In recent weeks, a Colombian news network, C&M, released videos of former Colombian president, Alvaro Uribe, addressing a group of Venezuelan opposition leaders at a meeting organized by Uribe supporters in Colombia. See report.
The video shows Uribe attacking Colombia’s current president, Juan Manual Santos for establishing good relations with Venezuela and urging the Venezuelan opponents of President Hugo Chavez to attack Santos and otherwise try to undermine Venezuelan-Colombian relations.
Meanwhile, Colombia’s former president is himself under investigation in Colombia for using advanced surveillance technology supplied to his DAS security department by the U.S. Embassy to surveil members of opposition parties, prosecutors and judges of Colombia’s Supreme Court. The entire DAS Department has since been abolished by the current president, Santos.
The last head of the DAS agency under Uribe’s administration, Maria Pilar Hurtado, is now being sought through extradition proceedings from Panama for the massive wiretapping scandal. Uribe previously urged her to flee to avoid Santos’s prosecution of the scandal and requested that Panama grant her asylum. Panama, which then granted the DAS leader’s asylum request, has not yet responded to Colombia’s demand for her return. A number of former DAS employees have already been convicted by Colombia’s courts for their illegal undercover surveillance efforts and other criminal acts.
Uribe’s first DAS director, Jorge Noguera Cotes, was convicted in September, 2011, of homicide and conspiracy in connection with the death squad murder of Colombian human rights activist and sociologist professor, Correa de Andreis, who had led an investigation into illegal land expropriation in Colombia.
A number of other DAS secret police officials have been convicted or are under prosecution for participation in DAS’s illegal wiretapping scheme. Uribe recently visited his ex chief of staff, Bernard Moreno, in jail where he is awaiting trial in connection with the illegal wiretapping.
But, not content with merely directing Venezuelan opposition leaders to subvert the new Colombia-Venezuelan cooperative relationship, Uribe is now attempting to place another of his former presidential chiefs of staff, Jose Obdulio Gaviria , a cousin of slain drug lord Pablo Escobar and one of Uribe's closest allies, in the center of Caracas to provide “security assistance” to the oppositionist mayor of the town of Chacao.
Chacao is an upper class, oppositionist stronghold in Caracas, whose former mayor, Leopoldo Lopez Lopez, is now running against President Chavez in the 2012 presidential election. Uribe's agent, Gaviria has been accused in Colombia of “masterminding the illegal wiretapping plot" and “meeting with paramilitary representatives inside the presidential palace” while serving under Uribe.
President Chavez has responded by stating that Uribe’s former chief of staff, Gaviria, will not be permitted to enter Venezuela.
Since Chavez’s election to the presidency in Venezuela in 1998, the U.S. has consistently increased its funding for opposition groups in Venezuela, provided them with money and assistance with their unsuccessful coup of 2002, and has conducted a massive international publicity campaign to demonize President Chavez and his socialist government. (See the works of Eva Golinger documenting U.S. funding of the Venezuelan opposition at: www.chavezcode.com/)
Colombia’s former president, Uribe, has been a long time ally of the U.S. and an opponent of Venezuela’s Chavez, causing a complete rupture of economic relations between the two countries and almost bringing them to the point of war following Uribe’s illegal invasion and bombing of a FARC hostage negotiator inside the country of Ecuador in 2008.
It is a hopeful sign that Colombia's current president, Juan Santos, has not only refused to bow to Uribe's demands that he resume the fractious relations with Venezuela that Uribe pursued, but is likewise pressing prosecution of Uribe allies that were involved in illegal wiretapping and relations with the right wing paramilitary organizations that were used by the big corporations to murder and terrorize Colombia's small farmers so they could expropriate their land. It is also clear that President Santos is refusing to aid former President Uribe's and American efforts to destablize the Chavez government preparatory to the 2012 presidential election.