Blood Profits

by Vanessa Neumann

  Perhaps. But I know many Colombians who would beg to differ. Drug money—from the insurgents, paramilitaries, and cartels—has infiltrated Colombian politics. Former Colombian president Ernesto Samper had his US visa canceled after it was alleged his 1994 presidential campaign had received US$6 million from the Cali cartel. In 2014, a top adviser to President Santos resigned amid allegations he accepted US$12 million from top drug lords, though no criminal charges have been filed.

  In terms of human rights violations in its fight against the FARC, the Colombian government has been criticized for its use of violent proxies. It used the right-wing paramilitaries of the AUC to commit atrocities against both the left-wing guerrillas and their civilian supporters that the government did not want to commit itself. This became known as the “Parapolitical Scandal” and revealed that the paramilitaries had political ties reaching deep into the Uribe administration. This is why, some skeptics allege, the paramilitaries were the first to get a reintegration deal.

  On November 9, 2006, the Colombian Supreme Court ordered the arrest of three congressmen for their alleged role in establishing paramilitary groups in the Department of Sucre on the Caribbean coast. Foreign Minister Maria Consuelo Araujo resigned at the time of the investigation into her brother’s and father’s connections to the paramilitaries and their involvement in the kidnapping of Álvaro Araujo’s opponent in a Senate election. In December 2007, Congressman Erik Morris was sentenced to six years in prison for his ties to the paramilitaries, making him the first member of Congress sentenced in the scandal.

  Along with corruption charges, there have been allegations that the Colombian military passed on intelligence to the AUC paramilitaries to support their battles against the FARC, committing at-arm’s-length massacres the government could not sanction directly. In February 2008, the former head of Colombia’s Department of Administrative Security (DAS), Jorge Noguera, was formally charged with collaborating with paramilitaries, including giving paramilitaries the names of union activists, some of whom they then murdered.16

  In April 2008, Mario Uribe, a former senator and a second cousin and close ally of former president Alvaro Uribe, was arrested for colluding with the paramilitaries. On February 21, 2011, Mario Uribe was convicted of aggravated conspiracy to commit a crime and sentenced to seven and a half years in prison. The US State Department reported that of Colombia’s 2006–2010 Congress, 128 former representatives (out of the total of 268) were accused of having paramilitary ties. Of those representatives newly elected to the 2010–2014 Congress, 13 who were reelected were under investigation by the Supreme Court.

  Though many facts of the scandal remain sketchy, Colombia’s judicial institutions appear to be working better than those in most of the rest of Latin America (and nearly any country with continued armed conflict): the Parapolitical Scandal has resulted in numerous prosecutions, and Colombia claims that its reintegration process will prosecute more fighters than in all previous such efforts put together, including the Nuremberg trials.

  Nevertheless, in his London office in 2010, Franco was realistic about the challenges of what he termed “a process of reintegration in the midst of confrontation.” He quoted former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, a man who arguably knew a thing or two about war and peace and terrorism.

  “He said that you have to negotiate as if there were no war and make war as if there were no peace negotiations. It’s really two faces of the same coin. A lot of pacifists think they’re mutually exclusive, or they make the assessment that this government has chosen war. This government has not chosen war; this government has confronted the circumstances with which it was faced. This is not a decision made by the Colombian government; this is a decision made by the guerrillas.”

  GRIEVANCE TO GREED

  The FARC, ELN, and other left-wing guerrilla terrorists always maintained their revolutionary credentials, insisting that overthrowing the government to bring greater social justice was their goal. Claiming to represent the lower, peasant, and agrarian class of Colombia, the FARC still oppose many of the country’s globalization and privatization efforts, which it sees as growing imperialism in a country under the influence of the US and multinational corporations. In 1982, the FARC adopted the suffix “-EP,” meaning Ejército del Pueblo (the People’s Army). The FARC-EP is designated a terrorist group by the governments of Colombia, the United States, Canada, Chile, New Zealand, and the European Union.

  Aside from giving them the means to manipulate their supporters, the narrative of their revolutionary cause has also given the FARC and ELN the means to manipulate the peace negotiations. As a result, the FARC will get a much more lenient deal than the paramilitaries did under the 2005 Justice and Peace Law. Though the revolutionary grievance of social inequality and agrarian reform has been the “just cause” of Colombia’s left-wing guerrillas, they evolved into an international criminal organization (so did the right-wing paramilitaries, by the way): while the illicit trade in narcotics, oil, and minerals bought weapons for the revolution, the illicit trade became good business. In the end, the weapons were there to guard the money—and the narrative of the revolution became a good fund-raising and community relations tool—including in the peace negotiations.

  None of this would be possible if it were not for the appetite of consumers—in this case, the appetite for narcotics, gold, smuggled oil, and raw materials for technology (the “conflict minerals” that go into cell phones). Domestically, it would not be possible without the local support of poor constituencies who are persuaded by a Robin Hood or revolutionary narrative that these armed groups are fighting for the benefit of the poor—when they are both perpetuating and exploiting people’s poverty and desperation.

  It is important that as informed citizens and consumers, we are aware of these dynamics and refuse to be duped by them. We must also hold governments accountable for corruption that gives safe haven to these groups and demand that they meet their contract with their people to provide security, an education, and job opportunities, so that their constituents are not marginalized and can lead dignified, peaceful, and law-abiding lives. As consumers, we need to stop making choices that devastate the lives of others, just so we can have a little fun.

  4

  Filling in the Puzzle

  In Colombia, I had seen the devastation wrought by protracted violence and was starting to understand the roles in that violence played by illicit goods smuggling, cross-border support for that smuggling (Venezuelan Chavistas supporting the FARC), the use of proxy groups (the Colombian government using the paramilitaries to viciously kill FARC members and their supporters), government corruption, and the use of narrative to manipulate constituent support. From 2010 into 2011, I started to expand my analysis of the dynamics moving the key players in Latin America. I talked to anyone I could find: former presidents and presidential candidates, bankers, academics, expats, soldiers, entrepreneurs, journalists. I wrote for the US conservative magazine The Weekly Standard and for Diplomat, a London-based magazine where I was still editor-at-large, on Colombia’s peace process and elections, as well as the elections in Brazil and Argentina. What I started to understand was how foreigners with their own agendas (including terrorists) infiltrate the politics of resource-rich countries such as Venezuela, by using corruption, their diaspora network, and dark money.

  One bit of research that opened my eyes was for my article on the geopolitical games surrounding Bolivia’s lithium supply. Lithium is a key material in making rechargeable batteries for laptops and cell phones and enabling the energy storage capacity of solar panels. The negotiations to secure the supply of the “oil of the twenty-first century” saw a Chavista-sympathizing, pro-coca, “anti-imperialist” president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, being courted by American investment funds, French billionaires, and Chinese officials. Clearly, where there is an energy supply, ideology becomes optional.

  In Venezuela, ideology is bent around the pillars of power. The anti-American, “an
ti-imperialist” regime under Hugo Chávez put several Venezuelans of Middle Eastern descent into senior positions, affecting national interests and security and handing Iran and its terrorist proxy in Lebanon, Lebanese Hezbollah, a potential plug-in for dark money and influence. A few of the ideological sympathizers from the Lebanese or Syrian diaspora whom Chávez appointed include Fadi Kabboul, appointed the executive director of planning (corporate strategy) for Venezuela’s government-owned oil company, PDVSA; Aref Richany Jiménez, elevated to the presidency of Venezuelan Military Industries Company (known as CAVIM); and Radwan Sabbagh, placed in charge of the state-owned mining concern, Ferrominera. Venezuela not only has oil, gold, iron, and aluminum, it also has uranium—which is obviously of interest to those involved in Iran’s nuclear program. The United States was not amused.

  TRADE AND TERRORISM

  On June 18, 2008, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) “designated” two Venezuela-based supporters of Hezbollah, Ghazi Nasr Al-Din and Fawzi Kan’an, along with two travel agencies owned and controlled by Kan’an. An OFAC designation is basically a sanction: assets are frozen and no bank can transact business with the designated entity. No entity whose bank has an office in the US or operates in a country whose currency is dollarized can do business with a designated entity.

  The OFAC statement accused Ghazi Nasr Al-Din of using his position as a Venezuelan diplomat (as chargé d’affaires at the Venezuelan Embassy in Damascus, Syria, and subsequently the director of political affairs at the Venezuelan Embassy in Lebanon) and as the president of a Caracas-based Shia Islamic Center to provide financial support to Lebanese Hezbollah. Nasr Al-Din met with senior Hezbollah officials in Lebanon to discuss operational issues, facilitated the travel of Hezbollah members to and from Venezuela, and provided donors with specific information on Hezbollah bank accounts. In late January 2006, Nasr Al-Din facilitated the travel of two Hezbollah representatives from the Lebanese Parliament to Caracas to solicit donations for Hezbollah and to announce the opening of a Hezbollah-sponsored community center and office in Venezuela. The previous year, Nasr Al-Din arranged the travel of Hezbollah members to attend a training course in Iran.

  Fawzi Kan’an owned two Venezuela-based travel agencies that were sanctioned by OFAC: Biblos Travel Agency (Biblos is a resort city north of Beirut), to which he couriered funds, and Hilal Travel Agency, which Kan’an formed in April 2001, for facilitating travel for Hezbollah members, even traveling with them to Iran for training. Travel agencies, I have since learned, are a classic ploy in transnational criminal and terrorist groups: not only do travel agencies provide the paperwork and logistics for the movement of people and cargo (often illicit, like weapons and drugs), but the invoicing mechanisms are excellent for laundering money and evading currency exchange or banking controls.

  Nasr Al-Din set up Hezbollah cells in Venezuela and was directly supervised by Iran’s religious leadership. In the central Venezuelan city of Barquisimeto, he ran the Bolivarian Circles: a militant armed group that is sympathetic to the causes of the Chavista Bolivarian Revolution and the Marxist narcoterrorist insurgency, the FARC. Nasr Al-Din was directly supervised by Mohsen Rabbani,1 an imam alleged to be personally responsible for the two terrorist bombings in Buenos Aires, in 1992 and 1994. Nasr Al-Din was also responsible for the recruitment and training of Latin American boys in Venezuela and in Qom, Iran.

  Qom is legendary to those who work Middle Eastern security: it is the most holy city of the Shia sect of Islam; it is also the operational base of the Quds Force, the group responsible for the “black ops” of spreading Iranian power around the globe through proxies and allies. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) Quds Force is “like taking the CIA, Special Forces, and the State Department and rolling them into one.”2 One of my Venezuelan sources detailed specific entry points and locations that Quds Force operatives of the IRGC were using to come into Venezuela.

  Despite having an Interpol red notice on him that was supposed to stop his travel, Imam Mohsen Rabbani traveled from Qom to Brazil in September 2010 and to Venezuela in March 2011. The Brazilians have said that when he entered Brazil, he went to Venezuela first. Only government complicity could have enabled such free movement for a suspected terrorist agitator. In other words, Venezuelan government officials have been turning poor young Venezuelan boys into jihadis for the benefit of Iran, while in exchange the Chavistas use Iranian and Hezbollah skills in asymmetric warfare3 to keep themselves in power.

  This is rather stunning in a country as heavily Catholic as Venezuela. However, in western Venezuela, along the border with Colombia, there is a concentration, albeit a small minority, of Middle Eastern descendants, who mix with FARC sympathizers and drug traffickers. But turning young poor boys into trained terrorist operatives for a militant Islamist group takes an effective strategy of active radicalization. Their poverty and societal marginalization have to be amplified into anger and converted to a revolutionary anti-American, anticapitalist ideology. They have to be taught radical Islam and the guerrilla insurgency tactics of asymmetric warfare, overlaid with jihadism.

  So far, there has not been much jihadism coming out of Venezuela, but its Chavista rulers were obviously very keen to leverage jihadist tactics in their own quest to maintain power. Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez himself ensured that all the military were trained in and carried a pocket-sized copy of Peripheral War and Revolutionary Islam: Origins, Rules and Ethics of Asymmetric Warfare, by Jorge Verstrynge. An unclassified Pentagon report to the US Congress4 in 2009 expressed concern about the large presence of the Quds Force in Venezuela and what it might mean for regional security. US defense secretary Robert Gates accused Iran of engaging in “subversive activity” in Latin America. No kidding.

  Iran’s elite IRGC is the branch of the Iranian military charged with protecting and advancing the Islamic Revolution. In Iran, trade and terrorism mix in particularly complex ways. According to a former US national intelligence officer for Asia, about 25 percent of Iran’s corporate enterprises are controlled by the IRGC. The super-elite Quds Force (those of the “black ops”) has set up subsidiary businesses in Venezuela across the manufacturing, energy, military, and financial sectors, with companies in mining, banking, tractors and bicycles, munitions, and even nuclear technology.

  The Quds Force are all over Venezuela. The guards around an alleged “tractor factory” in Bolívar State in central Venezuela are Quds and speak Farsi (the language of Iran), not Spanish. The factory has not been known to ever produce a single tractor, but it is suspected of being an Iranian weapons factory. A November 2008 seizure at sea lends credence to this suspicion: Turkish customs officials in the port of Mersin stopped and inspected an Iranian shipment to Venezuela and found bomb-making materials mislabeled as tractor parts.

  Many IRGC companies have set up subsidiaries in Venezuela (Iran’s fellow OPEC member) in collaboration with or using the services of Venezuela’s national oil company, PDVSA, and its affiliates. By using PDVSA, one of the world’s largest state-owned oil companies, the IRGC gains access not just to Venezuela’s banking system but, through it, to international financial markets, including its US subsidiary, Citgo. Citgo Petroleum Corporation refines PDVSA’s oil and commercializes gasoline, lubricants, and petrochemicals in the United States. In December 2016, 49 percent of Citgo was mortgaged to Russia’s Rosneft; if PDVSA defaults, the Russians will take over key pipelines and refineries in the US—and do so while sidestepping the usual US regulations for foreign investment in strategically important sectors, under the aegis of CFIUS—the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. That Russia backs Iranian interests is evident in Syria, where they back Iran’s man, fellow Shia Bashar al-Assad, while he slaughters his citizens. If the Russians end up owning Citgo, they will be using US-based assets (gasoline, refineries, and pipelines) to support themselves and Iran and al-Assad in Syria.

  As would be expected of two major oil producers, Iran’s
and Venezuela’s oil companies also cross-invested in each other: Iran invested in the Orinoco Belt, while PDVSA announced plans to invest $780 million in the South Pars gas field in southern Iran, a project referred to in Venezuelan documentation as “PetroPars.” Furthermore, Toseh Saderat Iran Bank set up a subsidiary in Venezuela: the International Development Bank (Banco Internacional de Desarrollo—BID). Every single one of the BID’s directors is an Iranian with Iranian government credentials. That would indicate that the BID is likely a pass-through for Iran to launder money and avoid sanctions.5

  The business relationship between Iran and Venezuela is also ideological. The late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad signed accords, gave each other gifts, and called each other brothers in the struggle against the “Evil Empire” (the US). Ahmadinejad was one of the recipients of a copy of the sword of Latin American liberator Simón Bolívar, after whom the Chavista Bolivarian Revolution is named and after whom Chávez renamed the Republic of Venezuela the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Replicas of the Sword of Bolívar have also been given to Vladimir Putin and Moammar Qaddafi.

  The alleged original Sword of Bolívar has been claimed by the Colombian Marxist guerrilla terrorist groups FARC and M-19, as well as by the late drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. In Latin America, it is the ultimate symbol of resistance: first to Spain, and then to the US and transnational corporations. The Sword of Bolívar’s alleged peregrinations through the hands of numerous soi-disant revolutionaries is proof positive that semiotics are still very important in Latin American politics.

  The fears of both Chavismo and Iranian nefarious intent are lent great credence by “Aeroterror” (“Terror Air”), the commonly used slang term for the weekly flights of Iran Air and Venezuelan national carrier Conviasa that hopscotch among Caracas, Tehran, and Damascus. The flights are always full, yet the passengers do not go through immigration and the cargo does not go through customs. They simply pass through their special gate area in Venezuela’s Simón Bolívar International Airport. Venezuelans and Venezuela watchers all think the flights transport terrorist operatives (some of those boys heading to Qom, Iran), as well as drugs, cash, and weapons, back and forth among the three cities—hence the epithet “Aeroterror.”