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Edited on Sun Mar-11-07 01:13 PM by rainy
was supporting guerrillas and is corrupt and a liar and etc..... I looked him up because I found out that someone I know knows his daughter who is living near them here in the states. I'm posting this because I have defended Chavez to many of my friends and family. Now, if I am in close to the daughter of someone who has first hand info that Chavez is not all the left thinks he is I want to be sure my facts are correct. What do you think of the following from www.militaresdemocraticos.com/articulos/en/20030201-01.html
Meanwhile, along the western border with Colombia, COL Julio Rodríguez Salas (class of 1974 and doctorate of law from France’s Sorbonne) tells me that Chávez provided safe haven for Colombia’s FARC guerrillas, an army of about 18,000 heavily armed rebel soldiers. “More than once I was ordered by the central government not to engage my brigade of mechanized troops against FARC guerrillas.”
Rodríguez’s mission was to defend a section of the western border with Colombia against guerrillas and narco-traffickers. He further notes that Chávez not only provided the guerrillas safe haven while he was stationed on the border, he also gave them weapons and financial aid through secret governmental accounts.
The chief liaison between Chávez and the FARC guerrillas was former interior minister Rodríguez Chacín, the nation’s top law-enforcement officer.
Dismayed that a sitting Latin American president could be involved with the FARC, I ask COL Rodríguez about Chávez’s motivation.
He says that “Chávez wants to create an independent Bolivarian state along Venezuela’s western border with Colombia.”
I immediately recall that one of the FARC’s objectives in Colombia was to establish a separate independent country.
Former Colombian president Andrés Pastrana had granted the narco guerrillas a safe haven the size of Rhode Island while negotiating a peace agreement, a gesture that proved to be absurd. Narco-trafficking is a multi-billion dollar business, not a leftist-driven revolution as some journalists labeled it. Since the recent inauguration of president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, Colombia’s military has taken back the area, pushing the FARC eastward toward and into the impenetrable jungles of Venezuela and Brazil.
I ask COL Rodríguez if the U.S. government is aware of Chávez’s relationship with the FARC. He says that BG Nestor González-González (a former army field commander on the border with Colombia) publicly called Chávez a traitor by permitting the FARC to operate in Venezuela. Gonzáles was transferred from his command post because his troops engaged in combat with Colombian rebels on Venezuelan turf. Proof of Chávez’s ties with the FARC was hand-delivered by BG Marcos Ferreira (chief of national identification) to the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, but to Rodriguez’s knowledge, nothing has come of it.
Understandably, Washington is too preoccupied with the Middle East and its war on terrorism to focus on the Latin American continent that many pundits describe as tilting more and more to the left with the election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) in Brazil and former army colonel Lucio Gutiérrez in Ecuador, who in January 2000, like Chávez, led a coup to oust then-president Jamil Mahuad.
On 11 Apr 2002, upward of a half-million people marched on the presidential palace of Miraflores and demanded that Chávez resign. When Chávez’s Bolivarian Circle snipers fired on the crowd from rooftops (some were caught on TV), killing 19 demonstrators and wounding an estimated hundreds more, the military withdrew its support of the president, and Chávez succumbed to the opposition leaders, once again demonstrating that the fate of the government depends on what the Army does. A Stratfor intelligence report noted that Chávez “surrendered because he feared for his life. He later justified his actions by saying he had no choice; he didn’t have the firepower on hand to beat back his foes.”
Chávez was whisked off to the Caribbean island naval base of La Orchila, where COL Rodríguez, acting as the opposition’s negotiator, said that he witnessed the president write his resignation in his own handwriting, an act that Chávez since has denied. He further states that the president cried in the presence of Cardinal Ignacio Valazco, asking to be taken to Cuba. A small jet was standing by, but when the pilots saw two helicopters approaching the tarmac (which turned out to be medical choppers), they thought they were pro-Chávez forces and fled before the then ex-president could be flown to Cuba.
Two days after Chávez was removed from office by what the press described as a “48- hour coup” — in which the U.S. said it played no role — Pedro Carmona Estanga, the 60-year-old head of Venezuela’s federation of chambers of commerce and industry Fedecamaras, who had been installed as interim president— made a series of dire political errors that led to the entrance of the 3rd Army Division and the Paratrooper Regiment, commanded by generals loyal to the president. Chávez was reinstated as president and within days made sweeping changes at all levels of military command, replacing more than 200 top-level officers with his handpicked cohorts, many in-experienced junior officers — further adding to the destruction of the institutional armed forces. Since then, COL Rodríguez has moved his family to the safety of the U.S., and Chávez’s people have searched his home on seven separate occasions looking for the handwritten resignation that is safely secured elsewhere.
COL Rodríguez, who has known the president since they were cadets at the military academy, is quick to point out that “from the beginning, Chávez has been manipulative, a liar, unscrupulous, and undemocratic.” He warns that the last graduating class of the military academy had several Chávez plants, as are some of the professors. Rodríguez further asserts that Chávez is enriching himself by, among other things, selling oil below market to Cuba, which Castro then sells in the open market and splits the spread with the Venezuelan president. “All this will come out when Chávez falls,” Rodríguez says.
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