Chavez accused of ties to terrorists
By Nicholas Kralev
05/17/06 "Washington
Times" -- -- Venezuela has allowed its
intelligence service to become a clone of Cuba's while it
shelters groups with ties to Middle East terrorists and allows
weapons from its official stockpiles to reach Colombian
guerrillas, a senior U.S. official said yesterday.
Those were the principal reasons why the Bush administration
blacklisted Venezuela on Monday, saying it has failed to fully
cooperate on counterterrorism, Thomas A. Shannon, assistant
secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, told editors
and reporters at The Washington Times.
"It's our hope now that we've gotten their attention," he said
of the Venezuelans, who are banned from purchasing U.S. weapons
because of the listing. "We hope that we are going to be in a
position where we can talk with them and look for how we can
improve [our] cooperation."
An immediate impact of the decision is that Venezuela will be
unable to buy spare parts from the United States to maintain its
aging fleet of U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets. A senior military
adviser to President Hugo Chavez said yesterday that Venezuela
might now sell the planes to another country, possibly Iran.
It was not clear what Iran might do with the planes, because it
is also subject to U.S. sanctions.
The United States stopped selling Venezuela sensitive upgrades
for the F-16s even before the latest action, which Mr. Shannon
described as "regrettable."
"This is actually an issue we've been wrestling with for quite
some time," Mr. Shannon said. "We did this with a lot of
reluctance, because we really want to find a way to work with
them and improve our cooperation, but they are just unprepared
and unwilling."
The U.S. official said that in dealing with Mr. Chavez, "the
purpose is not just to ignore him," he said. "The purpose is not
to allow him to define the terms of the confrontation and to
make sure that as we engage with him, we are not doing so in a
way that harms our larger interests. "It would be a mistake for
U.S. foreign policy in the region to overly concentrate on the
guy," Mr. Shannon said. "If we allow ourselves to get trapped in
the kind of confrontation that he wants to have with us, it
lessens our influence with others in the region."
He said the administration could no longer certify that
Venezuela was cooperating on counterterrorism because of its
close ties with Cuba and Iran, both of which Washington
considers state sponsors of terrorism.
"Cuban intelligence has effectively cloned itself inside
Venezuelan intelligence to the point that [our] ability to
cooperate and have a relationship with Venezuela on the
intelligence side is very difficult," Mr. Shannon said.
"We are worried about the kind of relationship [Mr. Chavez]
wants to have with Iran on the intelligence side," he added. Mr.
Shannon, a career diplomat serving in a post usually held by a
political appointee, also expressed concern about "groups and
individuals" in Venezuela with "links to terrorist organizations
in the Middle East."
He declined to be more specific, but U.S. military officials
have in the past noted the presence in Latin America of groups
linked to Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based terrorist organization.
In addition, he said, "the western part of Venezuela has always
been a wild place," and members of Colombian guerrilla groups
like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia [FARC] and the
National Liberation Army [ELN] have "moved with a certain amount
of ease." "But over time, we've seen what appears to be a more
structured relationship," he said. "There appears to be more
movement of weapons across the frontier into Colombia, and some
of it comes from official Venezuelan stockpiles, and it almost
certainly involves the participation of Venezuelan officials,
either corrupted or not."
Venezuelan Foreign Minister Ali Rodriguez accused the Bush
administration yesterday of climbing to "new heights of cynicism
and shamelessness" with its Monday decision on arms sales
"Behind its despicable accusations is a useless campaign of
shame designed to isolate Venezuela, destabilize its democratic
government and prepare the political conditions for an attack,"
Mr. Rodriguez said.
Mr. Shannon, speaking broadly about Mr. Chavez's influence in
the region, said he seems popular at the moment because he is
"awash" in oil money.
Copyright © 2006 News World Communications, Inc. All rights
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