Merchant of Death
Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible

Blood from Stones

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Venezuela Hosts Terrorist Central In Caracas
Little noticed by the outside world, Venezuela's president Hugo Chávez is hosting a gathering of global terrorist organizations in Caracas, featuring Colombia's FARC, Spain's ETA, the Communist Party of El Salvador, remnants of the Red Brigade and other armed groups seeking violent revolution in Latin America and beyond.

The conference shows how closely tied Chávez is to the FARC and other terrorist groups, despite the overwhelming evidence of the FARC's enormous involvement in drug trafficking, its thousands of kidnappings, endless attacks against the civilian population and its kidnapping of children and women to serve as sex slaves.

The second global convention of the Coordinadora Continental Bolivariana (Bolivarian Continental Coordinator-CCB), founded by the FARC in Venezuela in 2004 and newly renamed the Bolivarian Continental Movement, has as its primary stated purpose to militarily support the Venezuelan revolution and contribute to the struggle against Yankee bases in Colombia. Its platform also vows to overthrow the United States and its "moribund capitalist system."

The movement, which is running a multimedia website with its statements said the most exciting moment of the opening ceremony was the showing of a video of FARC leader Alfonso Cano greeting the group and wishing them success. Cano's speech (in Spanish) can be found here.

As is clear from the documents captured in the computer of Raul Reyes, the FARC is the primary founder and funder of the CCB. In a July 7, 2005 e-mail from Reyes to other FARC commanders that the FARC was not receiving enough credit for its leadership in the CCP, while recognizing that such participation could not be public.

The first CCB convention was held in late February 2008 in Quito, Ecuador, and the numerous visits of the delegates to the FARC camp where FARC commander Raul Reyes was living in a permanent structure was a trigger that led to Colombia's decision to bomb the camp, killing Reyes and others.

The vast majority of the armed left and right integrated into the democratic processes in Latin America after the peace processes in Central America, Colombia and elsewhere. A sign of how successful the new processes has been have been the electoral victories of once-armed left in El Salvador and Uruguay and the victory of Lula in Brazil. The necessity of armed revolution has passed, and Chávez's desire to re-start the bloodshed is a measure of his meglomania and authoritarianism.

The danger, as he discloses that he is receiving thousands of missiles from Russia, announces his intention to go nuclear and is close to finishing the installation of an AK-47 factory, is that he could, in fact, fan the region to flames. And that would be an historic tragedy.
POSTED BY DOUGLAS FARAH
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