[News] Colombia: CIA Platform for Aggression against Venezuela

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.resumen-english.org/2019/09/colombia-cia-platform-for-aggression-against-venezuela/ 



  Colombia: CIA Platform for Aggression against Venezuela

By Carlos Fazio on September 3, 2019

On August 28, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the creation of 
the Venezuela Affairs Unit (VAU), which will be located in the U.S. 
Embassy in Bogota, Colombia. This moves leaves no doubt that Colombia is 
being designated as the main platform for a US made coup d’état against 
the constitutional and legitimate government of Nicolas Maduro and the 
servile role that Colombian President Ivan Duque is expected to play.

The Venezuelan Affairs Unit will be headed by James Story, a former 
chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, who was one of the 
last diplomats to withdraw from the mission in the Venezuelan capital in 
March after President Nicolas Maduro broke off relations with Washington.

The level of the VAU is not traditional in the U.S. Foreign Service, and 
according to press reports it will not be equated to an “interests 
section” like the one that existed in Havana, Cuba, for decades. 
According to State Department sources, its provisional nature places it 
outside the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in terms of approving its 
staff, although it will continue to oversee the development of bilateral 
relations.

The creation of the U.S. parallel diplomatic office in Bogotá had the 
bipartisan (Democrat/Republican) support of Congress, and seeks to give 
regional legitimacy to the blurred presidency of the Venezuelan National 
Assembly, Juan Guaidó, at a time of extreme political weakness of the 
internal opposition to Maduro’s government.

President Maduro broke off relations with the U.S. January 23, after 
Donald Trump ignored his jurisdiction and recognized Guaidó, his 
creation, as “president in charge” of Venezuela. This came in the midst 
of an intoxicated media blitz in the Western world aimed at pressuring, 
destabilizing and producing a “regime change” there, with the support of 
several Latin American far-right presidents grouped in the so-called 
Lima Group.

Since then, officials from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) began 
to make contact with Venezuelan diplomatic officials for purposes of 
recruitment and incitement to abandon their posts, particularly in 
Colombia, Panama and the United Nations.

According to journalistic reports, in exchange for becoming 
collaborators of the U.S. spy agency, CIA officials offered between 120 
and 150 thousand dollars. In exchange those who defected would be 
obligated to give interviews in the media where they would promote, 
among other demands, rejection of President Maduro and the government 
they had defended up to that moment.

Since then, too, CIA agents have increased their activities in Colombian 
territory. By 2018, the U.S. agency achieved the defection of the 
Venezuelan press attaché in Bogotá, Luis Espinoza. Also noteworthy is 
the support they have given to a terrorist network based in Peru, called 
“Jaque Mate Venezuela 2019”, dedicated to the execution of violent acts 
in Venezuelan territory with the aim of destabilization.

Before the second round of presidential elections in Colombia, between 
Iván Duque and Gustavo Petro, in June 2018, the CIA prepared a public 
denunciation falsely accusing Royland Belisario, a member of the 
Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (SEBIN), of an alleged attack 
against the current president Duque. The version was covered by the 
Bogota daily El Tiempo on March 3 and attributed to “Colombian 
intelligence agencies”.

On April 15, during a question-and-answer session at the University of 
Texas, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated that, “When I was director 
of the CIA, we lied, we cheated and we stole. We even had training 
courses.” The State Department’s official transcript censored those 
assertions, but they were recorded on video. And while it is public and 
notorious that throughout its history the CIA has done what Pompeo said, 
it is serious that the head of U.S. diplomacy refers to himself in that way.

On February 7, after the arrest of former Bolivarian National Guard 
colonel Oswaldo Valentín García Palomo, Venezuela’s Vice President of 
Communication, Culture and Tourism Jorge Rodríguez revealed to the media 
the publication of intimidating messages and false news by anti-Chávez 
actors who outlined the framework of a series of coup actions.

García Palomo had long had the support of the CIA and the governments of 
Colombia, Chile and Brazil. In his confession, the former soldier 
declared that the CIA had contacted him through retired General Antonio 
Rivero, an activist of the Popular Will Party (Party of Guaidó) and a 
CIA agent, according to Rodriguez. He also explained that in Colombian 
territory he had had the support of alias “Alejandro”, a general of the 
Colombian National Police, who was the liaison with the government of 
Juan Manuel Santos.

The coup plan had been reactivated in May 2018, prior to the Colombian 
elections, with the advice of alias “Indiana” and “Colonel Lee” by the 
CIA and “Alejandro” from the Colombian government. Officials instructed 
García Palomo on the attack plan against Venezuela during the first 
quarter of 2019, and his confession, according to Jorge Rodríguez, came 
to dismantle the international misinformation intoxication campaign on 
the “humanitarian crisis,” as an alibi for an invasion designed by the 
CIA and the Pentagon with support from the Organization of American 
States (OAS) and the Lima Group.

In the context of a prolonged imperial hybrid war of attrition, February 
23, was scheduled as the umpteenth “D-Day” of the besieged Bolivarian 
Republic of Venezuela,  but instead would be another resounding failure 
of the international far-right terrorist that responds to the dictates 
of the White House.

On that day one of the members of the CIA station in Bogotá and US 
ambassador to the OAS, Carlos Trujillo accompanied U.S. Senator Marco 
Rubio and Florida State Representative Mario Díaz-Balart on their visit 
to the Colombian town of Cúcuta, bordering Venezuela and one of the main 
locations of tension between the two countries.

Cúcuta, where according to the Colombian intellectual Renán Vega Cantor 
“paramilitary power reigns”, had been the stage, the day before, of the 
concert “Venezuela Live Aid”, organized by the cultural gusanería of the 
Estefan clan (the marriage formed by Gloria and Emilio Estefan), which 
was attended by some 30 Made in Miami artists, including Silveste 
Dangond, called “the paramilitary of vallenato”.

This concert of hatred and war was conceived as a distracting action on 
the Colombian-Venezuelan border, aimed at covering up a false flag 
operation in the framework of the alleged introduction of “humanitarian 
aid” to Venezuela by the United States Agency for International 
Development (USAID), which since 1961 has been used by the CIA as one of 
its most powerful weapons for its covert operations.

In military jargon, false flag operations are those carried out 
clandestinely by an aggressive power, for the sake of appearing attacked 
and blaming the enemy. On February 23, two USAID trucks with supposed 
humanitarian aid for Venezuela were set on fire with Molotov cocktails 
on the Francisco de Paula Santander international bridge on the 
Colombian side by violent groups of the Venezuelan opposition. It was a 
complete CIA operation that U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary 
of State Pompeo blamed on the “tyrant” Maduro.

The operation, which was attended in situ by Colombian President Ivan 
Duque and his Chilean counterpart, Sebastian Piñera, as well as the 
lackey of the U.S. Ministry of Colonies, Uruguayan Luis Almagro, 
exhibited the links of the Miami Cuban-American mafia sponsored by the 
CIA with the “paracos” of Cúcuta and the continental ultra-right, but 
also the impunity with which the U.S. agency carries out its 
interventionist activities against Venezuela from the territory of Colombia.

 From the beginning of 2019 to date, the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá has been 
increasing the number of officials in its consulate in Cúcuta with two 
main objectives: to support the visits of U.S. congressmen, politicians 
and military as well as chiefs and officers of the intelligence 
community who travel to that border region, and to monitor the situation 
in Venezuela, on which they issue daily reports that are forwarded to 
the State Department, the White House and the Pentagon.

The U.S. consulate in Cúcuta has a high number of officials who are 
linked to the U.S. diplomatic mission in Caracas, which they had to 
evict after the brake of relations decreed by Nicolas Maduro. According 
to journalistic versions, among them there are some experts in covert 
operations and fieldwork with the Venezuelan ultra-right, paramilitary 
groups and criminal gangs, but also with opposition landowners who, as 
part of the economic war against Maduro’s constitutional government, 
carry out clandestine operations to extract minerals (gold, bauxite, 
iron), oil and gasoline to send abroad.

In this context, the creation of the Venezuelan Affairs Unit announced 
by Pompeo last week would reinforce the role of the Álvaro Uribe-Iván 
Duque duo as Washington’s puppets and that of Colombia as a platform for 
the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s aggression against Venezuela.

Source: Resumen Latinoamericano 
<http://www.resumenlatinoamericano.org/2019/09/03/colombia-plataforma-de-la-cia-para-la-agresion-a-venezuela/>, 
translation, North America bureau

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