VENEZUELA Arrests Suspected DEA Agent

[magbana]

Venezuela says arrests suspected U.S. drugs agent
Thu May 29, 2008 5:07pm EDT

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CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela said on Thursday it arrested a man who identified himself as a U.S. anti-drugs agent, which if confirmed could inflame tensions between the United States and one of its biggest oil suppliers.

President Hugo Chavez in 2005 ended cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), saying the agency was spying on him. The United States denied the charge and says Chavez does too little to stop trafficking from neighboring Colombia, the world's largest cocaine exporter.

Gen. Gabriel Oviedo said the man was acting suspicious when he was detained close to the border with Colombia while bearing Canadian and French passports and a Venezuelan identity card.

"The official at the scene proceeded to interrogate him and he said he was a DEA agent," Oviedo told state television.

The U.S. Embassy in Caracas said it had no knowledge of the arrest.

Relations have deteriorated since a failed 2002 coup against Chavez that Washington initially welcomed.

Tensions increased this month. The United States said new evidence of Chavez's ties to Colombian rebels was troubling, while the leftist charged a U.S. military jet that entered Venezuelan airspace was spying on the OPEC nation.

(Reporting by Carlos Rodriguez and Brian Ellsworth; Writing by Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Saul Hudson and Eric Walsh)

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN2929449720080529

http://snipurl.com/2bgy9

[EFerrari]

1. This is not good news. Another perversion of a law enforcement agency

for political purposes.

:(

[Judi Lynn]

2. WTF WAS he doing there, considering Venezuela THREW OUT the D.E.A. in 2005?

Feature: Venezuela Throws Out DEA, Washington Threatens Decertification 8/12/05

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez told reporters in Caracas Sunday he was annulling a bilateral agreement between his government and the DEA that allows the US anti-drug agency to operate in Venezuela. Those comments were but the latest and most definitive statement of an emerging Venezuelan government position that has been hardening over the past few weeks. The US government has responded with not-so-veiled threats to "decertify" Venezuela as not cooperating in US drug war goals when the State Department undertakes its annual certification review next month.

"The DEA was using the fight against drug trafficking as a mask, to support drug trafficking and to carry out intelligence in Venezuela against the government," Chavez said, according to an Associated Press account. "We have detected intelligence infiltration that threatened national security and defense. Under those circumstances we decided to make a clean break with those accords, and we are reviewing them," Chavez said. The DEA "is not necessary" for Venezuela to fight drug trafficking, he continued, adding that Venezuela would continue to cooperate internationally in efforts to repress the drug trade. "We will continue working with international organizations against drug trafficking," he said.

Neither the US Embassy in Caracas nor the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington responded to Drug War Chronicle requests for comment except to point to statements issued by the respective embassies this week. The US Embassy in Caracas did not address the DEA spying charges, limiting its comments to saying the rupture was "unfortunate" and served only drug traffickers and warning of the impact the move could have on certification. The embassy statement noted that President Bush must notify Congress of certification decisions on September 15. "The state of cooperation between US and Venezuelan law enforcement agencies will certainly be factored into that decision," the statement said. "As we have repeatedly stated in the past, the only people who win from a lack of cooperation between our governments on this issue are the drug traffickers and their allies."

More:
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle-old/399/venezuela.shtml

~~~~~~~~~~~~
Behind the Hype
Behind the name-calling and the apocryphal report lurks a strained relationship between Washington and Caracas. Cooperation between the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and its Venezuelan counterpart has dramatically deteriorated over the past two years, due less to acts of violation by the DEA than to the White House’s determination to defame Chávez’s rule in Venezuela. Starting back in 2005, Chávez began to oust DEA inspectors from his country, accusing them of using their privileged position to spy on his government. Bush responded by labeling Venezuela as “failing demonstrably” in its anti-drug war in the 2006 fiscal year report. The Venezuelan Embassy in Washington has released a statement that its government was willing to renegotiate an agreement with the DEA: that is, before the 2007 fiscal year report defaming Presidential Determination came out on September 15.

It is worth noting that the White House’s assessment is not shared elsewhere in Washington. The State Department’s 2006 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, released in March, suggests that Venezuela’s drug seizures have improved since 2004. The same agency also released a favorable report in 2005, which stated that between 1998 and 2004 – the period in which, coincidentally, Chávez was in office – Venezuelan drug seizures actually rose from 8.6 tons to 19.07 tons. This year alone, Venezuela has confiscated 35.6 tons of illicit drugs. Based on numbers rather than Bush administration hype, Venezuela is quite clearly doing better than Bush’s political report suggests.

More:
http://www.coha.org/2006/10/06/coha-opinion-drug-wars-bush-launches-attack-on-venezuelan-narcotics/