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http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/7582693.htm
Posted on Sun, Dec. 28, 2003
U.S. split grows over Chávez links to rebels
Among U.S. officials, disagreement has sharpened over the credibility of reports that Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez aided Colombian rebels.
BY JUAN O. TAMAYO
jtamayo@herald.comVENEZUELA
The Bush administration is growing increasingly divided over the credibility of intelligence reports on Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s links to Colombian guerrillas, officials say.
”It’s getting very testy, because the believers and skeptics want to quote only from the reports that agree with their own views,” said a top U.S. government official involved in the dispute.
The debate has remained largely out of the public eye because skeptics and believers agree that making the allegations against Chávez public would only push him further into the anti-American left and divert attention from a drive by his domestic opponents for a recall referendum.
LACK OF EVIDENCE
Both sides also agree that there’s no hard evidence that Chávez approved any assistance on weapons or false indentity documents to the Colombian rebels.
”There is no smoking gun on Chávez’s personal intervention or direction on this,” said a government official, describing his words as the consensus in Washington.
But hard-liners insist that Chávez’s leftist-populist policies have created at least the atmosphere in which officials of his government feel they have a green light to assist foreign radicals — because of political sympathy or simple corruption — and that Chávez is not doing enough to stop them.
”If Chávez didn’t give them the green light, he winked a lot,” said a former U.S. government official who had access to U.S. intelligence reports on Venezuela.
BEYOND CHAVEZ
Skeptics, meanwhile, argue that a 2-year-old political and economic crisis has left Venezuela mired in such chaos that Chávez cannot be blamed for the problems and caution that U.S. intelligence had insisted for more than a decade that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which so far have not been found.
The debate has been going on since Chávez, a former army paratrooper who led a failed coup in 1992, was elected in 1998 on a vow to eliminate Venezuela’s corrupt politics and favor its poor majority. He has embraced Cuba’s Fidel Castro and attacked U.S. policy at almost every turn, from Iraq and Afghanistan to the counter-drugs aid to neighboring Colombia.
But the argument sharpened after President Bush appointed several conservatives to key positions on Latin America, including White House Special Envoy Otto Reich; Roger Noriega, the assistant secretary of state for hemispheric affairs; and his deputy Dan Fisk.
On the skeptics’ side are U.S. Ambassador to Caracas Charles Shapiro, U.S. Ambassador to the Organization of American States John Maisto and several top officials at the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies, officials said.
SKEPTIC LEAVING
Shapiro will leave Venezuela next summer after only two years on the job — a year short of most ambassadorial appointments. A senior Bush administration official said Shapiro decided to leave early for personal reasons and denied he was being pushed out for his skepticism. Shapiro and the State Department declined to comment. He is likely to be replaced by Bill Brownfield, now ambassador in Chile.
Chávez has steadfastly denied the allegations of aiding foreign radicals but at times seemed supremely insensitive to the claims. Even in the face of a U.S. media report this year that Venezuelan identification documents may have been issued to Arab radicals, he appointed a Venezuelan of Syrian ancestry, whose father and uncle are officers in the Baghdad and Venezuelan branches of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, as the No. 2 official in the nation’s passport office.
NO MUSLIM RADICAL TIES
Even the most conservative ”believers” agree there’s no evidence of Chávez links to radical Muslims. ”Chávez knows we have a red line there. He’s an idiot, but he’s no fool,” said a former U.S. military intelligence officer who monitored Venezuelan affairs.
But over the past four years, Washington has received thousands of reports that leftist Colombian guerrillas have established rest camps and obtained weapons and false identity documents across the largely jungled border with Venezuela. What remains unclear is whether Chavez or his government have actively helped the Colombians.
CROSSING BORDERS
”Let’s be honest about this . . . Terrorists know no borders, and you have a country, Colombia, that is bordered by many different countries, so it only stands to reason that the terrorists will take advantage of those borders. That’s just common sense,” Army Brig. Gen. Benjamin R. Mixon, director of operations at the Miami-based Southern Command, told The Herald last month.
Officials at the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency last year found no evidence that the sale of Venezuelan weapons to Colombians had risen under Chávez but did find some signs of a drop, depending on how the figures were compared, a U.S. government official said.
More widely believed are reports that several hundred Cuban security advisors are active in the Venezuelan armed forces’ Directorate of Military Intelligence and the country’s secret political police, known as DISIP.
U.S. Embassy officials broke off contacts with DISIP last year because of its Cuban penetration — a decision that also meant losing contact with Venezuelan security sources and increasing Washington’s reliance on intelligence reports from Chávez foes.
One former U.S. congressional aide called the opposition sources ”the Ahmed Chalabis of Venezuela” — a reference to the Iraqi exile leader who fed U.S. intelligence several reports on Hussein’s weapons that have so far not proved to be correct.
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