Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez Worked to Flood U.S. With Cocaine, U.S. Prosecutors Say
Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez Worked to Flood U.S. With Cocaine, U.S. Prosecutors Say by Juan Forero and José de Córdoba – Wall Street Journal
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in the mid-2000s ordered his top lieutenants to work with Colombian Marxist guerrillas to flood the U.S. with cocaine in his government’s efforts to combat the Bush administration, according to U.S. documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal that shed new light on the leftist regime’s struggle with Washington.
The documents, prepared by federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York, outline for the first time the possible role of Mr. Chávez, an icon of the Latin American left who died from cancer in 2013, in drug trafficking. They assert that several leaders who served Mr. Chávez and remain in key posts in Venezuela’s regime today wielded cocaine trafficking as a weapon against their ideological adversary, the U.S.
In 2005, Mr. Chávez convened a small group of his top officials to discuss plans to ship cocaine to the U.S. with help from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, said a participant in the meeting who, at the time, was a justice on Venezuela’s supreme court, according to the papers…