U.S. DRUG CZAR POINTS FINGER AT CHAVEZ

In Unusually Harsh Criticism of the Venezuelan President, John P.
Walters Blames Lack of Enforcement for an Increase in Drug Shipments.

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA -- White House drug czar John P. Walters charged
Sunday that the government of President Hugo Chavez was facilitating
the rising flow of drugs from his nation to Europe and North America
through a lack of enforcement.

The public criticism by Walters, who heads the Office of National
Drug Control Policy, was unusually harsh for the Bush administration,
which has tried to steer clear of provoking the fiery Venezuelan leader.

With some exceptions, State Department and counter-narcotics
officials typically have made anonymous remarks disparaging
Venezuela's weak drug interdiction program.

"Where are the big seizures, where are the big arrests of individuals
who are at least logistical coordinators? When it's being launched
from controlled airports and seaports, where are the arrests of
corrupt officials? At some point here, this is tantamount to
collusion," Walters said in an interview.

In September, the U.S. government said Venezuela's was one of two
governments that had failed to take sufficient counter-narcotics
actions. The Venezuela Information Office, a Washington-based agency
funded by the Chavez government, said the accusations were misleading
and ignored the country's "history of cooperating" with international agencies.

Complaints about Venezuelan counter-narcotics operations have risen
since August 2005, when Chavez ordered a halt to all cooperation with
the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration office in Caracas, the
Venezuelan capital. Since then, seizures have fallen, and drug
shipments by aircraft and shipping containers have skyrocketed, U.S.
officials have said.

Then-U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield said in 2006 that the amount
of drugs flowing through Venezuela had quintupled in five years.

In December, U.S. officials in Caracas said as many as 100 illicit
airstrips, stretching from Tachira state in western Venezuela to
Bolivar state in the east, were used to transport cocaine. The
officials complained that the Chavez government had brought no major
convictions of traffickers in several years.

Walters said the volume of Colombian cocaine moving through
Venezuela, believed to represent at least one-third of Colombia's
production, continues to increase with no discernible effort by
Chavez government to impede it. He provided no statistics to back up
his assertion.

Signs of increasing shipments are reflected in rising drug busts in
Europe, especially in Spain and Portugal, Walters said.

The European Union last year opened a command center in Lisbon to
direct military interdiction efforts, similar to the Pentagon's Joint
Interagency Task Force South command center in Key West.

This month, Portuguese police announced that they had found nearly 10
tons of cocaine in a shipping container that had arrived from Venezuela.

"On the destination side of this flow, there has been action, but on
the departure side of the flow, Chavez has not responded, not even in
the minimal way," Walters said.