Some 30 suitcases of cocaine seized from Venezuela - France flight.

Venezuela arrested three low-level military officials after more than a ton of cocaine was found on a flight from Venezuela. The US has long accused military officials there of involvement in trafficking.

|
Eric Gaillard/Reuters/File
An Air France plane is seen on the tarmac at Nice International airport in Nice, France, July 31, 2013.

• A version of this post ran on the author's blog, bloggingsbyboz.com. The views expressed are the author's own.

Over one ton of cocaine was found on an Air France flight from Venezuela. The cocaine was packed in over thirty suitcases that were not registered to any passengers. As ToroMiguel and others point out, all of the baggage security at Venezuela's biggest international airport is handled by the National Guard. It's obvious the Venezuelan military played a major role in trafficking these drugs because they were the ones who had to handle the bags.

The US has long accused various Venezuelan military officials of involvement in drug trafficking. These aren't idle accusations or politically motivated attacks against an antagonistic government. It's a legitimate problem in Venezuela. There are top military officials, at times called the Cartel de los Soles or Cartel Bolivariano, who are profiting from drugs, extortion, and money laundering. They use the chain of command to move drugs across the Colombian border and then out of the country.

The Venezuelan government knows it has an image problem with this Paris cocaine seizure. They quickly arrested three lower level Guardsmen, but is there any chance that higher level officials will be held accountable? Almost certainly not. There is no accountability in the Maduro government.

If the Maduro government were serious about cracking down on corruption, this military-cartel connection would be an obvious place to start. There are only three reasons for him to avoid it:

1) He's naive. [Nicolás Maduro] believes his own conspiracies and ignores or refuses to believe the more obvious explanations.
2) He's complicit. However, I haven't seen significant evidence to suggest Mr. Maduro is involved.
3) He's scared. Maduro knows the Venezuelan military is corrupted by organized crime, but is afraid to move against them because they could threaten his own power.

It's that third scenario that is most concerning. If Maduro knows about the corruption but is too scared to act, then that's a serious criminal-military challenge to Venezuelan democracy that goes well beyond the debate over the ideological legacy of former President Chavez. If Maduro doesn't actually control the soldiers and guardsmen and can't remove the ones he needs to remove, then any future government will face a particularly tough fight to reassert that civilian control.

– James Bosworth is a freelance writer and consultant who runs Bloggings by Boz.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Some 30 suitcases of cocaine seized from Venezuela - France flight.
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/Latin-America-Monitor/2013/0923/Some-30-suitcases-of-cocaine-seized-from-Venezuela-France-flight
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe