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LATIN AMERICA |
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Venezuela Announces Capture of Colombian
Militia Chief
CARACAS – Venezuelan authorities reported
Saturday the capture of an alleged Colombian
female paramilitary chief and said her
presence in the country is further
“evidence” of the “continued aggressions” of
Colombia against the government of Hugo
Chavez.
Colombian citizen Magaly Janeth Moreno Vega,
alias “Perla,” was captured Thursday by the
Cicpc scientific and investigative police
force in the city of Maracaibo near the
Colombian border, Interior Minister Tarek El
Aissami said.
In a statement on state television, the
minister said that Moreno Vega is wanted by
Interpol of Colombia for the crime of
homicide, and is linked to a Colombian
investigation on the suspected penetration
of paramilitaries in the government of
Alvaro Uribe.
“This detention forms part of the evidence
of the escalating violence promoted by the
Colombian government against our people and
our government,” El Aissami said.
He said that Venezuelan authorities are
interrogating the suspected Colombian
paramilitary chief and are “processing some
highly important information” in their
possession.
“And we are determining the possible
committing of crimes” punishable under
Venezuelan law, the minister said, without
specifying when the alleged paramilitary
will be deported to Colombia.
He quoted information from the Colombian
press saying that Moreno Vega was the
“assistant and confidante of ex-Colombian
Attorney General Luis Camilo Osorio, the
current Colombian ambassador to Mexico.”
“That is to say, a paramilitary chief was
the confidante of the attorney
general...which shows the institutional and
moral decay of the Alvaro Uribe government,
and that (Colombian) institutions survive
with the support of drug mafias and
paramilitaries,” El Aissami said.
Meanwhile the Colombian government on
Saturday thanked Venezuelan authorities for
the detention of “Perla,” an ex-official of
the Cucuta prosecutor’s office, who passed
information to paramilitary groups, was
subsequently tried and sentenced but managed
to escape in 2005.
Colombian Defense Minister Gabriel Silva
also said that in Caracas, Moreno is being
described as a “person who (supposedly) has
relations with paramilitary groups and is
considered a person who proves the presence
of paramilitaries in Venezuela.”
All that, Silva said, “is false,” adding
that Magaly Janeth Moreno Vega “is a
criminal” suspected of “conspiracy to commit
crime and possible homicides,” who was
“tried in Colombia in 2005 and escaped” from
the country.
“Interpol has issued an arrest warrant for
Moreno,” the minister said.
Silva repeated that “we’re very pleased to
see how, for the first time in many years,
Venezuela is going ahead and capturing
Colombian criminals inside its borders.”
While Venezuela, like Uribe’s critics in
Colombia, accuses Uribe of ties to
paramilitary forces, Bogota says Venezuela
has been harboring and even providing
weapons to leftist guerrillas that have
fought a decades-old struggle against a
succession of Colombian governments.
A peace process of the AUC paramilitary
association with the government of President
Alvaro Uribe led to the demobilization of
some 31,000 combatants between 2003-2006. In
recent years, however, new paramilitary
groups have been reported that are said to
be made up of those who had demobilized.
Venezuela and Colombia, which share a
2,219-kilometer (1,379-mile) border, are
going through a new period of tension in
their bilateral relations as a result of the
military pact between Bogota and Washington
allowing U.S. soldiers the use of seven
Colombian bases.
That military accord is seen by Chavez as a
threat to this leftist political program and
as a platform from which to prepare an
imperialist “aggression” against Venezuela.
Separately, Chavez said Friday that the
destruction of two “illegal” footbridges on
the Colombian border are part of the
“routine” military actions to safeguard an
area devastated by “drug traffickers and
paramilitaries” from the neighboring
country.
He also slammed a supposed “media operation”
rolled out “from Colombia” with the presumed
support of the big international media that
present his government “as the aggressor,”
when, he said, it’s just the opposite.
“Right now in Europe the Europeans must
think that Chavez ordered a bridge blown up
like the Brooklyn Bridge or the Golden Gate”
in the U.S. cities of New York and San
Francisco, Chavez told delegates of leftist
parties meeting in Caracas.
The structures demolished “weren’t bridges,
they were some illegal footbridges,
handmade,” the likes of which Venezuela has
been “taking down, neutralizing, destroying
for years,” the Venezuelan president said. |
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