Oh dear! What has been reported now for years, that under the Chavez administration Venezuela has become a favored conduit for Colombian drug, is reported in a large, complete and documented article in the Washington Post, by no one less than Juan Forero, former Chavez supporter. It does not get any better than that.
Who is to blame? Chavez himself for his laxity with the FARC who gets refuge in Venezuela under the blind eyes of the Venezuelan army. Even paramilitaries managed to find refuge once the corruption pump was seeded. Along the FARC came the drug traffic from which the FARC gets its revenue. Then came the ransom industry and all sort of other organized crime, in front of a government that not only has refused to act energetically and consistency but which probably promotes a high level of insecurity to start developing its own policies of terror over the population. Under current horrifying crime figures, if you are an opposition figure and you get attacked in the streets you never know if it were real thugs or a squad sent to you by the government. How can you figure it out? Where can you go in Venezuela for redress when the state ignores so much the reality of crime, when the judicial system will only investigate what is convenient?
It will be at least a generation to repair the damage that Chavez tolerance for crime has inflicted upon Venezuela.
By the way, without trying to be facetious, will the new constitution help in any way solve this drug trafficking problems? Will drug smuggler have a 6 hour a day, 36 hour work week so they can have more "free" (see post below)? To educate themselves or to snort? It is when you read such article about the reality of Venezuelan life that you realize how divorced form Venezuelan reality the Chavez administration is becoming. Look at how much time the government is spending in trying to change the constitution to make a Hugo the first while here, in Yaracuy, the per capita crime of this rural state is now comparable to city crime, where we get kidnapping and ransom at almost the frequency of the Colombian border, in per capita..... Meanwhile hot air keeps coming from Caracas, and drugs from Colombia as I have been told that it is quite easy to find coke in San Felipe (heck, the governor is murmured in the streets to be a major user).
-The end-