[News] Venezuela - Separatist Opposition Uses Paramilitaries for Social Cleansing, Destabilization

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Venezuelan Government: Separatist Opposition Uses 
Paramilitaries for Social Cleansing, Destabilization

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/4521
June 15th 2009, by James Suggett - Venezuelanalysis.com

Paramilitary troops on Venezuela's border (YVKE archive)

Mérida, June 15th 2009 (Venezuelanalysis.com) -- 
Venezuelan Minister for Justice and Internal 
Affairs, Tarek El-Aissami, accused the governors 
of opposition-controlled states along the 
Colombian border of permitting bands of Colombian 
paramilitary troops to destabilize the region and 
carry out a wave of "social cleansing" murders in recent months.

Speaking from the southwestern border state of 
Táchira last weekend, El-Aissami said the 
paramilitaries include members of state police 
forces and have contributed to a more than 43% 
increase in Táchira's crime rate. Governor Cesar 
Perez, his chief of staff, and the regional 
director of Perez's political party COPEI, plan 
to use the paramilitaries to launch a violent 
separatist movement, said El-Aissami.

"We are not going to permit the fascist right 
wing, headed by a fascist governor, to pretend to 
separate Táchira from the national territory," El 
Aissami declared. "We alert the country to this 
secessionist plan of the state governor and his 
veiled intention to create paramilitary groups."

In the past two months, pamphlets were 
distributed in dozens of communities across 
western Venezuela threatening to assassinate sex 
workers, transvestites, homeless people, drug 
consumers and traffickers, gang members and 
alleged thieves. Local newspapers in the states 
of Táchira, Mérida, and Zulia reprinted the 
pamphlets, which advised parents to keep their 
children in their homes after dark to avoid being 
killed during "the hour of social cleansing."

Many of the pamphlets were signed by the 
paramilitary group known as the Black Eagles 
(Aguilas Negras). The Black Eagles are presumed 
to be a splinter group of the now dissolved 
United Self-Defenses of Colombia (AUC), a 
conglomeration of paramilitary groups formed in 
the 1990s to fight Colombian guerrilla rebels on 
behalf of large estate owners, cattle ranchers, 
and right-wing politicians using cash earned mostly from drug trafficking.

In three municipalities in Zulia state, local 
residents attribute a dozen murders over the past 
two months to paramilitary groups, according to 
the regional Panorama newspaper.

"They arrived armed to the teeth commando-style 
and they put us up against the wall to search us. 
They said that if they saw us talking on the 
corner again, they were going to kill us," a 
teenager in Zulia state recounted of his 
experience with the paramilitaries last month.

In late April, pamphlets also circulated in three 
municipalities in Mérida, and shortly afterward a 
transvestite sex worker was brutally murdered. 
Friends of the victim reported that men 
approached them on the street and attributed the 
crime to paramilitaries and threatened to kill 
more transvestites working on the streets at night.

Venezuela's national Criminal, Scientific, and 
Penal Investigations Unit (CICPC) and national 
intelligence officials have opened investigations 
into the pamphlets and the murders.

On Sunday President Hugo Chávez called on 
ordinary Venezuelans to employ "popular 
intelligence" to assist in the fight against 
paramilitary infiltration. "We must organize the 
people, it's not only a job for our comrades in the armed forces," he said.

Chávez threatened to bring Governor Perez to 
trial for treason, citing alleged intelligence 
documents that reveal a burgeoning "nest of 
paramilitaries" that plan to assassinate Chávez 
and promote secession in the opposition-controlled border region.

Last year, Zulia state legislators approved a 
feasibility study for autonomy and compared their 
efforts to the violent, U.S.-backed secessionist 
movement in eastern Bolivia. Earlier this year, 
the secessionist rhetoric of opposition officials 
in Táchira and Zulia intensified after the 
National Assembly approved the transfer of 
authority over transportation hubs from the states to the national government.

Chávez also said the paramilitary activity in 
Venezuela is an attempt to "re-create the 
phenomenon of the Colombian paramilitaries." 
Members of Venezuela's substantial Colombian 
immigrant community report that the language of 
the pamphlets is identical to the pamphlets 
distributed in urban and rural Colombia last year.

Chávez had previously denounced the presence of 
Colombian paramilitary groups operating in 
Venezuela with United States government support 
in early 2008. Venezuelan authorities have 
captured more than 160 paramilitaries in the 
outskirts of Caracas on separate occasions in 
2004 and early 2009. Investigations revealed the 
armed groups were engaged in the infiltration of 
poor neighborhoods and planning a coup d'etat. 
Since an agrarian land reform law was passed by 
the Chávez administration in 2001, paramilitaries 
have murdered as many as 214 rural community 
activists, according to the Ezequiel Zamora National Farmers Front.




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