President Hugo Chavez said Sunday that Venezuelan police had arrested at least 77 suspected Colombian paramilitary members who were allegedly training to strike against his government. Opposition leaders said the raids were a government-hatched scheme meant to divert attention from their presidential recall effort.
Chavez said 53 Colombian paramilitary members were arrested in a raid on a farm early Sunday, and another 24 paramilitary recruits were caught after fleeing into the countryside. However. one of those arrested said the detained men did not belong to any organized right-wing Colombian paramilitary group.
In his weekly Hello President radio and TV broadcast, Chavez said federal agents were uncovering additional clues and searching for more suspected paramilitary members. He said the arrests were proof of a conspiracy against the government of this leading oil-producing nation, involving Cuban and Venezuelan exiles in Florida and neighboring Colombia.
PHOTO: AFP
The allegations come at a time when an opposition petition campaign to force a recall election against Chavez is entering a decisive phase.
Chavez claimed that the plot was backed by Venezuela's mostly pro-opposition news media, adding that the raids had "eliminated the seed of a terrorist group."
"Now they are importing terrorists," Chavez said of his opponents, "and they are looking for people here."
Henrique Capriles, a mayor who supports the opposition, rejected Chavez's allegations that the captured men were being financed by opposition. He called the raids "a show organized by the government" to turn attention away from efforts to hold a presidential recall vote.
Capriles said municipal police were the first to discover the alleged paramilitaries, and then tipped off federal agents.
In Colombia, President Alvaro Uribe praised Venezuela for the arrests.
"What we need is that the governments of both neighboring countries help each other capture criminals from Colombia, guerrillas or paramilitaries operating over there," Uribe said.
A right-wing Colombian paramilitary leader, Salvador Mancuso, denied his United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia were involved.
"We deny the accusations against us by Venezuelan leaders," Mancuso said.
Mancuso claimed that Chavez was working with Colombia's two largest leftist rebel groups.
Chavez has denied this allegation, which was also raised in a recent US State Department report on terrorism.
The leftist Chavez -- who was briefly ousted in a 2002 coup -- said he had ordered police to capture "each and every one of the terrorists" involved in the alleged plot.
The collapse of the Swiss Birch glacier serves as a chilling warning of the escalating dangers faced by communities worldwide living under the shadow of fragile ice, particularly in Asia, experts said. Footage of the collapse on Wednesday showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountainside into the hamlet of Blatten. Swiss Development Cooperation disaster risk reduction adviser Ali Neumann said that while the role of climate change in the case of Blatten “still needs to be investigated,” the wider impacts were clear on the cryosphere — the part of the world covered by frozen water. “Climate change and
Poland is set to hold a presidential runoff election today between two candidates offering starkly different visions for the country’s future. The winner would succeed Polish President Andrzej Duda, a conservative who is finishing his second and final term. The outcome would determine whether Poland embraces a nationalist populist trajectory or pivots more fully toward liberal, pro-European policies. An exit poll by Ipsos would be released when polls close today at 9pm local time, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Final results are expected tomorrow. Whoever wins can be expected to either help or hinder the
DENIAL: Musk said that the ‘New York Times was lying their ass off,’ after it reported he used so much drugs that he developed bladder problems Elon Musk on Saturday denied a report that he used ketamine and other drugs extensively last year on the US presidential campaign trail. The New York Times on Friday reported that the billionaire adviser to US President Donald Trump used so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that he developed bladder problems. The newspaper said the world’s richest person also took ecstasy and mushrooms, and traveled with a pill box last year, adding that it was not known whether Musk also took drugs while heading the so-called US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after Trump took power in January. In a
It turns out that looming collision between our Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies might not happen after all. Astronomers on Monday said that the probability of the two spiral galaxies colliding is less than previously thought, with a 50-50 chance within the next 10 billion years. That is essentially a coin flip, but still better odds than previous estimates and farther out in time. “As it stands, proclamations of the impending demise of our galaxy seem greatly exaggerated,” the Finnish-led team wrote in a study appearing in Nature Astronomy. While good news for the Milky Way galaxy, the latest forecast might be moot
RSS