Venezuelan Government: Separatist Opposition Uses Paramilitaries for Destabilization

[Judi Lynn]

Venezuelan Government: Separatist Opposition Uses Paramilitaries for Destabilization
Written by James Suggett
Friday, 19 June 2009
Source: Venezuela Analysis

Venezuelan Minister for Justice and Internal Affairs, Tarek El-Aissami, accused the governors of opposition-controlled states along the Colombian border of permitting bands of Colombian paramilitary troops to destabilize the region and carry out a wave of "social cleansing" murders in recent months.

Speaking from the southwestern border state of Táchira last weekend, El-Aissami said the paramilitaries include members of state police forces and have contributed to a more than 43% increase in Táchira's crime rate. Governor Cesar Perez, his chief of staff, and the regional director of Perez's political party COPEI, plan to use the paramilitaries to launch a violent separatist movement, said El-Aissami.

"We are not going to permit the fascist right wing, headed by a fascist governor, to pretend to separate Táchira from the national territory," El Aissami declared. "We alert the country to this secessionist plan of the state governor and his veiled intention to create paramilitary groups."

In the past two months, pamphlets were distributed in dozens of communities across western Venezuela threatening to assassinate sex workers, transvestites, homeless people, drug consumers and traffickers, gang members and alleged thieves. Local newspapers in the states of Táchira, Mérida, and Zulia reprinted the pamphlets, which advised parents to keep their children in their homes after dark to avoid being killed during "the hour of social cleansing."

Many of the pamphlets were signed by the paramilitary group known as the Black Eagles (Aguilas Negras). The Black Eagles are presumed to be a splinter group of the now dissolved United Self-Defenses of Colombia (AUC), a conglomeration of paramilitary groups formed in the 1990s to fight Colombian guerrilla rebels on behalf of large estate owners, cattle ranchers, and right-wing politicians using cash earned mostly from drug trafficking.

In three municipalities in Zulia state, local residents attribute a dozen murders over the past two months to paramilitary groups, according to the regional Panorama newspaper.

"They arrived armed to the teeth commando-style and they put us up against the wall to search us. They said that if they saw us talking on the corner again, they were going to kill us," a teenager in Zulia state recounted of his experience with the paramilitaries last month.

In late April, pamphlets also circulated in three municipalities in Mérida, and shortly afterward a transvestite sex worker was brutally murdered. Friends of the victim reported that men approached them on the street and attributed the crime to paramilitaries and threatened to kill more transvestites working on the streets at night.

Venezuela's national Criminal, Scientific, and Penal Investigations Unit (CICPC) and national intelligence officials have opened investigations into the pamphlets and the murders.

More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1916/68/

[Peace Patriot]

1. "...and have contributed to a more than 43% increase in Táchira's crime rate."

"Speaking from the southwestern border state of Táchira last weekend, El-Aissami said the paramilitaries include members of state police forces and have contributed to a more than 43% increase in Táchira's crime rate. Governor Cesar Perez, his chief of staff, and the regional director of Perez's political party COPEI, plan to use the paramilitaries to launch a violent separatist movement, said El-Aissami."

You gotta wonder about the frequent RW/DU "talking point" that Venezuela has a high crime rate and that it's all Chavez's fault. In truth, crime is more a local matter--in the jurisdiction of local governors, mayors and police. (If the Chavez government "cracked down" on street crime, then they would criticize that, of course ('Chavez the dictator'!).) It is certainly fascinating to find out that the RW in Venezuela is fostering crime specifically as a destabilization tactic, and part of the secessionist war plan. Are our RW/DU posters coordinated with the RW paramilitaries in Venezuela, as to this 'talking point'--one of the few criticisms of the Chavez government that has a bit of credibility (in that, yes, there is a high crime rate)? Is it part of Rumsfeld's plan--laid out in his 12/1/07 op-ed in Washington Post--wherein, among other things, he urges using "the internets" for psyops ("The Smart Way to Defeat Tyrants Like Chavez")--for the RW paramilitaries create the crime, then use it as a "talking point" against Chavez and promulgate it here using the corpo/fascist 'news' monopolies and internet operatives?

El-Aissami says that it is part of the secessionist plot. But is it also part of a psyops plot here, to help keep our people stupid and quiescent, for when they make their move on Venezuela's oil?

Note: That Bush Cartel plans for Oil War II: South America are alive and well is reinforced by recent events in Honduras--another country where the RW elite is filthy on drug trafficking and other crime. Honduras doesn't have oil but does have strategic location for US corpo/fascist aggression against other countries--as we have seen in the past (RW death squads, organized and funded by the US, launched into Nicaragua and El Salvador)--particularly, in the current global economic context, Venezuela, whose major oil reserves are located on its northern Caribbean coast. Control of Honduras would give the operatives of a US or private corporate oil war a second launching pad for such aggression, the first being Colombia (on Venezuela's border). The Bushwhacks also reconstituted the US 4th Fleet in the Caribbean, which even Lula da Silva in Brazil is worried about. (He said it threatens Brazil's oil reservers.) Three bases for attack: Colombia, Honduras and the 4th Fleet. And add to those the internal base of attack--the fascist secessionists and their RW paramilitary death squads within Venezuela's northern oil provinces (allied with RW death squads, drug lords and the military in Colombia). Key to Oil War II, as an official US war, would be demonizing Chavez, which they've done rather successfully--getting the people of the US to forget all about Iraq. I tend to think that it will be an official US war because of this. They've gone to an awful lot of trouble--brainwashing, psyops, the 'Big Lie'--to paint Chavez as a "bad guy." But a private corporate resource war is also a distinct possibility, considering the vast sums of money that were stolen from us in Iraq and are now in private banks we know not where.