REVEALED: CHAVEZ ROLE IN COCAINE TRAIL TO EUROPE

The Guerrilla Group FARC Has Long Been Suspected Of Running The
Colombian Cocaine Industry. But How Does It Move The Drug So Readily
Out Of The Country In A Special Investigation, John Carlin In
Venezuela Reports On The Remarkable Collusion Between Colombia's
Rebels And Its Neighbour's Armed Forces

Some fighters desert from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC) because they feel betrayed by the leadership, demoralised by a
sense that the socialist ideals that first informed the guerrilla
group have been replaced by the savage capitalism of drug trafficking.
Others leave to be with their families. Still others leave because
they begin to think that, if they do not, they will die. Such is the
case of Rafael, who deserted last September after 18 months operating
in a FARC base inside Venezuela, with which Colombia shares a long
border. The logic of Rafael's decision seems, at first, perverse. He
is back in Colombia today where, as a guerrilla deserter, he will live
for the rest of his days under permanent threat of assassination by
his former comrades. Venezuela, on the other hand, ought to have been
a safe place to be a FARC guerrilla. President Hugo Chavez has
publicly given FARC his political support and the Colombian army seems
unlikely to succumb to the temptation to cross the border in violation
of international law.

'All this is true,' says Rafael. 'The Colombian army doesn't cross the
border and the guerrillas have a non-aggression pact with the
Venezuelan military. The Venezuelan government lets FARC operate
freely because they share the same left-wing, Bolivarian ideals, and
because FARC bribes their people.'

Then what did he run away from? 'From a greater risk than the one I
run now: from the daily battles with other guerrilla groups to see who
controls the cocaine-trafficking routes. There is a lot of money at
stake in control of the border where the drugs come in from Colombia.
The safest route to transport cocaine to Europe is via Venezuela.'

Rafael is one of 2,400 guerrillas who deserted FARC last year. He is
one of four I spoke to, all of whom had grown despondent about a
purportedly left-wing revolutionary movement whose power and influence
rests less on its political legitimacy and more on the benefits of
having become the world's biggest kidnapping organisation and the
world's leading traffickers in cocaine.

FARC has come a long way from its leftist revolutionary roots and is
now commonly referred to in Colombia and elsewhere as
'narco-guerrillas'. Pushed out to the border areas, it has been
rendered increasingly irrelevant politically and militarily due to the
combined efforts of Colombia's centre-right President, Alvaro Uribe,
and his principal backers, the United States, whose Plan Colombia,
devised under the presidency of Bill Clinton, has pumped hundreds of
millions of dollars into the Colombian military and police. A large
part of Plan Colombia is designed to eradicate the vast coca
plantations cultivated and maintained by FARC and other Colombian groups.

However, the impact on FARC has been ambiguous: its chances of
launching a left-wing insurrection in the manner of Nicaragua's
Sandinistas in 1979 are nil, but then they probably always were; yet
it looks capable of surviving indefinitely as an armed force as a
result of the income from its kidnapping, extortion and cocaine interests.

Helping it to survive, and prosper, is its friend and neighbour Hugo
Chavez. The Venezuelan President sought to extract some international
credit from the role he played as mediator in the release last month
in Venezuelan territory of two kidnapped women, friends of Ingrid
Betancourt, a French citizen and former Colombian presidential
candidate held by Farc for six years. But Chavez has not denounced
FARC for holding Betancourt and 43 other 'political' hostages.

I spoke at length to Rafael (not his real name) and three other FARC
deserters about the links between the guerrilla group and Chavez's
Venezuela, in particular their co-operation in the drug business. All
four have handed themselves in to the Colombian government in recent
months under an official programme to help former guerrillas adapt
back to civilian life.

I also spoke to high-level security, intelligence and diplomatic
sources from five countries, some of them face to face in Colombia and
London, some of them by phone. All of them insisted on speaking off
the record, either for political or safety reasons, both of which
converge in FARC, the oldest functioning guerrilla organisation in the
world and one that is richer, more numerous and better armed than any
other single Colombian drug cartel and is classified as 'terrorist' by
the European Union and the US.

All the sources I reached agreed that powerful elements within the
Venezuelan state apparatus have forged a strong working relationship
with FARC. They told me that FARC and Venezuelan state officials
operated actively together on the ground, where military and
drug-trafficking activities coincide. But the relationship becomes
more passive, they said, less actively involved, the higher up the
Venezuelan government you go. No source I spoke to accused Chavez
himself of having a direct role in Colombia's giant drug-trafficking
business. Yet the same people I interviewed struggled to believe that
Chavez was not aware of the collusion between his armed forces and the
leadership of FARC, as they also found it difficult to imagine that he
has no knowledge of the degree to which FARC is involved in the
cocaine trade.

I made various attempts to extract an official response to these
allegations from the Venezuelan government. In the end Foreign
Minister Nicolas Maduro made a public pronouncement in Uruguay in
which he said, without addressing the substance of the allegations,
that they were part of a 'racist' and 'colonialist' campaign against
Venezuela by the centre-left Spanish newspaper El Pais, where I
originally wrote about FARC and the Venezuelan connection.

What no one disputes, however, is that Chavez is a political ally of
FARC (last month he called on the EU and US to stop labelling its
members 'terrorists') or that for many years FARC has used Venezuelan
territory as a refuge. A less uncontroversial claim, made by all the
sources to whom I spoke (the four disaffected guerrillas included), is
that if it were not for cocaine, the fuel that feeds the Colombian
war, Farc would long ago have disbanded.

The varied testimonies I have heard reveal that the co-operation
between Venezuela and the guerrillas in transporting cocaine by land,
air and sea is both extensive and systematic. Venezuela is also
supplying arms to the guerrillas, offering them the protection of
their armed forces in the field, and providing them with legal
immunity de facto as they go about their giant illegal business.

Thirty per cent of the 600 tons of cocaine smuggled from Colombia each
year goes through Venezuela. Most of that 30 per cent ends up in
Europe, with Spain and Portugal being the principal ports of entry.
The drug's value on European streets is some UKP7.5bn a year.

The infrastructure that Venezuela provides for the cocaine business
has expanded dramatically over the past five years of Chavez's
presidency, according to intelligence sources. Chavez's decision to
expel the US Drug Enforcement Administration from his country in 2005
was celebrated both by FARC and drug lords in the conventional cartels
with whom they sometimes work. According to Luis Hernando Gomez
Bustamante, a Colombian kingpin caught by the police last February,
'Venezuela is the temple of drug trafficking.'

A European diplomat with many years of experience in Latin America
echoed this view. 'The so-called anti-imperialist, socialist and
Bolivarian nation that Chavez says he wants to create is en route to
becoming a narco-state in the same way that FARC members have turned
themselves into narco-guerrillas. Perhaps Chavez does not realise it
but, unchecked, this phenomenon will corrode Venezuela like a cancer.'

The deserters I interviewed said that not only did the Venezuelan
authorities provide armed protection to at least four permanent
guerrilla camps inside their country, they turned a blind eye to
bomb-making factories and bomber training programmes going on inside
FARC camps. Rafael - tall and lithe, with the sculptured facial
features of the classic Latin American 'guerrillero' - said he was
trained in Venezuela to participate in a series of bomb attacks in
Bogota, Colombia's capital.

Co-operation between the Colombian guerrillas and the Venezuelan
government extended, Rafael said, to the sale of arms by Chavez's
military to FARC; to the supply of Venezuelan ID cards to regular
guerrilla fighters and of Venezuelan passports to the guerrilla
leaders so they were able to travel to Cuba and Europe; and also to a
reciprocal understanding whereby Farc gave military training to the
Bolivarian Forces of Liberation, a peculiar paramilitary group created
by the Chavez government purportedly for the purpose of defending the
motherland in case of American invasion.

Chavez's contacts with FARC are conducted via one of the members of
the organisation's
leadership, Ivan Marquez, who also has a farm in Venezuela and who
communicates with the
President via senior officials of the Venezuelan intelligence
service. As a FARC
deserter who had filled a senior position in the propaganda
department said: 'FARC
shares three basic Bolivarian principles with Chavez: Latin American unity; the
anti-imperialist struggle; and national sovereignty. These
ideological positions lead
them to converge on the tactical terrain.'

The tactical benefits of this Bolivarian (after the 19th-century Latin
American liberator, Simon Bolivar) solidarity reach their maximum
expression in the multinational cocaine industry. Different methods
exist to transport the drug from Colombia to Europe, but what they all
have in common is the participation, by omission or commission, of the
Venezuelan authorities.

The most direct route is the aerial one. Small planes take off from
remote jungle strips in Colombia and land in Venezuelan airfields.
Then there are two options, according to intelligence sources. Either
the same light planes continue on to Haiti or the Dominican Republic
(the US government says that since 2006 its radar network has detected
an increase from three to 15 in the number of 'suspicious flights' a
week out of Venezuela); or the cocaine is loaded on to large planes
that fly directly to countries in West Africa such as Guinea-Bissau or
Ghana, from where it continues by sea to Portugal or the north-western
Spanish province of Galicia, the entry points to the EU Schengen zone.

A less cumbersome traditional method for getting the drugs to Europe
in small quantities is via passengers on international commercial
flights - 'mules', as they call them in Colombia. One of the guerrilla
deserters I spoke to, Marcelo, said he had taken part in 'eight or
nine' missions of this type over 12 months. 'Operating inside
Venezuela is the easiest thing in the world,' he said. 'FARC
guerrillas are in there completely and the National Guard, the army
and other Venezuelans in official positions offer them their services,
in exchange for money. There are never shoot-outs between FARC and the
guardia or army.'

Rafael said he took part in operations on a bigger scale, their final
objective being to transport the cocaine by sea from Venezuelan ports
on the Caribbean Sea. His rank in FARC was higher than Marcelo's and
he had access to more confidential information. 'You receive the
merchandise on the border, brought in by lorry,' he said. 'When the
vehicle arrives the National Guard is waiting, already alerted to the
fact that it was on its way. They have already been paid a bribe up
front, so that the lorry can cross into Venezuela without problems.

'Sometimes they provide us with an escort for the next phase, which
involves me and other comrades getting on to the lorry, or into a car
that will drive along with it. We then make the 16-hour trip to Puerto
Cabello, which is on the coast, west of Caracas. There the lorry is
driven into a big warehouse controlled jointly by Venezuelan locals
and by FARC, which is in charge of security. Members of the Venezuelan
navy take care of customs matters and the safe departure of the
vessels. They are alive to all that is going on and they facilitate
everything FARC does.'

Rafael described a similar routine with drug operations involving the
port of Maracaibo which, according to police sources, is 'a kind of
paradise' for drug traffickers. Among whom - until last week when he
was gunned down by a rival cartel in a Venezuelan town near the
Colombian border - was one of the 'capos' most wanted internationally,
a Colombian called Wilber Varela, but better known as 'Jabon', which
means 'soap'. 'Varela and others like him set themselves up in
stunning homes and buy bankrupt businesses and large tracts of land,
converting themselves almost overnight into personages of great value
to the local economy,' a police source said. 'Venezuela offers a
perfect life insurance scheme for these criminals.'

This 'tactical' convergence between the Venezuelan armed forces and
FARC extends to the military terrain. To the point that, according to
one especially high-placed intelligence source I spoke to, the
National Guard has control posts placed around the guerrilla camps.
What for? 'To give them protection, which tells us that knowledge of
the tight links between the soldiers on the ground and FARC reaches up
to the highest decision-making levels of the Venezuelan military.'

Rafael told how he had travelled once by car with Captain Pedro
Mendoza of the National Guard to a military base outside Caracas
called Fuerte Tiuna. He entered with the captain, who handed him eight
rifles. They then returned to the border with the rifles in the boot
of the car.

Rafael said that members of the National Guard also supplied FARC with
hand grenades, grenade-launchers and explosive material for bombs made
out of a petrol-based substance called C-4.

An intelligence source confirmed that these small movements of arms
occurred on a large scale. 'What we see is the drugs going from
Colombia to Venezuela and the arms from Venezuela to Colombia. The
arms move in a small but constant flow: 5,000 bullets, six rifles.
It's very hard to detect because there are lots of small networks,
very well co-ordinated, all of them by specialists in FARC.'

Rafael worked directly with these specialists, both in the arms and
the drugs business, until he decided the time had come to change his
life. 'In June and July I had received courses in making bombs
alongside elements of Chavez's militias, the FBL. We learnt, there in
a camp in Venezuela, how to put together different types of landmines
and how to make bombs. They also taught us how to detonate bombs in a
controlled fashion using mobile phones.'

They were training him, he said, for a mission in Bogota. 'They gave
us photos of our targets. We were going to work alongside two Farc
groups based in the capital. The plan was to set off bombs, but as the
date dawned I began to reflect that I could not continue this way.
First, because of the danger from the military engagements we had with
the ELN [another formerly left-wing guerrilla group] on the border
over control of the drug routes and, second, because it now seemed to
me there was a very real risk of getting caught and I believed I had
already spent enough years in jail for the FARC cause. It was also
highly possible that the security forces in Bogota would kill me. That
was why at the end of August I ran away and in September I handed myself in.'

A European diplomat who is well informed on the drug-trafficking
business generally, and who is familiar with Rafael's allegations,
made a comparison between the activities of FARC in Venezuela and
hypothetically similar activities involving Eta in Spain.

'Imagine if Eta had a bomb-making school in Portugal inside camps
protected by the Portuguese police, and that they planned to set off
these bombs in Madrid; imagine that the Portuguese authorities
furnished Eta with weapons in exchange for money obtained from the
sales of drugs, in which the Portuguese authorities were also involved
up to their necks: it would be a scandal of enormous proportions.
Well, that, on a very big scale, is what the Venezuelan government is
allowing to happen right now.'

'The truth,' one senior police source said, 'is that if Venezuela were
to make a minimal effort to collaborate with the international
community the difference it would make would be huge. We could easily
capture two tons of cocaine a month more if they were just to turn up
their police work one notch. They don't do it because the place is so
corrupt but also, and this is the core reason, because of this
"anti-imperialist" stand they take. "If this screws the imperialists,"
they think, "then how can we possibly help them?" The key to it all is
a question of political will. And they don't have any.'

A similar logic applies, according to the highest-placed intelligence source I
interviewed, regarding Farc's other speciality, kidnappings. 'If Hugo
Chavez wanted it,
he could force FARC to free Ingrid Betancourt tomorrow morning. He
tells FARC: "You hand
her over or it's game over in Venezuela for you." The dependence of Farc on the
Venezuelans is so enormous that they could not afford to say no.'

A Nation At War

. Colombia, the centre of the world's cocaine trade, has endured civil
war for decades between left-wing rebels with roots in the peasant
majority and right-wing paramilitaries with links to Spanish colonial
landowners.

. Manuel 'Sureshot' Marulanda named his guerrilla band the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia in 1966.

. FARC is thought to have about 800 hostages. The most high-profile is
Ingrid Betancourt, 45, held since 2002.

. Every FARC member takes a vow to fight for 'social justice' in
Colombia.

. About a third of FARC guerrillas are thought to be
women.

. Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez is pushing for 'Bolivarian
socialism', while Colombian President Alvaro Uribe is a free-market
conservative.