Latin America and all aspects

[buglerbilly]

New catch-all thread seeing as I believe this to be a growing "problem area"..........

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

Changes in War Against Latin America's Illicit Trafficking

Posted by David A. Fulghum at 4/27/2010 5:33 PM CDT

Problems in Latin America are changing, but not going away.

Hezbollah and the Qods force are raising funds and preaching extremism. Iran has almost doubled its embassies in the region. The war in Afghanistan is keeping U.S. intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) assets in Southwest Asia. Drug-running submarines are being built in the jungle. A $5 billion deal is bringing modern, assault-rifle production to Venezuela and putting the newest, Russian-made shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles where they could proliferate to terrorist groups like FARC and Shining Light. And Mexican drug gangs are moving into Central American.

First on the list of regional worries for the U.S. is ISR shortfalls.

“The biggest concern I have is not a military threat [but rather] illicit trafficking in drugs, people, weapons and bulk cash,” says U.S. Air Force Gen. Douglas M. Fraser, chief of Southern Command. “I call it an enterprise because it involves transit, supply, demand and associated financing.”

Right now, the U.S. focuses on the 80% of illicit traffic that moves on water and includes the use of fast boats and semi-submersibles. That effort interdicts or disrupts about 25% of the cocaine traffic in the Easter Pacific. What the U.S. doesn’t have is enough of the broad-area, persistent ISR cuing they need to find hard-to-detect ships.

A semi-submersible vessel has a low profile in the water. It’s 60-70-ft. long, has a 5,000-mi. range, carries 4-10 tons of cocaine, is run by a four-man crew and is built in the jungle of fiberglass and metal.

“We’ve seen them travel from the western coast of Columbia, around the Galapagos Islands and up toward Central America,” he says. “They travel at night and remain stationary during the day. The traffickers come ashore on the isthmus [of Panama] and transit land routes into Mexico.”

In 2008 76 semi-submersibles were detected or disrupted. Last year it was 52.

“We have a captured semi-submersible that we tow behind a ship,” Faser says. “We had a pinpoint position and a helicopter crew that knew where it was. They still flew over the top of it without seeing it. The [solution] is finding where the semi-submersibles are built so that we can get them before they set sail and are even harder to find.”

But that is not easy either. In particular, Southern Command needs a capability that can look through foliage because of the triple-canopy jungle. In addition to finding metal objects under trees, it also is valuable in finding trails, cocaine laboratories and traffic patterns. A foliage penetration radar has been under test and development by the Army for a decade. But it appears the breakthrough in capability is the use of multi-spectral sensors that use more of the spectrum to detect what the human eye cannot.

“The Army right now has an experimental capability that is on a vertical lift unmanned air vehicle –the A-160 [Hummingbird built by Boeing] – in a pod,” Fraser says. “[However,] A large portion of the ISR capability is heading to Afghanistan, so it does limit what we get. So we are working with the Border Patrol and P-3s and all the capacities we can get to fill that void. There is no UAV unit specifically focused on SouthCom.”

Iran is not seen as a military threat in Latin America, but its influence is growing from a commercial and diplomatic standpoint. The number of Iranian embassies has increased to 12 from 7 since 2007.

“Our concern is [Iran’s] connection to Hezbollah and Hamas that do have organizations within Latin America that provide financial and logistics support for parent organizations in the Middle East.”

Meanwhile, Russia is helping Venezuela modernize its military with a $5 billion sale. U.S. worries focus on the large number of small arms included in the package.

“That’s 100,000 AK-103s [AK-74M assault rifles chambered for NATO 7.62mm ammunition] plus a factory they are building with Russia that can produce upwards of 25,000 more each year,” Fraser says. “My concern there it the potential for proliferation to Farc and others. [Of equal concern is the] Igla S [also known as the SA-24 shoulder-fired SAM]. They are purchasing up to 2,400.

“I’m concerned that the [SA-26 SAMs] could get in the hands of FARC and illicit traffickers, he says. “You can look at what the Colombians have been able to do with UAVs in finding and prosecuting the FARC. The missiles would provide [FARC] with a defensive capability against reconnaissance.”

Fraser described an unsettling future.

“[Hugo Chavez] has remained in power and continues to solidify his position. I see the increasing presence of Iran.

nother ominous sign is that Mexican drug gangs are starting to move into Central America. To counter-balance that, various partner countries and agencies are working out plans to share information including the useful skill of change detection analyses.

“The shortfall is a broad area signals intelligence and electro-optical surveillance capability,” Fraser says. “We don’t have persistence over broad areas.”

[buglerbilly]

Venezuela's Hugo Chavez allegedly helped Colombian, Spanish militants forge ties


Chávez (Manuel Diaz - AP)

By Juan Forero
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 20, 2010

MACHIQUES, VENEZUELA -- For two years, Colombian officials have accused Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez of providing arms and sanctuary to Marxist rebels intent on toppling Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, Washington's closest ally in a turbulent region.

Now, based on documents and witness testimony, Chávez is facing fresh accusations that his government has gone well beyond assisting the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Documents seized from two subversive groups, along with information provided by former Colombian guerrillas, suggest that Venezuela facilitated training sessions here between the FARC and ETA, a separatist group in Spain that uses assassinations and bombings in its effort to win independence for the northern Basque region.

The evidence led Judge Eloy Velasco of the National Court in Madrid to level charges of terrorism and conspiracy to commit murder in March against a Chávez government official, Arturo Cubillas, and a dozen members of the FARC and ETA. Spanish authorities want Venezuela to extradite those accused, but so far the Chávez government has not responded to Velasco's international warrant.

The latest revelations, largely based on information collected by Spanish investigators in Colombia, Venezuela and France, prompted Arturo Valenzuela, the State Department's assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs, to declare in a congressional hearing in March that the Obama administration is "extremely concerned" by the allegations.

With Chávez hamstrung by harsh economic conditions, some in the U.S. Congress worry that the Venezuelan president could increasingly radicalize and forge closer links with subversive organizations or nations such as Iran, Sudan and Belarus.

"As he gets more bogged down domestically by the natural consequences of capricious rule, we are likely to see more troubling relationships," Carl Meacham, senior aide to Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said by phone from Washington.

Chávez strikes back

The new spotlight on Venezuela's alleged links to subversives has been so uncomfortable to Chávez that he has warned that Spain's multibillion-dollar investments here could suffer. Critics in Venezuela have also been intimidated for speaking out about the FARC or ETA.

When Oswaldo Álvarez Paz, an opposition figure here, publicly expressed support for Velasco's investigation in a television interview, he was arrested and charged with spreading false information.

"This government does not endorse nor support any terrorist group," Chávez said in March soon after Velasco's indictment. "We have nothing to explain to anyone."

Chávez critics have long asserted that his government could be aiding groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. But this is the first time judicial authorities outside Colombia have leveled accusations that link Venezuela's government with terrorist groups.

"There is nothing like this in the world, showing support for organizations that are declared terrorist groups," said Gustavo de Arístegui, a Spanish commentator and author of the book "Against the West," which details the anti-Western stand of Chávez and his allies, including Cuba's Fidel Castro and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Colombian authorities who have sifted through documents seized from three rebel commanders in 2008 and 2009 said they discovered that ETA operatives met with FARC guerrillas in rural camps from 2003 to 2008. Those camps were located outside Machiques, this cattle-raising town in Venezuela's northwestern Zulia state, as well as farther south in sparsely populated Apure state, according to Colombian government documents.

Colombian security service officials say ETA members taught bombmaking techniques to the explosives experts of at least five FARC units. Velasco, in his complaint, said that among those who facilitated the meetings in Venezuela was Cubillas, a Basque exile who had arrived in the country in 1989 and was absorbed by a small Basque community in Caracas. Cubillas, until recently an official in the state's National Land Institute, could not be reached for comment.

Ex-guerrillas speak

Two former FARC guerrillas who disarmed and now live freely in Colombia said in interviews that they saw ETA operatives in FARC camps outside Machiques in 2008.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity because they fear retribution for having cooperated with Colombian authorities, the former rebels described how Venezuelan military officers accompanied ETA operatives to the camps. The training, the rebels said, included how to build rockets and car bombs.

"They would talk about how they use them in Spain -- how they hid them under the cushions in cars," the older rebel, who is 23, said of the ETA explosives.

Colombian authorities said the FARC has in recent years begun activating car bombs with cellphones, a tactic long perfected by ETA. Authorities say they are also increasingly seeing remote-controlled land mines.

"The ramifications of this happening in territory we do not control is that the FARC increased its capacity to get new technology and modernize," said a high-ranking security services official in Colombia.

ETA benefited by taking advantage of Venezuela's isolated jungle camps to test weapons that could not be fired in Spain, said Florencio Domínguez, an expert on ETA in Bilbao, Spain. "They develop new tactics, new mechanisms, share experiences -- that's what ETA's terrorism entails, and it threatens the security of Spanish citizens," Domínguez said.

Velasco's criminal complaint also alleges that the FARC asked ETA to assassinate prominent Colombians in Spain. No one was killed, but the targets included President Uribe and Antanas Mockus, a former Bogota mayor now running for president in Colombia.

Colombian and Spanish authorities say that among those ETA closely tracked in Spain was former Colombian president Andrés Pastrana, who lived in Madrid for more than three years after he left office in 2002.

"President Chávez needs to give us an explanation of what happened," said Pastrana, who now lives in Bogota. "I left Colombia because of security, and now I learn that I was a target of ETA."

[buglerbilly]

Chavez’s influence wanes in Latin America

By Juan Forero, Wednesday, May 18, 10:29 AM

IPOJUCA, Brazil — Here on Brazil’s northeast coast, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez dreamed of building an oil refinery and naming it after a Brazilian adventurer who had fought for Venezuela’s independence. The joint venture with Brazil, he said in trips here, would help unify Latin America against his adversary, the United States.

The $15 billion refinery is now two years away from completion, but with little input from Venezuela or its mercurial president, who for years backed projects regionwide in his drive to make Venezuela the vanguard of a new era in Latin America.

Indeed, these days Chavez’s influence is waning across the region as Venezuela’s oil-powered economy has gone bust and concerns have been raised about his governing style, which includes the jailing of opponents.

The reversal, ever more pronounced since 2009 when Venezuela’s economy began to founder, has been startling compared with the days when Chavez jetted around South America giving fiery anti-American speeches and inaugurating works funded with petrodollars.

“He’s not flying high like he used to even two years ago,” said Luiz Felipe Lampreia, a former Brazilian foreign minister. “I think he’s losing his capacity to influence people and to lead, even with his own friends.”

Ever so quietly, some of the Venezuelan populist’s biggest projects have been abandoned or mothballed, or have yet to take flight, including a pipeline from Venezuela to Argentina, a South American development bank, housing, highways and a continental investment fund.

It is unclear exactly why some projects have been discarded. Venezuelan government spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment.

But Chavez’s retreat in the region has come as Venezuela’s economy, dampened by dwindling oil production and hampered by state nationalizations of farmland and companies, contracted 3.3 percent in 2009 and 1.6 percent last year. Billions of dollars in capital have left the country, according to recent U.N. economic data for Venezuela, and the heavy consumer spending of the past has dried up.

The country’s golden goose, the oil industry, is producing 30 percent less oil than it did a decade ago, industry analysts say.

Opinion polls in Latin America also show that the president’s image has been tarnished as Chavez has resorted to a range of policies his opponents call anti-democratic, including attacking the news media and governing with decree powers. Chavez has also forged ever closer ties to iron-fisted rulers, such as Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“The people of Latin America have a poor appraisal of democracy in Venezuela,” said Marta Lagos, director of Latinobarometro, a Chilean nonprofit policy analysis group that carries out polls across the region. Latinobarometro found in a February report that Latin Americans perceived Venezuela to be less democratic than other countries, assigning a 4.3 rating to Venezuela, with 10 being the most democratic.

When the group asked people to rate leaders in the Americas, Chavez finished second to last in its 2010 report. Even in Bolivia and Argentina, countries with warm relations with Venezuela, fewer than 35 percent of those polled had a favorable opinion of Chavez. “Evidently, what’s happening with Chavez is he’s not a leader of the region,” Lagos said.

The new dynamic for Venezuela is a reflection of a convergence of factors that have hampered Chavez’s objective of limiting U.S. influence. President Obama enjoys high approval ratings across Latin America, and most South American leaders are centrists who embrace globalization and trade ties with the United States. Multilateral lenders that Chavez accused of being tools of U.S. imperialism, such as the World Bank, are as active as ever and have lent record amounts across Latin America in recent years.

Some Latin American leaders, in private discussions with U.S. diplomats, have expressed distaste for what they consider Chavez’s intrusive style across the continent, according to U.S. diplomatic cables made public by WikiLeaks. Alan Garcia, Peru’s president, told the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio earlier this year that Chavez meddled in the affairs of other countries but now has less influence. “I do not respect anybody who wants to preach beyond his borders,” Garcia said.

This weekend, Ollanta Humala, a nationalist candidate for president in Peru who had been close to Chavez, said in an interview that it had been “an error” to have allied himself with the Venezuelan leader in his unsuccessful 2006 run at the presidency.

Perhaps most significantly for Chavez, there has been a political shift in Brazil, a country whose sheer size and influence make it critical to Chavez’s goals of regional unity.

Gone is popular president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who had the political capital to publicly embrace Chavez and withstand criticism from the news media and opponents, said Paulo Sotero, a Brazil expert at Washington’s Woodrow Wilson International Center.

Lula’s successor, though, is Dilma Rousseff, a reserved pragmatist focused on an ambitious domestic agenda. Analysts say Rousseff is well aware of Chavez’s poll numbers in Brazil, where a Pew Research Center study in 2010 showed that 13 percent of Brazilians had confidence in the Venezuelan leader.

“Dilma has to operate in the real world and be very sensitive to public opinion, and she knows that Hugo Chavez is not especially popular in Brazil,” said Julia Sweig, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations who speaks often with Brazilian officials. “The melodramatic, charismatic style of Chavez is not exactly the style that, I believe, Dilma appreciates.”

Yet it was under Lula that it became clear that the refinery project would move ahead without Venezuela, said Ildo Sauer, a former executive in Brazil’s state-controlled oil company, Petrobras.

Former officials in this state, Pernambuco, said that Brazil and Venezuela initially negotiated a deal to split costs for the refinery. The Venezuelan leader brought a planeload of children to sing in honor of the new deal, to be named after the 19th-century hero Jose Abreu e Lima, and state officials gave Chavez honorary citizenship, recalled Terezinha Nunes, a former state lawmaker involved in the negotiations.

But with construction underway in 2008, two hurdles arose: reluctance by Petrobras to work with Venezuela and the Venezuelan government’s inability to provide funding, said Sauer and former state officials. Some Brazilian officials who worked on a deal recalled being put off by Chavez’s rhetoric. “His discourse was political, ideological, about the liberation of the Americas, of fighting the forces of imperialism,” said the former governor, Jarbas Vasconcelos. “He imagined commanding a revolution in all the Americas against the United States.”

With construction now in its final stage, there is still a Chavez imprint on the project. “The only thing left from Chavez is the name, Abreu e Lima,” said Nunes.

[buglerbilly]

A new Missile Crisis? Iran is building a missile base in Venezuela

Tuesday, May 17, 2011 - Israel Online by Judith Levy



IF that fuckwhit CHAVEZ is actually doing this then he going to get a visit from a Tomahawk or twelve before too long............there is no way the USA is going to allow him to build a dual purpose Missile Base to threaten the US or its Allies in S America..............complete moron this guy, whack job numero uno!

ISRAEL, May 17, 2011 -— There's a situation developing south of the U.S. border that has the potential to become President Obama's own personal missile crisis.

Die Welt reports that Iran has entered the concrete planning phase for constructing launching pads for intermediate-range missiles in Venezuela. The missiles Iran intends to deploy at the site are believed to be Shahab 3s (1300-1500 km range), Scud-Bs (285-330 km) and Scud-Cs (300, 500 and 700 km).

Note that Venezuela is about 2000 km from Florida. Although Iran's longest range missile currently travels about 1500 km, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Iran is making "robust strides" in its attempts to manufacture longer-range ballistic missiles "with the apparent aim of being able to deliver nuclear warheads."

In this March 26, 2007 file photo, an image released by the Israel Aerospace Industries, an Israeli Arrow interceptor anti-tactical ballistic missile is test fired from an unknown location in Israel. Image for illustrative purposes only. (Image: Associated Press)

Citing "Western security insiders," Die Welt claims that Iran is building the launching pads on the Paraguaná Peninsula, which is on the coast of Venezuela, about 75 miles from Colombia.

This would appear to be the first stage of a larger project to establish a military base that will eventually be manned by Iranian missile officers and soldiers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, as well as Venezuelan missile officers, who are to receive intensive training from the Iranians.

The base is the product of a commitment made by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran in October 2010. When the agreement was signed, the Hudson Institute noted the significance of the timing: it coincided with NATO's Lisbon summit (19-20 November 2010), which set up a missile defense capability to protect NATO's European territories against ballistic missile attacks from the East (i.e., Iran).

"Iran's counter-move consists in establishing a strategic base in the South American continent -- in the United States’ soft underbelly," the Institute wrote.

The plan is now in motion. Engineers from Khatam al-Anbia, a construction company owned by the Revolutionary Guards, visited Paraguaná in February. According to Die Welt, their delegation was approved by Amir al-Hadschisadeh, the head of the Guard’s Air Force.

The project is believed to entail commando and control stations, bunkers, barracks and watchtowers, and twenty-meter deep rocket silos. Iranian petroleum revenues are financing it, and Iran is said to have already paid in cash for the preliminary phase of construction.

The missile base, when armed, will constitute a multi-level threat. Chavez agreed at the 2010 meeting in Teheran to fire on Iran's Western enemies if Iran is itself attacked, and Iran agreed to allow Venezuela to use its missiles for "national needs" -- a phrase that should cause some sleep to be lost in Bogotá, and elsewhere in the region.

The base will also, as the Hudson Institute notes, represent a means by which Iran and its suppliers can sidestep UN sanctions. After the latest round of sanctions, "Russia decided not to sell five battalions of S-300PMU-1 air defense systems to Iran," the Institute wrote in December 2010.

Additionally, although neither Iran nor Venezuela currently has a nuclear capability, Iran is working toward that goal, potentially adding another dimension to the base.

"These weapons, along with a number of other weapons, were part of a deal, signed in 2007, worth $800 million. Now that these weapons cannot be delivered to Iran, Russia is looking for new customers; according to the Russian press agency Novosti, it found one: Venezuela."

Judith Levy is a Duke- and Oxford- educated writer with a background in History and International Relations. She was the Soref Research Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and has also spent time working in finance as an editor and writer. Judith keeps a blog, judithlevy.com, where she focuses primarily on Israel and its neighborhood. Follow Judith on Twitter:@levyjudith.

Read more of Judith at Israel Online in The Communities at The Washington Times.