CARACAS: Two former members of the Venezuelan armed forces have been arrested on suspicion of drug trafficking, using the main Caracas airport to smuggle in cocaine shipments which then were trafficked north to the US.
The pair were captured by Venezuelan police, having been sought by both local and international courts. Both are suspected of working for Colombian and Mexican cartels, assisting them with their cocaine shipments which passed through South America.
Captain Vassyly Villarroel Ramirez, 43, and 32-year-old Lt. Robert Alexander Pinto Gil were detained in Caracas on Monday.
Pinto, who escaped jail in 2013, was a leader of trafficking groups in the coastal states of Anzoategui and Sucre.
Villarroel was wanted for “permitting and encouraging links between Colombian and Mexican cartels,” said Néstor Reverol, commander of the military police.
The former soldier had been sought by Venezuelan police since October 2008. In 2011 the United States charged him on multiple counts of cocaine trafficking.
“Villarroel Ramirez is a prime example of a narcotics trafficker who exploited his former military position and connections to facilitate the transport of cocaine to Mexico, and profit from the sales that followed,” said Adam Szubin, the Treasury’s director of the office of foreign assets control (OFAC).
According to the indictment, between January 2004 and December 2009 Villarroel and a co-conspirator imported thousands of kilograms of cocaine from Colombia, through Venezuela, to Mexico. It was then transportated to and distributed within the United States.
Villarroel is accused by the US of providing security and protection when cocaine loads – and the proceeds from Mexico – were smuggled from Maiquetía International Airport in Caracas, via commercial or private aircraft.
The US say he facilitated the cocaine loads from Colombia through Venezuela, in partnership with known drug traffickers such as Daniel Barrera Barrera, known as “El Loco Barrera”, and Javier Antonio Calle Serna or “Comba” – both of whom are now in prison.
The cocaine shipments benefited Mexican drug trafficking organizations, specifically the Sinaloa Cartel, run by the recently escaped Chapo Guzman, and the vicious Zetas – plus the now diminished Beltran Leyva Organization.
Foreign and local critics allege Venezuela’s socialist government, under current President Nicolas Maduro and former leader Hugo Chavez, has been abetting cocaine shipments from neighboring Colombia to the United States and Europe.
Indeed, four senior allies of Chavez, all with military backgrounds – who remain in influential positions in the government of Mr Maduro – are accused of links to the cartels.
In January a former Venezuelan presidential security chief accused the country’s powerful National Assembly president, Diosdado Cabello, of drug trafficking – something he stridently denied.
Hugo Carvajal, a former director of military intelligence and general, is the subject of a US indictment for alleged cocaine smuggling, but remains protected by the government – despite his brief arrest on the Dutch Antilles island of Aruba, at American request.
Henry Rangel Silva, a former joint chief of staff and the current governor of Trujillo, was charged with drug trafficking by the US in December 2008.
Ramon Rodriguez Chacin, a navy officer and former interior minister, who is now governor of Guarico state, is accused by the US of assisting Colombian guerrillas to buy weapons with the profits from their drug dealing.
And Walid Makled, a convicted Venezuelan drug trafficker who in February was sentenced to 14 years in prison for sending 10 tonnes of cocaine a month to the US, has boasted that he had 40 generals on his payroll.
Officials in Venezuela, however, state that the accusations of high-level collusion is intended to justify US-led hostility towards the government. They point to arrests such as those of the two former military officers at an army roadblock on Monday as evidence of Venezuela’s anti-drugs zeal.
