Dramatic developments in Venezuela as more putschists and violent instigators are behind bars tonight. Here’s the story, via Aporrea:
The Venezuelan government has arrested 41 persons in the Altamira neighborhood of eastern Caracas, who caused damage to public and private property and held up vehicular traffic in the zone on Friday.
Of this group, eight are of foreign nationality, and were wanted for international terrorism, according to President Nicolás Maduro, via Twitter.
The head of state, in the context of the Peace and Coexistence Plan, announced the formation of a special police and military team for investigating the entry of irregulars and mercenaries into the country to create violence by way of narcotrafficking.
Translation mine.
The 41 perps were caught in flagrante delicto, so there’s not much doubt about what they were up to. One of them is a minor. Most are male.
Meanwhile, in other news of guarimberos caught in flagrante, we have this little item:
Venezuelan Robert Alonso, the “King of the Guarimba”, on whose estate 100 Colombian paramilitaries were captured in May 2004, is conspiring in Miami with well-known Cuban-American terrorists, as confirmed inadvertently by a web site identified with Luis Posada Carriles and the most violent elements of the local circles generated by the CIA.
The site “Nuevo Acción” [sic], published by Aldo Rosado Tuero, openly nostalgic for Franco and Mussolini, announced that “opposition leader” Robert Alonso addressed a select group of Cuban-American terrorists at a “patriotic luncheon” located at “La Finca Media Luna”, on the outskirts of Miami.
Alonso addressed the attendees “to call for help and solidarity for the irreducible combatants of Cuban exile for his campaign to increase resistance to the ungovernment of Nicolás Maduro,” reported Nuevo Acción. “Robert explained the function of the ‘guarimba’ and other forms of struggle which a group of ‘Venezuelan patriots’ were performing.”
In the accompanying photo, one can see Reinol Rodríguez, current “military chief” of Alpha 66, along with José Dionisio Suárez and Armando Valladares, three individuals known to belong to organizations formed by the CIA.
Reinol (Reynol or Reynold) Rodríguez belongs to the small group of paramilitaries tied to international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, in Miami. Rodríguez is the killer of Carlos Muñiz Varela, who was shot dead from a car in a march on April 28, 1979. The young Cuban was then director of the Varadero Travel Agency, in the capital of Puerto Rico, and organized visits from exiles to Cuba as part of a process of political rapprochement.
Dionisio “Pool of Blood” Suárez Esquivel was sentenced for the assassination of former Chilean minister Orlando Letelier, on September 21, 1976. Arrested in 1990, he admitted his guilt. He was freed by George W. Bush in 2001, just a few days before September 11.
Armando Valladares was one of the 17 terrorists arrested on Christmas Eve of 1960, in Havana, amid a CIA-directed string of attacks on stores and movie theatres. During the raid, they discovered three bomb-making factories and a large quantity of weapons and explosives. Freed after several years, Valladares went to work for the CIA, who used him in a series of international events as a “Cuban dissident”. In 2009, he joined the authors of a fascist conspiracy in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, to assassinate President Evo Morales, and foment a civil war. He later appeared alongside Honduran putschists in Roberto Micheletti’s gang.
Robert Alonso fled Venezuela in 2004, after the discovery of a plan to assassinate President Hugo Chávez and the arrest on his estate, by Venezuelan security forces, of 153 Colombian paramilitaries, who were wearing uniforms of the Venezuelan armed forces.
The operation took place in a zone controlled by then-mayor Henrique Capriles Radonski — now leader of the opposition — and counted on the complicity of police officers of the territory. Previously, Alonso had participated with Capriles in the assault on the Cuban embassy during the coup d’état of 2002.
A permanent promotor of acts of violence in Venezuela, Alonso fled the country with false documents, across the Colombian border, to later install himself in Miami, Florida, where his buddies were waiting for him.
The brother of the Cuban-American singer/actress María Conchita Alonso incited the “guarimbas”, violent street protests by the Venezuelan opposition, causing deaths and injuries an various parts of the land.
Alonso is associated with the military putschists of the Plaza Altamira, who called for an insurrection against the elected Chávez government, and were linked to acts of terrorism against the Colombian consulate, diplomatic installations of Spain, and the Organization of American States (OAS) in Caracas.
Son of a wealthy Cuban family that prospered under the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, Robert Alonso left the island at the age of 11, to live in Venezuela. Truly his father’s son, he studied at Deer Park High School in Deer Park, Washington, at the Kinman Business school of Washington State in Spokane, at the College for Television and Film (Munich, Germany) and took journalism at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland.
The appearance of Alonso in the pages of Nuevo Acción arose at the same time as the existence of a series of e-mails sent by ultra-right-wing political advisor Juan José Rendón and opposition deputy María Corina Machado and Ricardo Koesling came to light in Venezuela, offering details of their destabilization plots against the Venezuelan government.
Koesling, known in Venezuela for his participation in violent acts against the Cuban embassy in 2002, is a long-time partner-in-crime of Luis Posada Carriles. In 1976, he was already in the orbit of the CIA agent working for the Venezuelan secret police when he ordered, from Caracas, the destruction of a Cuban aircraft in mid-flight. In 2000, Koesling communicated with Posada, in prison in Panama for terrorism. Today, he is still connected to the community of CIA assassins in Miami, on account of his Venezuelan connection.
The putschist organization to which Alonso belongs extends as far as Colombia, and to the far-right circles represented by Álvaro Uribe Vélez, has many other members in Miami who have already demonstrated their willingness to resort, without the slightest scruple, to violence in order to finish off the dignified legacy of Hugo Chávez.
All of them recognize in Posada Carriles, the former “Commissar Basilio” of the DISIP [Venezuelan secret police, now disbanded] who, for several years in Caracas, tortured, kidnapped and murdered dozens of young Venezuelan revolutionaries who dreamed of a new Venezuela, freed from its predators.
Translation mine.
Don’t be too surprised if the eight “foreigners” among those arrested in Altamira turn out to have ties to this band of elderly, but still very nasty, thugs. After all, they all hang together.
A very interesting account of what is going on in Merida is at
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/10438
The reporter, http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/10438
The reporter, Tamara Pearson, is an Australian who has been living in Merida for several years. Her analysis and eye witness eporting have been excellent–check her out in the venezuelanalysis archive.
I was in Merida in 2008, and I was walking around the campus of the University of the Andes (ULA). I saw three young men in red t shirts passing out leaflets. It turned out that they were Chavistas. I told them what I was doing there, and they took me to the student cafeteria and somehow got me a ticket that got me a free lunch (which was more than I could eat!).
One of them told me that just the night before his girlfriend had been kidnapped by rightist students who beat her, tore her clothes, drove her around and terrorized her and finally dumped her far out of town. This was a fairly common practice in Merida, where the students at ULA are overwhelmingly upper class, and very aggressive. (At the end of our conversation, in which I had asked them lots of questions, one of them put his arm around my shoulder and said, “Come on, tell us. You’re from the CIA, right?” His friend said, “Don’t worry about it. If he were from the CIA his Spanish would be a lot better than this guy’s.”)
The link above fits the pattern of what has been happening in Merida for years. While I was there in 2008 one of the heroes of the ULA students was a man named Nixon Moreno. He was in hiding at the time, because in one of their “peaceful” demonstrations he and his associates kidnapped a policewoman and raped her with a stick of wood. I saw signs all over the the university supporting him for president of the student union. Google his name for details, which are, of course, disputed, in the way that practically everything on wikipedia that is controversial is disputed.
Yes, I’m familiar with Tamara Pearson’s writing, and Nixon Moreno…I’ve translated articles on that little thuggie for a few years now. He looks exactly like you’d expect a sexually violent right-winger to look, and his first name couldn’t possibly fit him better, unless maybe he were named for one of the Bush Crime Family. I wonder if he’s still hiding out in the Apostolic Nunciature, like he was the last time I saw his ugly mugshot…