benefited from it.

Bouterse’s only public defender in the region is Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.

Again, the elements of TOC as statecraft can be seen. Chávez reportedly funded Bouterse’s improbable electoral comeback in Suriname, funneling money to his campaign and hosting him in Venezuela on several visits.60 While no other heads of state accepted Bouterse’s invitation to attend his inauguration, Chávez did, although he had to cancel at the last minute. In recompense, he promised to host Bouterse on a state visit to Venezuela.

One of the key differences between the Bolivarian alliance and earlier criminalized states in the region is the mutually reinforcing structure of the alliance. While other criminalized states have been widely viewed as international pariahs and broadly shunned, thus hastening their demise, the new Bolivarian structures unite several states in a joint, if loosely-knit, criminal enterprise. This ensures these mutually sup- porting regimes can endure for much longer.

At the other end are weak and captured states, where certain nodes of governmental authority, whether local or central, have been seized by TOCs, who in turn are the primary beneficiaries of the proceeds from the criminal activity. Penetration of the state usually centers on one or more of three functions: judiciary (to ensure impunity), border control and customs (to ensure the safe passage of persons and goods), and legislature (to codify the structures necessary to TOC organizations, such as a ban on extradition, weak asset forfeiture laws, etc.). It also is more local in its focus, rather than national.

Typically, TOC elements aim at dislodging the state from local territory, rather than assuming the role of the state in overall political authority across the country. As Shelley noted, “Older crime groups, often in long-established states, have developed along with their states and are dependent on existing institution- al and financial structures to move their products and invest their profits.”

By definition, insurgents aim to wrest political control from the state and transfer it to their own leadership.

“Captured states” are taken hostage by criminal organizations, often through intimidation and threats, giving the criminal enterprise access to some parts of the state apparatus. Guatemala would be an example: the government lacks control of roughly 60 percent of the national territory, with the cartels enjoying local power and free access to the border; but the central government itself is not under siege.

In the middle range between the extremes, more criminalized cases include participation in criminal activity by state leaders, some acting out of personal interest, others in the interest of financing the services or the ideology of the state. A variant of this category occurs when a functioning state essentially turns over, or “franchises out” part of its territory to non- state groups to carry out their own agenda with the blessing and protection of the central government or a regional power. Both state and nonstate actors share in the profits and proceeds from criminal activity thus generated. Venezuela under Hugo Chávez is perhaps the clearest example of this model in the region, given his relationship with the FARC.

Hugo Chávez and the FARC: The Franchising Model.

Chávez’s most active support for the FARC came after the FARC had already become primarily a drug trafficking organization vice political insurgency. The FARC has also traditionally earned considerable income (and wide international condemnation) from the kidnapping for ransom of hundreds of individuals, in violation of the Geneva Convention and other international conventions governing armed conflicts. It was impossible, by the early part of the 21st century, to separate support for the FARC from support for TOC, as these two activities were the insurgent group’s primary source of income.

Chávez had cultivated a relationship with the FARC long before becoming president. As one recent study of internal FARC documents noted:

When Chávez became president of Venezuela in February 1999, FARC had not only enjoyed a relationship with him for at least some of the previous seven years but had also penetrated and learned how to best use Venezuelan territory and politics, manipulating and building alliances with new and traditional Venezuelan political sectors, traversing the Colombia-Venezuela border in areas ranging from coastal desert to Amazonian jungle and building cooperative relation- ships with the Venezuelan armed forces. Once Chávez was inaugurated, Venezuelan border security and foreign policies shifted in the FARC’s favor.67

Perhaps the strongest public evidence of the importance of Venezuela to the FARC is the public fingering of three of Chávez’s closest advisers and senior government officials by the U.S Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

OFAC said the three—Hugo Armando Carvajál, director of Venezuelan Military Intelligence; Henry de Jesus Rangél, director of the Venezuelan Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services; and Ramón Emilio Rodriguez Chacín, former minister of justice and former minister of interior—were responsible for “materially supporting the FARC, a narco-terrorist organization.” It specifically accused Carvajál and Rangél of protecting FARC cocaine shipments moving through Venezuela, and said Rodriguez Chacín, who resigned his government position just a few days before the designations, was the “Venezuelan government’s main weapons contact for the FARC.”

According to the U.S. indictment against him, Makled exported at least 10 tons of cocaine a month to the United States by keeping more than 40 Venezuelan generals and senior government officials on his payroll. “All my business associates are generals. The highest,” Makled said. “I am telling you, we dis- patched 300,000 kilos of coke. I couldn’t have done it without the top of the government.”75 What added credibility to Makled’s claims were the documents he presented showing what appear to be the signatures of several generals and senior Ministry of Interior officials accepting payment from Makled. “I have enough evidence to justify the invasion of Venezuela” as a criminal state, he said.76

The FARC and Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua.

Since the electoral victories of Correa in Ecuador and Morales in Bolivia, and the re-election of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, their governments have actively supported FARC rebels in their war of more than 4 decades against the Colombian state, as well as significant drug trafficking activities.77 While Ecuador and Venezuela have allowed their territory to be used for years as rear guard and transshipment stations for the FARC and other drug trafficking organizations, Bolivia has become a recruitment hub and safe haven; and Nicaragua, a key safe haven and weapons procurement center. In addition, several senior members of both the Correa and Morales administrations have been directly implicated in drug trafficking incidents, showing the complicity of the state in the criminal enterprises.

In Bolivia, the Morales government, which has maintained cordial ties with the FARC at senior levels,78 has, as noted, faced an escalating series of drug trafficking scandals at the highest levels.79 It is worth noting that Alvaro García Linera, the nation’s vice president and a major power center in the Morales administration, was a member of the armed Tupac Katari Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento Revolucionario Tupak Katari [MRTK]), an ally of the FARC, and served several years in prison.

An analysis of the Reyes computer documents concluded that the FARC donated several hundred thousand dollars to Correa’s campaign,84 a conclusion drawn by other national and international investigations.85 The Reyes documents show senior Ecuadoran officials meeting with FARC commanders and offering to remove certain commanders in the border region so the FARC would not be under so much pressure on the Ecuadoran side.

A closer friend, at least for a time, was Hugo Mol- dis, who helped found the MAS and has been one of the movement’s intellectual guides, and was seriously considered for senior cabinet positions. Instead, he was given the job as leader of the government-backed confederation of unions and social groups called the “People’s High Command” (Estado Mayor del Pueblo [EMP]),93 and he maintains a fairly high profile as journalist and writer for several Marxist publications.

The EMP was one of the principal vehicles of the MAS and its supporters in forcing the 2003 resignation of the government of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, and Morales, as president, named it the organization responsible for giving social movements a voice in the government.

Moldiz told the group that “our purpose is to defend the government, defend the political process of change, which we have conquered with blood, strikes, marches, sacrifice, and pain. Our main enemy is called United States imperialism and the Bolivian oligarchy.”95

The Regional Infrastructure.

Brazil and Peru, while not actively supporting the FARC, have serious drug trafficking issues to contend with on their own and exercise little real control over their border regions. Despite this geographic and geopolitical reality, Colombia has undertaken a costly and somewhat successful effort to reestablish state control in many long-abandoned regions of its own national territory. Yet the Colombian experience offers an object lesson in the limits of what can be done even if the political will exists and if significant national treasure is invested in reestablishing a positive state presence. Once nonstate actors have established uncontested authority over significant parts of the national territory, the cost of recouping control and establishing a functional state presence is enormous.

It becomes even more costly when criminal/terrorist groups such as the FARC become instruments of regional statecraft. The FARC has been using its ideological affinity with Correa, Morales, Chávez, and Nicaragua’s Ortega to press for a change in status to “belligerent group” in lieu of terrorist entity or simple insurgency. “Belligerent” status is a less pejorative term and brings certain international protections.

the FARC and its political arm, the Continental Bolivarian Movement (Movimiento Continental Bolivariano[MCB] discussed below), has become a vehicle for a broader-based alliance of nonstate armed groups seeking to end the traditional democratic representative government model and replace it with an ideology centered on Marxism, anti-globalization, and anti-United States.

…not all states are criminal, not all TOCs are engaged in terrorism or collude with terrorist groups, and not all terrorist groups conduct criminal activities. The overlap between all three groups constitutes a small but highly dangerous subset of cases, and ap- plies most particularly to the Bolivarian states.

The TOC-Terrorist State Alliance.

At the center of the nexus of the Bolivarian move- ment with TOC, terrorism, and armed revolution is the FARC, and its political wing, the Continental Boli- varian Coordinator (Coordinadora Continental Bolivari- ana [CCB]), a continental political movement founded in 2003, funded and directed by the FARC. In 2009, the CCB officially changed its name to the MCB to re- flect its growth across Latin America. For purposes of consistency, we refer to the organization as the CCB throughout this monograph.

In a November 24, 2004, letter from Raúl Reyes, the FARC’s second-in-command, to another member of the FARC General Secretariat, he laid out the FARC’s role in the CCB, as well as the Chávez government’s role, in the following unambiguous terms:

The CCB has the following structure: an executive, some chapters by region . . . and a “foreign legion.” Headquarters: Caracas. It has a newspaper called “Correo Bolivariano,” [Bolivarian Mail] and Internet site and an FM radio station heard throughout Caracas. . . . This is an example of coordinated struggle for the creation of the Bolivarian project. We do not exclude any forms of struggle. It was founded in Fuerte Tiuna in Caracas. [Author’s Note: Fuerte Tiuna is the main government military and intelligence center in Venezuela, and this is a clear indication that the Venezuelan government fully supported the founding of the organization.] The political ammunition and the leadership is provided by the FARC. 97

According to an internal FARC report dated March 11, 2005, on the CCB’s activities in 2004, there were already active groups in Mexico, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Chile. International brigades from the Basque region of Spain, Italy, France, and Denmark were operational. Work was underway in Argentina, Guatemala, and Brazil. The number of organizations that were being actively coordinated by the CCB was listed at 63, and there were “political relations” with 45 groups and 25 institutions. The CCB database contained 500 e-mails.

Numerous other documents show that different Bolivarian governments directly supported the CCB, whose president is always the FARC leader.

The government of Rafael Correa in Ecuador of- ficially hosted the second congress of the organization in Quito in late February 2008. The meeting was at- tended by members of Peru’s Tupac Amaru Revolu- tionary Movement (Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru [MRTA]); the Mapuches and MIR of Chile; Spain’s ETA, and other terrorist and insurgent groups.

The 2009 meeting at which the CCB became the MCB was held in Caracas and the keynote address was given Alfonso Cano, the current FARC leader. Past FARC leaders are honorary presidents of the organization.101 This places the FARC—a well-identified drug trafficking organization with significant ties to the major Mexican drug cartels102 and a designated terrorist entity with a broad-based alliance that spans the globe—directly in the center of a state-sponsored project to fundamentally reshape Latin America and its political structure and culture.

The importance of the cocaine transit increase through Venezuela was documented by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which estimates that the product transit rose fourfold from 2004 to 2007, from 60 metric tons to 240 metric tons.

Finally, the CCB, as a revolutionary meeting house for “anti-imperialist” forces around the world, provides the political and ideological underpinning and justification for the growing alliance among the Bolivarian states, again led by Chávez, and Iran, led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Hezbollah’s influence extends to the nature of the war and diplomacy pursued by Chávez and his Bolivarian comrades. The franchising model strongly resembles the template pioneered by Hezbollah.

THE BOLIVARIAN AND IRANIAN REVOLUTIONS: THE TIES THAT BIND

The most common assumption among those who view the Iran-Bolivarian alliance as troublesome, and many do not view it as a significant threat at all, is that there are two points of convergence between the radical and reactionary theocratic Iranian government and the self-proclaimed socialist and progressive Bolivarian revolution.

These assumed points of convergence are: 1) an overt and often stated hatred for the United States and a shared belief in how to destroy a common enemy; and 2) a shared acceptance of authoritarian state structures that tolerate little dissent and encroach on all aspects of a citizen’s life.

While Iran’s revolutionary rulers view the 1979 revolution in theological terms as a miracle of divine intervention in which the United States, the Great Satan, was defeated, the Bolivarians view it from a secular point of view as a roadmap to defeat the United States as the Evil Empire. To both, it has strong political con- notations and serves as a model for how asymmetrical leverage, whether applied by Allah or humans, can conjure the equivalent of a David defeating a Goliath on the world stage.

Ortega has declared the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions to be “twin revolutions, with the same objectives of justice, liberty, sovereignty and peace . . . despite the aggressions of the imperialist policies.” Ahmadinejad couched the alliances as part of “a large anti-imperialist movement that has emerged in the region.”

Among the first to articulate the possible merging of radical Shite Islamic thought with Marxist aspirations of destroying capitalism and U.S. hegemony was Illich Sánchez Ramirez, better known as the terrorist leader, “Carlos the Jackal,” a Venezuelan citizen who was, until his arrest in 1994, one of the world’s most wanted terrorists.

The emerging military doctrine of the “Bolivarian Revolution,” officially adopted in Venezuela and rapidly spreading to Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador, explicitly embraces the radical Islamist model of asymmetrical or “fourth generation warfare,” and its heavy reliance on suicide bombings and different types of terrorism, including the use of nuclear weapons and other WMD.

Chávez has adopted as his military doctrine the concepts and strategies articulated in Peripheral Warfare and Revolutionary Is- lam: Origins, Rules and Ethics of Asymmetrical Warfare (Guerra Periférica y el Islam Revolucionario: Orígenes, Reglas y Ética de la Guerra Asimétrica ) by the Spanish politician and ideologue, Jorge Verstrynge (see Figure 4).110 The tract is a continuation of and exploration of Sánchez Ramirez’s thoughts, incorporating an explicit endorsement of the use of WMD to destroy the United States. Verstrynge argues for the destruction of the United States through a series of asymmetrical attacks like those of 9/11, in the belief that the United States will simply crumble when its vast military strength cannot be used to combat its enemies.

Central to Verstrynge’s idealized view of terrorists is the belief in the sacredness of fighters sacrificing their lives in pursuit of their goals.

An Alliance of Mutual Benefit.

This ideological framework of a combined Marxism and radical Islamic methodology for successfully attacking the United States is an important, though little examined, underpinning for the greatly enhanced relationships among the Bolivarian states and Iran. These relationships are being expanded, absorbing significant resources despite the fact that there is little economic rationale to the ties and little in terms of legitimate commerce.

One need only look at how rapidly Iran has in- creased its diplomatic, economic, and intelligence presence in Latin America to see the priority it places on this emerging axis, given that it is an area where it has virtually no trade, no historic or cultural ties, and no obvious strategic interests. The gains, in financial institutions, bilateral trade agreements, and state visits (eight state visits between Chávez and Ahmadinejad alone since 2006), are almost entirely within the Bolivarian orbit; and, as noted, the Bolivarian states have jointly declared their intention to help Iran break international sanctions.

The most recent salvo by Iran is the launching of a Spanish language satellite TV station, HispanTV, aimed at Latin America. Bolivia and Venezuela are collaborating in producing documentaries for the station. Mohammed Sarafraz, deputy di- rector of international affairs, said Iran was “launching a channel to act as a bridge between Iran and the countries of Latin America [there being] a need to help familiarize Spanish-speaking citizens with the Iranian nation.” He said that HispanTV was launched with the aim of reinforcing cultural ties with the Spanish- speaking nations and helping to introduce the traditions, customs, and beliefs of the Iranian people.

What is of particular concern is that many of the bilateral and multilateral agreements signed between Iran and Bolivarian nations, such as the creation of a dedicated shipping line between Iran and Ecuador, or the deposit of $120 million by an internationally sanctioned Iranian bank into the Central Bank of Ecuador, are based on no economic rationale.

Iran, whose banks, including its central bank, are largely barred from the Western financial systems, benefits from access to the international financial mar- ket through Venezuelan, Ecuadoran, and Bolivian financial institutions, which act as proxies by moving Iranian money as if it originated in their own legal financial systems.120 Venezuela also agreed to provide Iran with 20,000 barrels of gasoline per day, leading to U.S. sanctions against the state petroleum company.

CONCLUSIONS

Latin America, while not generally viewed as part of the stateless regions phenomenon, or part of the failed state discussion, presents multiple threats that center on criminalized states, their hybrid alliance with extra-regional sponsors of terrorism, and nonstate TOC actors. The groups within this hybrid threat—often rivals, but willing to work in temporary alliances—are part of the recombinant criminal/terrorist pipeline, and their violence is often aimed at gaining control of specific territory or parts of that pipeline, either from state forces or other nonstate groups.

pipelines are seldom disrupted for more than a minimal amount of time, in part because the critical human nodes in the chain, and key chokepoints in the pipelines, are not identified, and the relationships among the different actors and groups are not under- stood adequately. As noted, pipelines are adaptable and versatile as to product—the epitome of modern management systems—often intersecting with formal commercial institutions (banks, commodity exchanges, legitimate companies, etc.), both in a physical and virtual/cyber manner, in ways difficult to determine, collect intelligence on, or disaggregate from protected commercial activities which may be both domestic and international in nature, with built-in legal and secrecy protections.

While the situation is already critical, it is likely to get worse quickly. There is growing evidence of Russian and Chinese organized crime penetration of the region, particularly in Mexico and Central America, greatly strengthening the criminal organizations and allowing them to diversify their portfolios and sup- ply routes—a particular example being precursor chemicals for the manufacture of methamphetamines and cocaine. The Chinese efforts to acquire ports, re- sources, and intelligence-gathering capacity in the region demonstrate just how quickly the situation can develop, given that China was not a major player in the region 5 years ago.

This is a new type of alliance of secular (self-proclaimed socialist and Marxist) and radical Islamist organizations with a common goal directly aimed at challenging and undermining the security of the United States and its primary allies in the region (Colombia, Chile, Peru, Panama, and Guatemala). This represents a fundamental change because both primary state allies in the alliance (the governments of Venezuela and Iran) host and support nonstate actors, allowing the nonstate actors to thrive in ways that would be impossible without state protection.

Under- standing how these groups develop, and how they relate to each other and to groups from outside the region, is vital—particularly given the rapid pace with which they are expanding their control across the continent, across the hemisphere, and beyond. Developing a predictive capacity can be done based only on a more realistic understanding of the shifting networks of actors exploiting the pipelines; the nature and location of the geographic space in which they operate; the critical nodes where these groups are most vulnerable; and their behaviors in adapting to new political and economic developments, market opportunities and setbacks, internal competition, and the countering actions of governments.

In turn, an effective strategy for combating TOC must rest on a solid foundation of regional intelligence which, while cognizant of the overarching transnational connections, remains sensitive to unique local realities behind seemingly ubiquitous behaviors. A one-size-fits-all policy will not suffice.

It is not a problem that is only, or primarily, a matter of state or regional security, narcotics, money laundering, terrorism, human smuggling, weakening governance, democracy reversal, trade and energy, counterfeiting and contraband, immigration and refugees, hostile states seeking advantage, or alterations in the military balance and alliances. It is increasingly a combination of all of these. It is a comprehensive threat that requires analysis and management within a comprehensive, integrated whole-of-government approach. At the same time, however expansive in global terms, a strategy based on geopolitics—the fundamental understanding of how human behavior relates to geo- graphic space—must always be rooted in the local.

ENDNOTES

  1. “Fact Sheet: Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime,” Washington, DC: Office of the Press Secretary, the White House, July 25, 2011.
  2. On the lower end, the United Nations (UN) Office of Drugs and Crime estimate transnational organized crime (TOC) earn- ings for 2009 at $2.1 trillion, or 3.6 percent of global gross domes- tic product (GDP). Of that, typical TOC activities such as drug trafficking, counterfeiting, human trafficking, weapons traffick- ing, and oil smuggling, account for about $1 trillion or 1.5 per- cent of global GDP. For details, see “Estimating Illicit Financial Flows Resulting from Drug Trafficking and other Transnational Organized Crimes,” Washington, DC: UN Office of Drugs and Crime, September 2011. On the higher end, in a speech to Interpol in Singapore in 2009, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Ogden cited 15 percent of world GDP as total annual turnover of TOC. See Josh Meyer, “U.S. attorney general calls for global effort to fight organized crime,” Los Angeles Times, October 13, 2009, available from articles.latimes.com/print/2009/oct/13/nation/na-crime13.
  3. This definition is adapted from the 1998 UN Conven- tion on Transnational Organized Crime and Protocols Thereto, UNODC, Vienna, Austria; and the 2011 Strategy to Combat Trans- national Organized Crime, available from www.whitehouse.gov/ administration/eop/nsc/transnational-crime/definition.
  4. The self-proclaimed “Bolivarian” states (Venezuela, Ecua- dor, Bolivia, and Nicaragua) take their name from Simón Bolivar, the revered 19th-century leader of South American independence from Spain. They espouse 21st-century socialism, a vague notion that is deeply hostile to free market reforms, to the United States as an imperial power, and toward traditional liberal democratic concepts, as will be described in detail.
  5. One of the most detailed cases involved the 2001 weapons transfers among Hezbollah operatives in Liberia, a retired Israeli officer in Panama, and a Russian weapons merchant in Guatema- la. A portion of the weapons, mostly AK-47 assault rifles, ended up with the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidads de Colombia [AUC]), a designated terrorist organization heavily involved in cocaine trafficking. The rest of the weapons, including anti-tank systems and anti-aircraft weapons, likely end- ed up with Hezbollah. For details, see Douglas Farah, Blood From Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror, New York: Broadway Books, 2004.
  6. For a detailed look at this development, see Antonio L. Mazzitelli, “The New Transatlantic Bonanza: Cocaine on High- way 10,” North Miami, FL: Western Hemisphere Security Analy- sis Center, Florida International University, March 2011.
  7. The FARC is the oldest insurgency in the Western hemi- sphere, launched in 1964 by Colombia’s Liberal Party militias, and enduring to the present as a self-described Marxist revolu- tionary movement. For a more detailed look at the history of the FARC, see Douglas Farah, “The FARC in Transition: The Fatal Weakening of the Western Hemisphere’s Oldest Guerrilla Move- ment,” NEFA Foundation, July 2, 2008, available from www.nefa- foundation.org/miscellaneous/nefafarc0708.pdf.
  8. These include recently founded Community of Latin Amer- ican and Caribbean States (Comunidad de Estados Latinoamericanos y Caribeños [CELAC]), and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América [ALBA]).
  9. James R. Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, “Un- classified Statement for the Record: Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,” January 31, 2012, p. 6.
  10. For the most comprehensive look at Russian Organized Crime in Latin America, see Bruce Bagley, “Globalization, Ungov- erned Spaces and Transnational Organized Crime in the Western Hemisphere: The Russian Mafia,” paper prepared for Internation- al Studies Association, Honolulu, HI, March 2, 2005.
  11. Ruth Morris, “China: Latin America Trade Jumps,” Latin American Business Chronicle, May 9, 2011, available from www. latinbusinesschronicle.com/app/article.aspx?id=4893.
  12. Daniel Cancel, “China Lends Venezuela $20 Billion, Se- cures Oil Supply,” Bloomberg News Service, April 18, 2010. By the end of August 2011, Venezuela’s publicly acknowledged debt to China stood at some $36 billion, equal to the rest of its out- standing international debt. See Benedict Mander, “More Chinese Loans for Venezuela,” FT Blog, September 16, 2011, available from blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2011/09/16/more-chinese-loans-4bn- worth-for-venezuela/#axzz1Z3km4bdg.
  13. “Quito y Buenos Aires, Ciudades preferidas para narcos nigerianos” (“Quito and Buenos Aires, Favorite Cities of Narco Nigerians”), El Universo Guayaquil, Ecuador, January 3, 2011.
  14. Louise Shelley, “The Unholy Trinity: Transnational Crime, Corruption and Terrorism,” Brown Journal of World Affairs, Vol. XI, Issue 2, Winter/Spring 2005.
  15. National Security Council, “Strategy to Combat Trans- national Organized Crime: Addressing Converging Threats to National Security,” Washington, DC: Office of the President, July 2011. The Strategy grew out of a National Intelligence Estimate inititated by the Bush administration and completed in December 2008, and is a comprehensive government review of transnational organized crime, the first since 1995.
  16. “Fact Sheet: Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime,” Washington, DC: Office of the Press Secretary, the White House, July 25, 2011.
  17. Ibid.
  18. Stewart Patrick, Weak Links: Fragile States, Global Threats and International Security, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011.
  19. The phrase “dangerous spaces” was used by Phil Williams to describe 21st-century security challenges in terms of spaces and gaps, including geographical, functional, social, economic, legal, and regulatory holes. See Phil Williams, “Here Be Dragons: Dan- gerous Spaces and International Security,” Anne L. Clunan and Harold A. Trinkunas eds., Ungoverned Spaces: Alternatives to State Authority in an Era of Softened Sovereignty, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010, pp. 34-37.
  20. For a more complete look at Transnistria and an excellent overview of the global illicit trade, see Misha Glenny, McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
  21. For a complete look at the operations of Taylor, recently convicted in the Special Court for Sierra Leone in the Hague for crimes against humanity, see Douglas Farah, Blood From Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror, New York: Broadway Books, 2004.
  22. For a look at the weapons transfers, see “Los ‘rockets’ Venezolanos” Semana, Colombia, July 28, 2009. For a look at doc- umented financial and logistical support of Chávez and Correa for the FARC, see “The FARC Files: Venezuela, Ecuador, and the Secret Archives of ‘Raúl Reyes,’” An IISS Strategic Dossier, Wash- ington, DC: International Institute for Strategic Studies, May 2011. To see FARC connections to Evo Morales, see Douglas Farah, “Into the Abyss: Bolivia Under Evo Morales and the MAS,” Alex- andria, VA: International Assessment and Strategy Center, 2009.
  23. Douglas Farah, “Iran in Latin America: Strategic Security Issues,” Alexandria, VA: International Assessment and Strategy Center, Defense Threat Reduction Agency Advanced Systems and Concept Office, May 2011.
  24. Rem Korteweg and David Ehrhardt, “Terrorist Black Holes: A Study into Terrorist Sanctuaries and Governmental Weakness,” The Hague, The Netherlands: Clingendael Centre for Strategic Studies, November 2005, p. 22.
  25. Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-states: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1990. Jackson defines negative sovereignty as freedom from outside interference, the ability of a sovereign state to act in- dependently, both in its external relations and internally, towards its people. Positive sovereignty is the acquisition and enjoyment of capacities, not merely immunities. In Jackson’s definition, it presupposes “capabilities which enable governments to be their own masters” (p. 29). The absence of either type of sovereignty can lead to the collapse of or absence of state control.
  26. Anne L. Clunan and Harold A. Trinkunas eds., Ungov- erned Spaces: Alternatives to State Authority in an Era of Softened Sovereignty, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010, p. 19.
  27. Moises Naim, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copy- cats are Hijacking the Global Economy, New York: Anchor Books, 2006, p. 33.
  28. Robert Killebrew and Jennifer Bernal, “Crime Wars: Gangs, Cartels and U.S. National Security,” Washington, DC: Center for New American Security, September 2010, available from www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/CNAS_CrimeWars_ KillebrewBernal_3.pdf.
  29. Max G. Manwaring, Street Gangs: The New Urban Insurgency, Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, March 2005.
  30. As is true in much of Central America and Colombia, in Mexico there are centuries-old sanctuaries used by outlaws where the state had little authority. For a more complete explanation, see Gary Moore, “Mexico, the Un-failed State: A Geography Lesson,” InsightCrime, November 9, 2011, available from insight- crime.com/insight-latest-news/item/1820-mexico-the-un-failed-state-a- geography-lesson.
  31. For a look at the factors that led to the rise of the Bolivarian leaders, see Eduardo Gamarra, “Bolivia on the Brink: Center for Preventative Action, Council on Foreign Relations, February 2007; Cynthia J. Arnson et al., La Nueva Izquierda en América Latina: Derechos Humanos, Participación Política y Sociedad Civil (The New Left in Latin America: Human Rights, Political Participation and Civil Society), Washington, DC: The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, January 2009; Farah, “Into the Abyss: Bolivia Under Evo Morales and the MAS”; Farah and Simpson.
  32. See “Iran to Help Bolivia Build Peaceful Nuclear Power Plant,” Xinhua, October 31, 2010; Russia Izvestia Information, September 30, 2008; and Agence France Presse, “Venezuela Wants to Work With Russia on Nuclear Energy: Chávez,” September 29, 2008.
  33. Author interview with IAEA member in November, 2011. The official said the agency had found that Iran possessed enough uranium stockpiled to last a decade. Moreover, he said the evidence pointed to acquisition of minerals useful in missile production. He also stressed that dual-use technologies or items specifically used in the nuclear program had often been shipped to Iran as automotive or tractor parts. Some of the principal investments Iran has made in the Bolivarian states have been in a tractor fac- tory that is barely operational, a bicycle factory that does not seem to produce bicycles, and automotive factories that have yet to be built.
  34. “Venezuela/Iran ALBA Resolved to Continue Economic Ties with Iran,” Financial Times Information Service, July 15, 2010.
  35. Manwaring.
  36. These typologies were developed and discussed more completely, including the national security implications of their growth, in Richard Shultz, Douglas Farah, and Itamara V. Lo- chard, “Armed Groups: A Tier-One Security Priority,” USAF Academy, CO: USAF Institute for National Security Studies, Occasional Paper 57, September 2004.
  37. Louise I. Shelley, John T. Picarelli et al., Methods and Mo- tives: Exploring Links between Transnational Organized Crime and International Terrorism, Washington, DC: Department of Justice, September 2005.
  38. Ibid., p. 5.
  39. While much of Operation TITAN remains classified, there has been significant open source reporting, in part because the Colombian government announced the most important arrests. For the most complete look at the case, see Jo Becker, “Investi- gation into bank reveals links to major South American cartels,” International Herald Tribune, December 15, 2011. See also Chris Kraul and Sebastian Rotella, “Colombian Cocaine Ring Linked to Hezbollah,” Los Angeles Times, October 22, 2008; and “Por Lavar Activos de Narcos y Paramilitares, Capturados Integrantes de Or- ganización Internatcional” (“Members of an International Orga- nization Captured for Laundering Money for Narcos and Parami- litaries”), Fiscalía General de la Republica (Colombia) (Attorney General’s Office of Colombia), October 21, 2008.
  40. Among the reasons for the increase in cocaine trafficking to Western Europe is the price. While the cost of a kilo of cocaine averages about $17,000 in the United States, it is $37,000 in the EU. Shipping via Africa is relatively inexpensive and relatively attractive, given the enhanced interdiction efforts in Mexico and the Caribbean. See Antonio Mazzitelli, “The Drug Trade: Africa’s Expanding Role,” United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, presentation at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, May 28, 2009.
  41. Benjamin Weiser and William K. Rashbaum, “Liberian Of- ficials Worked with U.S. Agency to Block Drug Traffic,” New York Times, June 2, 2010.
  42. For a history of AQIM, see “Algerian Group Backs al Qaeda,” BBC News, October 23, 2003, available from news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/africa/3207363.stm. For an understanding of the relation- ship among the different ethnic groups, particularly the Tuareg, and AQIM, see Terrorism Monitor, “Tuareg Rebels Joining Fight Against AQIM?” Jamestown Foundation, Vol. 8, Issue 40, November 4, 2010.
  43. Evan Perez, “U.S. Accuses Iran in Plot: Two Charged in Alleged Conspiracy to Enlist Drug Cartel to Kill Saudi Ambas- sador,” The Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2011.
  44. “La Amenaza Iraní” (“The Iranian Threat”), Univision Documentales, aired December 8, 2011.
  45. Sebastian Rotella, “Government says Hezbollah Profits From U.S. Cocaine Market via Link to Mexican Cartel,” ProPubli- ca, December 11, 2011.
  46. For an examination of the “cultures of contraband” and their implications in the region, see Rebecca B. Galemba, “Cultures of Contraband: Contesting the Illegality at the Mexico-Guatemala Border,” Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University Department of An- thropology, May 2009. For a look at the use of traditional smug- gling routes in TOC structures in Central America, see Doug- las Farah, “Mapping Transnational Crime in El Salvador: New Trends and Lessons From Colombia,” North Miami, FL: Western Hemisphere Security Analysis Center, Florida International Uni- versity, August 2011.
  47. For a more complete look at that conflict and other con- flicts over plazas, see Samuel Logan and John P. Sullivan, “The Gulf-Zeta Split and the Praetroian Revolt,” International Relations and Security Network, April 7, 2010, available from www.isn.ethz. ch/isn/Security-Watch/Articles/Detail/?ots591=4888caa0-b3db-1461- 98b9-e20e7b9c13d4&lng=en&id=114551.
  48. Mazzitelli.
  49. “Drug Trafficking as a Security Threat in West Africa,” New York: UN Office on Drugs and Crime, October 2008.
  50. For a look at the chaos in Guinea Bissau, see “Guinea- Bissau president shot dead,” BBC News, March 2, 2009, available from news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7918061.stm.
  51. Patrick.
    52. See, for example, Robert I. Rotberg, “Failed States, Collapsed States, Weak States: Causes and Indicators,” Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror, Washington, DC: Brookings In- stitution, January 2003.
  52. Rotberg.
  53. Rem Korteweg and David Ehrhardt, “Terrorist Black Holes: A Study into Terrorist Sanctuaries and Governmental Weakness,” The Hague, The Netherlands: Clingendael Centre for Strategic Studies, November 2005, p. 26.
  54. “The Failed States Index 2009,” Foreign Policy Magazine, July/August 2009, pp. 80-93, available from www.foreignpolicy.com/ articles/2009/06/22/2009_failed_states_index_interactive_map_and_ rankings.
  55. Julio A. Cirino et al., “Latin America’s Lawless Areas and Failed States,” in Paul D. Taylor, ed., Latin American Security Chal- lenges: A Collaborative Inquiry from North and South, Newport, RI: Naval War College, Newport Papers 21, 2004. Commercial insur- gencies are defined as engaging in “for-profit organized crime without a predominate political agenda,” leaving unclear how that differs from groups defined as organized criminal organiza- tions.
  56. For details of Taylor’s activities, see Douglas Farah, Blood From Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror, New York: Broadway Books, 2004.
  57. Hannah Stone, “The Comeback of Suriname’s ‘Narco- President’,” Insightcrime.org, Mar 4, 2011, available from insight- crime.org/insight-latest-news/item/865-the-comeback-of-surinames- narco-president.
  58. Simon Romero, “Returned to Power, a Leader Celebrates a Checkered Past,” The New York Times, May 2, 2011.
  59. “Wikileaks: Chávez funded Bouterse,” The Nation (Barba- dos), February 2, 2011.
  60. Harmen Boerboom, “Absence of Chávez a blessing for Su- riname,” Radio Netherlands Worldwide, August 12, 2010.
  61. For a look at the Zetas in Guatemala, see Steven Dudley, “The Zetas in Guatemala,” InSight Crime, September 8, 2011. For a look at Los Perrones in El Salvador, see Douglas Farah, “Organized Crime in El Salvador: Homegrown and Transnational Dimen- sions,” Organized Crime in Central America: The Northern Triangle, Woodrow Wilson Center Reports on the Americas #29, Wash- ington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, November 2011, pp. 104-139, available from www.wilsoncenter.org/ sites/default/files/LAP_single_page.pdf.
  62. Louise Shelley, “The Unholy Trinity: Transnational Crime, Corruption and Terrorism,” Brown Journal of World Affairs, Vol. XI, Issue 2, Winter/Spring 2005, p. 101.
  63. See Bill Lahneman and Matt Lewis, “Summary of Proceed- ings: Organized Crime and the Corruption of State Institutions,” College Park, MD: University of Maryland, November 18, 2002, available from www.cissm.umd.edu/papers/files/organizedcrime.pdf.
  64. Author interviews with Drug Enforcement Administra- tion and National Security Council officials; for example, two aircraft carrying more than 500 kgs of cocaine were stopped in Guinea Bissau after arriving from Venezuela. See “Bissau Police Seize Venezuelan cocaine smuggling planes,” Agence France Presse, July 19, 2008.
  65. “FARC Terrorist Indicted for 2003 Grenade Attack on Americans in Colombia,” Department of Justice Press Re- lease, September 7, 2004. available from www.usdoj.gov/opa/ pr/2004/September/04_crm_599.htm; and Official Journal of the European Union, Council Decision of December 21, 2005, available from eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/site/en/oj/2005/l_340/l_ 34020051223en00640066.pdf.
  66. “The FARC Files: Venezuela, Ecuador and the Secret Ar- chives of ‘Raúl Reyes’,” Washington, DC: International Institute for Strategic Studies,” May 2011.
  67. The strongest documentary evidence of Chávez’s support for the FARC comes from the Reyes documents, which contained the internal communications of senior FARC commanders with senior Venezuelan officials. These documents discuss everything from security arrangements in hostage exchanges to the possibil- ity of joint training exercises and the purchasing of weapons. For full details of these documents and their interpretation, see Ibid.
  68. “Treasury Targets Venezuelan Government Officials Sup- port of the FARC,” Washington, DC: U.S. Treasury Department, Office of Public Affairs, September 12, 2008. The designations came on the heels of the decision of the Bolivian government of Evo Morales to expel the U.S. ambassador, allegedly for support- ing armed movements against the Morales government. In soli- darity, Chávez then expelled the U.S. ambassador to Venezuela. In addition to the citations of the Venezuelan officials, the United States also expelled the Venezuelan and Bolivian ambassadors to Washington.
  69. “Chávez Shores up Military Support,” Stratfor, November 12, 2010.
  70. “Venezuela: Asume Nuevo Ministro De Defensa Acusado de Narco por EEUU” (“Venezuela: New Minister Accused by the United States of Drug Trafficking Takes Office”), Agence France Presse, January 17, 2012.
  71. Robert M. Morgenthau, “The Link Between Iran and Ven- ezuela: A Crisis in the Making,” speech at the Brookings Institu- tion, Washington, DC, September 8, 2009.
  72. Colombia, Venezuela: Another Round of Diplomatic Fu- ror,” Strafor, July 29, 2010.
  73. The FARC Files: Venezuela, Ecuador and the Secret Ar- chives of ‘Raúl Reyes’.”
  74. The Colombian decision to extradite Makled to Venezu- ela rather than the United States caused significant tension be- tween the two countries and probably means that the bulk of the evidence he claims to possess will never see the light of day. Among the documents he presented in prison were his checks cashed by senior generals and government officials and videos of what appear to be senior government officials in his home dis- cussing cash transactions. For details of the case, see José de Cór- doba and Darcy Crowe, “U.S. Losing Big Drug Catch,” The Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2011; “Manhattan U.S. Attorney Announces Indictment of one of World’s Most Significant Narcotics Kingpins,” United States Attorney, Southern District of New York, November 4, 2010.
  75. “Makled: Tengo suficientes pruebas sobre corrupción y narcotráfico para que intervengan a Venezuela” (“Makled: I have Enough Evidence of Corruption and Drug Trafficking to justify an invasion of Venezuela”), NTN24 TV (Colombia), April 11, 2011.
  76. For a more comprehensive look at the history of the FARC; its relations with Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador; and its involvement in drug trafficking, see “The FARC Files: Ven- ezuela, Ecuador and the Secret Archives of ‘Raúl Reyes’”; Doug- las Farah, “Into the Abyss: Bolivia Under Evo Morales and the MAS,” Alexandria, VA: International Assessment and Strategy Center, June 2009; Douglas Farah and Glenn Simpson, “Ecuador at Risk: Drugs, Thugs, Guerrillas and the ‘Citizens’ Revolution,” Alexandria, VA: International Assessment and Strategy Center, January 2010.
  77. Farah, “Into the Abyss: Bolivia Under Evo Morales and the MAS.”
  78. Martin Arostegui, “Smuggling Scandal Shakes Bolivia,” The Wall Street Journal, March 3, 2011.
  79. Farah, “Into the Abyss: Bolivia Under Evo Morales and the MAS.”
  80. “The FARC Files: Venezuela, Ecuador, and the Secret Ar- chives of ‘Raul Reyes’’’; Farah and Simpson; and Francisco Huer- ta Montalvo et al., “Informe Comisión de Transparencia y Verdad: Caso Angostura” (“Report of the Commission on Transparency and Truth: The Angostura Case”), December 10, 2009, available from www.scribd.com/doc/24329223/informe-angostura.
  81. Farah and Simpson.
  82. For details of the relationships among these officials the president’s sister, and the Ostaiza brothers, see Farah and Simpson.
  83. “The FARC Files: Venezuela, Ecuador and the Secret Ar- chives of ‘Raúl Reyes’.”
  84. See, for example, Farah and Simpson; Huerta Montalvo; Arturo Torres, Juego del Camaleón: Los secretos de Angostura (The Chameleon’s Game: The Secrets of Angostura), 2009.
  85. “The FARC Files: Venezuela, Ecuador and the Secret Ar- chives of ‘Raúl Reyes’.”
  86. Farah, “Into the Abyss.”
  87. Eugene Roxas, “Spiritual Guide who gave Evo Baton caught with 350 kilos of liquid cocaine,” The Achacachi Post (Bo- livia), July 28, 2010.
  88. “Panama arrests Bolivia ex-drugs police chief Sanabria,” BBC News, February 26, 2011.
  89. “Las FARC Buscaron el Respaldo de Boliva Para Lograr Su Expansión” (“The FARC Looked for Bolivian Support in Order to Expand”).
  90. The MAS is the coalition of indigenous and coca growing organizations that propelled Morales to his electoral victory. The movement, closely aligned with Chávez and funded by the Ven- ezuelan government, has defined itself as Marxist, socialist, and anti-imperilist.
  91. It is interesting to note that Peredo’s brothers Roberto (aka Coco) and Guido (aka Inti) were the Bolivian contacts of Che Gue- vara, and died in combat with him. The two are buried with Gue- vara in Santa Clara, Cuba.
  92. A copy of the founding manifesto of the EMP and its adherents is available from bibliotecavirtual.clacso.org.ar/ar/libros/osal/ osal10/documentos.pdf.
  93. Prensa Latina, “President Boliviano Anunica Creación de Estado Mayor Popular” (“Bolivian President Announces the For- mation of a People’s High Command”), February 2, 2006.
  94. “Estado Mayor del Pueblo Convoca a Defender Al Gobi- erno de Evo” (“People’s High Command Calls for the Defense of Evo’s Government”), Agencia Boliviana de Informacion, April 17, 2006, available from www.bolpress.com/art.php?Cod=2006041721.
  95. The situation has changed dramatically with the election of Juan Manuel Santos as President of Colombia in 2010. Despite serving as Uribe’s defense minister during the most successful operations against the FARC and developing a deeply antagonis- tic relationship with Chávez in that capacity, relations between Santos and the Bolivarian heads of state have been surprisingly cordial since he took office. This is due in part to Santos’ agreeing to turn over copies of the Reyes hard drives to Correa, and his ex- pressed desire to normalize relations with Chávez. A particularly sensitive concession was allowing the extradition of Walid Mak- led, a designated drug kingpin by the United States, to be extra- dited to Venezuela rather than to stand trial in the United States.
  96. “The FARC Files: Venezuela, Ecuador and the Secret Ar- chives of ‘Raúl Reyes’.”
  97. March 11, 2005, e-mail from Iván Ríos to Raúl Reyes, pro- vided by Colombia officials, in possession of the author.
  98. April 1, 2006, e-mail from Raúl Reyes to Aleyda, provided by Colombia officials, in possession of the author.
  99. Following Ortega’s disputed electoral triumph in No- vember 2011, the FARC published a congratulatory communiqué lauding Ortega and recalling their historically close relationship. “In this moment of triumph how can we fail to recall that memo- rable scene in Caguán when you gave the Augusto Cesar San- dino medal to our unforgettable leader Manuel Marulanda. We have always carried pride in our chests for that deep honor which speaks to us of the broad vision of a man who considers himself to be a spiritual son of Bolivar.” Available from anncol.info/index. php?option=com_content&view=article&id=695:saludo-a-daniel-orteg a&catid=71:movies&Itemid=589.
  100. Reyes was killed a few days after the CCB assembly when the Colombian military bombed his camp, which was in Ec- uadoran territory. The bombing of La Angostura caused a severe diplomatic rift between Colombia and Ecuador, but the raid also yielded several hundred gigabytes of data from the computers Reyes kept in the camp, where he lived in a hardened structure and had been stationary for several months.
  101. Farah and Simpson.
  102. “U.S. Counternarcotics Cooperation with Venezuela Has Declined,” Washington, DC: Government Accountability Office, July 2009, GAO-09-806.
  103. Ibid., p. 12.
  104. For a more detailed look at this debate, see Iran in Latin America: Threat or Axis of Annoyance? in which the author has a chapter arguing for the view that Iran is a significant threat.
  105. “‘Jackal’ book praises bin Laden,” BBC News, June 26, 2003.
  106. See, for example, Associated Press, “Chávez: ‘Carlos the Jackal’ a ‘Good Friend’,” June 3, 2006.
  107. Raúl Reyes (trans.) and Hugo Chávez, “My Struggle,” from a March 23, 1999, letter to Illich Ramirez Sánchez, the Venezuelan terrorist known as “Carlos the Jackal,” from Ven- ezuelan president Hugo Chávez, in response to a previous let- ter from Ramirez, who is serving a life sentence in France for murder. Harper’s, October 1999, available from harpers.org/ archive/1999/10/0060674.
  108. In addition to Operation TITAN, there have been numer- ous incidents in the past 18 months in which operatives being directly linked to Hezbollah have been identified or arrested in Venezuela, Colombia, Guatemala, Aruba, and elsewhere in Latin America.
  109. Verstrynge, born in Morocco to Belgian and Spanish parents, began his political career on the far right of the Spanish political spectrum as a disciple of Manuel Fraga, and served in a national and several senior party posts with the Alianza Popular. By his own admission he then migrated to the Socialist Party, but never rose through the ranks. He is widely associated with radical anti-globalization views and anti-U.S. rhetoric, repeatedly stating that the United States is creating a new global empire and must be defeated. Although he has no military training or experience, he has written extensively on asymmetrical warfare.
  110. Verstrynge., pp. 56-57.
  111. Bartolomé. See also John Sweeny, “Jorge Verstrynge: The Guru of Bolivarian Asymmetric Warfare,” September 9, 2005 available from www.vcrisis.com; and “Troops Get Provocative Book,” Miami Herald, November 11, 2005.
  112. “Turkey holds suspicious Iran-Venezuela shipment,” Associated Press, June 1, 2009, available from www.ynetnews.com/ articles/0,7340,L-3651706,00.html.
  113. For a fuller examination of the use of websites, see Doug- las Farah, “Islamist Cyber Networks in Spanish-Speaking Latin America,” North Miami, FL: Western Hemisphere Security Anal- ysis Center, Florida International University, September 2011.
  114. “Hispan TV begins with ‘Saint Mary’,” Tehran Times, December 23, 2011, available from www.tehrantimes.com/arts-and- culture/93793-hispan-tv-begins-with-saint-mary.
  115. For a more complete look at Iran’s presence in Latin America, see Douglas Farah, “Iran in Latin America: An Over- view,” Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Summer 2009 (to be published as a chapter in Iran in Latin America: Threat or Axis of Annoyance? Cynthia J. Arnson et al., eds., 2010. For a look at the anomalies in the economic relations, see also Farah and Simpson.
  116. “Treasury Targets Hizbullah in Venezuela,” Washing- ton, DC: United States Department of Treasury Press Center, June 18, 2008, available from www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releas- es/Pages/hp1036.aspx.
  117. Orlando Cuales, “17 arrested in Curacao on suspicion of drug trafficking links with Hezbollah,” Associated Press, April 29, 2009.
  118. United States District Court, Southern District of New York, The United States of America v Jamal Yousef, Indictment, July 6, 2009.
  119. For a look at how the Ecuadoran and Venezuelan banks function as proxies for Iran, particularly the Economic Devel- opment Bank of Iran, sanctioned for its illegal support of Iran’s nuclear program, and the Banco Internacional de Desarrollo, see Farah and Simpson.
  120. Office of the Spokesman, “Seven Companies Sanctioned Under Amended Iran Sanctions Act,” Washington, DC: U.S. De- partment of State, May 24, 2011, available from www.state.gov/r/ pa/prs/ps/2011/05/164132.htm.
  121. Russia Izvestia Information, September 30, 2008, and Agence France Presse, “Venezuela Wants to Work With Russia on Nuclear Energy: Chávez,” September 29, 2008.
  122. Simon Romero, “Venezuela Says Iran is Helping it Look for Uranium,” New York Times, September 25, 2009.
  123. Nikolai Spassky, “Russia, Ecuador strike deal on nuclear power cooperation,” RIA Novosti, August 21, 2009.
  124. José R. Cárdenas, “Iran’s Man in Ecuador,” Foreign Pol- icy, February 15, 2011, available from shadow.foreignpolicy.com/ posts/2011/02/15/irans_man_in_ecuador.
  125. The primary problem has been the inability of the Colom- bian government to deliver promised services and infrastructure after the military has cleared the area. See John Otis, “Decades of Work but No Land Titles to Show for It,” GlobalPost, Novem- ber 30, 2009. For a more complete look at the challenges posed by the reemergence and adaptability of armed groups, see Fundación Arco Iris, Informe 2009: El Declive de la Seguridad Democratica? (Re- port 2009: The Decline of Democratic Security?), available from www. nuevoarcoiris.org.co/sac/?q=node/605.

Notes from The War of All the People: The Nexus of Latin American Radicalism and Middle Eastern Terrorism

The War of All the People: The Nexus of Latin American Radicalism and Middle Eastern Terrorism

 

by Jon B. Perdue, Stephen Johnson

Jon B. Perdue is the author of The War of All the People: The Nexus of Latin American Radicalism and Middle Eastern Terrorism, published by Potomac Books in August 2012. Mr. Perdue was also the editor and wrote the foreword to the book Rethinking the Reset Button: Understanding Contemporary Russian Foreign Policy by former Soviet Central Committee member and defector Evgeni Novikov. He also contributed a chapter to the book Iran’s Strategic Penetration of Latin America (Lexington Books, 2014).

Perdue also serves as an instructor and lecturer on peripheral asymmetric warfare, strategic communication and counterterrorism strategy. He is credited with coining the term “preclusionary engagement,” a strategy of counterterrorism that focuses on combined, small-unit operations that can be conducted with a much smaller footprint prior to or in the early stages of conflict against a threatening enemy, in order to preclude the necessity of much larger operations, which are far more difficult in terms of costs and casualties, once the conflict has escalated due to the lack of a forceful resistance.

Mr. Perdue’s articles have been published in the Washington Times, Investor’s Business Daily, the Miami Herald, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a number of newspapers in Latin America. Perdue served as an international election observer in the historic elections in Honduras in 2009 and as an expert witness in a precedent-setting human rights trial in Miami-Dade Circuit Court in 2010. He has served as a security analyst for NTN24, a Latin America-based satellite news channel, and CCTV, a 24-hour English-language news channel based in China.

For most of the past decade Mr. Perdue has served as the Director of Latin America programs for the Fund for American Studies in Washington, DC, and as a Senior Fellow for the Center for a Secure Free Society. He also serves on the boards of the Americas Forum in Washington, DC and the Fundación Democracia y Mercado in Santiago, Chile. He has worked unofficially on three presidential campaigns, contributing foreign policy and counterterrorism policy advice.

Preface

As Edward Gibbon hypothesized despite its greatness and the quantum leap in human achievement and prosperity that it wrought, Rome fell after being pushed – but it requires little force to topple what had already been hollowed from within. Rome fell when Romans lost the desire and the ability to defend it.

The American republic has survived the buffeting winds of war and governmental caprice to stand as the sole remaining superpower. Its principal threat is no longer from rival nation-states but from a multitude of smaller subversions.

As the military strategist Bernard Brodie noted, “good strategy presumes good anthropology and sociology. Some of the greatest military blinders of all time have resulted from juvenile evaluations in this department.

What still challenges the United States today is the pervasive lack of seriousness that prevents those agencies tasked with defending the homeland from being able to even name the enemy that we face. It illustrates a failure of will to claim the legitimacy that we have sacrificed so much to attain and an infections self-consciousness that has no basis in realpolitik.

More than any failed strategy or improper foreign policy, it is this American self-consciousness that is the topsoil for the growth of anti-American terrorism worldwide.

It is foolhardy to allow our enemies to paralyze our will to fight by defining American foreign policy as some new form of imperialism or hegemony. The desire for human freedom, lamentably, is not an expansionist impulse.

Introduction

“The War of All the People” is the doctrine of asymmetrical and political warfare that has been declared against the United States, Western civilization, and most of the generally accepted tenants of modernity. At its helm today are Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran – two self-described “revolutionary” leaders hell-bent on the destruction of capitalism and what they call “U.S. hegemony” throughout the world.

In October 2007 the two announced the creation of a “global progressive front” in the first of a series of joint projects designed to showcase “the ideological kinship of the left and revolutionary Islam.” Ahmadinejad would promote the theme on state visits to Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, highlighting what he called “the divine aspect of revolutionary war”.

Declaring his own war against “imperialism,” Chavez aims to supplant U.S. dominance in the hemisphere with so-called 21st Century Socialism.

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The Castro regime adopted the War of All the People doctrine from Viet Minh general Vo Nguyen Giap, who began publishing the military theories of Ho Chi Ming along with his own (much of it adapted from the theories of Mao Zedong) in the 1960s.

Giap’s most thorough examination of the tenets of a “people’s war” was put forth in his book To Arm the Revolutionary Masses: To Build the People’s Army, published in 1975.

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What makes the current threat different is its stealthy, asymmetrical nature. The doctrine has been adapted to avoid the missteps made during the days of Soviet expansionism and has instead focused on the asymmetrical advantages that unfree states enjoy over free ones. While the United States enjoys a free press, it has no equivalent to the now-globalized state-run propaganda operations that unfree states utilize to attack the legitimacy of free ones.

…oil-rich states like Venezuela and Libya have been able to leverage their petrodollars to buy influence in those organizations and by corrupting weaker states to do their bidding on the world stage. These regimes have also formed new alliances around “revolutionary” and “anti-imperialist” ideology in order to coordinate their efforts against the ideals of the West.

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Peripheral warfare conducted by Chavez also includes the use of “ALBA houses,” ostensible medical offices for the poor that serve as recruitment and indoctrination centers for his supporters in neighboring countries… ALBA houses are modeled on Cuba’s Barrio Adentro program, which it has utilized for years to infiltrate spies and agitators into neighboring countries under the guise of doctors, coaches and advisers to help the poor… What is given up by ignoring a tyrant’s provocations is the ability to actively prevent the incremental destruction of democratic institutions that solidify his power.

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There exists a mistakenly view of the interactions between disparate extremist organizations and terrorist groups internationally. This “burqa-bikini paradox” – the premise that culturally or ideologically distinct actors couldn’t possibly be cooperating to any significant degree – has frequently been the default position of journalists, the diplomatic community, and even some in the intelligence community.

Douglas Farah, a former Latin America correspondent for the Washington Post and now a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center, challenged this premise at a December 2008 Capitol Hill briefing titled “Venezuela and the threat it Poses to U.S. and Hemispheric Security”:

These lines that we think exist where these groups like Iran – well they’re a theocracy, or Hezbollah, they’re religiously motivated, they won’t deal with anyone else – bullshit! They will deal with whoever they need to deal with at any given time to acquire what they want…. And the idea that someone won’t deal with Hezbollah because they don’t like their theology is essentially horseshit. You can document across numerous times and numerous continents where people of opposing views will do business together regardless of ideology or theology.

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It is no stretch of logic to surmise that terrorist groups are the natural allies of authoritarian regimes. But throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, there was a battle in Washington between those who believed that the Soviet Union was complicit in terrorism and those who maintained that the Soviets eschewed it as a tactic. The official policy of the Soviets during the Cold War was to declare its opposition to terrorism while unofficially supporting and supplying proxy terrorist groups. But in 1970 Moscow had grown bold enough to train terrorists to overthrow the Mexican government and set up a satellite totalitarian state just across the U.S. Border.

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Carlos (the Jackal) “was given a staff of 75 to plot further deaths and provided with guns, explosives and an archive of forged papers” by the East Germans. He was provided with safe houses and East German experts to ensure that his phones were not bugged, and even his cars were repaired by the Stasi.

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The recovery of Stasi files had proven that the extent of Soviet bloc involvement in terrorism was far greater than even the CIA and other security agencies had considered. Throughout the Cold War, much of the conventional media and the foreign policy establishment often dismissed reports that the Soviets were sponsoring international terrorism or that the Marxist terrorists of Europe might be intermingling with Maoists in Latin America.

Some analysts and scholars referred to the writing of Karl Marx and Lenin to shot that the, and hence the Soviets, were ideologically opposed to terrorism… This and other tenants of Marxist-Leninist theory were often used to claim an ideological aversion to Soviet terror sponsorship.

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In 1916 Lenin wrote to Franz Koritschoner, one of the founders of Austria’s Communist Party, telling him that the Bolsheviks “are not at all opposed to political killing… but as revolutionary tactics individual attacks are inexpedient and harmful. Only the mass movement can be considered genuine political struggle. Only in direct immediate connection with the mass movement can and must individual terrorist acts be of value.

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Soviet Use of Communist Party Front Groups in the United Nations

The CPSU’s International Department was tasked with controlling the policy of the world communist movement. From 1955 to 1986, Boris Ponomarev was the chief of this department, which became the premier Soviet agency for fomenting and supporting international terrorism.

Under Ponomarev, the CPSU founded the Lenin Institute, which trained communist from Western and Third World countries in psychological warfare and propaganda and in guerilla warfare. Seeing the potential of “liberation movements” and “anti-imperialist” movements as proxy forces against the West, the CPSU also founded in 1960 the Peoples’ Friendship University (renamed Patrice Lumumba University in 1961) to train “freedom fighters” from the Third World who were no Communist Party members.

The International Department was also in charge of setting up front groups and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that could advocate by proxy for Soviet aims at the United Nations (UN) and other international governments. According to a U.S. House of Representative Subcommittee on Oversight report on February 6, 1980, Soviet subsidies to international front organizations exceeded $63 million in 1979 alone.

The report noted that the KGB and the Central Committee “actively promote” the UN imprimatur of the NGO front groups. The international Department controlled the NGOs and held coordinated meetings twice a year, and an official of the Soviet journal Problems of Peace and Socialism (also known as World Marxist Review) would always attend.

According to the report, Anatoly Mkrtchyan, the Soviet director of the External Relations Division of Public Information, was in charge of the NGO section.

Source: At the U.N., Soviet Fronts Pose as Nongovernmental Organizations Juliana Geran Pilon

https://www.heritage.org/global-politics/report/the-un-soviet-fronts-pose-nongovernmental-organizations

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After Arafat started the First Intifada in 1987, both the Soviet Union and Cuba increased military support to the Palestinians, often portraying U.S. and Israeli actions in the Middle East as hegemonic aggression against unarmed Palestinian victims.

In 1990 Havana sent assistance to Iran following an earthquake, and Iran started buying biotechnology products from Cuba. In the last 1990s Castro made a number of bilateral agreements with Iran, and several high-level delegations from Iran made trips to Cuba.

(33)

In 1962, the CPSU helped to establish the Paris-based Solidarite terrorist support network that was masterminded by Henri Curiel. Curial was an Egyptian communist born to an Italian Jewish family who ran a highly successful clandestine organization providing everything from arms to safe houses to actionable intelligence for terrorist group from Brazil to South Africa.

In 1982 a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate stated that Curiel’s Solidarite “has provided support to a wide variety of Third World leftist revolutionary organizations,” including “false documents, financial aid, and safehaven before and after operations, as well as some illegal training in France in weapons and explosives.”

Besides the direct support and training of terrorists, the Soviets made ample use of front groups that posed as religious organizations, academic institutions, or human rights advocates. A 1980 CIA report titled Soviet Covert Action and Propaganda stated:

At a meeting in February 1979 of World Peace Council (WPC) officials, a resolution was adopted to provide “uninterrupted support for the just struggle of the people of Chile, Guatemala, Uruguay, Haiti, Paraguay, El Salvador, Argentina and Brazil.” Without resort to classified information, from this one my logically conclude that the named countries are targets for Soviet subversion and national liberation struggles on a continuing basis. One might interpret “uninterrupted support for the just struggle” to mean continuing financial and logistic support to insurrection movements.

(34)

A former senior GRU officer confirmed this when he made the following statement:

…” If I give you millions of dollars’ worth of weapons, or cash, I have a small right to expect you to help me. I won’t tell you where to place the next bomb, but I do expect to have a little influence on your spheres of action. And if someone later arrests an Irishman, he can honestly say that he never trained in the Soviet Union. And he still believes he is fighting for himself.”

(38)

The point that Colby and Sterling were making was that the Soviets supported terrorist groups as proxy forces, specifically to retain the appearance of distance from their activities. The more important point was that international terrorist groups would have been far less prodigious, and far less deadly, without the support that they received from the Soviet Union and its satellite states…. The Soviet aspect could be seen as giving these groups a “do-it-yourself kit for terrorist warfare.”

(41)

According to [Former Secretary of Defense Robert] Gates, “We would learn a decade later that [CIA analysis] had been too cautious. After the communist governments in Eastern Europe collapsed, we found out that the Easter Europeans (especially the East Germans) indeed not only had provided sanctuary for West European ‘nihilist’ terrorists, but had trained, armed and funded many of them.

(49)

She (Leila Khaled) has also been a regularly scheduled speaker at the World Social Forum.

On May 26, 1971, Khaled told the Turkish newspaper Hurryet that:

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) sends instructors to Turkey in order to train Turkish youth in urban guerrilla fighting, kidnapping, plan hijackings, and other matters… In view of the fact that it is more difficult than in the past for Turks to go and train in PFLP camps, the PFLP is instructing the Turks in the same way as it trains Ethiopians and revolutionaries from underdeveloped countries. The PFLP has trained most of the detained Turkish underground members.

Within ten years, terrorist attacks in Turkey would be killing an average of nine to ten people per day.

Source: Sterling, Terror Network

(52)

The Baath Party’s founders were educated at the Sorbonne in Paris, where, incidentally, an inordinate number of the world’s former dictators were schooled. Commenting on this phenomenon, Egyptian journalist Issandr Elamsani said that Arab intellectuals still see the world through a 1960s lens: “They are all ex-Sorbonne, old Marxists, who look at everything through a postcolonial prism.”

The Sorbonne in the 1960s was one of the intellectual centers of radial political science. In the tradition of the Jacobins, it offered a pseudo-intellectual foundation for end-justifies-means terrorism, which many of its graduates – among them Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, Peruvian terrorist leader Abimeal Guzman, intellectual arbiter of the Iranian revolution Ali Shariati, and Syrian Baathist Michel Aflaq – would use to justify mass murder.

(60-61)

Aleida Guevara, the daughter of Che, made a trip to Lebanon in 2010 to lay a wreath on the tomb of former Hezbollah leader Abbas al-Musawi. At the ceremony, she echoed [Daniel] Ortega’s sentiments, saying, “I think that as long as [the martyr’s] memory remains within us, we will have more strength, and that strength will grow and develop, until we make great achievements and complete our journey to certain victory.”. Guevara later told supporters while visiting Baalbek, “If we do not conduct resistance, we will disappear from the face of the earth.” To make sure that the international press understood the subtext, Hezbollah’s official in the Bekaa Valley said, “We are conducting resistance for the sake of liberty and justice, and to liberate our land and people from Zionist occupation, which receives all the aid it needs from the U.S. administration.

Though Guevara was parroting what has become standard rhetoric among revolutionaries in all parts of the world, her visit had the potential to become controversial. Just three years earlier, in 2007, she and her brother Camilo had visited Tehran for a conference that was intended to emphasize the “common goals” of Marxism and Islamist radicalism.

Titled “Che Like Chamran,” the conference was a memorial to the fortieth anniversary of Che Guevara’s death, which happened to coincide with the twenty0sizzth anniversary of the death of Mostafa Chamran. Chamran, a radical Khomeinist who founded the Amal terrorist group in Lebanon, went to Iran in 1979 to help the mullahs take over and died in 1981 in the Iran-Iraq War (or, according to some, in a car accident.

Speaker Mortaza Firuzabadi, a Khomeinist radical, told the crowd that the mission of both leftist and Islamist revolutionaries was to fight America “everywhere and all of the time,” adding, “Our duty is to the whole of humanity. We seek unity with revolutionary movements everywhere. This is why we have invited the children of Che Guevara.”

…He ended his speech with an entreaty to all anti-American revolutionaries in the world to accept the leadership of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his revolutionary regime.

Qassemi returned once again to the podium at this point. “The Soviet Union is gone,” Qassemi declared. “The leadership of the downtrodden has passed to our Islamic Republic. Those who wish to destroy America must understand the reality.

Though it has been treated as a rarity by much of the Western media, collaboration between radical groups that might appear to have little in common have included joint operations of far-right, fascist, and neo-Nazi groups with far-left, Marxist and Islamist groups. These collaborations go back well before World War II.

The widespread misconception that a philosophical or religious wall of separation exists between the extremist ideological movements of the world is not only demonstrable false, it is highly detrimental to a proper analysis of the terrorist threat and to the public’s understanding of counterterrorism efforts. This myth has served well the forces of subversion.

The small subset of the population that is drawn to extremist movements is not limited to those who process the same or a similar ideology but instead includes those who tend to seek personal fulfilment from extremism itself. Ideology can be quite malleable when militants see an opportunity to take advantage of the popularity of a more militant group, regardless of any ideological differences between them. In fact, these groups have often found common cause soon after seeing a rival group begin to dominate international headlines.

(64-65)

One of the principal objectives of a terrorist attack that is often overlooked is the expected overreaction of the state in response to the threat.

Feltrinelli’s thesis, like those of many terrorist theorists before and after, was that this would bring “an advanced phase of the struggle” by forcing “an authoritarian turn to the right”.

Feltrinelli is emblematic of the ideologically itinerant radicals who wreaked havoc in the 1960s and 1970s in Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. He was a close friend of Fidel Castro’s, attended the Tricontinental Conference in 1966, and published its official magazine, Tricontinental, in Europe after the event… (he) began wearing a Tupamaros uniform on his return to Italy. There Feltrinelli built his own publishing empire, flying to Moscow to secure the publishing rights to Boris Pasternack’s Dr. Zhivago and publishing Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa’s bestseller The Leopard, … The profit from these blockbusters allowed him to fill bookstores throughout Italy with radical manifestos and terrorist literature.

On March 15, 1972, the police found Feltrinelli’s body in pieces at the foot of a high-voltage power line pylon. He had been placing explosives on the pylon with a group of fellow terrorists when one of his own explosives detonated accidentally.

(71)

According to the Aryan Nations’ website, the premise that could bridge the ideological gap between these ostensibly disparate worldviews that Muslims are of the same “Aryan” lineage. This view was not hard to concoct. Adolph Hitler’s minister of economics, Hjalmar Schacht, had professed a similar theory which was one promoted by King Darius the Great: the Persian bloodline was of Aryan lineage. This, Schacht argued it made the Persians – and therefor, somehow, all Muslims – the natural allies of Hitler’s vision of a superior Aryan race that should rule the world.

(72-73)

The rise of the Third Reich became a rallying point for many Muslim leaders, who fostered a bit of Muslim mythmaking by claiming that both Hitler and Mussolini were closet Muslims. One rumor had it that Hitler had secretly converted to Islam and that his Muslim name was Hayder, translated as “the Brave One”.” Mussolini, the rumors told, was really an Egyptian Muslim name Musa Nili, which translated into “Moses of the Nile.”

As far back as 1933, Arab nationalists in Syria and Iraq were supporting Nazism.

Arab support for Hitler was widespread by the time he rose to power. And when the Nazis announced the Nuremburg Laws in 1935 to legalize the confiscation of Jewish property, “telegrams of congratulations were sent to the fuhrer from all over the Arab and Islamic world.”

It was Germany’s war against the British Empire that motivated much of the early support for the Nazi regime. Hitler was, after all, fighting the three shared enemies of Germany and the Arab world at the same time: Zionism, communism, and the British Empire.

After World War II, many German officers and Nazi Party officials were given asylum in the Middle East, mostly in Syria and Egypt, where they were utilized to help set up clandestine services throughout the region – this time in support of many of the anticolonialist forces fighting the British and French.

(74)

Ronald Newton, a Canadian academic who wrote The Nazi Menace in Argentina, 1931-1947… thesis was that the tales of Nazi-fascist settlement in Argentina was the result of British disinformation, designed to thwart postwar market capture of Argentina by the United States. The theory was refuted in 1998 after Argentina president Carlos Menem put together a commission to study the issue.

(85)

The stated aim of right-wing extremist groups had always been to bring down the leftist democratic state model and bring about a national socialist or fascist state. But that ideology began to devolve in the 1980s as neo-Nazi groups started to see the dame and legitimacy that was afforded to left-wing terrorist groups that were committing far more violent acts and seemed to be rewarded proportionately.

Two years after Palestinian terrorists killed eleven Israeli team members at the Munich Olympics in 1972, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat was invited by the United Nations to address its General Assembly, and the PLO was awarded UN observer status shortly after that. Moreover, by the 1980s the PLO had been accorded diplomatic relations with more countries than Israel had.

(91)

In 1969, Qaddafi became the chief financier of terrorism of every stripe throughout the world. And though he became known as the principal donor to worldwide leftist groups, he began his terrorist franchise with those of the extreme right.

(93)

In his book Revolutionary Islam, Carlos tried to join the two strongest currents of revolutionary terror, declaring that “only a coalition of Marxists and Islamists can destroy the United States.”

Carlos’s book would be little noticed until Hugo Chavez, speaking to a gathering of worldwide socialist politicians in November 2009, called him an important revolutionary fighter who supported the Palestinian cause. Chavez said during his televised speech that Carlos had been unfairly convicted and added, “They accuse him of being a terrorist, but Carlos really was a revolutionary fighter.”

(97)

“There is a revolution going on in Venezuela, a revolution of an unusual kind – it is a slow-motion revolution.” Thus, declared Richard Gott in an interview with Socialist Worker on February 12, 2005. Gott, a British author and ubiquitous spokesman for all things Chavez and Castro, is not the first to note the nineteenth-century pedigree of Chavez’s 21stCentury Socialism.

The incremental implementation of socialism was the dream of the Fabian Society, a small but highly influential political organization founded in London in 1884… The logo of the Fabian Society, a tortoise, represented the group’s predilection for a slow, imperceptible transition to socialism, while its coat of arms, a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” represented its preferred methodology for achieving its goal.

(98)

In a 1947 article in Partisan Review, [Arthur] Schlesinger Jr. stated, “there seems to be no inherent obstacle to the gradual advance of socialism in the United States through a series of New Deals.”

Gradualism has always been considered “anti-revolutionary” in communist and socialist circles. But pragmatism has taken the place of idealism after the events of 9/11 increased international scrutiny on radical groups, forcing revolutionists like Chavez and Ahmadinejad to use the Fabian strategy as a “soft subversion” tactic with which to undermine their enemies. In the past decade, Chavez and his allies in Lain America have all embraced Ahmadinejad’s regime, and all have developed their strategic relationship based on mutual support for this incremental subversion.

(99-100)

Castro has had a lot of practice in the art of subversion. Within a short time after he came to power in Cuba, he began trying to subvert other governments in Latin America and the Caribbean. On may 10, 1967 Castro sent an invasion force to Machurucuto, Venezuela, to link up with Venezuelan guerillas to try and overthrow the democratic and popular government of President Raul Leoni.

Led by Arnaldo Ochoa Sanchez, the invasion force was quickly vanished, and the Venezuelan armed forces, with the help of peasant farmers leery of the guerillas, pacified the remaining guerrilla elements before the end of the year. Then the Venezuelan government issues a general amnesty to try and quell any violence from the remaining guerrilla holdouts. But the PRV, Red Flag and the Socialist League continued to operate clandestinely. Douglas Bravo, the Venezuelan terrorist who inspired Carlos the Jackal, remained the intransigent leader of the PRV. One of Bravo’s lieutenants was Adan Chavez, Hugo’s older brother, who would serve as Hugo’s liaison to the radical elements throughout for years to come.

After suffering calamitous defeats at the hand of the Venezuelan armed forces, the PRV decided the best way to continue the revolution would be to infiltrate the “system” and subvert it from within. In 1970, they would first make a move to infiltrate the armed forces. Bravo first contacted Lt. William Izarra in 1920. A year later, Chavez entered military school and started to recruit leftist military members to what became a clandestine fifth-column groups, the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movements. The failed 1992 coup that launched Hugo Chavez’s political career would be planned and executed jointly by the MBR, PRV, Socialist League and Red Flag.

After his release in 1994, Chavez spent six months in Colombia receiving guerrilla training, establishing contacts with both the FARC and the ELN of Colombia, and even adopting a nom de Guerra, Comandante Centeno.

Once he was elected president four years later, he would repay the Colombian guerrillas with a $300 million “donation” and thank Castro with a subsidized oil deal.

Though Chavez would denounce Plan Avila often, it would be his own decision to order its activation in 2002 that would provoke his own military to remove him from power.

Chavez seemed to take the near-death experience as a sign from divine providence of his right to rule and began a purge of the military and the government of anyone who might later threaten his power. Chavez then began radicalizing the remainder of the Venezuelan military by replacing its historical training regimen with a doctrine of asymmetric warfare that involved all sectors of society. He would call his new doctrine la guerra de todo el pueblo – “the war of all the people”.

(101-104)

The Revolutionary Brotherhood Plan

While Chavez calls his hemispheric governing plan “21st Century Socialism,” his critics have given it another name – democradura.

Democradura is a Spanish neologism that has come to define the budding autocracies in Lain America that have incrementally concentrated power in the executive branch under the guise of constitutional reform.

A Socialist think tank in Spain, the CEPTS foundation, part of the Center for Political and Social Studies, was founded in Valencia in 1993 by left-wing academics supporting Spain’s socialist Party as well as the FARC and ELN terrorist groups in Colombia. It put together a team of Marxist constitutional scholars to write the new constitutions of Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, turning them into “socialist constitutions” but with variations applicable to each particular country.

(105)

Where Bolivia’s indigenous president Evo Morales used race to marginalize his opposition, Correa used the rhetoric of environmental radicalism to demonize the mining, oil and gas sectors in Ecuador. Anyone who opposed the anthropocentric environmental language in the (new) constitution was called a “lackey” or multinational corporations and oligarchs. This stance also allowed Correa to eventually break the contracts with these companies in order to demand higher government revenues from their operations, which was then used to support government-funded projects in government-friendly provinces.

The process of Marxist constitution making first caught the attention of the revolutionary left during Colombia’s constitutional change in 1991. The Colombian constitution had been in place since 1886, a long time for regional constitutions, and was only able to be changed with some political machination and legal subterfuge.

As M-19 guerrillas began demobilization talks with a weak Colombian government in the late 1980s, the group took advantage of its position to transition from an armed insurgency to a political party. By 1991 M-19 was able to get one of its leaders, Antonio Navarro, included as one of the three copresidents of the constituent assembly that drew up the new constitution.

Navarro was able to negotiate a prohibition against any attempts by the state to organize the population against the armed guerrilla groups. Not only would this provision end up escalating violence in Colombia, but it would inspire other terrorist groups throughout the America to seek both an armed and a “political wing” which would be utilized skillfully to prolong their longevity as insurgents.

After witnessing the ease with which the Colombian constitution was changed, “constitutional subversion” became standard operation procedure for those countries headed by Chavez’s allies.

The former Venezuelan ambassador to the United Kingdom, Jorge Olavarria, assessed the situation with a bit more apprehension and foresight: “The constituent assembly is nothing more than a camouflage to make the world think that the coming dictatorship is the product of a democratic process.

Where most Latin American constitutions contained between 100 and 200 articles, the new Venezuelan constitution had 350, or 98 more than its predecessor. According to Professor Carlos Sabino of Francisco Marroquin University in Guatemala, the essence of the new constitution was “too many rules, no system to enforce them.” (it) “would consolidate an authoritarian government with a legal disguise, necessary in today’s globalized world where the respect for democratic values is the key to good international relations.

(108)

The Defense of Political Sovereignty and National Self-Determination Law would prohibit organizations, as well as individuals, that advocate for the political rights of Venezuelans from accepting funds from any foreign entity. It also prohibited them from having any representation from foreigners and even sponsoring or hosting any foreigner who expresses opinions that “offend the institution of the state.” This law was included with the International Cooperation Law, which would force all NGOs to reregister with the government and include a declared action plan on their future activities, along with a list of any financing that they expected to receive.

(109)

gNGOs are Governmental Non-Governmental Orgs. Fake NGO’s operated by the government.

(110)

The Sandinista government in Nicaragua has been even more aggressive against civil society groups, raiding the offices of long-established NGOs and launching what it called Operation No More lies, a crackdown against those that it accuses of money laundering, embezzlement and subversion.

(111)

At the end of March 2011, former president Jimmy Carter made a trip to Cuba to meet with members of the regime. About the time he arrived, Cuban state television aired a series in which it portrayed independent NGOs as subversive organizations that sought to “erode the order of civil society” in Cuba. The report claimed that “via the visits to the country of some of its representatives and behind the backs of Cuban authorities, these NGOs have the mission of carrying out the evaluations of the Cuban political situation and instructing, organizing, and supplying the counter-revolution.” It accused the organizations of hiding “their subversive essence [behind] alleged humanitarian aid.” The series featured Dr. Jose Manuel Collera, who was revealed as “Agent Gerardo,” a Cuban spy who had infiltrated the NGOs in the United States “to monitor their work and representatives.”

Along with thwarting the oversight power of NGOs in Venezuela, Chavez also included a number of “economic” laws designed to put the stamp of legitimacy on his new “communal” economic system that had caused shortages throughout the country… These laws made communes the basis of the Venezuelan economy and established “People’s Power” as the basis of local governance. It is codified as being responsible to the “revolutionary Leadership,” which is Chavez himself. This effectively supplanted the municipalities and regional governments.

(117) 

Managing the Media

Speaking in September 2010 at a Washington event to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors Walter Issacson, warned, “We can’t allow ourselves to be out-communicated by our enemies. There’s that Freedom House report that reveals that today’s autocratic leaders are investing billions of dollars in media resources to influences the Global opinion… You’ve got Russia Today, Iran’s Press TV, Venezuela’s TeleSUR…”

Their techniques are similar: hire young, inexperienced correspondents who will toe the party line as TV reporters, and put strong sympathizers, especially Americans, as hosts of “debate” shows.

Where normal media outlets will film only the speakers at such an event, these state-sponsored media units will often turn the cameras toward the audience in order to capture on film those in the audience who may be government critics. Their purpose for this is twofold – to later screen the video to see who might be attending such a conference and to intimidate exiles from attending such events.

(118)

TeleSUR’s president, Andres Izarra, is a professional journalist who formerly worked for CNN en Espanol. He also serves as Chavez’s minister of communications and information. Izarra said of TeleSUR’s launch: “TeleSUR is an initiative against cultural imperialism. We launch TeleSUR with a clear goal to break this communication regime.”

In a 1954 letter to a comrade, Fidel Castro wrote, “We cannot for a second abandon propaganda. Propaganda is vital – propaganda is the heart of our struggle.

“We have to win the war inside the United States, said Hector Oqueli, one of the Rebel leaders. And after the Sandinistas first took power in Nicaragua in the 1980s, the late Tomas Borge, who served as the interior minister and head of state security for the Sandinista regime, told Newsweek, “The battle for Nicaragua is not being waged in Nicaragua. It is being fought in the United States.

It had not been difficult for the revolutionary left in Latin America to find willing allies in the United States to help with its propaganda effort. An illustrative example is William Blum, the author of several anti-American books that have called U.S. foreign engagements “holocausts”. Blum has described his life’s mission as “slowing down the American Empire… injuring the Beast.” Blum’s treatment of U.S. involvement in Latin America is noteworthy, because it is emblematic of what often passes as scholarship on the subject and because it gets repeated in many universities where he is often invited to speak to students… In January 2006, Blum’s Rogue State got an endorsement by Osama bin Laden, who recommended the book in an audiotape and agreed with Blum’s idea that the way the United States could prevent terrorist attacks was to “apologize to the victims of American Imperialism.”

Examples of bad scholarship follow…

Blum’s book is typical of a genre that has long eschewed scholarship for sensationalized anti-Americanism. At the summit of the Americas in April 2009, Chavez handed President Obama a copy of Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano, about which Michael Reid, the Americas editor at The Economist, wrote, [Galeano’s history is that of the propagandist, a potent mix of selective truths, exaggeration and falsehood, caricature and conspiracy. Called the “Idiots Bible” by Latin American scholars, Galeano’s 1971 tome was translated to English by Cedric Belfrage, a British journalist and expatriate to the United States who was also a Communist Party member and an agent for the KGB.

The Artillery of Ideas

Another Chavez propaganda effort designed to reach English-speaking audiences is the state funded newspaper Correo del Orinoco, named for a newspaper started by Simon Bolivar in 1818.

(121)

Un April 2010 Chavez held a celebration on the eight anniversary of the coup that earlier had removed him from office for two days. He named the celebration “Day of the Bolivarian Militias, the Armed People and the April Revolution” and held a swearing in ceremony for 35,000 new members of his civilian militia. As part of the festivities, Chavez also had a swearing in ceremony for a hundred young community media activists, calling them “communicational guerrillas.” This was done, according to Chavez, to raise awareness among young people about the “media lies” and to combat the anti-revolution campaign of the opposition-controlled private media.

(122)

The most notorious propaganda and coverup operation to date has been that of the Puente Llaguno shooting in 2002, in which nineteen people were killed and sixty injured as Chavez’s henchmen were videotaped shooting into a crowd of marchers from a bridge overhead.

(124)

According to Nelson (the author of The Silence and the Scorpion) the reason that Chavez felt the need to go after the Metropolitan Police was because they were the largest group in the country, aside from the army. This, feared Chavez, made them a potential threat for another coup against his regime. After he was briefly ousted from office in 2002, Chavez skillfully utilized the canard that the Metropolitan police had fired the first shots at the Bolivarian Circles as an excuse to take away much of their firepower and equipment, leaving them only with their .38 caliber pistols. And one a Chavez loyalist took over as mayor of Caracas, the Metropolitan Police were completely purged. According to Nelson, loyalty to Chavez’s political party became much more important than expertise or experience on the police force.

In January 2007, the President of TeleSUR, Andres Izarra, revealed the thinking behind Chavez’s campaign against the media: “We have to elaborate a new plan, and the one that we propose is the communication and informational hegemony of the state.”

(131)

A report done for the United Nations by the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders said that verbal attacks against anyone “who dared to criticize the policies of President Ortega or his government… were systematically and continuously taken up by the official or pro-Government media.” The reports, issued in June 2009, stated:

President Ortega’s government tried to silence dissident voices and criticisms of Government policies through members of the government who verbally assaulted demonstrators and human rights defenders as well as the Citizens Council (Consejos de Poder Ciudadno – CPC) who hampered the NGOs’ activities and physically assaulted defenders. In this context, 2008 saw numerous attacks against human rights defenders and attempts to obstruct their activity…

These Citizens’ Councils were taken directly from the “Revolutionary Brotherhood” plan and are close facsimiles of groups like the Bolivarian Circles in Venezuela. Ortega claimed in July 2007 that “more than 6,000 [CPCs] has been formed,” and “around 500,000 people participated in CPCs.”

(142)

Managing the Military

Daniel Patrick Moynihan: More and more the United Nations seems only to know of violations of human rights in countries where it is still possible to protest such violations… our suspicions are that there could be a design to use the issue of human rights to undermine the legitimacy of precisely those nations which still overserve human rights, imperfect as that observance may be.” (871)

The Department of State Bulletin. (1975). United States: Office of Public Communication, Bureau of Public Affairs.

The southern Connections was a coordinated effort by far-left supporters of the Castro regime and other leftist governments in Latin America to end the Monroe Doctrine or at least to deter Washington’s policy of intervention against communist expansion in the hemisphere.

(144)

EL Salvador’s civil war, from 1979 until 1992, was emblematic of the Cuba-instigated wars in Latin America. It was Fidel Castro who convinced the various left-wing guerilla groups operating in El Salvador consolidate under the banner of the DRU, officially formed in May 1980. The DRU manifesto stated, “There will be only one leadership, only one military plan and only one command, only one political line.” Fidel Castro had facilitated a meeting in Havana in December 1979 that brought these groups together – a feat that has not been repeated since, as the historic tendency of most leftist terrorist groups in the region have been of splintering after fights over egos and ideological differences.

It was a Salvadoran of Palestinian descent, Schafik Handal, who helped found the Communist Party of El Salvador and who would serve as Castro’s partner in the Central American wars of the era.

(145)

Stealth NGOs

One of the most effective asymmetrical tactics has been the use of dummy NGOs as front groups in Latin America. A number of nongovernmental organizations operating in the region that claim to advocate for human rights actually receive funding from radical leftist groups sympathetic to revolutionary movements in the hemisphere. Many of these groups derive much of their legitimacy from unwitting representative of the European Union, the United Nations and even the U.S. Department of State who often designate them as “special rapporteurs” for human rights reporting.

(146)

Both Cristian Fernandez de Kirchner, the current president, and her husband the late President Nestor Kirchner, were far left radicals in the 1960s and 1970s and filled both of their administrations with ex-terrorists and radicals… Many have accused the Kirchner’s and their allies of blatant double standards on human rights issues – especially in the prosecution of former military members who served during Argentina’s Dirty War from 1976 to 1983.

Since 2003, when Nestor Kirchner took office, the successive Kirchner administrations have aggressively prosecuted hundreds of ex-soldiers, many of who served prior to the beginning of the Dirty War. The double standard arises because not one of the ex-terrorists, who started the Dirty War in the first place, has been prosecuted. The Kirchners, along with far-left judicial activists in the region, have relied on a blatantly unjust tenant of “international human rights law” that says crimes against humanity only apply to representatives of the state, a group that includes military and policy but excludes the terrorists who ignited the guerillas wars.

(148)

Since the late 1990s, the NGO practice of dragging the military into court on allegations of human rights violations has destroyed the careers of some of [Colombia’s] finest officers, even though most of these men were found innocent after years of proceedings.”

According to O’Grady, the enabling legislation that makes this judicial warfare possible is what’s been termed the “Leahy Law,” after its sponsor, Sen Patrick Leahy (D-VT). Under this law, American Military aid can be withdrawn if military offenses are brought against them, even when the credibility of the charges is dubious. O’Grady noted, “The NGOs knew that they only had to point fingers to get rid of an effective leader and demoralize the ranks.”

The legislation that became the Leahy Law was first introduced in 1997 in the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act, and similar language was inserted into the 2001 Foreign Operations Appropriations Act. It has since been used repeatedly against Colombia, which has been a target ever since it became serious about taking on the FARC and took funding from the United States to Implement Plan Colombia, an anti-drug smuggling and counter-insurgency initiative.

(149)

The publicity about Reyes’s death put the spotlight on the situation in Colombia and led researchers to uncover the fact that many of the so-called trade unionists in Colombia were moonlighting as FARC terrorists.

Raul Reyes was the prime example, having begun his career at age sixteen when he joined the Colombian Communist Youth (JUCO), which led him to become a trade unionist at a Nestle plant in his hometown of Caquetá. His position as a Nestle “trade unionist” was a front for his real job, which was influencing, recruiting, and radicalizing fellow workers at a plant for the Colombian Communist Party… Since the beginning of the FARC, and its collaboration and later split with the party, a number of Colombian trade unions have served as way stations for FARC members as they moved from union posts to the ranks of the FARC.

(150)

Uribe was able to turn the tide…. By strategically transitioning from the largely fruitless supply-control methods of Plan Colombia to the population centric counterinsurgency (PC-COIN) methods of Plan Patriota, a later iteration of the original plan that put focus on counterinsurgency.

Where the previous policy had granted a vast demilitarized zone to the FARC in exchange for a proposed peace treaty, Plan Patriota utilized a counter-insurgency strategy that attacked terrorists with physical force. But more importantly, it attached their legitimacy by placing security personnel in remote areas where there had been no state presence before. What this accomplished, more successfully than any of the Colombian military’s previous operational tactics, was to change the populations’ perception of the forty-year insurgency. What had been seen as a conflict between rival political parties was now looked upon as the battle of a legitimate, elected government against illegitimate narco-terrorists.

Revolutionizing the Military

In 2001 the Venezuelan daily Tal Cual published a leaked document from the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DIM) which spelled out a plan to politicize the military. According to the document top military officers were to be divided into “revolutionists” who supported Chavez, “institutionalists” who were considered to be neutral, and “dissidents” who were opposed to the regime. It also advocated for catequesis (Spanish for catechism) to proselytize these officers to accept Chavez’s socialist governing program.

(152-153)

During the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, Andropov “had watched in horror from the windows of his embassy as officers of the hated Hungarian security service were strung up from lampposts” It is said that Andropov was “haunted for the rest of his life by the speed with which an apparently all-powerful Communist one-party state had begun to topple” and was thereafter “obsessed with the need to stamp out ‘ideological sabotage’ where it reared its head within the Soviet bloc.” This obsession made the Soviets much more eager to send in troops whenever other communist regimes were in jeopardy.

…both Castro and Chavez, would develop a Hungarian complex as well, leading to a clampdown on ‘ideological sabotage’ within their respective countries. In 1988 Castro stated, when speaking of the Sandinistas’ use of civilian militias to defend their revolution in Nicaragua, that both Cuba and Nicaragua needed a “committed… people’s armed defense that is sufficient in size, training and readiness, “adding that Salvador Allende hadn’t had a big enough force to prevent the coup that drove him from power in Chile in 1973. It was a rare moment of candor, as the militia is usually touted as the last bastion against a U.S. invasion. But in reality, it is a tool designed to accomplish the prime objective of an aspiring autocrat – to ensure the longevity of the regime. Max Manwaring, writing on Chavez’s use of these civilian militias, stated:

All these institutions are outside the traditional control of the regular armed forced, and each organization is responsible directly to the leader (President Chavez). This institutional separation is intended to ensure the no military or paramilitary organization can control another, but the centralization of these institutions guarantees the leader absolute control of security and social harmony in Venezuela.

Perpetuating the Regime

Started as a jobless protest in 1996, the piquiteros have transformed into what are, according to The Economist, “government rent-a-mobs” consisting of “unemployed protestors receiving state welfare payments.” The piquiteros were co-opted by Nestor Kirchner’s government, through some have splintered since his wife succeeded him.

(154)

In February 2011 the gravity of the effort to militarize Morales’s civilian supporters became far clearer. According to ABC, a Paraguayan daily, Iran was providing the financing for the militia training facility. Called the Military Academy of ALBA, it is located in Warnes, thirty miles north of Santa Cruz. ABC reported that the facility would train both military personnel and civilian militia members from all of the ALBA countries.

(156)

Shortly after Castro’s guerrillas took power in Havana, Cuban embassies in Latin America became recruitment centers and incubators for radical groups and terrorist subversives throughout the hemisphere. Organizing subversive student movements became a priority for Cuban “diplomats,” and the autonomy of the campuses provided easy access and impunity.

A comparison of the student vote to that of the general population at the time provides an illustration of the radicalization of the student body. During the 1960s in Venezuela, students at the Central University typically voted 50 to 60 percent for candidates from the Communist Party of Venezuela and the radical Castroite MIR, while these candidates never broke 10 percent among the general population.

A Venezuela MIR guerrilla noted that their near total domination of the liceos (secondary schools) and the universities led them wrongly to believe that this level of acceptance could be extrapolated to the general population. But in reality, noted the guerrilla, “there was absolutely no mass solidarity with the idea of insurrection.” One MIR cofounder, Domingo Alberto Rangel, noted after renouncing the group’s support for terrorism that “the Left enjoys support among students, but it is unknown among working-class youth, or the youth of the barrios.”

In Colombia, the Industrial University of Santander in Bucaramanga was a haven for that country’s ELN terrorists. In 1965 in Peru, the ELN based itself in the San Cristobal of Huamange National University in Ayacucho, and at the National University in Lima a number of leftist political parties set up operations for MIR terrorists.

Just over twenty years later, after Shining Path and Tupac Amaru terrorists had gained control over a majority of the rural area of Peru and had begun to threaten the capital, the (first) government of President Alan Garcia reluctantly decided to raid the University of San Marcos, the National University of Engineering, and a teacher’s college – three schools that had long been known as terrorist havens.

This kind of autonomy without accountability is a policy that invited terrorist infiltration among impressionable young people.

(159)

Like guerrilla groups in many countries in Latin America, Mexico’s also have a cadre of supporters in NGOs who purport to be human rights advocates. After the bombing of the FARC camp in Ecuador, instead of denouncing the FARC for hosting Mexican students in a war zone, one Mexican human rights NGO called the operation an “unjustified massacre” and announced that it was planning to sue the Colombian government.

(161)

According to The Miami Herald, [Tareck] El Aissami was born in Venezuela to Syrian parents, and his father, Carlos, was the president of the Venezuelan branch of the Baath Party and was an ardent supporter of Saddam Hussein. El Aissamni’s uncle, Shibili el-Aissami, whose whereabouts are unknown, was a top-ranking Baath Party official in Iraq.

(164)

The extent of Cuban subversion was investigated and reported to Congress as early as 1963, when the Senate Judiciary Committee released a report detailing the activities of Cuban operatives in the hemisphere. The report concluded: “A war of liberation” or ‘popular uprising’ is really hidden aggression: subversion… the design of Communist expansion finds in subversion the least costly way of acquiring peoples and territories without exaggerated risk.” The report elaborated on the goal of Cuban subversion:

Its aim is to replace the political, economic, and social order existing in a country by a new order, which presupposes the complete physical and moral control of the people… That control is achieved by progressively gaining possession of bodies and minds, using appropriate techniques of subversion that combine psychological, political, social, and economic actions, and even military operations, if this is necessary.

(166)

It was reported by a defector that all Sandinista military plans were sent first to Havana to be vetted by Raul Castro and a Soviet handler before any action was taken against the contras.

A State Department background paper also reported that besides the influx of thousands of Cuban “advisers,” nearly all of the members of the new state police organization, the General Directorate of Sandinista State Security, were trained by the Cubans.

Alfonso Robelo, one of the original members of Nicaragua’s five-man junta, told reporters, “this is something that you have to understand, Nicaragua is an occupied country. We have 8,000 Cubans plus several thousand East Bloc people, East Germans, PLO, Bulgarians, Libyans, North Koreans, etc. The national decisions, the crucial ones, are not in the hands of the Nicaraguans, but in the hands of the Cubans… And, really, in the end, it is not the Cubans, but the Soviets.”

While many foreign policy experts and officials in the Carter administration scoffed at the idea of either Soviet of Cuban steering of the Sandinistas, numerous defectors later confirmed it. Victor Tirado, one of the original Sandinistas, wrote in 1991 that “we allowed ourselves to be guided by the ideas of the Cubans and the Soviets.” Alvaro Baldizon, a chief investigator of the Sandinista Ministry of the Interior, said after defecting, “The ones who give the orders are the Cubans…. Every program, every operation is always under the supervision of Cuban advisors.”

Since the Barrio Adentro program began in Venezuela in October 2000, the number of Cubans in the country has grown to somewhere between forty thousand and sixty-five thousand, depending on the source.

(169)

One of the programs instituted by the Cubans that has driven out many of the professional officers is a new system that allows sergeants to be promoted to the rank of colonel simply by what they call “technical merit” – which most officers define as a high level of fealty to the Chavez political program.

(170)

Prior to the 2006 presidential election in Peru, Hugo Chavez set his sights on the country to try to bring it into the ALBA orbit. Besides sending letters of invitation to mayors near the border areas of his allies, Chavez underwrote a number of ALBA houses in rural areas of Peru. The Peruvian government became concerned enough about the ALBA houses that a congressional committee investigated them and issues a report in March 2009 recommending they be shut down. The committee report concluded that Chavez was trying to influence Peruvian politics via the ALBA houses, which had been established without any government-to-government agreement.

A June 2009 incident in the Amazon city of Badua ended the détente. The incident, called the Baguazo, ended in a bloodbath when members and supporters of a radicalized “indigenous rights” group slit the throats of police officers who had been sent to end the group’s roadblock that had closed the city’s only highway for over a month. Leaders of the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest were revealed to have ties to Chavez and Morales and had previously traveled to Caracas to participate in a meeting of radical indigenous groups.

(171 – 172)

Like Soviet communism, Chavez’s 21st Century Socialism can only survive by spreading and enveloping its neighbors, lest too much of a distinction be shown in economic outcomes by its nonsocialist neighbors.

In a July 2008 hearing of the Western Hemispheric Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Dr. Norman Bailey, a former official of the National Security Council whose specialty was monitoring terrorism by tracking finances, testified that Chavez had spent “$33 billion on regional influence.” Bailey further stated that corruption in the Chavez regime was “nothing less than monumental, with literally billions of dollars having been stolen by government officials and their allies in the private sector over the past nine years.” Bailey also testified that a Chavez government official had his bank accounts closed by HSBC Bank in London, which had deposits of $1.5 billion.”

A large portion of the income derived from both the narco-trafficking and money laundering is funneled to Venezuelan entities and officials and “is facilitated by the Venezuelan financial system, including both public and private institutions.”

* Bailey testimony before the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee

(174)

A Wikileaks cable released in December 2010 revealed that Ortega had been given “suitcases full of cash” in Caracas. “We have firsthand reports that GON [Government of Venezuela] officials receive suitcases full of cash from Venezuelan officials during official trips to Caracas,” a 2008 diplomatic cable written by Ambassador Paul Trivelli stated. The embassy cables also said that Ortega was believed to have used drug money to underwrite a massive election fraud.

The accusations of suitcases of Venezuelan money going to Nicaragua match very closely with an August 2007 case in which a Venezuelan American businessman, Antonini Wilson, was cause at the Ezeiza Airport just outside Buenos Aires with a suitcase packed with $800,000 in cash. According to U.S. prosecutors who ended up in charge of the case, the money was intended for Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, who was campaigning for (and eventually won) the presidency of Argentina… when Wilson flew home to Key Biscayne immediately after he incident, he reported it to the FBI, fearing (rightly) being set up as the “fall guy,” according to his court testimony. Wilson agreed to wear a wire during his subsequent meetings with Venezuelan officials and to record his phone calls. Three of the officials involved were indicted in the United States and pleaded guilty. Another fled and is still at large.

(179)

Nicaraguan defectors had long reported the drug-trafficking habits of the Sandinista government. Antonio Farach, a defector who had worked as a Sandinista minister in Nicaragua’s embassies in Honduras and Venezuela, told U.S. officials in 1983 that Humberto Ortega, brother of the president and then Nicaragua’s minister of defense, was “directly involved” in drug trafficking.

Farach repeated an oft-reported rationale used by Marxists who moonlight in the drug trade as a sideline to revolution. He states that Sandinista officials believed their trafficking in drugs was a “political weapon” that would help to destroy “the youth of our enemies.” According to Farach, the Sandinistas declared, “We want to provided food to our people with the suffering and death of the youth of the United States.”

(190)

As of 2008, nineteen of the forty-three groups that are officially designated “foreign terrorist organizations” were all linked to the international drug trade, and as much as 60 percent of all terrorist organizations were believed to be linked to the drug trade.

From fiscal years 1999 through March 2010, 329 Iranian nationals have been caught by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

In March 2005 FBI director Robert Mueller testified before the House Appropriations Committee that “there are individuals from countries with known Al Qaeda connection who are changing their Islamic surnames to Hispanic-sounding names and obtaining false Hispanic identities, learning to speak Spanish and pretending to be Hispanic.

In 2010 the Department of Homeland Security had thousands of what are called “OTMs” – Other Than Mexicans – incarcerated for illegally crossing the southern border. The OTMs consisted of individuals from Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and elsewhere.

(199)

Hugo Chavez’s placement of individuals with known ties to terrorist groups in charge of his immigration and identification bureau have long been documented.

(204)

Influenced by Chavez and radical leftist groups in the region, Lopez Obrador staged a populist sit-in in the central square of Mexico City for nearly two months, claiming to be the “legitimate president”.

Rep Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) told several Mexican legislators at the time that he had received intelligence reports that Chavez had been funding AMLO’s Party of the Democratic Revolution. Had Lopez Obrador won, the nefarious influences of Chavez and Ahmadinejad would have moved to America’s doorstep, and the nexus of drug trafficking and terrorism that were already on the border would be an order of magnitude greater.

(207)

In September 2011, El Universal reported that a Spanish court had prosecuted five members of Askapena, the international wing of ETA. Court documents showed that Askapena had been instructed to set up an international relations network by organizing seminar and creating “solidarity committees” in Europe and North and South America.

(208)

The New York Times reported on January 28, 1996 that during the last two months that the Sandinistas were in power, they had granted Nicaraguan citizenship and documentation to over nine hundred foreigners, including terrorists from ETA and Italy’s Red Brigades, three dozen Arabs and Iranians from Islamic terrorist groups, and terrorists from “virtually every guerrilla organization in Lain America”.

(209)

As far back as May 2008, Jackson Diehl, deputy editorial page editor and foreign policy writer for the Washington Post, wrote that Chavez belonged on the State Department’s list of State Sponsors of Terror.

His reported actions are, first of all, a violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1373, passed in September 2001, which prohibits all states from providing financing or havens to terrorist organizations. More directly, the Colombian evidence would be more than enough to justify a State Department decision to cite Venezuela as a state sponsor of terrorism. Once cited, Venezuela would be subject to a number of automatic sanctions, some of which would complicate its continuing export of oil to the United States…

(221)

It is this irrational reluctance to properly describe the threat we face from declared enemies that validates those enemies contrived grievances. Almost inversely proportional to our increased prowess in kinetic warfare, we have continually ceded the ideological war that has become the only battlefield on which our enemies are able to make an impact. As Max Manwaring and others have stated, today’s battles are fights for legitimacy. To allow political correctness or misplaced deference to alter the terminology of war is to cede our most valuable territory. To our enemies, deference equals weakness, not civil accommodation.

Another tenet shared by political Islam in the Middle East and 21st Century Socialism in Latin America is that its adherents have declared war not only on the United States and the West in general but on capitalism and free societies as well. TO most of us in the West, this is equivalent to declaring war on gravity, as free exchange and free enterprise are the bases of life and the engines of progress throughout the world.

We enjoy the advantage that our enemies are not only fighting against us but are also fighting against the trajectory of human progress. Our duty is to decide whether we are going to continue to accommodate their superstitions or whether we will confront them before further carnage provides them with false validation.

 

Notes from CastroChavism: Organized Crime in the Americas

CastroChavism: Organized Crime in the Americas by José Carlos Sánchez Berzaín, Bolivia’s former Minister of Defense and the author of XXI Century Dictatorship in Bolivia.

(16)

[Venezuela and Bolivia] are dictatorships that reach[ed] power through elections and through successive coups that liquate democracy.

(17)

The two Americas make up an axis of confrontation in which perpetual and arbitrary control of power, on the one handed, branded dictatorship with ideology as a pretext; versus democracy, with respect for human rights, alternation in power, accountability and free elections, declaratively protected by the inter-American system, enshrined – among others – in the inter-American democratic charter.

From 1959 to 1999, the Cuban dictatorship is “Castroism.” From 1999 onwards it is “Castrochavismo,” led by Hugo Chavez until his death.

(18-19)

It began as progressive leftist populism, and was successively called ALBA Movement (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America); the Bolivarian Movement; and after a few years Socialism of the 21st Century.

Castro receives a new source of financing for his conspiratorial and criminal actions with Chavez’s surrender not only of Venezuela’s money and oil but, as we have learned today, of the entire country. This allowed the dictator to reactivate genuine Castroism under the mantle of the Bolivarian Movement, or ALBA, and disguise it as democracy. With Venezuela’s money he started conspiracies, which led to the fall and overthrow of democratic leaders. The first one occurs in Argentina, with the fall of President De La Rua. The second happens in Ecuador and it is Jamil Mahuad who pays the proce. The Third one is the overthrow of President Gonzalo Sanches de Lozada in Bolivia. The fourth is in Ecuador, with the fall of President Lucio Gutierrez. They also overthrew the OAS Secretary General, Miguel Angel Rodriguez, who had just been elected. A false case of corruption was planted in Costa Rica, where Rodriguez ends up being illegally detained, making room for Insulsa to arrive.

The nascent CastroChavista organization expands with Lula da Silva taking power in Brazil with the Workers Party, whose government he used to strengthen the extraordinary flow of economic resources with transnational corruption .A sample of such crimes include the infamous case of “Lava Jato – Odebrecht”

The destruction of democracy becomes noticeable in the exiles, who had been purely Cuban and are now regional – waves of Venezuelans Bolivians, Nicaraguans, Ecuadorians, Argentines, and Central Americans.

(21)

An electoral dictatorship is a political regime that by force or violence concentrates all power in a person or in a group or organization that repressed human rights and fundamental freedoms and uses illegitimate elections, neither free no fair, with fraud and corruption, to perpetuate itself indefinitely in power.”

(23)

Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua… are criminal entities that must be separated from politics and must be treated as transnational organized crime from within the framework of the Palermo Convention and other norms, without the immunities or privileges inherent to the heads of State or government.

(24)

Castrochavista dictatorships are in crisis, but are not defeated. They are called out as regimes that violate human rights, that have no rule of law, where there is no division or independence of public powers, and that are narco States and creators of poverty. To remain in power, they apply the uniform strategy of “resisting at all costs, destabilizing democracies, politicizing their situation and negotiating.”

The first element of this strategy, of “retention of all power at all costs,” can be seen in Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba – where they imprison and torture political prisoners. The President of the Human Rights assembly in Bolivia has just reported that there are 131 deaths without investigation from killings that the government has committed, and there are more than 100 political prisoners.

(25)

The second element of their strategy is to “destabilize democracies,” for which they conspire against those who accuse them and against the governments that defend democracy. The destabilization range from false news and character assassination of leaders whom they designate as right wing, to criminal acts of terrorism, kidnappings and narco guerrillas.

The third element of their strategy is to “politicize their situation and their criminal acts.” When the dictatorships in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua improperly imprison a citizen, when they torture them, when they evn kill them – they call it defense of the revolution.

These four dictatorships are narco states and, to justify themselves, they argue that “drug trafficking is an instrument of struggle for the liberation of the peoples”

Evo Morales in 2016 at the United Nations said that “the fight against drug trafficking is an instrument of imperialism to oppress the peoples”.

Jesus Santrich fled from Colombia to Venezuela, proclaiming that he had been persecuted by the right. The bosses of the ELN narco-guerrillas of Colombia are under protection in Cuba.

The third element of Castrochavismo, which consists in politicizing their crimes, serves to ensure that when they kill any person they say that they are defending the revolution. When they torture they say they defend the popular process of liberation of peoples and so on.

The fourth element of Castrochavista strategy is to “negotiate”. They negotiate in order to gain time, demoralize the adversary, collect bills from their allies or extort money from third states to gain their support or at least neutralize them.

From these four elements, they survive.

(27)

Political events are based on respect for the “rule of law,” which is simply that “no one is above the law,” on the temporality of public service, on accountability and public responsibility, where you can take on an adversary. But organized crime has no adversaries, it has enemies and the difference between an adversary and an enemy is that the former is defeated or convinced, whereas the latter is eliminated, and this explains the number of crimes that Castrochavismo commits in the Americas.

(30)

The peoples of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia are fighting against the dictatorships that oppress them, but it is not a local or national oppressor, they take on a transnational enemy, united by the objective of retaining power indefiniately as the best mechanism for impunity.

Castrochavismo as a transnational organized crime structure is a very powerful usurper with a lot of money, a lot of criminal armed forces, control of many media and many mercenaries of various specialties at its service, which has put the peoples they oppress in a true and extreme “defenseless condition.”

As long as there are dictatorships there will be no peace or security in the Americas.

(33)

It is vital to differentiate and separate that which is “politics” meaning an activity of public service, from that which is “organized crime” and “delinquency.” Politics with its ideologies, pragmatisms, imperfections, errors, crises, even tainted by corruption is one thing, but another very different things is politics and power under the control of associated criminals who turn their politics into their main instrument for the commission of crimes, the setting up of criminal organizations, the seizure and indefinite control of power with criminal objectives and for the sake of their own impunity.

Politics is legal, meaning that it is conducted in pheres considered to be “just, allowed, according to justice and reason” because it is of order and public service….

(35)

Castro, Maduro, Ortega and Morales are not politicians, they are not corrupted government – they are organized delinquency that holds political power and plans to indefinitely keep holding it. They can no longer keep being treated as politicians, and least of all as State Dignitaries.

(42)

CastroChavist is the label for Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez’s undertaking that, using the subversive capabilities of the Cuban dictatorial regime and Venezuelan oil, has resurrected – commencing in 1999, the expansion of Castroist, antidemocratic communism with a heavy antiimperialist discourse.

(46-47)

What is happening in Venezuela today is the result of almost two decades of progressive and sustained abuses to freedom and democracy, violation of human rights, persecutions, electoral fraud, corruption, violation of the sovereignty of the country, theft of government and private resources, killing of the freedom of the press, elimination of the rule of law, disappearance of the separation and independence of the branches of government, control of the opposition, imprisonment and forced exile of political opponents, narcotics trafficking and all that may be necessary to make Venezuela a Castroist-model dictatorial “narco-state with a humanitarian crisis.”

The international democratic community has understood that for the sake of their own interests and security, it must preclude Venezuela from turning into the second consolidated dictatorship of the Americas, and prevent the dictatorships of Bolivia and Nicaragua from following that path. Liberating Venezuela is a strategic necessity.

(49)

In Bolivia, the top and perpetual leader of the coca leaf harvesters, Evo Morales, is the head of the Purinational State of Bolivia wherein “by decree of law” he has increated the lawful cultivation of coca by 83% from 12,000 hectares to 22,000 hectares and has increased the cultivation of unlawful coca from the existing 3,000 hectares in 2003 – the year they toppled President Sanchez de Lozada – to the current 50,000 hectares.

Evo Morales’ drug czar Colonel Rene Sanabria was arrested by the DEA for cocaine trafficking and has been sentenced by US judges to 15 years in jail.

(55)

In democracy, corruption is not the rule but the flaw, it is the violation of normalcy, “the misuse of government power to get illegitimate advantages, generally in a secret or private way”, it is “the consistent practice of utilizing the functions and means of the government for the benefit – whether this benefit be financial or otherwise – of those who are involved with it.” In a democracy, there are investigations, prosecution, and punishment with accountability, there is separation and independence of the branches of government, the Rule of Law exists, and there is freedom of the press. On the other hand, however, in dictatorships, corruption is the means, the cause, and the end objective of getting to, and indefinitely remaining in power.

(61)

The Venezuelan dictatorship is the Gordian knot the keeps the Venezuelan people from recovering their freedom and democracy, one that at the same time sustains dictatorships in the America, specifically in Cuba, Bolivia, and Nicaragua as a system of Transnational Organized Crime – they are a real danger not only for this region, but the whole world.

(62)

The hub of narcotics trafficking that Venezuela has been turned into, with the Colombian FARC’s cocaine and with Evo Morales’ coca growers’ unions from Bolivia, has penetrated the entire region and impacts the whole world with serious consequences in security and the wellbeing of people.

(65)

A well-orchastrated international system of public relations, lobbyists who work for the Cuba-Venezuela-Bolivia-Nicaragua group, the subjecting of PetroCaribe countries with bribes of Venezuelan oil, it’s penetration into international organizations, its control over the national news media and its creation and influence over international media, its collusion with important magnates and businessmen, and its repetitive anti-U.S. discourse along with its opening to Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, have all been factors – that have allowed the existence of the Ortega’s Crime Dictatorship in Nicaragua.

(67)

Cuba with the Castro’s, Venezuela with Chavez and Maduro, Bolivia with Evo Morales, Nicaragua with Daniel Ortega, and Ecuador with Rafael Correa, replaced freedom of the press with a system of control of the information with prior censorship, self-censorship, financial and judicial repression. They appropriated themselves – through transfers under duress, seizures, intervention, and violence – of private news media in order to place them at their service, they have supported and created state media, founded and funded regional media, they manage the official propaganda as a mechanism for extorsion, they use taxes as a means of pressure and retribution, they extort companies regarding the assignment of propaganda, they start and sustain “assassination of reputation” campaigns against journalists and owners of news media.

(74)

Crimes committed by the 21st Century Socialist Regimes range from persecution with the aim of physical torture and killing, judicial trials with false accusations heard by “despicable judges”, the application of the regime’s pseudo-laws violating human rights or of “despicable laws”, restricting freedom of speech or freedom to work, to be employed, or discharge a profession, assassinating the individuals reputation to convert the wrongly accused as an undesirable, subjecting the person into a condition of being defenseless, depriving him/her of a job and much more.

(75)

…they’ve replaced politics with criminal practices in order to totally and indefinitely control political power.

Extortion is a key feature of the Castrochavista methods that is further proof of the Transnational Organized Crime nature of these dictatorships.

Extortion is “the pressure exerted on someone – through threats – to compel them to act in a certain way and obtain a monetary or other type of benefit.” The legal definition of extortion includes “the intimidation or serious threat that restricts a person to do, tolerate the doing or not doing of something for the purpose of deriving a benefit or undue advantage for one’s self or someone else.”

The Castrochavista constitutions have established “the law’s retroactivity” and have suppressed or limited parliamentary immunities in order to keep extorting members of the opposition.

Judges, prosecutors and even attorneys are extorted. Several cases corroborate this, cases, such as Venezuela’s Judge Maria Lourdes Afiuni’s jailing, violations, and tortures; the fired prosecutors and judges who were afterwards prosecuted in the case of Magistrate Gualberto Cusi in Bolivia, as well as the jailing of defense attorneys; the persecution and exile of Magistrates from Venezuela’s Supreme Justice Tribunal “ the legitimate one in exile,” or that of Attorney General Ortega, the assassination of Prosecutor Alberto Nisman in Kirchner’s Argentina, and dozens more.

The imprisonment, torture, humiliations, assassinations, and exile started as extrortions and are dictatorial warning operations in order to ensure the submission of the system it manipulates “setting precedents” of its decision to use extortion to obtain benefits for the dictator and his Organized Crime group who is called government. Benefits range from financial gain, cover up, and impunity, to the indefinite tenure in government.

(78)

Cornered by crises, the dictatorships of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia, have gone into an attack more and the meeting of the Sao Paulo Forum in Havana was the scenario to launch their new phase of destabilization.

Dictatorships attack with forced migration, the generation of internal violence, and destabilization.

(79)

All of the region’s democratic countries are under the pressure of forced migration caused by Venezuela’s dictatorship that has converted on of its shameful problems into a problem for the whole region. Democracies must now deal with problems in: their security, unemployment, provision of health care, their handling of massive numbers of people in transit, identification issues, budgets, and human rights, all because the Castrochavista criminal regime of Nicolas Maduro has transformed its crimes and its effects into a political weapon. Very similar to the so-called “Mariel’s exodus” promoted by Dictator Fidel Castro against the United States, but many folds greater and for an indefinite period.

(81)

The Sao Paulo Forum is 1990 was the dictatorial reaction to the crash of Soviet Communism and was gathered, for the first time, with the objective of addressing the international scenario following the fall of the Berlin Wall and to confront the “neo-liberal” policies. It is the tool with which the Castroist dictatorship formulated the “multiplication of the confrontation axis” strategy, going beyond class struggles to the fight against any elements that may be useful to destabilize democratic governments.

The 21st Century in the Americas is the history of the Castro-Chavista buildup…

The worn-out cliché of “liberation of the peoples” as an “anti-imperialist” argument and slogan for massive demonstrations, has remained to become “the people’s oppression” that is corroborated by the quantity of massacres, assassinations, torture, political prisoners, exiles, and the daily life the people must endure.

(83)

It has become necessary for Americas’ leaders and politicians to clearly differentiate themselves from the criminals who hold power in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia. Not doing so implies the assumed risk of being accomplices and concealers.

(89)

The price for Pablo Iglesias and PODEMOS backing to the investiture of the PSOE would be the sustainment of the dictatorships for which Iglesias works and their funding, are now amply evident in Spain’s new foreign policy aiming to sustain the CastroChavista dictatorships of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia.

(92)

Is the use of force the only options for the dictatorships to leave?

Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia are under regimes that after applying all possible simulations and misrepresentations in order to be a revolution, a democracy, populist, leftist, and socialist governments but are nothing by Organized Crime’s organizations that hold power by force.

Alleging self-determination of the nation state while oppressing the citizens and violating their human rights is but another flaw of the CastroChavista dictatorships.

(95)

The parameters to qualify a regime as a dictatorship, an Organized Crime dictatorship, and a criminal government, are set out but existing universal and regional standards, such as: the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Charter of Bogota, the Convenant of San Jose, the European Union Treaty, the Palermo Conventions, the Interamerican Democratic Charter, and many more.

(102)

The dictatorial nature of a regime is proven by its violation of all essential components of democracy through the supplanting of the democratic order, manipulation of constituent referendums, consults and elections, down to the imposition of a fraudulent legal framework, a “legal” scheme, that nowadays is the legal system in existence in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Correa’s Ecuador.

(105)

Why Abstention?

To run as a candidate in a dictatorship is to dress up a tyrant as a democrat.

(106)

For elections to be free and fair, there must be “conditions of democracy” in existence, this is the minimum presence of the essential components of democracy that will enable all citizens to be wither voters or be elected, will guarantee an equity of options to the candidates, transparency in the process, impartiality in the electoral authorities, offer guarantees of resources with impartial judges, with freedom of association, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and guarantees against electoral fraud, timeliness and more.

(109)

In 1961, Cuba’s dictatorship birthed; Nicaragua’s National Liberation Army (ELN) afterwards converted into the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), then later converted into the 13th of November Revolutionary Movement (MR13N), and the Revolutionary Armed Forced (FAR) in Guatemala. In 1962, it birthed Venezuela’s National Liberation Armed Forces (FALN), the Colombian Self-Defense Forces turned into the Southern Block Forces afterwards turned into the Colombian Armed Revolutionary Forces (FARC). In Peru, it birthed the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Leftist Revolutionary Movement (MIR), in Bolivia the National Liberation Army (ELN), in Uruguay the Tupamaros, as an urban guerrilla, in Argentina the Montoneros, and in the 70’s the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP), in Brazil the Revolutionary Movement 8 (MR*), and many more. The Castroist movement did no spare any country from staining it with the blood of guerrillas.

(120)

The OAS has two charters; the Charter of Bogota which birthed the organization and the Interamerican Democratic Charter, with which democracy was institutionalized.

Article 1 of the IDC mandates that “America’s people haec the right to democracy and their government has the obligation to promote and defend it.”

(123)

The Palermo Convention for Human Trafficking should be applied to the Cuban physicians.

(134)

What dictator Nicolas Maduro and his regime insist in presenting as “elections” is a chain of serious crimes to misrepresent the popular sovereignty, sustain the narco-state, and guarantee himself impunity. The “organized crime group” that hold power has committed, and is willing to commit, whatever crime may be necessary to continue receiving the criminal benefits that have taken Venezuela to the current state of its ongoing crisis.

(188)

Fear is an essential component of dictatorships, this is why they kill the “Rule of Law” and supplant it with the “Rule of the State” with despicable laws to enable them to persecute, imprison, dishonor and wrest the property of, citizens.

The foreign enemy is useful in order to blame the United States for all disastrous results from the organized crime that holds political power, such as what the Castros’ have done for so many years and now Maduro, Morales, and their thugs do.

Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia claim the “right” conspires, pays politicians, and wants them toppled, attributing to themselves the position of being “leftist”, socialist, and communist when in reality they are criminal “fascists” whose sole ideology and objective is the total and indefinite control of power along with their illicit enrichment.

(193)

Odebrecht is one of the Brazilian companies implicated in the Forum of Sao Paulo’s criminal network implemented by Lula de Silva with the dictators Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez with the payments of millions of dollars in bribes.

(202)

Hugo Chavez allied himself with Fidel Castro in 1999 when Cuba agonized during it’s “special period” as a parasite state that, since the breakdown of the Soveit Union, did not have a way to survive. With Venezuela’s oil, Chavez salvaged the only dictatorship there was at that time in the Americas and kick started the recreation of Castroist expansionism under the labels of the Bolivarian Movement, ALBA, and 21st Century Socialism and that is today known as “CastroChavismo”.

 

 

 

Quotes from Gringo by Chesa Boudin

Quotes from Gringo by Chesa Boudin

(53)

My mother Kathy’s father, Leonard, was a founding partner of a law firm that defended the Allende administration after it nationalized United States-owned copper mines. The litigation was pending when Pinochet’s coup toppled the democratic government. My grandfather’s firm acquired Chile as a client largely on the strength of its long-standing relationship with the Cuban government. Over a mojito in a hotel lobby in Old Havana, long after my grandfather’s death, I learned about his work in Cuba from Luis Martinez, the former head of the Cuban national airline, Cubana de Aviacion, and a high ranking official in the Ministry of Transportation. We sat sipping the sweet minty drinks that reportedly had Hemmingway hooked from his first taste…

Luis had gray hair but was fit and energetic. He had great respect for my grandfather, he told me. Back when he was running the airline, my grandfather had saved on of their planes. It had flowin into New York to bring Cuban diplomats to a United Nations meeting, but the United States and Cuba were in the midst of diplomatic and legal feuds…

He explained that when Cuba began nationalizing large landholdings and factories, many of which had United States citizens for owners, there was an immense amount of legal work to sort out the mess. Grandpa Leonard’s firm handled much of it.

(55)

Luis gave me a parting gift that he had received from my grandfather forty years earlier: a slightly worn first edition copy of a book called The Theoretical System of Karl Marx, by Louis Boudin, my great-great uncle.

Louis and Leonard had been lawyers, fighting their battles in defense of civil liberties, labor organizations, and Third World governments in the courtroom, but my partners took to the streets when the Allende government fell. In the aftermath of the coup there were protests in solidarity with Chilean democracy in countries around the world, including the United States…

The Weather Underground also protested targeting ITT’s (International Telephone and Telegraph) Latin American division corporate office.

(57)

Allies inside el imperio have an essential role to play in any process of global change and should not be scorned.

(67)

Second, I started thinking about my first year in college when, in the wake of the Battle in Seattle, the anti-World Trade Organization protests of November 30, 1999, I got involved in the anti-globalization movement. I worked enthusiastically to recruit other students on my campus for a protest in Washington, D.C., against the IMF, the World Bank, and other international financial institutions. I wanted to take action in solidarity with the global poor and marginalized, those sectors of society that Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz would later call “discontents” in his bestselling book Globalization and Its Discontents.

(106)

I had stepped off a bus in the Caracas terminal for the first time on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in November 2004. My expectations of the city I had arrived in came from Professor Vitales, back in Chile.

(109)

At that time I knew only a couple of people in Caracas. One was Marta Harnecker… The other was Marta’s husband, Michael Lebowitz. Michael was a Marxist economist professor from Canada whose unkempt hair and puffy white beard framing a full face might have led the casual observer to confuse him with the photo of Marx on the cover of his award-winning book, Beyond Capital.

(110)

Marta asked me if I would be willing to translate into Spanish a working paper Michael has written that she wanted to be able to share with friends in the Chavez administration. It was the first of many occasions when I realized that when Marta asks for something it is very hard to say no.

(111)

Marta’s office was in the heart of the old palace. The large room had a high painted ceiling and tall wooden doors that led out onto an open-air courtyard garden with a small fountain in the middle. The suite of offices on the other side of the fountain belonged to the chief of staff, a position that changed frequently under Chavez.

(112)

She introduced me to the other people scurrying around the office as the son of political prisoners in the United States.

(113)

It was 10am before the meeting started at the round wooden table in Mara’s office. From the warm greetings that were exchanged it was obviously a meeting of friends. Still, I couldn’t help but feel nervous. In addition to Michael and Marta, the meeting included Haiman el Troudi, a presidential adviser at the time but soon to be chief of staff, and several other senior people in the government

* Haiman served for roughly a year as chief of staff before leaving the palace. Marta, Michael, and several other colleagues of their left the palace with Haiman and founded a policy think tank called Centro Internacional Miranda. As of December 2008, Marta and Michael were both in senior positions at the CIM and Haiman had recently been named minister of planning.

(116)

It was hard for me to believe that after just three full days in the country I had already participated in a meeting in the heart of the presidential palace.

In Chavez’s Venezuela it couldn’t be easy for estadosunidenses to gain political access of the sort I had stumbled into. I had found one of the few places on the planet where having parents in prison in the United States for politically motivated crimes actually opened doors rather than closed them.

(118)

If the coup that briefly toppled Chavez in 2002 had occurred in the 1960s or 1970s, while my parents were young activists, they probably would have protested the States Department or a big oil company. But to my knowledge, none of my forebears had ever had this kind of a window into radical government.

(119)

A month after my arrival in Venezuela, Caracas hosted an international conference called Artists and Intellectuals in Defense of Humanity. Nobel laureates, activists, painters, writers, dancers, and organizers from across the globe were invited to participate. Among them was my mom, Bernadine. My time in Venezuela had built my confidence as a translator and I was hired as one of the dozens of interpreters at the conference. It was good to have a break from the office routine and a paid job for a change. And I got to hand out with Mom when my working grouop wasn’t in session.

It was at one of the plenary events for the conference that I first saw Chavez speak. The Teresa Carreno Theatre in central Caracas was packed with thousands of red-shirt-wearing chavistas – read being the color of Chavez’s political party – by the time my mom and I made it through the security lines into the massive auditorium.

Adolfo Perez Esquivel… spoke without notes and with slow, carefully annunciated words. “In this hour of particular danger, we renew our conviction that another world is not only possible but also necessary. We commit to struggle for that other world with more solidarity, unity, and determination; in defense of humanity we reaffirm our certainty that the people will have the last word.”

(121)

[Chavez] thanked Perez Esquivel for his introduction and then mentioned a few prominent visitors he knew were in the crowd: Daniel Ortega, Ricardo Alarcon, Tariq Ali, Ignacio Ramonet, Danny Glover, Cynthia McKinney, representatives of the national labor union (UNT), that national indigenous federation of Venezuela, and the Bolivarian farmers.

Chavez began by talking about the significance of the conference, the need to build networks of intellectuals and artists fighting for humanity. He criticized the intellectuals who had announced “the end of history” and the triumph of neoliberalism.

(122)

His [Chavez’s] speaking style was erratic – wandering, switching topics, going off on tangents – yet captivating. He didn’t use notes or a teleprompter and relied on sheer charisma to carry the crowd with him on a journey that stretched around the planet, and through political theory (he cited Marti and Trotsky).

Being at such events always had a profound effect on me. Words on a page cannot capture the contagious energy they inspire. Those in attendance bear the hours of waiting admirably, celebrating their optimism, their newfound connections to state power.

(123)

Four months after I began working in Miraflores, I switched to a new office, that of Presidential International Relations…. I was now charged with following media reports on United States-Venezuela relations and Venezuela’s role in the international arena generally.

When Marta or Michael wanted me, I took time off from my new office to work with them. Marta Coordinated the organization of the Third Annual International Conference in Solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution.

(124)

Chavez has been calling for a new socialist model but no one in the government had explained concretely what exactly this new economic system would look like.

In May 2005, my parents, Bill and Bernadine, were invited down to Venezuela and I got the change to hit the streets.

Bill and Bernadine gave talks to audiences of as many as two hundred people in Caracas and the interior at universities and cultural centers. The groups they were spoke to were primed with screenings of the Academy Award-nominated documentary The Weather Underground. I interpreted for them throughout the trip, including the public appearances.

(125)

Their talks included anecdotes about successful community-based struggles for equal education and justice in poor Chicago neighborhoods. The lessons they had learned from 1960s era freedom schools and protest movements were employed to inform today’s struggles, a focus on the present and the future rather than the starry-eyed reminiscing about the past.

We were astonished at the enthusiasm of the crowds’ reaction, especially in the interior.

(126)

People with a highly developed political analysis saw, in the film and in our presence, hopeful examples of internal resistance to imperialism norteamericano. Others simply seemed happy to have people from El Norte in their midst affirming their attempts to build a new, different society.

(140)

I had what Venezuelan’s call a chapa, a sort of Get Out of Jail Free Card, an ID or document that opens doors and solves problems. This took the form of a signed and sealed letter from the office of Presidential International Relations explaining the political significance of the film we were making. It worked its magic and in a matter of moments we were through the last round of security.

(143)

I had met at least half a dozen Chileans, like Pablo and Liza, who had come to Venezuela to work in solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution; no doubt they had hoped that it would prove more successful than their own country’s short lived democratic revolution.

(144)

We hung out in the politically progressive expat scene in Caracas, which some Venezuelans view as an expression of international solidarity and others as political tourism. Venezuelans that dislike the Chavez government often make snide comments about gringos who were red T-shirts, or dress as hippies, suggesting that it would be better if they spent their time and money on Venezuela’s beaches than on playing games in the political system, and that they would never tolerate a government like that of Chavez in their own countries.

(149)

Two months after my stint as the fixer for the news crew in Caracas, I headed off to Medellin, Colombia, to meet my mom, Bernadine… Thought it was my first time in the city, my mom had been there on several occasions previously. All her trips to Colombia, like this one, had been on human rights missions at the invitation of a Colombian colleague, a Franciscan nun named Sister Carolina Pardo.

Sister Carolina speaks nearly perfect English, thanks, in part, to time she spent in a sort of exile at a master’s program in clinical social work at Loyola University in Chicago from 2004 – 2006 when the threats against her in Colombia were at a peak. It was during that period she and my mom developed a close friendship and working relationship.

(152)

We were there as part of a one hundred-strong delegation of international human rights activists and journalists from fifteen different countries who wanted to learn about and support the local communities.

The plan was to visit several different communities that had been displaced by government or paramilitary violence.

(161)

We began a ceremony in which displaced people from Choco and representatives of displaced communities from other parts of Colombia, who had come along with the delegation, shared their stories about disappearances and murders of loved ones: husbands, brothers and fathers. The the internationals in the group began. An Argentine mother of the Plaza de Mayo lit a candle for her daughter who had disappeared more than thirty years ago in that country’s Dirty War against the left. A Chilean ex-political prisoner under Pinochet lit a candle for his companions who never made it out of the torture camps.  A Brazilian woman representing the MST, the Landless Workers Movement, lit a candle for peasants recently killed in Brazil while fighting for a small plot of land to plant.

Though I tried to concentrate on interpreting for my mom, there were several moments in the proceedings where I could not stop myself from choking up. I couldn’t help but think about my own biological parent’s decades in prison, my father’s continuing incarceration, and the three men who were killed during the crime my parents participated in. I considered lighting a candle and sharing their plight with the group, but then decide against it. Perhaps it was too hard to break out of my role as interpreter and take on the role of the participant, or maybe I didn’t feel up to the task of trying to explain my parents’ use of violence to these people who themselves had suffered so much. Certainly, I was self-conscious of our position as the only two representatives from the United States, a county that, directly or indirectly, had fueled the violence in all of the Latin American countries represented in our solemn gathering.

(163)

Our role there made me think of a Zapatista saying I had learned while exploring Chiapas years earlier: “If you have come to help us, please go home; if you have come to join us, welcome. Pick up a shovel or a machete and get busy.”

(194)

The reemergence of the Latin American left today is unlike previous reformist movements in the region that derived political power from vertical relationships to unions, peasant associations and party hierarchies. Today’s progressive political movements in the region tend to hae more horizontal power structures and to rely on a diverse array of social movements. These kinds of groups make up the radical left in the United States today too, but with seemingly no impact on electoral results.

(199)

They had generously invited me into their hellish world, deep inside the earth. All I could offer them in exchange was a cheap present of a few sticks of dynamite. But a small part of me also felt somehow redeemed: as a young backpackers and motorcyclist, Che Guevara has been profoundly affected by seeing the horrible conditions in the mines in Bolivia. .. Here was proof of what they said, a justification of sorts for their political perspectives.

 

Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan writer my parents encouraged me to read before I was even interested in Latin America, describes Potosi as a mine that “eats men.”

(206)

“We have a saying,” Jose answered. “singre de minero, semilla de guerrillero.” The rhyme lost is lost in translation but the meaning is the same: the miner’s blood is the seed of the guerrilla.

“Did some of you go on to form underground guerrilla organizations?”

Jose laughed a little, and told me gently that I was missing the point. He explained that after 1985 tens of thousands of Bolivian miners had no choice but to migrate away from the mines in search of a new life for themselves and their families. A few went to other countries in search of work, but more went to the campo and became farmers, especially of coca in the Chapare region, or moved into cities, especially in the rapidly growing El Alto.

(215)

Venezuela’s political experiment is still a democratic and courageous effort to invent an alternative model, based on the insistence that another way, another world is possible.

Sometimes cynicism and pessimism descend and I resign myself to the idea that these Latin American political experiments are doomed to failure. But I hope I’m wrong. Certainly never, not once, have I thought they shouldn’t be tried. Humanity can benefit from political diversity the way that it does from linguistic, cultural, racial, or religious diversity. The political status quo is antiquated and in need of urgent, radical change. Democratic political experiments like those in Venezuela, regardless of their long-term viability, inspire hope and political creativity across the globe.

(216)

The more I spoke and comprehended, the more I was able to understand what was happening in the region around me, to build friendships through my wanderings.

As I came of age, changing in myself, I found a region that was also in the midst of the most profound transformation. I came to see Latin America as a prism through which I could better understand my own roots in the radical left in the United States.

(221)

Whether at home in the United States, or abroad on the road, I will have to keep living in at least two worlds.

***

There is also video available on CSPAN  where Chesa Boudin talked about his life as a young adult in Venezuela when Hugo Chavez came to power. It’s interesting to note that in the question and answer section that he declares that he is still in contact with several Colombian activists at the time of this video.

American CastroChavismo : Why Venezuela Matters

American media, public intellectuals and government officials have failed to present an accurate assessment of the threat that revolutionary leftist organizations that have declared their allegiance to foreign governments pose to the U.S. Constitution. The political unrest and media polarization which has accelerated over the past decade is not an organic response to grievances. It is the product of a twenty year-long strategy developed by anarchists, communists and secessionists in collaboration with foreign government actors. At present we are in year ten of a large-scale, clandestine effort involving tens of thousands of American to subvert and eventually annul the Constitution and replace it with one aligned with the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

To differentiate this particular historical effort from past political projects, Socialism should no longer be used to describe this movement of movements – instead we should say that American values and political systems are under siege from the political wing of criminal CastroChavista networks. 

What is American CastroChavismo? 

CastroChavismo is a repertoire of rhetorical schemes, organizational tactics, and criminal activities ranging from harassment, extortion, the trafficking of narcotics, and assassination to obtain and then maintain political power. American CastroChavismo refers to the political groups on the receiving end of the efforts of the Cuban Communist Party, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela and their allies to transfer this repertoire for the purpose of beginning a “People’s Insurgency”. American CastroChavismo groups have received political training in ALBA-TCP member states or received it from members of those countries in the United States, or were recruited into collaborating with the “red de redes” (network of networks) linked to the World Social Forum developed through the efforts of former president of Venezuela president Hugo Chavez, former president of Cuba Fidel Castro, and former commander of the FARC Alfonso Cano.  

Over the past two years I’ve investigated Venezuelan activities in the United States in connection to a grant financed by the Social Science Research Council. My goal was to discover where within Facebook’s Condor Dataset I would be the most likely to find coordinated inauthentic behavior and disinformation operations. My quest to answer this research question began with my examination of Foreign Agent Registration Act documents submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice by Venezuelan government contractors, official reports and proposals published by Cuba, Ecuador and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela as well as their Ministries of Popular Power. I read statements made by officials, the journals of the FARC-EP, Resistencia, and the ELN, Insurrección, along with numerous other open source documents. What I read soon led me to start examining a large body of publications produced by social movements linked to the World Social Forum, as well as academic papers about these groups. After I organized all the facts into chronological order and developed a relational database which contains the names, dates, locations and activities of thousands of encounters between U.S. politicians, grassroots activists and, Cuban and Venezuelan government officials or their proxies a story emerge which I share below in the form of a montage.

Antifa Born in Havana and Raised in the United States 

The lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq set the stage for the development of American CastroChavismo. After a proposal in the Sao Paulo Forum was seconded by the European Social Forum, political bodies that facilitate coordination amongst social movements and Socialist parties, a day of coordinated protests was decided. On February 15th, 2003, in some 800 cities across the world people marched in opposition to the then imminent invasion of Iraq. The event didn’t dissuade George W. Bush, but did provide an indication of the numerical size and magnitude of American’s discontent with their government, and it did result in numerous attendees providing their contact information to a variety of groups that would soon use it as a means of organizational recruitment. On April 12, 2003, three weeks after March 19th, 2003 invasion was underway, a call was made for the formation of a new Anti-Fascist Internationale in Granma, the newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party.

Following this announcement FARA documents, movement publications and journalistic accounts show that Cuba and Venezuela began an effort at building relationships with grassroots U.S. radical political activists – much as Cuba did with armed revolutionary groups in Latin America immediately following Castro’s seizure of power – as well as Democratic Party officials in the Black Congressional Caucus and the Progressive Caucus. 

In October 2003 the CastroChavista Network in Defense of Humanity was formed. In their self-published magazine is an extensive speech by Hugo Chavez which describes the necessity for informational warfare to be waged against the U.S. Reading it one also learns that the goals of this group is to promote anti-American publications through academic support networks. One of the renowned public intellectuals which signed onto this document is Howard Zinn and one of the groups that would later thank this network for their work is the FARC-EP.

On September 5th, 2005 the Common Grounds Collective was founded. The People’s Hurricane Relief Fund was one of the groups that received money from Citgo and became a means by which Venezuelan ambassadors and Communist activists could organize meetings. On a pirate radio station, anarchist activist and later Antifa organizer Scott Crow would “describe Common Ground as “a paramilitary organization.” One of the organization’s founders, Brandon Darby, would later claim that while on a trip to Venezuela government officials sought to introduce him to the FARC.  In June of 2005 700 U.S. activists – including members of the Young Communist League, Socialist Workers Party, and Project South – fly to Caracas, Venezuela to attend training at the World Youth Festival – a network which the U.S. government previously categorized as a Communist Front Organization. 

The August 2005 FARA Reporting log for the Venezuela Information Office (VIO) shows that the VIO called numerous U.S. activist groups to encourage them to participate in a Social Forum in Boston and emphasized that Venezuelan government officials would be in attendance. Those contacted – all of whom would attend the March 6th to the 9th 2006 conference – included the Democratic Socialists of America, the Communist Party of the United States and the regional director of ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. In the October 27th, 2005 edition of the newspaper for the Workers World Party – a revolutionary Marxist organization – they announced a Cuban/Venezuelan/American Labor Conference to be held in Tijuana, Mexico from December 9th to the 11th that they are helping organize. On December 20th, 2005 CITGO – under the direction of Hugo Chavez – launched an oil heating program. A large part of it would go to indigenous tribes – that some say swung the 2020 Presidential election in Arizona to Joe Biden – and community activist groups. By the time the program was suspended in 2014, it had given almost 500 million dollars worth of oil.  

During the World Social Forum held January 24th – 29th in Caracas, it’s decided that a United States Social Forum will be held in 2007. A Border Forum held October 13th – 15th, in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico helps to prepare for it. Throughout 2006 – and for many years after – Venezuelan ambassadors Bernardo Alvarez Herrera, Martin Sanchez, Omar Sierra as well as labor attache’s such as Marcos Garcia and others attended socialist conferences, political assemblies of secessionist groups, forums with Communist unions and took meetings with aldermen and representatives from the Black Congressional Congress to advertise the success of the “Venezuela model” of politics, to develop sister cities programs. One of the politicians who strikes a deal with the PSUV-led CITGO is Senator Bernie Sanders

June 27th to July 1st of 2007 the first national United States Social Forum was held in Atlanta and it brought together over 20,000 activists. This is, arguably, the most important event for the American Communist movement in over a century. While a delegation of Cubans are not given visas to to attend, numerous Castroist groups ensures their geopolitical interests are voiced and Venezuelan ambassadors socialize and sit it on the strategy meetings. Young Democratic Socialists of American member and future founder of Jacobin Bhaskar Sunkara are on a panel with a government official. Outside the U.S. – in Nairobi, Kenya – the World Social Forum there will soon lead to an impact on U.S. politics. Julian Assange will attend and find himself so impressed by the Kenyan Communist Party – which is allied to Hugo Chavez – that he stays there two years in an effort to contribute to ensure that Another World is Possible. When threatened with jail another Chavez ally, Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, will help him avoid arrest.

May 30-June 1 of 2008 at the Sonja Haynes Stone Black Culture and History Center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina over 70 people from 17 states and 20 cities got together to launch the Black Left Unity Network – an organization that is avowedly Chavista, has participated in the Social Forum, and will go on to advocate on the Black Lives Matter Platform.

In 2009 former Vice President of the Republic of New Afrika, a black secessionist movement, Chokwe Lumumba, ran to be on the City Council of Jackson, Mississippi. He forms a People’s Movement Assembly in Jackson, Mississippi prior to his run and uses the connections made from his work as President of the Coordinating Committee for the Venezuelan government sponsored People’s Hurricane Relief and Oversight to obtain fuel and lightbulbs via the Citizens Energy program. He wins, and later becomes the Mayor despite concerns that much of his  campaign was paid for by outside money

From June 22-26, 2010 in Detroit, Michigan another United States Social Forum was held. Venezuelan ambassadors are in attendance, as are two of the founders of Black Lives Matter – Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors. During the event marches are held in order to free Simón Trinidad, a high-ranking member of the FARC-EP, and at the end of the event a National Social Movement Agenda is set across 13 fronts of struggle with a twenty year-long strategy for achieving it.  

In July, 2010 the CastroChavista “Union Meeting for Our America” network hosted a number of U.S. based unions. Several chapters of the American Federation of Teachers, United Auto Workers and the SEIU as well the representatives for UNITE Here, Union del Barrio and the Union of California Faculty sign the Caracas Declaration. 

In 2011 New York, Occupy Wall Street was launched primarily from the efforts of activists linked to the Right to the City Movement – which emerged from the Social Forum network – and Communist Parties. In Venezuela, at the International Meeting for Revolutionary Transformations a new network called the Afro-descendant Regional Articulation of Latin America and the Caribbean (ARAAC) is formed. Several years later, on November 7th, 2018 in Boston, the U.S. chapter cofounder of this CastroChavista organization Yvette Lepolata thank Democratic Socialists of America Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley for work done on their behalf will later host multiple events with it’s Venezuelan founder and ambassador to the U.S. Jesus “Chucho” Garcia.

On May 19th, 2012 over 300 anti-imperialist and progressive community activists from across the US gathered at the Centro Autonomo in Chicago to launch the International League of People’s Struggle, an umbrella group of activists linked to foreign Communist parties. Jesús Rodríguez-Espinoza, a Venezuelan Ambassador, addressed this founding assembly whose chair and spokesperson is Jose Maria Sison, a Communist in the Philippines.

August 22nd, 2015 at North Carolina Central University Venezuela ambassador Jesus “Chucho” Garcia gives an interview wherein he claims that UNESCO’s Afro-Descendant Decade was developed a result of agitation by Venezuelan and Cuban Communists, and that their goal is to use this effort to promote the same nexus of movements which brought Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro into power: Afro-Indigenous Socialism. In We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Pan-African Consciousness Raising and Organizing in the United States and Venezuela the doctoral thesis of NCCU alumni Layla Brown-Vincent,  describes “Chucho” giving similar speeches going back to the mid 2000s and meeting with groups such as Black Workers for Justice, the All African People’s Revolutionary Party, Cooperation Jackson and other revolutionary Black nationalist groups.  

The 2nd annual Sao Paulo Forum held June, 17th 2017 at the St. Stephen & the Incarnation Episcopal Church in Washington D.C., the Democratic Socialists of America, the Communist Party, Black Lives Matter, SEIU, and other groups long associated with the Forum meet with the representatives of the Venezuelan, Nicaraguan and Bolivian governments. Four months later, September 16th and 17th Venezuelan Ambassador Carlos Ron, several Venezuelan media contractors, and other Social Forum Leaders along with around five hundred people attended the inaugural People’s Congress of Resistance.

In 2017 the CastroChavista World Social Forum on Migrations hosted U.S. based groups such as Alianza Americas and Casa de Maryland – the latter of which had previously received $1.5 million dollars from Hugo Chavez. Despite the availability of extensive open source information like that listed which above shows the connection between Social Forum events, Cuba and Venezuela – President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence are summarily dismissed in the mainstream press as conspiracy mongers when they declare that Nicolas Maduro and domestic Leftist groups are supporting the Migrant Caravan. 

Though CastroChavista political networks in the United States continue to impact politics into the present, and to an extent far greater than what the above montage of activities demonstrate, I’m stopping here because this last entry and everything leading up to it allows for three important conclusions to be deduced. 

The first deduction to be derived from the above account is that political ads, posts by bots on social media and fake news are not as significant assessing the impact of foreign influence in domestic U.S. politics as the creation, funding and management of fifth columns. Such an evaluation is all the more so true considering that the infiltration and organizing within social media companies of radicals aligned to the forum as well as former Venezuelan ambassadors with links to revolutionary movements like, Martin Sanchez, who has a position of power over what Facebook users are presented with in their feed, means that indicators such as “number of posts shared or viewed” aren’t necessarily valid.

The second is that the mainstream journalism’s unwillingness to rigorously investigate the activities of American social movements, niche political parties and radical unions have made Americans ignorant to the significant network effects of their convergence, alliance and collaboration with the governments of Cuba, Venezuela and others in the new Anti-Fascist, i.e. Communist, Internationale.

Lastly, recognizing that American CastroChavismo is a continental project means that it must be understood in relation to its siblings in South America, Central America and the Caribbean. Because of this it’s important to understand at the same time that political activists who would later become the leaders of loosely affiliated network organizations such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter were meeting with Venezuelan ambassadors, the FARC-EP was beginning to shape the trans-national political activist organization which would later become the Bolivarian Continental Movement. The relationship between this funded-by-kidnapping-and-narco-trafficking, armed Marxist insurgency’s efforts at exploiting social movements in their favor and Venezuela is made clear in a November 24, 2004 letter by Raúl Reyes, the FARC’s second-in-command, to another member of the FARC General Secretariat. In this document discovered following the capture of Reyes’ computer in Ecuador, it’s now known that Fort Tiuna, the main government military and intelligence center in Venezuela, is where the Bolivarian Continental Movement is headquartered. Unless citizens want to see the rhetorical schemes, organizational tactics, criminal activities, and armed insurgencies that have led so many to flee their homelands, we must be vigilant against all of the toxic and foreign effects of American CastroChavismo.

The Limits of Activity Based Intelligence Development

Only so much information can be gathered from open source materials on American CastroChavismo. Contracts and pacts made in private can only be included if those involved divulge details. While the facts listed above and those not included tell a compelling story of American subversion, the fact patterns which emerge from this process presents a worrisome constellation that speaks to the hidden core of the contemporary condition of American politics. 

Some questions able to be formulated are simple and speculative, but still sensible guides that ought to justify law enforcement inquiries. For example:  

Is it rational to assume that Nicolas Maduro –  who has the means, motive, and opportunity to subvert the U.S. constitutional order; who leads a party whose goals include the subversion of the United States; that has been indicted with other members of his administration on criminal charges; and that has at his disposal a network of actors sympathetic to his cause – is engaged in additional illegal activities through these associations? 

Some of the questions are more complex and relate to legal matters.

Given six members of the National Lawyers Guild were invited to participate in a meeting with Venezuelan Embassy Staff on the 15th May, 2006; the organization’s participation in the various Social Forums; their July 4-16, 2015 travel to Venezuela for the purposes of expressing Solidarity, and their prior designation as a Communist Party front group – is it appropriate to consider their support of those engaged in rioting following the death of George Floyd as being activities engaged in on behalf of a foreign government? Isn’t this illegal, and worth an investigation by law enforcement? 

In light of the fact that the SEIU has been involved in Cuban and Venezuelan solidarity activities and the Social Forum process since its founding; has had their leadership receive awards from Nicolas Maduro; is – according to Jaime Contreras  – an organization with a membership composition that is 60% immigrant; and that Nicolas Maduro pays those that protest in Venezuela on his behalf would it not be likely that there is some sort of ongoing financial remuneration occurring via proxies –  a typical CastroChavista tactic – to encourage SEIU members (and other groups like it) to direct wages to political efforts? Isn’t this illegal, and worth an investigation by law enforcement?

These aren’t questions that I am equipped to answer. 

And yet they and others like it need to be posed to the myriad individuals and groups not listed above and resolved publicly no matter how socially or professionally uncomfortable they are. The gravity of the consequences of uncontested American CastroChavismo is too consequential. 

It’s not hyperbolic for a risk assessment of American CastroChavismo to claim that the subversion of the United States Constitution and the forfeiture of national sovereignty they agitate for means that authoritarian Socialism is on the horizon.

The Size and Significance of American CastroChavismo

Since Cuba’s announcement of the formation of an Antifascist International and Venezuela’s cultivation of clandestine communist groups and social movements in the U.S numerous cities have adopted significant policies in contravention to the United States Constitution. Sanctuary Cities have proliferated, in San Francisco ex-Venezuelan government translator turned District Attorney Chesa Boudin has effectively legalized many crimes and Democratic Party mayors and governors that for the moment benefit from these groups political capabilities have also shirked their duties and integrity in anticipation of political gain. Many of the groups and events linked to the CastroChavista Social Forum have gotten extensive media coverage – Black Lives Matter, Antifa, the Standing Rock Protest Swarms, the Democratic Socialists of America – and yet the twenty-year long strategy we are now a decade into has remained hidden. 

At the date of publication of this article Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana’s research for the Social Science Research Council has enabled us to identify several political parties and over two hundred social movements and NGOs aligned with the CastroChavismo. Because we do not include the Islamist groups that CastroChavistas frequently collaborate with, a reflection of the Venezuelan alliance with Iran, Hezzbollah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, nor Chinese groups – this number should be understood to be on the low end. 

We’ve identified thirty-eight English language media organizations that qualify as disseminators of CastroChavista propaganda. Because we do not include all of the companies that have hired journalists and commentators whose media contributions can be categorized as CastroChavista, this number should also be understood to be on the low end. 

The rhetorical tropes and ideologically imbued narratives of these groups legitimize and  valorize anti-Constitutional subversion and the normalization of criminal and unethical activities. Normalizing harassment, extortion, sabotage, hacking, politically motivated non-enforcement of crimes and similar activities are the precursors for an armed domestic insurgency.  This is the very definition of irregular warfare. 

Boaventura de Sousa Santos, a Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison describes the variety of struggles that converge at the Social Forum events as follows in his article “A Left Of The Future: The World Social Forum And Beyond”: “The social struggles that find expression in the World Social Forum… are extremely diverse and appear spread out in a continuum between the poles of institutionalism and insurgency. Even the concept of non-violence is open to widely disparate interpretations.” 

American CastroChavismo, in other words, is neither separated by a geographical border nor an ideological one: it is an effort at normalizing guerilla politics and corruption so that power can be taken from the citizen and wielded by the dictator that deems themself enlightened. Venezuela Matters because of their efforts to develop guerilla politics within our borders, which as of yet has not the same success as it has had elsewhere.

***

Ariel Sheen is an Investigator and Project Manager for a Social Science Research Council grant examining Venezuela’s political and media operations in the United States in partnership with Harvard University and Facebook via Social Science One. He is a doctoral student in the Technology and Innovation Management program at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Medellín, a Colombian national scholarship recipient and was awarded a Don Lavoie Fellowship at George Mason University. He received his Master’s degree in Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement from New York University and is the translator of Bolivarians Speak: Documents from the PCC, PSUV, FARC-EP & Allies Irregular War Against the United States and Guerrilla Girls Like FARC Poetry: Selected Poems of Jesús Santrich. He has also worked as a communications and digital media strategist, data scientist, and business intelligence consultant.

Bolivarians Speak: Documents from the PCC, PSUV, FARC-EP & Allies Irregular War Against the United States

Bolivarians Speak: Documents from the PCC, PSUV, FARC-EP & Allies Irregular War Against the United States

Now available on Amazon.

The leaders of United Socialist Party of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez and Nicolas Maduro, and their partners in the Cuban Communist Party, the FARC-EP, the ELN and the Sao Paulo Forum have a geopolitical vision for a multi-polar New World Order. This vision is one that transforms all of the current governments and constitutional traditions of Latin America and the Caribbean, by hook and by crook, into Castroist-type Authoritarian dictatorships to be united into a single governing body. Those that struggle to make this Pan-Latin American League of Nations come into being call themselves Bolivarians.

The following selection of translations illustrates how these Communist Parties and transnational criminal networks sought to make this happen though the subversion of politics, democratic norms and institutions in the United States of America via the promotion of illegal immigration, informational warfare, and ideologically-driven economic conflict.

Updating HUAC legal framework to a Bolivarian Context

In Notes from Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications, the Congressional Committee provides two descriptions in the form of checklists which provide the legal basis for a Front Organization and a Subversive Organization.

They’re able to be viewed in plain text by clicking the above, however, I’ve also adapted them into an Excel file so that it’s easier to chart/view such organizations.

Front Organizations

Subversive Organization Guide

Given that one aspect of my SSRC project is “updating” this into a Bolivarian context, below I’ve attached Excel files which change the subject from Soviet Russia to Bolivarian Venezuela.

Bolivarian Front Organizations

Bolivarian Subversive Organization Guide