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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
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href="https://www.resumen-english.org/2019/09/colombia-cia-platform-for-aggression-against-venezuela/">https://www.resumen-english.org/2019/09/colombia-cia-platform-for-aggression-against-venezuela/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Colombia: CIA Platform for Aggression
against Venezuela</h1>
By Carlos Fazio on September 3, 2019</div>
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<p>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, <span id="more-10540"></span>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Source: <a
href="http://www.resumenlatinoamericano.org/2019/09/03/colombia-plataforma-de-la-cia-para-la-agresion-a-venezuela/">Resumen
Latinoamericano</a>, translation, North
America bureau</p>
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