Remember our ol’ buddy Jota-Jota, the samurai of silliness? Remember all the dirty-tricks campaigns he’s launched against Chavecito and Madurito? Well, get a load of the kind of company he runs with…and all for top dollar, of course:
J. J. Rendón, preferred advisor to known right-wing politicians from Venezuela, Colombia and Central America — among them, Henrique Capriles — has received $12 million US over the last three years from three major Colombian narcotraffickers, presumably to get them an agreement from the Santos government for surrender in exchange for no extradition [to the US].
So said drug lord Javier Antonio Calle Serna, one of the two “Comba” brothers, in the US, on January 10 of this year, in a confession to a Colombian prosecutor. During the meeting, the criminal affirmed that between 2010 and 2011, he and other narcotrafficking capos, such as Diego Rastrojo, “Cuchillo” and “Loco” Barrera, wanted to propose to the government that they would disarm their mafias and cease drug trafficking in the country.
These revelations have just been published by the Colombian daily, El Espectador, which tells how the three capos confided in Rendón to obtain from the government an acceptance of their plan to submit to justice, and to convey that plan to the president.
According to El Espectador, the proposal was sent by way of a document with the signatures of the mafiosi and a video, but “in the end it didn’t work out”, because, according to Serna, they demanded an accompaniment from the US government that never arrived.
“The Colombian government strung out the project and started capturing my people; when I saw that time was passing and nothing was happening, I decided in favor of the American government and turned myself in,” Serna said.
Consulted by the newspaper, Rendón denied having received any money, and stated that “due to his closeness with the president”, Santos, in 2011, some lawyers representing the capos asked him to serve as a bridge to the authorities.
Rendón, a fugitive from Venezuelan justice who is famous for the cynicism of his methods, assured that he “simply acted as a channel to bring that correspondence” to the Prosecutor’s Office.
“There was a meeting. I met with the president, I handed him that, and left. The president said that the Prosecutor’s office would take charge of that,” said the organizer of electoral campaigns characterized by their dirtiness. “This denunciation looks like another plot against me,” suggested Rendón, now living in Miami despite the denunciations of the Venezuelan government and an Interpol warrant against him.
During an interview, Rendón’s attorney, Abelardo de las Espriella, admitted enigmatically that although the president and the then attorney-general, Viviane Morales, “knew about J. J.’s approaches, that they had as their sole proposition the surrender of a significant group of narcotraffickers and to generate a political event favorable to the government.”
Upon investigating the case, El Espectador came across an extensive document, of 109 pages, titled “Agenda for solving the problem of narcotrafficking and the violence it generates”, dated June 2011, in which it is established that J. J. Rendón was officiating as “general strategist” of said proposal.
El Espectador states that various sources confirmed that this project was known not only by the high government, the former attorney-general Morales, the chief of police, the intermediaries of the process, and President Santos, but also by functionaries of the embassy of the United States.
The author of the article writes: “Even though J. J. Rendón told this paper that there is nothing secret about these approaches, what is certain is that only now does the country know of the proposal in detail, which in the year 2011 was formalized by the top drug lords.”
Sources confirmed to El Espectador that J. J. Rendón participated actively in the management of the plan, even though “he maintains that he acted as a simple messenger and hardly knew of the minutiae of the process.”
“Now [Rendón] must respond to the accusation that he received $12 million US for advancing this proposal, an accusation which he reduces to a new plot against him,” concludes the journalist, Juan David Laverde Palma.
Over the last 27 years, Rendón has advised the presidential campaigns of Enrique Peña Nieto, Juan Manuel Santos, Álvaro Uribe Vélez, and Porfirio Lobo, among others. Discredit, disparagement, and the grossest of lies are his principal strategies.
The unscrupulous Rendón declared, in an interview with Colombian journalist María Jimena Duzán, that he is an anti-ethical advisor because “that ethical thing is for philosophers”.
In Miami, Rendón stays in touch with the criminal network of terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, advisor to each conspiracy to bring down, by all means, the Venezuelan government. This was confirmed by the recent publication in Caracas of an exchange of letters between Rendón and Ricardo Koesling, a Cuban-Venezuelan who, for decades, has been moving in Posada’s circles.
Even though he is under an Interpol capture order, by request of the Venezuelan government, Rendón remains in the US with the total complacency and protection of the immigration authorities and the FBI.
Though he rebuffs the accusations over the million-dollar proposal he made to the Colombian government, Rendón does not deny his relations with some of the most dangerous drug lords in the world, who saw in him a man they could trust.
He calls himself a “samurai”, but the dubious relations he maintains, the secrecy which he always cherishes, the immorality of the defamation campaigns he peddles, all surely place his claims in doubt.
Translation mine.
Somehow, I can’t imagine someone like Jota-Jota doing anything for anyone just out of the goodness of his heart…mainly because, as his own “anti-ethical” statements show, he hasn’t got a heart, let alone any goodness in it. So of course I find it hard to believe that a bunch of Colombian drug lords would ask him to ferry a few documents to Juan Manuel Santos’s office, in exchange for nothing. Samurai kitsch doesn’t come cheap, and neither does Miami real estate. $12 million US, spread out over three years and at least as many drug barons, sounds about right.
The funny part is that this grand (and costly) scheme, like everything else Jota-Jota has done, has basically blown up all over him like a beached dead whale. As the informant who turned himself over to the US government has testified, Santos did nothing about the proposal, other than maybe use it to line the seat of his chair. One drug runner after another was getting caught, and nothing was guaranteed…least of all protection from extradition to the US. Meaning that even as a simple messenger boy, if we are to take Jota-Jota at his untrustworthy word, the Samurai of Silliness is an epic failure.
And an expensive one, too.
UPDATE: The Correo del Orinoco reports that Jota-Jota is stepping down as Santos’ campaign manager, “voluntarily”, with a sanctimonious little speech about the “enemies of peace” using him “as an instrument” against the credibility of Santos. Whatever could it mean? Ha, ha.
