Speaking in Havana Sunday, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez said Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos had agreed to extradite businessman and accused drug lord, Walid “the Turk” Makled, to his native Venezuela, rather than to the United States where Makled is also wanted on drug trafficking charges. Makled has been in Colombian custody since his arrest in a joint US-Colombia operation last August. According to Reuters, shortly after his arrest the head of the Colombian police said Makled would be sent to the US for prosecution – making what Hugo Chavez said Sunday quite significant, if it’s indeed true.
The AP on Sunday notes that while Juan Manuel Santos recently signed a new series of bilateral accords with Venezuela, including one related to increased bilateral counternarcotics collaboration, the two men did not publicly address the issue of Makled’s extradition during their meetings last week. Addressing those talks with Chavez over the weekend, Santos, somewhat jocularly, referred to Chavez as his “new best friend” but again avoided any discussion of the Makled case.
Between Chavez’s pronouncement and Santos’s silence is where the intrigue over the Walid Makled is found. Here’s STRATFOR Global Intelligence which has been investigating the Makled case for some time:
“When Colombia and Venezuela restored diplomatic and trade relations in September, shortly after Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos took office, STRATFOR raised the question of what additional leverage Bogota might have had. The rapid rapprochement between Bogota and Caracas was not solely due to Colombia's need to alleviate pressures on businessmen on the border who depended on trade with Venezuela for their livelihood, nor was it simply the result of a personal power struggle between Santos and his more hawkish predecessor, as many erroneously speculated (Santos and former President Alvaro Uribe Velez, in fact, have worked very closely together on Venezuela, among other issues). When STRATFOR began receiving reports of the Venezuelan military quietly shutting down Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) camps and flushing FARC members back across the border into Colombia, it was evident that Bogota was holding something big over Chavez's head."
That “something big,” STRATFOR argues, is Walid Makled. A former Chavez ally who fell out with the regime in 2008, Makled has since maintained that he holds information implicating senior Venezuelan government officials “in money-laundering and drug-trafficking.” Should those allegations be pursued further in a US-based trial against Makled, the Colombia-Venezuela rapprochement would no doubt be threatened. On the other hand, his extradition to Venezuela would likely be rebuked by the US, who is in the process of reworking the status of its relationship with Colombia, “including how to proceed with an expanded military basing agreement.”
No conclusions yet on what will transpire in the coming weeks. But, at the very least, the Walid Makled case seems an important bellwether to watch in assessing Juan Manuel Santos’s seriousness about and capacity for balancing new relationships with both the United States and neighboring Venezuela.
To other stories:
· Also on Venezuela, an interjection into civilian politics by the head of the country’s Operational Strategic Command, Major General Henry Rangel Silva. In an interview with the Caracas paper Ultimas Noticias published Monday, Rangel Silva said the idea of an “opposition government is hard to swallow,” adding that “it would mean selling the country, and that is not going to be accepted, not by the Armed Force and much less by the people.”
· Meanwhile, in Cuba, BBC Mundo reports on President Chavez’s trip to Cuba over the weekend where the two countries commemorated the 10 year anniversary of a bilateral cooperation agreement that has, most notably, sent thousands of Cuban doctors to Venezuela in return for Venezuelan oil being sent to Cuba. The agreement also marked the beginning of alternative Latin American regional integration through ALBA.
· On domestic politics in Cuba, the AP says that on Monday Cuban President Raúl Castro announced the date of the country’s much-anticipated Communist Party congress. The congress – the first since 1997 – will be held this April, and according to Castro will “make fundamental decisions on how to modernize the Cuban economic model and adopt the paths for economic and social policy of the party and the revolution.”
· In Argentina, the man the AP calls the “intellectual author” of military repression during the country’s brutal 1976-1983 dictatorship, naval officer Emilio Massera, died Monday in a Naval Hospital. Massera is suspected of being the architect of the military’s plan to murder some 30,000 members of the opposition. He also directed the notorious clandestine torture facilities at the Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA). In 2005, prosecution against Massera was suspended after the court determined he was suffering from “dementia.” Massera was 85. More from Argentina’s Clarín.
· Meanwhile, in neighboring Uruguay, reports on the imprisonment of Uruguayan general Miguel Dalmao, convicted for his role in the murder of a left wing activist in 1974. Dalmao’s detention marks the first time an active member of Uruguay's military has been jailed for human rights violations committed during the country's 1973-85 dictatorship. Dalmao, however, is expected to appeal the decision – a process which “will likely take months.”
· Mexico is the fifth more dangerous country in the world to be a journalist, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (by way of the CS Monitor). It follows only Iraq, Iran, China, and Russia. That as Latin American media leaders met in Merida for the 66th assembly of the Inter American Press Association where much of the discussion focused on violence against journalists in the host country, according to a report from Mercopress. The Guardian reports, meanwhile, that another Mexican journalist was killed Friday – the 10th this year. In the border city of Matamoros, the paper reports, reporter Carlos Alberto Guajardo Romero, was shot and killed while he witnessed the shootout that led to the murder of Gulf Cartel capo Antonio Ezequiel Cárdenas Guillen.
· On another major target of drug violence – Mexican mayors – Reuters reports that the mayor elect in a small Veracruz town was kidnapped and killed, along with two others, on Monday. No motive as of yet for the killings.
· Laura Randall, the editor of Changing Structure of Mexico: Political, Social and Economic Prospects, writes at Mexidata.info on the effects of decentralization on Mexican citizen security. According to Randall, “the notion that ‘democracy’ is the same as ‘decentralization,’ and the ill-managed decentralization of government contributed to the breakdown of law and order at the municipal level in much of rural Mexico.”
· The Central America Politics blog has two short breakdowns on recent spikes in violence in both El Salvador and Guatemala. WOLA’s Morris Panner and Adriana Beltrán write on the latter – with a particular focus on organized crime – in the latest print edition of Americas Quarterly.
· In Honduras, In these Times on a new round of teacher strikes against the Lobo government, protesting, among other things, the “gutting of a minimum wage law that was supposed to take effect in January.”
· IPS reports on the continued success of worker-run cooperatives, formed out of the 2001/2002 economic crisis, in Argentina. According to a new study, today there are some 205 “recovered” companies, with a total of 9,362 workers -- up from 161 companies with 6,900 workers in 2004.
· New worries that cholera has reached the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince.
· And in the Miami Herald this morning, former Chilean president – and now the first Under-Secretary-General for UN Women – Michelle Bachelet lays out her objectives at her new post.
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