The Netherlands refuses to extradite FARC ally Hugo Carvajal Barrios to the U.S.
The
Netherlands' July 27 decision to return a former director of Venezuela's
military intelligence—who had been detained in Aruba—to Caracas, rather than
fulfill the extradition request of the Obama administration, is a blow to U.S.
prestige.
It
is also a major setback in the fight against terrorism in the Americas.
In
2008 the U.S. Treasury designated Hugo Carvajal Barrios a drug
"kingpin" for "materially assisting the narcotics trafficking
activities" of the FARC, a Colombian terrorist organization. Treasury
alleges that he not only protected cocaine shipments but also supplied the
guerrillas with weapons and official documents to travel in and out of
Venezuela.
Venezuelan
Deputy Foreign Minister for Europe Affairs Calixto Ortega leaves the facilities
of Le Juez & Marchena lawyer's office, in charge of the defense of detained
Venezuelan former Chief of Inteligence Hugo Carvajal Barrios, in Oranjestad,
Aruba, 25 July 2014.European Pressphoto Agency
Yet
it's not surprising that the Netherlands decided it would be less costly to be
on the good side of the bad guys than to be on the bad side of the good guys.
After six years of the Obama global retreat, any leader would be crazy to
expect the U.S. to go to the mat for an ally, even one that stuck its neck out
for Uncle Sam. So when Venezuela threatened military and economic retribution
at the Netherlands Antilles if Carvajal was extradited, the Dutch foreign
affairs minister relented.
The
U.S. Treasury often distinguishes between drug trafficking and terrorism in
Latin America. But Carvajal's résumé demonstrates that the two have become
inseparable. America's voracious appetite for illegal drugs has allowed violent
political actors to create powerful transnational criminal organizations.
Hugo Chávez took
power in 1999 and over the years Venezuela became a government-approved transit
route for the FARC's shipments of Colombian cocaine bound for the U.S. The
Venezuelan National Guard is now a FARC business partner, and for both
financial and ideological reasons it ensures safe passage of the goods.
The
FARC is most famous for massacring civilians, kidnapping and torturing police
officers, and blanketing rural areas with land mines that maim peasants. All of
this terror is done in the name of social justice for Colombians.
The
efforts that Venezuela went to in order to retrieve Carvajal from Aruba would
seem to confirm how much information he has about the FARC-Venezuela
relationship—and perhaps much more. The FARC has a history of liaison with the
Irish Republican Army and the Basque separatist group ETA. Venezuela has close
ties to Iran, and security experts have long speculated that Iranian-backed
Hezbollah, which operates throughout the region, has made Venezuela a key
outpost.
Carvajal
participated in the February 1992 military-coup attempt led by Chávez against
then-president Carlos Andrés Pérez, and he remained a close confident of the
pro-Castro strongman until Chávez died in 2013. He has been indicted for drug
trafficking in federal court in Florida and New York. But the former head of
military intelligence, from 2004-11, is also widely considered responsible for
making Venezuela a haven for FARC terrorists.
In
2007, a Colombian army captain and an army corporal tracking the FARC inside
Venezuela were captured by a local police department and handed over to the
National Guard. In 2008, the Colombian magazine Semana published an interview
with an unnamed Venezuelan National Guard officer who claimed to have been
posted to the garrison where the army men were taken. He told the media outlet
that Carvajal put a colonel "in charge of torturing the Colombians for
several days. In some of the interrogations there was a guerrilla who we were
told was from [Colombia's other rebel group] ELN."
After
the interrogation was finished, according to the unnamed officer, Mr. Carvajal
ordered that they be executed. When their bodies were eventually returned to
Colombia, it was clear that they had been tortured.
In
July and October 2008, the Colombian military discovered Swedish-made anti-tank
rocket-launchers, lethal and easy to operate, in the hands of the FARC. It
traced the serial numbers to purchases made by the Venezuelan military.
Messages retrieved from laptop computers seized when Colombia bombed the
Ecuador camp of FARC leader Raul Reyes that same year indicated that Carvajal
was the Venezuelan official who put the bazookas in the hands of the
terrorists.
In
other words, Carvajal is a big fish who is tied up in stuff a lot more
dangerous to hemispheric peace and freedom than drug running. Yet when the
Obama administration had this notorious criminal almost within its grasp, it
waited for the "process" to unfold, as if it were charging a Boy
Scout with trespassing, instead of anticipating the enemy's next move. Meanwhile,
Venezuela so frightened the Netherlands that our NATO ally granted the prisoner
the diplomatic immunity that only days before Aruba justice officials said he
did not have.
This
is asymmetric warfare. The failure to reel in Carvajal when he was in custody
in Aruba raises serious doubts that the U.S. fully grasps that fact. Note to
President Obama: These guys want to kill us. In the future, please plan
accordingly.
Write
to O'Grady@wsj.com
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