Cuba, FARC may be training guerrillas at Venezuelan camp
Cuban advisors and Colombian rebels are helping train paramilitary
fighters, critics and former participants say.
BY CASTO OCANDO
El Nuevo Herald
SAN CRISTOBAL, Venezuela -- The Venezuelan government, with help from
Cuban military advisors and leftist Colombian guerrillas, is operating a
secret paramilitary training camp in a closed-off tourist campground
near here, former participants and government critics say.
The camp offers six-week courses for a rolling contingent of 400 to
1,000 participants, including a first-phase political indoctrination
with texts printed in Cuba and a second phase of guerrilla training for
the most loyal students that includes the use of light and heavy
weaponry and use of explosives, they added.
One complaint filed in April with a prosecutor's office in the
surrounding state of Tachira requested an investigation of the secret
operations conducted by the Cubans, including ideological instructions
based on the philosophy of Ché Guevara and Fidel Castro as well as
speeches by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.
If the allegations are confirmed, it would heighten tensions between
Chávez's leftist government, the conservative government of President
Alvaro Uribe in neighboring Colombia and the Bush administration in
Washington.
Although the Chávez government has not responded to the allegations,
local officials in the area have acknowledged the existence of the camp
and the presence of Cubans, while denying that the activities at the
Tapo-Caparo National Park involve paramilitary activities.
CUBAN PRESENCE
Gerardo Luna, the pro-Chávez mayor of the Panamericano municipality
adjacent to the reserve acknowledged the presence of Cuban trainers but
said the camp is a training center for people involved in social welfare
missions for the national government.
''Not at any moment is there paramilitary training and much less
terrorist training,'' Luna told El Nuevo Herald.
The campground, roughly 125 acres in size and a two-hour drive from San
Cristobal, capital of Tachira, is closed off by a military checkpoint. A
park spokesperson told El Nuevo Herald that the campground was ``closed
for remodeling until the end of the year.''
According to Desarrollo Urbanite Caparo, a private tourism company that
organizes trips to the area, its services have been suspended for the
time being because ''the government has taken the installations'' until
January.
Witnesses interviewed by El Nuevo Herald say the camp is cloaked in
secrecy and run under strict military discipline to train Venezuelan
civilians who support Chávez in the type of guerrilla war that the
president has repeatedly vowed to launch in case he's ousted from power,
either by a military coup or the U.S. invasion he has repeatedly alleged
has been planned.
''When I arrived, I expected to attend a course on training for social
organizations, and I met with a military course,'' said 28 year-old
Berta, a resident of Maracaibo who agreed to talk about her experience
on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
Berta said she was kicked out in February after she began to complain
against the military-styled regimen and to question the lessons.
''I don't like military education and the entire course, the way
subjects were approached, the Cuban instructors and the type of people
that enroll in the course, made me reject it,'' she said.
Berta said she was expelled in February, but managed to take with her a
copy of the textbook, published in Cuba and now in the hands of the
Tachira prosecutors.
The lake around the campground ''has gone from being a center
traditionally open for nautical sports and excursions, to a center for
political-ideological indoctrination and paramilitary training since the
beginning of this year,'' said former national Congressman Cesar Pérez
Vivas, who filed the complaint with Venezuelan prosecutors.
The camp offers ''training of a military type for the participants, and
they select those that have a greater vocation for a workshop on
asymmetric [guerrilla] war, which is nothing but paramilitary training
that teaches civilians to shoot and techniques for the making explosives
out of gas cylinders and other artifacts,'' said Pérez, now the
opposition candidate for governor of Tachira.
FARC INVOLVEMENT
Pérez added that some of the trainers come from the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the largest leftist guerrilla force in the
neighboring country. ''We have information that in the workshops on
asymmetric war and explosives, there have been people linked to the
FARC,'' he said.
''There is a close ideological relationship between the Venezuelan
government and the Colombian guerrilla that allows this type of
cooperation in training,'' said Carlos Casanova, a former member of the
state legislature.
Also active in the camp, Pérez added, is the Francisco Miranda Front, a
paramilitary Venezuelan organization whose website says it was created
to promote Chávez's ''Bolivarian revolution,'' and which has been
allegedly involved in several violent attacks on the president's critics.
One person who has free access to campground told El Nuevo Herald that
groups of about 450 Venezuelans are constantly arriving, most of them
from the states Zulia and Merida primarily. The most recent group
arrived in mid-August and was made up of qbout 1,000 people, the source
added, asking for anonymity out of fear of government reprisals.
Some supporting evidence for the alleged cooperation between FARC
trainers and the Venezuelan government has come from e-mails found in
the computers of the FARC leader known as Raúl Reyes, killed by the
Colombian army earlier this year. The e-mails were made public by
Colombian authorities.
In an April 2005 e-mail, another FARC leader known as Iván Márquez sent
Raúl Reyes a request for guerrillas to train about 100 Venezuelan
''squad leaders'' -- presumed to be members of the armed forces reserve
corps created by Chávez.
A 2007 e-mail from Marquez to Reyes reported that the Venezuelan
minister of interior and justice at the time, Ramón Rodríguez Chacín,
wanted the FARC to ``transmit our experience in the guerrilla war.''
Last month, the U.S. government accused Rodríguez Chacín and two senior
Venezuelan intelligence officials of helping Colombian FARC guerrillas
with weapons and drug trafficking. Rodríguez Chacín had resigned as
minister just days earlier.
Also named in the U.S. Treasury Department accusation were Gen. Hugo
Carvajal, head of military intelligence, and Gen. Henry Rangel Silva,
head of the secret police known as Disip. The U.S. action freezes any
assets the three men may have under U.S. jurisdiction.
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