Hugo Chavez, FARC and now.... AlQaida?

Gustavo Coronel is an excellent writer and he knows Venezuelans problem very well. You can check his blog at:

http://lasarmasdecoronel.blogspot.com/

vdebate reporter

Hugo Chavez, FARC and now... Al Qaida?
Un Boeing 727, de Venezuela, llevaba cocaína a Mali.

A report in the UK Guardian speculates that the drug traffic passing through Mali seems to be more and more controlled by Al Qaida, possibly in association with the Colombian FARC. This is interesting, as the Boeing 727 carrying cocaine that recently landed and subsequently crashed on take-off in Mali was Venezuelan. This suggests the possibility that the Venezuelan regime of Hugo Chavez could be linking forces with Al Qaida, in a similar manner to its already existing links with the FARC. Says the report (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/29/drugs-cocaine-africa-al-qaida) :
“Professor Stephen Ellis of Amsterdam's Free University, an expert on west Africa's drugs trade, said that several reports suggested that the airstrip was in a region controlled by the group known as "al-Qaida in the land of the Islamic Maghreb". Previously known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, it was responsible for a spate of car bombings in Algeria in 2007 that left dozens dead, including at least 11 UN staff.
"Until now, there is no evidence they have had a direct interest in the drug trade," said Ellis. "But if the airstrip was controlled by al-Qaida, it suggests there is direct contact between them and Latin American drug interests."
The Home Office estimates that 50% of the cocaine that enters the UK comes from west Africa. Two years ago the government put the figure at under 30%.
Like manufacturers taking advantage of cheaper labour by moving their plants abroad, the major Colombian drugs gangs have exploited west Africa's political instability, poorly funded law enforcement agencies, endemic corruption and porous borders. But a link with terrorist networks would add a new dimension.
It is not only al-Qaida that may be involved. A briefing prepared for the US Congress speculated that west Africa's substantial Lebanese trading community – strong supporters of Hezbollah – have been buying the drug from the paramilitary group Farc, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia”. .

By Gustavo Coronel

Chávez says he chews coca daily

Chávez says he chews coca daily

Analysts said Chávez's comments before National Assembly amounted to a dangerous endorsement and might be an admission of an illegal act.

Sun, Jan. 20, 2008
BY CASTO OCANDO
El Nuevo Herald

Venezuela's controversial President Hugo Chávez has revealed that he regularly consumes coca -- the source of cocaine -- raising questions about the legality of his actions.

Chávez's comments on coca initially went almost unnoticed, coming amid a four-hour speech to the National Assembly during which he made international headlines by calling on other countries to stop branding two leftist Colombian guerrilla groups as terrorists and instead recognize them as ``armies.''

''I chew coca every day in the morning . . . and look how I am,'' he is seen saying on a video of the speech, as he shows his biceps to the audience.

Chávez, who does not drink alcohol, added that just as Fidel Castro ''sends me Coppelia ice cream and a lot of other things that regularly reach me from Havana,'' Bolivian President Evo Morales ``sends me coca paste . . . I recommend it to you.''

It was not clear what Chávez meant. Indigenous Bolivians and Peruvians can legally chew coca leaves as a mild stimulant and to kill hunger. But coca paste is a semi-refined product -- between leaves and cocaine -- considered highly addictive and often smoked as basuco or pitillo.

''It is another symptom that [Chávez] has totally lost the concept of limits,'' said Aníbal Romero, a political scientist with the Caracas Metropolitan University. ``It shows Chávez is a man out of control.''

More seriously, Venezuelan and Bolivian analysts said Chávez's comments amount to a dangerous endorsement of a substance controlled around the world, and perhaps even an illegal act by a very public head of state.

''If he is affirming that he consumes coca paste, he is admitting that he is consuming a substance that is illegal in Bolivia as well as Venezuela,'' said Hernán Maldonado, a Bolivian analyst living in Miami. ''Plus, it's an accusation that Evo Morales is a narco-trafficker'' for sending him the paste.

Morales is the longtime head of a Bolivian coca-growers' union and is known to chew coca in public, even during cabinet meetings, since he took office. Bolivia limits the coca acreage in an effort to control supplies of coca leaf that wind up being refined into cocaine.

Most likely, however, it seems Chávez was referring to chewing coca leaves, a traditional and legal practice among indigenous groups in the high Andes mountains but illegal in Venezuela, according to experts.

''Venezuela signed the Vienna Convention of 1961, which regulates everything that has to do with narcotics,'' said Mildred Camero, former president of the government's main counter-narcotics agency, the National Council Against the Illicit Use of Drugs. ``On the list . . . the coca leaf was prohibited.''

Although the growing and chewing of coca leaf is legal in Bolivia, Morales ''should explain the shipments he sends to Chávez,'' said Carlos Sánchez-Berzaín, a Morales critic and former Bolivian interior minister now living in Miami.

''The [Bolivian] government should declare how it sends the coca, how much it sends, with what frequency, the weight, in what type of container, because it is a controlled substance and the government must be monitored,'' Sánchez-Berzaín said.

This is not the first time that the president praised the properties of coca leaves. During a visit to a communal kitchen in western Caracas in early 2006, with Uruguayan President Tabaré Vásquez, Chávez suggested using the kitchen's ovens to bake bread made from a special coca-based flour.

''We could try that here, as part of that effort to de-Satanize a product that our indigenous people have been producing for centuries,'' he said.

In early 2007, Venezuela signed an agreement to buy 4,000 tons of coca leaf from Bolivia in what it said was an effort to diminish the supply available for refining paste and cocaine and launch the manufacture of food and medicinal products on an industrial scale.

Caracas made the first payment of $500,000, but the project remains frozen, in large part because of the legal implications of shipping the leaves across borders.

Although coca leaves have nutritional and medical characteristics, ''the principal component is an alkaloid, cocaine,'' that can be ''harmful'' if it's made part of a daily diet, Nancy Siles, a biochemist with the Bolivian College of Biochemistry and Pharmacy, wrote in a a recent report.