Hebert Veloza, formerly known as “HH”, in the hands of the Colombian authorities.
From Aporrea, a shocking revelation by a Colombian paramilitary leader, one that will surely put “El Doptor Varito” in an awkward position (as if he could get any more pretzel-like):
Ex-paramilitary chief Hebert Veloza, alias “HH”, admitted that he and his men committed more than 3000 killings between 1994 and 2003. Veloza confirmed in an interview given to the daily El Espectador that there were ties between certain politicians, members of the Colombian military, and police with the AUC paramilitaries. He also said that with his extradition to the US, “the victims will go on not knowing the truth.”
The man formerly known as “HH” recognized that in the massacres his organization committed, “more innocent than guilty people died, but that’s war.”
Veloza entered the AUC in 1994, when he was 28 years old. He received several months of training at a hacienda in the Cordoba department before committing his first “operation” at the end of that same year. Although he assures that during his training he was not taught to dismember bodies–as many paramilitaries are known to have done with their victims–he admits to having “decapitated many as a strategy to promote terror”.
Veloza admitted that in their fight against leftist guerrillas, his forces counted on direct and indirect aid from the high commands of the Colombian military and police, especially in the banana-growing region of Urabá. He says that “all the senators, representatives or politicians who’ve been mentioned” in the “para-politics” scandal said that the guerrillas were their enemy. All of them are “compromised because they have ties to the rightist paramilitaries”.
Recently Veloza handed over to the judicial authorities a USB drive which presumably belonged to Carlos Castaño, and which contains information revealing paramilitaries’ plans to infiltrate Venezuela and make attempts on the life of president Hugo Chavez.
Translation mine.
We can see more and more, as stories like this come out, just what a slimy little snake Alvaro Uribe really is. Remember, Uribe’s ties to the paras are not exactly a secret, although he’s doing his best to try to clamp a lid on it all. Hence all these extraditions for paras on piddling drug charges.
But if what Veloza says is true (and the odds that it is are good, because it tallies with what respected human rights groups have long said), then this could really be explosive, because Venezuelan authorities have long known about a Colombian paramilitary connection to the various coup attempts against Chavecito, especially the more violent ones. Should it ever come out in court that Uribe has been trying to assassinate Chavez, using the paras as proxies, it will be the end not only for Uribe’s political career, but will also put relations with Washington into a deep freeze for Venezuela. After all, just as the paras are Uribe’s proxies, so Uribe is Washington’s proxy. Nothing that any of them do comes without approval–tacit or explicit–from there. And if you still don’t know why Washington is waging a proxy war on Venezuela, using Colombia to provide plausible deniability, you’re truly dead from the neck up.
