Blood Profits

by Vanessa Neumann

  Connect this government-protected covert route with the visa and trade pacts with other members of ALBA6 (the Spanish acronym for the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America), and it means terrorists can be transiting regionally with almost no way to track them—a concern Gen. Douglas Fraser, former head of the US Southern Command (which has responsibility for military action south of Mexico), expressed publicly on April 5, 2011.7

  Stories spread of government involvement in drug trafficking and the provision of Venezuelan identity cards to known Middle Eastern terrorists. The growing routes linking South American cocaine to Middle Eastern terrorists run primarily from Colombia through Venezuela. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) 2011 World Drug Report named the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela as the most prominent transshipment point for cocaine bound for Europe, with the cocaine coming mainly from Colombia,8 primarily from the FARC and ELN terrorist groups.

  I spoke to many people who would have a unique insight, including former military officers, to understand how this could have happened. The left-wing alliance of Colombian drug traffickers and Middle Eastern terrorists of various types had been around for decades, but the election of Hugo Chávez put key personnel in the cabinet and elevated them in the military.

  Venezuela’s vice president and former minister of the interior and justice is Tareck Zaidan El Aissami Maddah, a Venezuelan of Syrian descent. He was sanctioned as a drug kingpin in February 2017 by the US Treasury Department. His father, Carlos El Aissami, was the head of the Ba’ath Party in Venezuela and praised Osama bin Laden as “the great Mujahideen leader” after 9/11 and called himself (in a press conference) “a Taliban.” His great-uncle Shibli El Aissami was assistant to the secretary-general of the Ba’ath Party in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. The original Ba’athists were the Syrians; when two warring factions split, one of the factions crossed the border into Iraq. Tareck El Aissami grew up in the border region between Venezuela and Colombia, where he mingled not only with a greater Middle Eastern diaspora, but with Colombia’s FARC Marxist guerrillas.

  As minister of the interior and justice, El Aissami created the National Bolivarian Police (PNB is the Spanish acronym) in 2009 and oversaw large seizures of narcotics and the capture of various drug capos, including Diego Pérez Henao (aka “Rastrojo”), Ramón Antonio del Rosario Fuentes (alias “Toño Leña”), and Maximiliano Bonilla Orozco (aka “El Valenciano,” “Daniel Barrera,” and “El Loco Barrera”). Many international security analysts (including myself) suspected that the seizures were to disrupt a cartel that rivaled the Cartel of the Suns, so named for the sun insignia on the military uniforms of the cocaine trafficking generals. The Cartel of the Suns was led by Venezuela’s director of military intelligence, Gen. Hugo Carvajal. The cartel is not linked to the military; it is the military.

  The administration of President Hugo Chávez found such common cause with Middle Eastern terrorist groups inimical to “the Empire” (aka the United States) and its “Zionist” friends, that thousands of foreign terrorists (Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Spain’s ETA) were given national identity cards, allowing them full access to the benefits of Venezuelan citizenship—and making them effectively invisible to US intelligence services.

  In 2003, Gen. Marcos Ferreira, who had been in charge of Venezuela’s Department of Immigration and Foreigners (until he decided to support the 2002 coup against Chávez), said that he had been personally asked by Ramón Rodríguez Chacín (who served as both deputy head of DISIP—Venezuela’s intelligence service, now renamed SEBIN—and interior minister under Chávez) to allow the illegal entry of Colombians into Venezuela thirty-five times and that the national intelligence service itself regularly fast-tracked terrorists, including Hezbollah and Al Qaeda. The newly minted Venezuelan citizens during Ferreira’s tenure included 2,520 Colombians and 279 Middle Easterners simply identified as “Syrians” on their applications. And that was during only the first three years of a regime that radicalized dramatically after that point.

  The man who replaced Gen. Marcos Ferreira as head of Venezuela’s Department of Immigration and Foreigners was Hugo Cabezas, who has well-chronicled ties with guerrilla movements at the University of the Andes. Evidence has surfaced that during this time both men illegally issued Venezuelan passports and identity documents to members of Hezbollah and Hamas. Cabezas is also a founding member of Utopia, an armed group that has connections with the Bolivarian Liberation Forces. Reports that Venezuela has provided Hezbollah operatives with Venezuelan national identity cards are so rife that they were raised during the July 27, 2010, Senate hearing for the recently nominated US ambassador to Venezuela, Larry Palmer. When Palmer answered that he believed the reports, Chávez refused to accept him as ambassador. In February 2017, CNN did an investigation, called Passports to Terror, on the sale of Venezuelan passports by the Venezuelan Embassy in Baghdad to known terrorists.

  Some of the best insights on the interconnections among drug traffickers, terrorists, marginalized diasporas, and government officials have come from Walid Makled, who was arrested on August 19, 2010, in Cúcuta, a town on the Venezuelan-Colombian border. A Venezuelan of Syrian descent known variously as “El Turco” (“The Turk”) or “El Arabe” (“The Arab”), Makled is allegedly responsible for smuggling ten tons of cocaine a month into the US and Europe—a full 10 percent of the world’s supply and 60 percent of Europe’s—which would make him Venezuela’s latter-day Pablo Escobar. His massive infrastructure and distribution network make this entirely plausible—and make it entirely implausible that the Venezuelan government did not know about it.

  Makled owned Venezuela’s biggest airline, Aeropostal, and huge warehouses in Venezuela’s biggest port, Puerto Cabello, and bought enormous quantities of urea (used in cocaine processing) from a government-owned chemical company. He got control of Venezuela’s biggest port through one of Chávez’s inner-circle military cohorts, Luis Felipe Acosta Carles, whom Makled met in the city of Valencia, where both men lived. Makled’s position in Chavismo was sealed when (by his own words) he gave two million dollars to General Acosta Carles to support Chávez during the attempted recall referendum in 2004, which Chávez won. Chávez then supported Acosta Carles’s run for governor shortly afterward, which he won. As a reward, Governor Carles granted Makled the administration of the most important port in the country: Puerto Cabello. From there, Makled and his cohorts—“the Makleds”—are alleged to have run drugs through the port and supplied weapons to the FARC in exchange for cocaine, which they then purportedly smuggled to Central America and West Africa.9

  After his arrest and incarceration in the Colombian prison La Picota, Makled gave numerous interviews to various media outlets. When asked on camera by a Univisión television reporter whether he had any connection to the FARC, he answered: “That is what I would say to the American prosecutor.” His cryptic answer was intended to tread the thin line between not being killed by the people whose secrets he held and withholding a negotiating chip for the US prosecutor.

  Asked directly whether he knew of Hezbollah operations in Venezuela, he answered: “In Venezuela? Of course! That which I understand is that they work in Venezuela. [Hezbollah] make money and all of that money they send to the Middle East.”

  In Walid Makled’s ongoing trial in Caracas, it was revealed that all of the documentation and cover that Makled needed for his criminal enterprise was supplied by a high-ranking Chavista who often received orders directly from Chávez himself: Eladio Aponte Aponte, a Venezuelan Supreme Court justice. In an attempt at preemptive damage control, the Chavista-controlled Venezuelan National Assembly relieved the justice of his duties and began the process to convict him—whereupon he fled to Costa Rica and was picked up by the US Drug Enforcement Agency and flown to Washington, D.C., where he began singing like a canary.

  Aponte’s was the highest-level defection from the Chávez regime at that time. Among Aponte’s juicy revelations to US authorities were that President Hugo Cháv
ez would call him to tell him how to convict political rivals and that Generals Hugo Carvajal (former director of military intelligence) and Henry Rangel Silva (the interior minister), both designated as drug kingpins by the US Treasury Department, would call him to tell him to secure and provide legal cover for multiton cocaine shipments from the FARC through Venezuela.

  Ayman Joumaa, a Sunni Muslim of the Medellín cartel with deep ties to Shiites in the Hezbollah strongholds of southern Lebanon, was identified as a key broker in the triangulated relationship among Chavistas, drug cartels, and terrorist groups. His indictment charged him with “coordinating shipments of Colombian cocaine to Los Zetas in Mexico for sale in the United States, and laundering the proceeds.”10 According to the FBI,11 the “proceeds” Joumaa laundered amounted to $200 million a month. That was what US intelligence officials previously thought Iran gave to Hezbollah a year. In short, vast swaths of the Venezuelan government have become important nodes in an international crime-terror pipeline.

  THE REBELLION

  The relationships in what Chávez called “the International Rebellion”12 arose in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union—the point in history that is also the starting point of the convergence of groups into the crime-terror pipeline. When the Soviet Union collapsed, so did its financial support of Cuba and other Marxist fighting groups. Cubans refer to this time as “the Special Period,” presumably special for the starvation that ensued. Cubans who lived through it will tell you how devastating it was for them.

  The 1990 São Paulo Forum was attended by prominent (even right-wing) Venezuelan political leaders and international terrorists. The roster included not only then-Venezuelan president Carlos Andrés Pérez (against whom Chávez would attempt a coup in 1992), but also Alí Rodríguez, then-president of the Venezuelan government-owned oil company, PDVSA; Pablo Medina, a left-wing Venezuelan politician who initially supported Chávez, but later moved to the opposition; as well as Fidel Castro, Moammar Qaddafi, and leaders of several Latin American Marxist terrorist groups—Colombia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC), Uruguay’s Tupamaros (who were by then already fomenting a powerful cell in Venezuela, centered in the 23 de Enero neighborhood of Caracas), and Peru’s Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso).

  These alliances have deepened and become institutionalized as the Bolivarian Continental Coordinator, the office that coordinates all the Latin American leftist armed groups. They held their first congress in Caracas in 2005 and appointed leadership: Dominican politician Narciso Isa Conde was made president and Amilcar Figueroa (aka “Tino”) was made a board member, as were FARC commander Manuel Marulanda Vélez, along with Cuban president Fidel Castro, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, and Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega. FARC commanders Alfonso Cano and Iván Marquéz were made honorary presidents. Their stated mission: to achieve and impose the Bolivarian (Marxist-Leninist) ideology throughout Latin America.

  At its congress in Quito in February 2008, the Bolivarian Continental Coordinator rebranded itself the Bolivarian Continental Movement, and Isa Conde outlined a goal of “articulation of revolutionary diversities from a common strategy capable of confronting and defeating the imperialist strategy and definitively emancipating our America.”13 In other words: it is anti-US. The congress that constituted the new Bolivarian Continental Movement met in Caracas on December 7, 2009. It moved the organization from being just an association of left-wing movements to becoming in and of itself a movement founded by the FARC, and one that supports violent insurgency to bring about societal changes.

  Unsurprisingly, the opening greeting was a video message from one of the group’s honorary presidents: FARC commander Alfonso Cano. According to a well-placed Venezuelan military source of mine, the Bolivarian Continental Movement is headquartered in the Venezuelan state of Barinas—the same state that is effectively a Chávez family fiefdom, with their sprawling family estate, La Chavera, and total control of local politics.

  * * *

  I WAS SPENDING December 31, 2011, into 2012 with family on the West Coast when I got an email that my piece for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, “The New Nexus of Narcoterrorism: Hezbollah and Venezuela,” my second article on the subject, had been picked up by the ABC News Web site, then by a Spanish-language news Web site called La Patilla, and from there by a Venezuelan government Web site, which edited it liberally. The pro-Chavista Web site described me as “a highly paid lobbyist” (not true) advocating the assassination of President Chávez—a false accusation, but certainly a very serious crime in any country. It also gave the address of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, where the article claimed I kept an office.

  “You need to cancel your trip,” read the email from the same former assistant secretary of defense and former national intelligence officer who would later advise me on my trip to Beirut. I called my brother in Caracas and explained why I would be missing his daughter’s christening three weeks hence.

  Both my anger and my curiosity were piqued. If the Venezuelan government felt threatened by my writing about its relationship with Hezbollah, I knew I should keep digging. Four months later, I touched down at Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport.

  5

  Sheikh, Colonel, Trafficker, Terrorist

  Determined to pull the thread on the relationship between Venezuela’s Chavista regime and the Iranian-backed terrorist group Lebanese Hezbollah, I contacted a friend who would know a lot about them: Lee Smith, my editor at the US conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, for whom I had written several articles. Lee had lived in Beirut, spoke some Arabic, and wrote a lot about the Levant’s various power players, including Hezbollah. He had friends in Beirut and, as a journalist, moved around freely there, meeting with political and military leaders from various factions. After the September 11, 2001, attacks on the Twin Towers, whose flaming ruins he saw clearly from his Brooklyn home, Lee had left the US and gone to the Middle East to figure out how this had happened. He alternately lived in Lebanon, Egypt, and Israel to see what he could learn.

  In early 2012, I told Lee that the next time he went to Lebanon, I wanted to plan my trip to coincide with his, so he could be my guide. He would be going in early May 2012 and told me to meet him there. No one had asked me to go; no one was covering my expenses. But what I would learn about the vast intercontinental tentacles of crime-terror pipelines, how terrorist groups gain constituencies, and how Americans are viewed in the Middle East would be the turning point in my career.

  Once my travel plans were set, I told a friend and colleague in New York of my intention to go to Beirut. He was a well-connected former US assistant secretary of defense. A few days later he told me to stop by at the end of a dinner he was hosting at a private club: the others at the dinner knew Lebanon quite well and would be able to give me a few pointers and contacts.

  As they lingered over after-dinner drinks in the back of the basement dining room, I sat down with my friend and two other men: a gray-haired American and a Central Asian. They recommended I speak to a moderate Shia sheikh and an Alawite from a famous and powerful political family. The Alawite was living in exile in Europe, but would be really well informed as to regional networks and connections. I emailed him and called him from New York. He was well mannered, but not as helpful as I had hoped. I waited until I landed in Beirut to contact the moderate Shia sheikh.

  “What passport should I use?” was my first question to Lee before I took off from JFK Airport in New York for my trip to Beirut.

  “The American.”

  “Doesn’t Hezbollah control the airport? Don’t they hate Americans?”

  “Yes, but they will respect it. They won’t mess with an American at the airport.”

  Perhaps not at the airport, but maybe later.

  Hezbollah is a transliteration from the Arabic for “Party of God.” They are both a terrorist group and a political party—in Lebanon, they function as a state within a state, with phenomenal intelligence and co
vert operatives. They proclaim themselves the armed resistance of Shia Muslims, whose heartland is Iran and who suffer a strong sense of marginalization by their Sunni Muslim brethren, whose homeland is the wealthy and powerful Saudi Arabia, the Keeper of the Two Mosques, Mecca and Medina. Hezbollah is the front line of the Sunni-versus-Shia civil war that tears apart the Middle East. There are endless complexities and nuances, but in simple and broad brushstrokes, Hezbollah oppose Daesh.

  THE COLONEL AND THE SHEIKH

  A day after I landed, Lee invited me to the christening of the child of some friends of his. They were Maronite Catholics. The Maronite Church was founded on Mount Lebanon in the fourth century by Saint Maron and it spread across the Levant, including what is modern-day Syria and Jordan. When the Muslims conquered Syria (634–638 AD), the Maronites fled to Lebanon and bound themselves to the Byzantine Empire. They adapted in the face of growing persecution by Muslims, until the Egyptian Mamluks destroyed their forts and monasteries in 1289–1291. In other words, they were Christian allies in the Crusades. Today, they have European allegiances, practice a form of Catholicism, and mostly speak French. They feel rather marginalized by growing Islamic influence (both Sunni and Shia) in Lebanon.

  In the large garden, children played while more than forty adults sat at a long lunch table overflowing with Lebanese mezze, the selection of small dishes typical of cuisine in the Near East, the Balkans, and parts of Central Asia.

  “Who? Who told you to speak to him?” said my host when I asked him about the sheikh whose name I had been given after dinner in New York.