NEW YORK TIMES
4 août 2010
Dans une démocratie comme celle des USA, l’érection d’une mosquée face au trou des tours jumelles du World Trade Center, abattues par des islamistes radicaux en 2001, est condamnée par le peuple, mais ses élus l’ignorent, comme le New York Times !
54% des Américains, et 52% des New-Yorkais, rejettent ce projet, déjà accepté par le maire Michael Bloomberg avec ses édiles au nom d'une tolérance ignorée par les fanatiques de l'islam.
Pourquoi M. Bloomberg, d’obédience juive, ne demande-t-il pas en échange l’érection d’une synagogue à Ryad, Téhéran, Islamabad, Djakarta, Alger, Rabat, Tunis ou Kaboul ?
Comme nombre de mes lecteurs, je crains que cette funeste décision n’ait été prise par les leaders de la communauté hébraïque new-yorkaise pour contrebalancer leur appui au sionisme en Israël…
Faut-il rappeler que 3.000 innocents ont péri dans les attaques contre les tours jumelles menées par les assassins d’Al Qaida, au nom du prophète de l’islam ?
3 août 2009
Ces preuves sont contenues dans des documents explosifs retrouvés dans des ordinateurs saisis récemment sur des rebelles arrêtés par l’armée colombienne. Elles contredisent les démentis de Hugo Chavez sur son appui en argent et en armes aux FARC.
Une copie de ces courriels, actuellement analysés par des agences de renseignements occidentales, a été fournie à Simon Romero, journaliste au New York Times. Un courriel du commandant des FARC Ivan Marquez, daté de 2008, décrit un plan pour acheter au Venezuela des missiles sol-air, des fusils et des radios. Il fait état de ses contacts avec le général Henry de Jesus Rangel Silva, alors directeur des services secrets de la police vénézuélienne, et Ramon Rodriguez Chacin, un ex-ministre de l’Intérieur de Chavez connu pour ses liens actifs avec les FARC. (Rappelez-vous, c'est sur mon blog, la scène de janvier 2008. Lors de la libération de l'otage Clara Rojas par les FARC, Chacin, alors émissaire, avait encouragé les guérilleros à « continuer la lutte ». Une caméra a enregistré la scène).
Installé au Venezuela avec l’aval de Chavez, Ivan Marquez évoque la fourniture de ces armements près du Rio Negro, dans l’Etat vénézuélien de l’Amazonie, et la remise de documents aux trafiquants d’armes, par le général Rangel Silva, pour leur permettre de circuler dans le pays afin d’acheminer la livraison. Mais les documents saisis ne confirment pas si la livraison a effectivement eu lieu.
Rodriguez Chacin et Rangel Silva sont accusés par le département du Trésor américain de trafic de drogue. Leurs comptes ont été gelés aux USA. Ils encourent une peine de prison allant jusqu’à 30 ans s’ils pénètrent aux Etats-Unis.
Les documents cités par le quotidien révèlent aussi que les FARC ont donné des cours de guerre de guérilla à des officiers vénézuéliens, comme l’indique un commandant de la guérilla, Timoleon Jimenez, alias « Timochenko », qui lui aussi opère depuis le Venezuela. Un autre document saisi en mai dernier révèle enfin que Hugo Chavez a parlé personnellement avec Timoleon Jimenez pour lui exprimer sa solidarité avec le combat des FARC.
Voici le papier du NYT : Venezuela Still Aids Colombia Rebels, New Material Shows
By SIMON ROMERO
Published: August 2, 2009 CARACAS, Venezuela — Despite repeated denials by President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan officials have continued to assist commanders of Colombia’s largest rebel group, helping them arrange weapons deals in Venezuela and even obtain identity cards to move with ease on Venezuelan soil, according to computer material captured from the rebels in recent months and under review by Western intelligence agencies.
The materials point to detailed collaborations between the guerrillas and high-ranking military and intelligence officials in Mr. Chávez’s government as recently as several weeks ago, countering the president’s frequent statements that his administration does not assist the rebels. “We do not protect them,” he said in late July. The new evidence — drawn from computer material captured from the rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC — comes at a low point for ties between Venezuela and Colombia. Mr. Chávez froze diplomatic relations in late July, chafing at assertions by Colombia’s government that Swedish rocket launchers sold to Venezuela ended up in the hands of the FARC. Venezuela’s reaction was also fueled by Colombia’s plans to increase American troop levels there.
“Colombia’s government is trying to build a case in the media against our country that serves its own political agenda,” said Bernardo Álvarez, Venezuela’s ambassador in Washington, describing the latest intelligence information as “noncorroborated.” Mr. Chávez has disputed claims of his government’s collaboration with the rebels since Colombian forces raided a FARC encampment in Ecuador last year. During the raid, Colombian commandos obtained the computers of a FARC commander with encrypted e-mail messages that described a history of close ties between Mr. Chávez’s government and the rebel group, which has long crossed over into Venezuelan territory for refuge.
The newest communications, circulated among the seven members of the FARC’s secretariat, suggest that little has changed with Venezuela’s assistance since the raid. The New York Times obtained a copy of the computer material from an intelligence agency that is analyzing it. One message from Iván Márquez, a rebel commander thought to operate largely from Venezuelan territory, describes the FARC’s plan to buy surface-to-air missiles, sniper rifles and radios in Venezuela last year.
It is not clear whether the arms Mr. Márquez refers to ended up in FARC hands. But he wrote that the effort was facilitated by Gen. Henry Rangel Silva, the director of Venezuela’s police intelligence agency until his removal last month, and by Ramón Rodríguez Chacín, a former Venezuelan interior minister who served as Mr. Chávez’s official emissary to the FARC in negotiations to free hostages last year. In the message, Mr. Márquez discusses a plan by Mr. Rodríguez Chacín to carry out the deal near the Río Negro in Amazonas State in Venezuela. Mr. Márquez goes further, explaining that General Rangel Silva gave the arms dealers documents they could use to move around freely while in Venezuela.
Intelligence of this kind has been a source of tension between Colombia and Venezuela, with the government here claiming the information is false and used to further political ends. Colombian officials, by contrast, argue that the intelligence proves that the FARC survives in part on its ability to operate from Venezuela’s frontier regions. The latest evidence, suggesting that the FARC operates easily in Venezuela, may put the Obama administration in a tough spot. President Obama has recently tried to repair Washington’s relations with Venezuela, adopting a nonconfrontational approach to Mr. Chávez that stands in contrast to the Bush administration’s often aggressive response to his taunts and insults.
But the United States and the European Union still classify the FARC as a terrorist organization. The Treasury Department accused General Rangel Silva and Mr. Rodríguez Chacín last year of assisting the FARC’s drug trafficking activities, opening the officials to freezes on their assets, fines and prison terms of up to 30 years in the United States. Venezuela has said the men are not guilty of those charges. “We do not comment on intelligence matters,” said Noel Clay, a State Department spokesman, in relation to the latest captured communications. A spokesman from the Colombian Foreign Ministry declined to comment on the matter.
Computer records obtained in the Colombian raid in Ecuador last year appeared to corroborate the assertion that Venezuela helped the FARC acquire the Swedish-made rocket launchers at the heart of the latest diplomatic dispute between the two countries. The launchers were purchased by the Venezuelan Army in the late 1980s but captured in Colombia in combat operations against the FARC last year. The FARC’s use of Swedish arms has an added dimension: the rebels kidnapped a Swedish engineer in Colombia in 2007, holding him hostage for nearly two years — during which he was reported to have suffered brain damage and paralysis from a stroke — before releasing him in March.
“The issue of these weapons is extremely serious for us,” said Tommy Stromberg, the political officer at the Swedish Embassy in Bogotá, the Colombian capital, which also oversees Sweden’s affairs in Venezuela. Mr. Stromberg said Venezuela had bought Swedish arms as recently as 2006. “We have asked Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry for clarification on how this happened, but have not had a response.” The computer records from the raid in Ecuador last year also seem to match some of the information in the new communications under review by Western intelligence officials.
For example, a message obtained in the Ecuador raid and written in September 2007 contained an earlier reference to the arms deal discussed recently by the FARC. In the earlier message, Mr. Márquez, the rebel commander, referred to dealers he described as Australian, and went into detail about the arms they were selling, including Dragunov rifles, SA-7 missiles and HF-90M radios, the same items he discusses in the more recent communications. Another file from the Ecuador raid mentioning an offer from the FARC to instruct Venezuelan officers in guerrilla warfare matches recently obtained material from a rebel commander, Timoleón Jiménez, that says the course took place. Other communications refer to FARC efforts to secure Venezuelan identity cards in a plan overseen by General Rangel Silva, the former Venezuelan intelligence chief. In other material captured as recently as May, Mr. Márquez, the rebel commander, said Mr. Chávez had spoken personally with Mr. Jiménez, expressing solidarity for the FARC’s struggle. Then Mr. Márquez went into more mundane matters, referring to unspecified problems the FARC had recently encountered in La Fría, an area in Venezuela near the border with Colombia.
24 juillet 2009
N'étant pas une agence de presse à moi tout seul, je ne puis traduire, pour les non anglophones, cette enquête courageuse du New York Times sur l'Etat vénézuélien de Barinas, voisin de la Colombie.
Le peuple y crève de faim, les enlèvements y dépassent désormais ceux de la Colombie, quand la famille du dictateur castriste Hugo Chavez s'engraisse à loisir sur les fonds de l'Etat, avec un détournement de 20 millions de dollars que le pouvoir législatif, aux ordres de l'ex-putschiste de 1992, a oublié de dénoncer.
Voici le papier. Merci à SD de me l'avoir signalé:
State Ruled by Crime and Chávez Family
Scott Dalton for The New York Times
« This is what anarchy looks like, at least the type of anarchy where the family of Chávez accumulates wealth and power, » said Ángel Santamaría, a Barinas cattleman whose 8-year-old son, Kusto, was held for ransom for 29 days.
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BARINAS, Venezuela — Stretching over vast cattle estates at the foothills of the Andes, Barinas is known for two things: as the bastion of the family of President Hugo Chávez and as the setting for a terrifying surge in abductions, making it a contender for Latin America’s most likely place to get kidnapped.
The New York Times
Barinas is the home region of the family of Hugo Chávez.
An intensifying nationwide crime wave over the past decade has pushed the kidnapping rate in Venezuela past Colombia’s and Mexico’s, with about 2 abductions per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the Interior Ministry.
But nowhere in Venezuela comes close in abductions to Barinas, with 7.2 kidnappings per 100,000 inhabitants, as armed gangs thrive off the disarray here while Mr. Chávez’s family tightens its grip on the state. Seizures of cattle ranches and crumbling infrastructure also contribute to the sense of low-intensity chaos.
Barinas offers a unique microcosm of Mr. Chávez’s rule. Many poor residents still revere the president, born here into poverty in 1954. But polarization in Barinas is growing more severe, with others chafing at his newly prosperous parents and siblings, who have governed the state since the 1990s. While Barinas is a laboratory for projects like land reform, urgent problems like violent crime go unmentioned in the many billboards here extolling the Chávez family’s ascendancy.
“This is what anarchy looks like, at least the type of anarchy where the family of Chávez accumulates wealth and power as the rest of us fear for our lives,” said Ángel Santamaría, 57, a cattleman in the town of Nueva Bolivia whose son, Kusto, 8, was kidnapped while walking to school in May. He was held for 29 days, until Mr. Santamaría gathered a small ransom to free him.
The governor of Barinas, Adán Chávez, the president’s eldest brother and a former ambassador to Cuba, said this month that many of the kidnappings might have been a result of destabilization efforts by the opposition or so-called self-kidnappings: orchestrated abductions to reveal weaknesses among security forces, or to extort money from one’s own family.
“With each day that passes,” the governor said recently, “Barinas is safer than before.”
Through a spokeswoman, he declined to be interviewed.
In an election last year marred by accusations of fraud, Adán Chávez succeeded his own father, Hugo de los Reyes Chávez, a former schoolteacher who had governed Barinas for a decade with the president’s brother, Argenis, the former secretary of state in Barinas.
Another brother, Aníbal, is mayor of nearby Sabaneta, and another brother, Adelis, is a top banker at Banco Sofitasa, which does business with Adán’s government. Yet another brother, Narciso, was put in charge of cooperation projects with Cuba. The president’s cousin Asdrúbal holds a top post at the national oil company.
Politicians once loyal to the president who have broken with him and his family here contend that Mr. Chávez’s family has amassed wealth and landholdings through a series of deals carried out by front men.
One opposition leader, Wilmer Azuaje, detailed to prosecutors and legislators what he said was more than $20 million in illegal gains by the family since the president’s father was elected governor in 1998. But in a brief review of those claims, National Assembly, under the control of Chávez loyalists, cleared the family of charges of illicit enrichment.
“In the meantime, while the family wraps itself in the rhetoric of socialism, we are descending into a neo-capitalist chaos where all that matters is money,” said Alberto Santelíz, the publisher of La Prensa, a small opposition newspaper.
One reason for the rise in kidnappings is the injection of oil money into the local economy, with some families reaping quick fortunes because of ties to large infrastructure projects.
A new soccer stadium, built under the supervision of Adelis Chávez’s at a cost of more than $50 million, is still unfinished two years after its first game in 2007, joining other white elephants dotting Barinas’s landscape. Nearby lies the unfinished Museum of the Plains, intended to celebrate the culture of the president’s birthplace. A sprawling shopping mall stands half-completed after its backers fled a shakedown by construction unions.
More than a decade into the Chávez family’s rule in Barinas, the state remains Venezuela’s poorest, with average monthly household income of about $800, according to the National Statistics Institute. Kidnapping, once feared only by the wealthy, has spread in Barinas to include the poor. In one case this year of a 3-year-old girl kidnapped in the slum of Mi Jardín, the abductor, when told that the only thing of value owned by the girl’s mother was a refrigerator, instructed her to sell it to pay the ransom.
Kidnapping specialists here said the abductors were drawn from two Colombian rebel groups, a small Venezuelan guerrilla faction called the Bolivarian Liberation Front, other criminal gangs and corrupt police officers. Just a fraction of the kidnappings result in prison sentences.
“With impunity rampant in Barinas, how can our governor say with a straight face that people are kidnapping themselves?” asked Lucy Montoya, 38, a hardware store owner whose sister, Doris, a 41-year-old mother of three, was kidnapped in March.
Doris Montoya’s abductors have not freed her or communicated with her family since receiving ransom money in May, Lucy Montoya said, adding, “The government’s handling of this crisis is an affront to our dignity as human beings.”
Meanwhile, new figures show kidnappings climbing to 454 known cases in the first six months of 2009, including about 66 in Barinas, compared with a nationwide 2008 estimate of between 537 and 612. But officials acknowledge that the true figures are probably higher because many cases are never reported.
Here in Barinas, victims seethe over the inaction of the president and his family. “Our ruling dynasty is effectively telling us we are expendable,” said Rodolfo Peña, 38, a businessman who was abducted here last year. “The only other plausible theory,” he said, “is that they are too inebriated by power to notice the emergency at their feet.”