Category Archives: Southern theater

The Militias of Venezuela and the Tanks of Chavez

Posted on by

Two stories that, when taken together, foretell of even more chaos in South America which will eventually bring even more pressure on our southern border. The first comes from Strategy Page:

January 21, 2011: The battle with the drug gangs has led to the seizure of nearly eight tons of cocaine so far this month. This war is low key, widespread and largely out in the bush. Thus it gets little media attention, but it grinds on, and is slowly driving the drug gangs out of the country, or out of business, and further reducing the size and influence of leftist rebels like FARC and ELN. The leftist rebels have been hurt so bad that central control has broken down. The dozens of local FARC units are more and more going their own way. Some are becoming more like gangsters than revolutionaries, while others cling to their revolutionary origins. Neither approach is particularly attractive to most Colombians.

Neighboring Venezuela is sliding towards revolution. President Hugo Chavez, facing defeat in the 2012 presidential elections, is using increased oil income (from rising world prices) to import the goods (especially food) that Venezuela no longer produces (because the government has taken control of so much of the economy). Chavez is forming “peasant militias” composed of his loyalists and armed with assault rifles bought from Russia. It’s still not certain that Chavez would risk a civil war to hold onto power.

That there is a connection between Chavez and his “peasant militias” and FARC is not in doubt by any rational observer. FARC also maintains operating relationships with various Mexican cartel factions. That would probably be a better explanation for border gangs obtaining fully automatic AK-47s and hand grenades than the myth that those items are purchased in border town pawn shops.

The next story is from J.E. Dyer called Bridges to Bogota. While noting that Venezuela is adding 92 Russian made Main Battle Tanks to it’s already substantial heavy and light armor forces Dyer points out that Chavez has little use for the purchase outside of imperialist aggression:

The light tanks alone are more than enough to quell popular unrest in Venezuela.  They are more likely to be used in that role than the MBTs, as they are smaller, lighter, and travel easily on more of Venezuela’s erratic road network – while providing all the firepower necessary for the average insurgency-quelling.

Meanwhile, a look at the map shows that Venezuela’s environs, and in particular her borders with Colombia and Brazil, are spectacularly hostile to armored warfare.  There is no threat of invasion from either side.  Brazil has a substantial inventory of armor, but no political friction with Venezuela of the kind that would make present-day Brazilians hanker after the capacity to invade their northern neighbor.  Even if they had such a hankering, getting tanks into Venezuela from Brazil would entail filing through a narrow, mountainous route – being highly vulnerable to counterattack – and having to go a very long way through Venezuela to achieve any territorial gains that were politically useful.

But there is one significant change to the region that would benefit Chavez if he decided to start flexing his muscle:

There is now an improved, commercial-grade highway stretching all the way from Caracas to Bogotá, served by the José Antonio Páez Bridge over the Arauca River at the Colombian border town of Arauca.  (See map.)  The road enables heavy commercial traffic (primarily oil-industry traffic) to traverse the Llanos.  The bridge – an iron-truss bridge built in the second half of the 20th century – was given a maintenance upgrade by Colombia in 2009 and 2010.

The highway, inaugurated in stages from 2008 to 2010, is christened La Ruta de los Libertadores – the Route of the Liberators.  Venezuela refers to her stretch of the roadway as the Autopista José Antonio Páez.   The road traces the route of Bolivar’s army in the Andean campaign of 1819.  And its completion means that it is no longer the case that Chavez literally cannot drive 45-ton main battle tanks into central Colombia.  Doing so might be inadvisable: with only one feasible route, an alerted Colombian military would have no difficulty finding the invasion force, and would have at least one key advantage in countering it.  But the enterprise has gone from being impossible to being highly unlikely.  The road itself is more important than the bridge; bridging equipment, well deployed, can get tanks across a river, but the important change from a military standpoint is the existence of a road that will bear heavy traffic through the thinly-populated Llanos and across the rough ascent to Bogotá.

Added to this is the capacity for Venezuela to stage a mini D-Day invasion of it’s neighbors:

That said, however, there are other factors we should not ignore.  One is that Venezuela has a tank landing-ship force.  It’s not a big one; there are only four ships.  They were built in South Korea in the 1980s.  But that number of ships, and the number of tanks they could deliver, would make a difference to a dicey internal situation in a nation like Panama, Costa Rica, or Honduras.  In combination with paramilitary forces from Cuba and Nicaragua, they could up the ante significantly.

In theory, Chavez has this particular capability now, with the existing landing ships and his French and British tanks.  The addition of the nine submarines he is buying from Russia would significantly enhance a landing force’s survivability and effectiveness, however, along with the dozens of Su-30 strike fighters, and Mi-17 and Mi-35 combat helicopters, being purchased from Russia as well.  No single capability is a game-changer; it’s the cumulative enhancement of capability from Chavez’s shopping spree that makes the difference.

Chavez is facing losing power in his country and watching his FARC allies fall apart in Columbia. With a weakened America withdrawing from the region, and worse openly supporting his communist allies, Chavez sees his time for enacting the true socialist revolution he wants coming to a close. He will use the limited time he has left to rescue his allies and re-invigorate the Latin American communist movement.

That may include not just an invasion of Columbia to support his FARC allies, but of Honduras and any other country that he can outgun. Ultimately he may support leftist elements in Mexico as FARC increasingly takes control of operations there.

Can a bankrupt America fight off dozens of tanks backed by Nicaraguan and Cuban paramilitaries staged by land we already ceded to cartels? Probably, but at what cost? It may seem fanciful to consider but in ten years ago who would have thought that parts of Arizona would be effectively under the control of transnational warlords?  It’s time we started paying attention to the new Soviet Union forming right on our southern border.

h/t Fausta

Brazilian Drug Gang Shoots Down Police Helicopter During Shanty Town Offensive

Posted on by

Rio sounds like a great place to have the 2016 Olympics. From VOA:

Residents of some of Rio de Janeiro’s worst slums are fleeing their homes, hoping to escape a drug war that has left part of the city in ruins.

Smoke rose from the smoldering wreckage of a police helicopter Saturday, while at least eight buses burned and gunfire filled the air in the slum of Morro dos Macacos.

Police say the fighting broke out early Saturday, when one of the city’s three main drug gangs invaded the area in an attempt to expand their territory.

At least eight suspected gang members were killed in subsequent gunbattles with police, while two police officers riding in the helicopter were also killed.  Several other people were injured.

Police say the aircraft exploded on a football field after the pilot tried to make an emergency landing.

Hundreds of police officers have been sent into the area to end the fighting.

The outbreak of violence comes just weeks after Rio won the right to host the 2016 Olympic Games.

Via BreitbartTV we have video of the incident:

Transnational gangs have grown in power and have been an increasingly legitimate challenger to states like Brazil where the government is unable to throw the resources necessary into maintaining control of the streets; Mexico is in a similar situation. With the collapsing dollar and the decrease in tax revenues we will be seeing in the next few years America too will provide a fertile operating ground for gangs to establish similar footholds as police and other law enforcement structures become too expensive for states to maintain.

Here’s the future of America if the economy and cultural/civil architecture continue to decline.

MS-13 Smuggling Hundreds of Muslims Across Mexican Border

Posted on by

It’s no secret that MS-13 has ties to Al-Qaeda going back at least to early 2002. Jihad Watch ran a post on Al-Qaeda’s link to MS-13 back in January of 2005 and FrontPage ran a piece a week or so earlier about the connection that included some disturbing details about high ranking known AQ operatives spotted meeting with the gang in Honduras. One of the first pieces I wrote for Red Alerts detailed the link between the Kries faction of the Aryan Nations, Radical Islamist groups and the Bolivarian revolution in Latin America.

The Narco-terror/Islamist connection has been a story that has slowly fallen off most people’s radar unfortunately. I myself forgot about it until alerted to this piece by Dr. Paul William of The Last Crusade that just ran on Family Security Matters that details how little progress we’ve made in the last few years:

In the wake of 9/11, Mara Salvatrucha attracted the attention of top al Qaeda officials, who realized that the gang could be used to smuggle operatives and weapons into the United States.[1] An agreement was forged between the terrorists and the gang-bangers. In exchange for safe passage across the border, al Qaeda – through its cells in South America – agreed to pay the Maras from $30,000 to $50,000 for each sleeper agent they managed to smuggle into the country with bogus matricula consulars.[2]

Matricula consulars are official identification cards that are issued by the Mexican government through its consular offices. The cards verify that the bearers are Mexican citizens who are living outside of Mexico
with the government’s permission.

According to U.S. officials, these cards pose a grave threat to national security. Steven McCraw, assistant director of the FBI’s Office of Intelligence, told a House Judiciary Subcommittee: “The ability of foreign nationals to use the matricula consular provides an opportunity for terrorists to move freely within the United States without triggering name-based watch lists that are disseminated to local police officers.”

Counterfeit matricula consulars are easy to obtain. In Los Angeles, the going rate is $90; in New York City, $150.

[...]

According to border patrol officials, including Sheriff D’Wayne Jenigan of Del Rio, Texas, thousands of Special Interest Aliens (SIAs), with the help of Mara Salvatrucha “coyotes,” have made their way across the Mexican border and into the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Such SIAs come from countries that pose national security concerns: Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Somalia, Yemen, Jordan, Lebanon, and even Iraq.

The routes used by illegal aliens to enter the U.S. have become littered with discarded Muslim prayer blankets, pages from Islamic texts, and Arabic newspapers. Law enforcement officials have named such passageways “terrorists’ alleys” and a street leading north from the city of Douglas, Arizona, as “Arab Road.”

Ready for that fence? The Obama administration is less interested in securing our southern border than Bush, who I respect but had a blind spot on the dangers Mexico poses to us. We need to keep stories like this circulating so that this homeland security issue doesn’t remained buried on the back page until something happens that makes the front page.

h/t reader Damien

Mormons Fighting for Their Lives in Mexico

Posted on by

Though Washington Post reporter William Booth can barely keep the sneering contempt for the Mexican Mormons out of his report his piece is one of the best reports on the conflict between Mexico’s drug cartels and the religious sect that just wants to farm in peace. Mexico’s government has given the sect permission to form a rural police force and arm themselves, which just shows how out of control Mexico is.

Booth, like many here, miss the point about the Cartel’s power grab. Legalization of drugs here will do nothing to put this genie back in the bottle. Otherwise this report, and the included video, give you a sense of how hopeless the situation is down there:

In the past three months, American Mormon communities in Mexico have been sucked into a dust devil of violence sweeping the borderlands. Their relative wealth has made them targets: Their telephones ring with threats of extortion. Their children and elders are taken by kidnappers. They have been drawn into the government’s war with the drug cartels.

This month, a leader of their colony was abducted by heavily armed men dressed as police, then beaten and shot dead 10 minutes from town. Benjamin LeBaron, 31, whom everyone called Benji, had dared to denounce the criminals, while refusing to pay a $1 million ransom demanded by kidnappers who had grabbed his teenage brother from a family ranch in May.

Amid the blood and mesquite at the site of his last breath, Benjamin LeBaron’s killers posted a sign that read: “This is for the leaders of LeBaron who didn’t believe and who still don’t believe.”

[...]

“All we want to do is live in peace. We want nothing to do with the drug cartels. They can’t be stopped. What we want is just to protect ourselves from being kidnapped and killed,” said Marco LeBaron, a college student who came home for the funeral of his brother, the slain anti-crime activist. Marco LeBaron is one of 70 Mormons who have volunteered to join a rural police force to protect the town. The Mexican government has given them permission to arm themselves.

For a taste of how the gangs operate, this section describes a home invasion. Not for the squeamish:

Early on July 7, four trucks loaded with men passed through a highway tollbooth, where they were recorded on videotape outside Galeana, where Benjamin LeBaron lived in a sprawling, new stucco home with his wife and five young children. Two trucks stopped at the cemetery outside town and waited. Two pickup trucks filled with 15 to 20 heavily armed men, wearing helmets, bulletproof vests and blue uniforms, came for LeBaron.

They smashed in his home’s windows and shouted for him to open the door, as his terrified children cried inside, according to an account given by his brothers. LeBaron’s brother-in-law Luis Widmar, 29, who lived across the street, heard the commotion and ran to his aid. Both men were beaten by the gunmen, who threatened to rape LeBaron’s wife in front of her children unless the men revealed where LeBaron kept his arsenal of weapons.

“But he didn’t have any, because I promise you, if he did, he would have used them to protect his family,” Julian LeBaron said.

LeBaron and Widmar were shot in the head outside town. A banner was hung beside their bodies that blamed them for the arrest of 25 gunmen who were seized in June after terrorizing the town of Nicolas Bravo, where they burned down buildings and extorted from business owners. According to Mexican law enforcement officials, the gunmen are members of the Sinaloa drug cartel, which is fighting the Juarez cartel for billion-dollar cocaine-smuggling routes into El Paso.

After the men killed LeBaron and Widmar, a video camera captured their departure at the highway tollbooth — the make, model and year of their vehicles and the license numbers, according to family members. There have been no arrests.

h/t N.T.A.