[News] Washington's favorite Venezuelan opposition leader exposes links to Colombian death squads and narco networks

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/12/26/leopoldo-lopez-venezuela-colombia-drugs/
Washington's
favorite Venezuelan opposition leader exposes links to Colombian death
squads and narco networks
Ben Norton·December 26, 2020
------------------------------

While the US government and media glorify Leopoldo López as a new MLK, the
Venezuelan opposition leader collaborates with Colombia’s narco-affiliated,
death squad-sponsoring former President Álvaro Uribe and his protegé Iván
Duque.
------------------------------

According to Western corporate media outlets and human rights groups,
Venezuela’s far-right opposition leader Leopoldo López is a hallowed saint.

The New York Times glorified López as the would-be “savior” of Venezuela
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/01/magazine/can-venezuela-be-saved.html>,
akin to none other than Martin Luther King Jr.
<https://www.coha.org/the-new-york-times-uncanny-comparison-of-leopoldo-lopez-with-martin-luther-king/>,
while Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have dubbed him a
noble “prisoner
of conscience <https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/amr53/6078/2017/en/>”
and “Venezuela’s most prominent political prisoner.”

The real Leopoldo López, however, has repeatedly shown himself to be a
violent extremist committed to overthrowing Venezuela’s government no
matter the cost. And the right-wing political opposition factions under his
control have revealed links to drug trafficking, death squads, and
organized crime in neighboring Colombia.

This December, López traveled to Colombia for a series of meetings and
photo ops. He flew to the country’s border with Venezuela on a plane
registered with a Florida-based company that had sold an aircraft to a
Colombian who was busted for trafficking hundreds of kilograms of cocaine
in Honduras.

López proceeded to meet with far-right Colombian politicians who are
closely connected to drug cartels and paramilitaries that have massacred
civilians. His hosts included the notoriously corrupt former President
Álvaro Uribe, and his handpicked successor, Iván Duque.

Colombia has helped support some of López’s radical right-wing
regime-change plots, including an attempted invasion of Venezuela in May
2020.

While top Colombian officials demonize their neighbor’s elected Chavista
government as a “dictatorship,” López’s meetings in Colombia took place the
same week as the 86th massacre of human rights defenders
<https://www.periodicobolivia.com.bo/masacre-en-el-municipio-colombiano-de-armenia/>
in the country that year, with a death toll of more than 290 social
movement activists.
Leopoldo López’s protegé Juan Guaidó collaborated with Colombian drug
traffickers

The role of the US government in sponsoring Venezuela’s extreme right-wing
opposition
<https://thegrayzone.com/2019/01/29/the-making-of-juan-guaido-how-the-us-regime-change-laboratory-created-venezuelas-coup-leader/>
is well known. The support that Venezuela’s anti-Chavista opposition has
received from government institutions, paramilitaries, drug cartels, and
organized crime networks in neighboring Colombia is however less well
understood.

At the height of the US-backed regime-change attempt in 2019, Venezuelan
coup leader Juan Guaidó – a protegé of Leopoldo López – was photographed
meeting with members of the Rastrojos, a Colombian paramilitary involved in
drug trafficking.

The Rastrojos have been responsible for massacres of civilians, political
assassinations, drug trafficking, weapons dealing, and kidnappings. The
paramilitary group is linked to former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe,
who met with Leopoldo López in December 2020.

Photos from February 2019 showed Guaidó posing with two leaders of the
paramilitary group – Alberto Lobo Quintero, known as “el Broder,” and Jhon
Jairo Durán, known as “el Menor.”

These drug traffickers reportedly helped Guaidó illegally cross the border
into Colombia to carry out a US-backed coup attempt on February 23
<https://thegrayzone.com/2019/02/24/burning-aid-colombia-venezuela-bridge/>,
in which opposition hooligans supported by Washington tried to ram a truck
full of US supplies across a bridge into Venezuela, but ended up setting
the convoy on fire instead.
Leopoldo López plots Venezuela coups with support from US and Colombia

While Juan Guaidó was selected as interim president because of his former
position in the opposition-controlled National Assembly
<https://thegrayzone.com/2020/01/08/final-episode-juan-guaido-surreal-regime-change-reality-show/>,
he was little more than a stand-in for the Venezuelan right-wing’s
kingmaker: Leopoldo López Mendoza, scion of one of Venezuela’s most
influential oligarchic clans.

Since leftist leader Hugo Chávez won his first presidential election in
1998, López has reigned over an extremist right-wing hellbent on removing
him from power. López has helped oversee numerous violent coup attempts in
Venezuela, and was a leading force behind the bloody “guarimba” barricades
that paralyzed the country.

In April 2002, when the military briefly overthrew President Chávez, López
was mayor of the affluent Chacao municipality in Caracas. López directly
assisted the coup by leading a mob that surrounded the house of a
government minister, brutalized the top-level official in the street, then
kidnapped him. Latin America expert Greg Grandin described López years
later as “a thug. Ted Cruz with a mob
<https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/leopoldo-lopez-is-not-venezuelas-savior/>
.”

Flush with US financial support, López helped found the Voluntad Popular
(Popular Will) party that became a vehicle for Guaidó’s bid for regime
change.

Venezuelan political analyst Diego Sequera
<https://youtu.be/yBfEWdh_0Ec?t=6004> explained to The Grayzone, “Leopoldo
López is the only Venezuelan that actually the US government really cares
about; everyone else is just prop; it’s just like secondary characters.”

In May 2020, a group of mercenaries backed by a US firm linked to the
Donald Trump administration tried to invade Venezuela
<https://thegrayzone.com/2020/05/07/silvercorp-founder-grayzone-state-department-venezuela-invasion/>,
with the goal of overthrowing the government of President Nicolás Maduro.

The Wall Street Journal later revealed that López was the mastermind of the
comically botched military invasion. In a June 26 article titled “Venezuelan
Opposition Guru Led Planning to Topple Maduro
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuelan-opposition-guru-led-planning-to-topple-maduro-11593163801?mod=hp_lista_pos2>,”
the newspaper disclosed that López “was behind a months-long effort to
contract mercenaries to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro,” and had
“considered at least six proposals from private security contractors to
carry out military incursions to spur a rebellion in Venezuela’s armed
forces and topple” the Chavista government.

López collaborated with allies of Guaidó and fellow members of their
Popular Will party. They ended up deciding to contract the
Florida-based mercenary
firm Silvercorp USA
<https://thegrayzone.com/2020/05/07/silvercorp-founder-grayzone-state-department-venezuela-invasion/>,
planning the invasion with Jordan Goudreau, a US Army veteran, and Clíver
Alcalá, a former Venezuelan general who defected to Colombia.

López’s allies then introduced Goudreau and Alcalá to right-wing Venezuelan
opposition leaders in numerous meetings in the Colombian capital Bogotá,
seeking millions of dollars of financing for the operation, the Wall Street
Journal reported.

These mercenaries trained dozens of fighters, mostly Venezuelan defectors,
in camps in northeastern Colombia. Then on May 3 they launched the attack
from Colombian territory.

The US government denied involvement in the attempted May 2020 invasion.
But the former US Special Operations officer who helped plan the coup
attempt, Jordan Goudreau, has said in a breach-of-contract lawsuit that he met
with two administration officials at the Trump National Doral Miami golf
resort
<https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/article246819562.html>
to discuss the plot, and was assured that he had the White House’s support.

Two former US soldiers participated in the failed invasion, and are
currently being imprisoned in Caracas.

The Wall Street Journal made it clear that López has pushed for the most
extreme, violent strategies to overthrow the government. “López expressed
the view that negotiations and the electoral route would take too much
time,” it reported.

Juan Forero, the Journal’s South America bureau chief and a staunch
supporter of Venezuela’s right-wing opposition, noted on Twitter that
“Leopoldo Lopez’s party was key in selling Trump on plan to back Guaidó.”
Leopoldo López flies with drug trafficking-linked plane company

The various coup attempts planned by Leopold López, Juan Guaidó, and their
sponsors in Washington and Bogotá had repeatedly failed. So this December,
López adopted a new PR strategy.

On December 11, he flew from his new home in Spain (where he also has the
support of the government) to Cucutá, a Colombian city on the border with
Venezuela. There López posed for photos with Venezuelan immigrants, in a
marketing exercise designed to portray himself as a noble, bleeding-heart
defender of his people.

But Venezuelan journalists soon uncovered a scandal: The plane that ferried
López to Cucutá was owned by a Florida-based company that had previously
sold a plane to a Colombian who was busted in Honduras for transporting 500
kilograms of cocaine.

The Venezuelan investigative journalism publication La Tabla analyzed
photos of López with the aircraft to uncover its links to Colombian drug
trafficking.

López flew on a small AC90 plane with the tail number N690SE
<https://flightaware.com/live/flight/N690SE>. The aircraft’s flight log can
be publicly accessed using a tracking website. With these resources, as
well as photos of the plane on Instagram, La Tabla found that it was owned
by Skyline Enterprises Corp
<https://twitter.com/latablablog/status/1337869403250159617>.

This company is registered with the United States government and based in
Florida in the city of Miramar, a suburb of Miami.

Skyline Enterprises has been in the spotlight before for indirect links to
drug trafficking.

In 2018, the Miami New Times published an article titled “Drug Traffickers
Are Buying Up Planes in South Florida
<https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/drug-traffickers-buying-up-planes-in-south-florida-new-times-investigation-finds-10249767>.”
The investigation revealed that the company had sold a plane in 2009 to a
Colombian customer. Then in 2010, that plane was found in Honduras with 500
kilograms of cocaine.

The director of Skyline, Gilbert Gonzalez, denied knowledge of the drug
links, telling the newspaper, “We check as much as we can the background of
the people or the companies,” but once it is sold, “you could turn around
and give it to your cousin… It’s kind of hard to track.”

When the cocaine-filled plane was intercepted by Honduran authorities in a
remote region of the country in 2010, the pilots landed and opened fire at
security forces, according to a local media report
<http://www.todanoticia.com/20084/honduras-operacion-antidrogas-deja-1/>.

One of the co-pilots, a Honduran national, was killed. The other co-pilot,
a Colombian national, was arrested. The plane had a valid Colombian license
when it was seized with the 500 kilos of cocaine.

La Tabla discovered that the same aircraft caught trafficking cocaine in
Honduras was later found in 2020 in Colombia. The plane crashed north of
the capital Bogotá.

It is unclear how the aircraft ended up back in the hands of its Colombian
owner. Honduran authorities denied that it was the same plane, but La Tabla
conclusively confirmed that it was indeed the aircraft.

The right-wing government in Honduras
<https://thegrayzone.com/2019/07/01/coup-honduras-interview-president-manuel-zelaya-10th-anniversary-us/>,
which was installed in a US-backed coup d’etat, is notoriously corrupt and
closely linked to drug trafficking
<https://thegrayzone.com/2019/10/24/honduras-us-backed-drug-trafficking-dictatorship-opposition-united/>
.

According to public records, the plane was registered with a man named
Henry Moreno Cortázar.
Leopoldo López meets with Colombia’s Álvaro Uribe, friend of drug cartels
and death squads

But the photo op in Cucutá was just the beginning of Leopoldo López’s PR
campaign in Colombia. On December 15, López tweeted a photo of himself with
far-right former President Álvaro Uribe Vélez.

Uribe is the most powerful politician in Colombia, the beneficiary of
extensive and well-documented links to the drug cartels and death squads
that hold sway in the country.

In 2018, the National Security Archive
<https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/colombia/2020-08-31/friends-el-viejo-declassified-records-detail-suspected-paramilitary-narco-ties-former-colombian>
released declassified US State Department cables that showed Washington was
aware its favorite ally in Bogotá had collaborated for decades with drug
traffickers and paramilitaries, using cocaine money to fund his political
campaigns.

A 2018 New York Times investigation acknowledged that a feared death squad
used an Uribe family ranch
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/08/world/americas/colombia-uribe-death-squad.html>
as its headquarters, planning assassinations, kidnappings, and other crimes
on their land. Álvaro’s brother Santiago Uribe was imprisoned on charges of
directing a paramilitary group, called the Doce Apóstoles (12 Apostles).

The Venezuelan right-wing’s kingpin apparently had no problem with Uribe’s
lengthy list of crimes, because he praised the Colombian leader in his
tweet.

Uribe is “a good friend in the struggle for the freedom of Venezuela,”
López insisted. He also made it clear that this drug-linked, death
squad-sponsored Colombian mafioso is helping sponsor regime-change plots in
Venezuela.

“We spoke about the urgent need to get out of the dictatorship to put an
end to the suffering of our people,” López wrote.
Leopoldo López meets with narco-linked President Iván Duque

Colombia’s current president, Iván Duque Márquez, is Álvaro Uribe’s
handpicked successor, and follows in his far-right footsteps.

Like Uribe, Duque is linked to drug traffickers and organized crime
networks in the country. Since he came to office in a deeply contested
election in 2018, in which he was credibly accused of fraud, Colombian
journalists have exposed Duque’s ties to a notorious drug lord
<https://www.infobae.com/america/colombia/2020/03/14/quien-era-el-el-nene-hernandez-el-ganadero-y-narco-que-tiene-a-ivan-duque-frente-al-escandalo-mas-grande-de-su-gobierno/>
named José Guillermo “Ñeñe” Hernández.

Ñeñe Hernández was an extremely wealthy rancher involved in the drug trade,
who used his illicit money to fund right-wing politicians. A leaked
recording exposed that Duque used under-the-table funding from Ñeñe in
order to bribe Colombians and buy votes in the 2018 election. The Colombian
public prosecutor and police are investigating Ñeñe, who died in Brazil
under strange circumstances in 2019, for his role in drug trafficking and
killings.

When Leopoldo López visited Colombia in December, he also met with Iván
Duque.

The Colombian president invited
<https://www.eltiempo.com/politica/gobierno/por-que-leopoldo-lopez-fue-invitado-al-programa-diario-de-ivan-duque-554838>
the Venezuelan opposition extremist onto his program “Prevención y Acción
<https://youtu.be/EtadK5lXiR0?t=2749>” (Prevention and Action), a daily
show in which the government discusses the measures it is taking to contain
the Covid-19 pandemic.

Duque took advantage of the massive audience of average Colombians who
watch the coronavirus program, which is supposed to be apolitical, to
bombard his citizens with anti-Venezuela propaganda.

At the end of the broadcast, Duque and López spoke for nearly 10 minutes
about the situation in Venezuela.

Duque referred to Venezuela’s democratically elected government as a
“dictatorship of extreme brutality,” while heaping praise on López, who he
declared “has had a voice full of courage and conviction” and a “voice of
freedom.”
[image: Ivan Duque Leopoldo Lopez Colombia]Leopoldo López on Colombian
television with President Iván Duque on December 14, 2020

For his part, López exacerbated xenophobia inside Colombia by insisting
that, if Maduro’s government was not soon overthrown, hordes of Venezuelan
immigrants would continue crossing the border, and bring the coronavirus
along with them, infecting their neighbors.

López also heaped enthusiastic praise on the far-right Colombian government
in the TV broadcast, calling it “an example for the world.”

That week, the corpses of human rights defenders continued to pile up,
bringing the total of mass killings of social movement activists in
Colombia in 2020 to 86, with nearly 300 victims.

López’s gushing praise for the Colombian government arrived as a new report
revealed how the right-wing regime had arrested 10,471 students on
trumped-up terrorism or rebellion charges
<https://colombiareports.com/colombias-systematic-criminalization-of-youth/>
between 2000 and 2018.
Saving face in photo op with liberal Bogotá mayor

Leopoldo López’s meeting with Álvaro Uribe triggered condemnations from
even staunch supporters of the Venezuelan opposition.

The avowedly anti-Chavista Americas director of the billionaire-funded
US-based NGO Human Rights Watch
<https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/08/billionaire-human-rights-watch-sanctions-nicaragua-venezuela/>
(HRW), José Miguel Vivanco, lambasted López for the meeting, calling it a
“grave mistake” that “does a lot of damage to his credibility.”

HRW has spent years heroizing the coup-plotting Venezuelan opposition
leader, portraying López as a “prisoner of conscience” and “Venezuela’s
most prominent political prisoner” before he was released in a failed coup
attempt on April 30, 2019.

Vivanco is closely allied with far-right forces across Latin America
<https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/08/billionaire-human-rights-watch-sanctions-nicaragua-venezuela/>,
and has aggressively lobbied for US sanctions on Venezuela and Nicaragua.
But López’s friendly chat with Uribe was even too much for him.

Facing mounting criticism over his radical antics, and desperate to save
face, Leopoldo López sought out a photo-op with the liberal mayor of
Bogotá, Claudia López, in what Latin American media
<https://www.infobae.com/america/colombia/2020/12/17/leopoldo-lopez-sorprendio-al-aparecer-en-un-evento-de-la-alcaldia-de-bogota-y-claudia-lopez-resalto-su-valentia/>
outlets referred to as a “surprise.”

Claudia López hails from Colombia’s centrist Green Alliance party. She is
an open lesbian and supports progressive cultural policies, but is careful
to never diverge from certain dogmas when regional politics are concerned,
harshly criticizing Venezuela and other leftist governments in Latin
America.

On December 17, the mayor held an event in Bogotá featuring Leopoldo López
alongside Venezuelan migrants. She praised the Venezuelan opposition
leader, saying, “It makes me happy to see him free.”

In her tweet, Claudia López also went out of her way to demonize
Venezuela’s democratically elected government as a “dictatorship”

The photo-op was clearly aimed at papering over Leopoldo’s extreme-right
image, portraying him as a supporter of political pluralism who can make
common cause with liberals. For Claudia López, it was a way of reassuring
conservative critics that she would faithfully line up against
revolutionary left-wing forces in the region.

But it was not enough to deflect from the ultimate agenda of Leopoldo
López. His trip represented the open consolidation of an alliance between
the putschist forces under his control and a Colombian government
intimately intertwined with drug trafficking and criminal networks, both
hellbent on crushing the leftists in their midst.
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