Venezuelan authorities sift through the effects found in a Colombian paramilitary camp within Venezuelan territory. It’s yet more evidence of crimes that have been terrorizing Venezuelans from the border regions all the way to Caracas, and significant enough that a high-ranking member of the federal government showed up to clarify to the media exactly what it was all about:
Yesterday afternoon, the Venezuelan vice-president, Jorge Arreaza, toured the “La Invasión” zone near the Venezuela-Colombia border, where the Venezuelan federal criminal-investigative police, the CICPC, had found a brothel and a centre for extortion and kidnappings, used by paramilitary groups.
“Who knows what they did to young Venezuelan or Colombian women, to persons they kidnapped, how many families suffered with those paramilitary groups putting people in this cellar to make them suffer by way of extortion,” Arreaza said.
Arreaza also commented that in said house they had found photographs of various houses in the El Rosario sector of Colombia, as well as an agenda containing amounts, in [Venezuelan] bolivares, for “services” already paid.
He also announced the finding of a metal building which functioned as an explosives factory.
“We found a shack which was used as an explosives factory. Also, there were paramilitary elements such as balaclavas, masks, gloves, computers, cash money, petrochemical materials, and uniforms of groups called the Red Scorpions and Anti-Guerrillas, among other things.”
“These are aspects of the Colombian internal conflict, which have nothing to do with Venezuelan reality. They are Colombian gangs and problems which have been exported to Venezuela, a peaceful territory which should not have been the object of these menaces.”
Finally, Arreaza said that “paramilitarism will not be able to take place in Venezuelan territory, no matter how much the right-wing is against the decisions the government takes in favor of the people.”
Traslation mine.
So it would appear that Colombian paramilitaries are not only being used by the opposition to terrorize the people of Venezuela and artificially inflate the crime rates (no doubt in an effort to make the Bolivarian government look ineffective, which it certainly has NOT been); they’re also human traffickers and sex slavers, as the brothel would indicate. And they’ve been carting women from at least two countries there, as well as other kidnap-extortion victims.
And this is just one finding among several, all indicating that paramilitarism — product of one Álvaro Uribe Vélez, ex-president of Colombia and rabid fascist — has been playing an active role in propping up the increasingly farcical Venezuelan opposition. The finding of the facemasks, one might say, is more than a little symbolic, as the masks of the oppos keep falling off their faces at the most inopportune moments.
