...that the Chavez government was involved in drug trafficking or countenanced it in any way.

They betray their own prejudice by, in one paragraph, asserting that "President Chavez has a firm grip on the Venezuelan justice system," while in the next paragraph stating the following: "...there is little doubt as to (Maklid's) involvement in the smuggling of cocaine. Three of his siblings — Aldala, Bessel and Alex — were detained in November 2008, at a family ranch with 380 kilos of cocaine. From that moment, Makled became a fugitive from Venezuelan justice, until his capture in the Colombian border city of Cucuta in August 2010."

http://interamericansecuritywatch.com/makleds-window-into-trafficking-in-venezuela-closing/

WHY, if the Chavez government was involved in drug trafficking, was the Chavez government detaining Maklid's siblings on cocaine charges and in hot pursuit of Maklid himself as a drug kingpin "fugitive"?

I am not saying there may not have been corrupt members of the Venezuelan national guard. That can happen in any country. What I'm saying is that the Chavez government, far from abetting the drug trade, was actively pursuing this drug lord, who fled Venezuela and was finally caught in a Colombia/Venezuela border town and RIGHTFULLY returned to Venezuela to be charged and tried. It doesn't sound to me like Maklid "kept (the Chavez) government in check"; it was rather the other way around--the Chavez government finally put a "check" on Maklid and his criminal organization.

As for the Miami Hairball and its report on Stratfor's report on Wikileaks cables, they are the biggest liars and propagandists of all the Corporate Press, on the Latin American Left and the Chavez government in particular. So, UPFRONT, I am highly skeptical of ANYTHING they assert. Apart from their bizarre characterization of Maklid as an "entrepreneur," how else are they coloring and distorting this matter and disinforming their news consumers? I don't trust them AT ALL (and don't have a lot of trust in Stratfor either), so I will have to read these cables myself.

"On Monday February 27th, 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files, over five million e-mails from the Texas headquartered "global intelligence" company Stratfor. The e-mails date between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal's Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defence Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor's web of informers, pay-off structure, payment laundering techniques and psychological methods."

http://wikileaks.ch/gifiles/docs/1327642_makled-s-threat-to-the-venezuelan-regime-.html

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Now read this Stratfor report on the cables, knowing who they are. Click on the link above. Wikileaks published but does not endorse the Stratfor report. Better to read it yourself than to rely on the Miami Hairball for an interpretation of an interpretation.

I would also advise applying my "rule of thumb" for Bushwhacks, to Stratfor, that, whatever they say, the opposite is true, and that, whatever they accuse others of doing, they are doing or planning to do.

I think this includes drug trafficking by the MIC (under the Bush Junta and maybe on-going). That is one thing they accuse Chavez of--drug trafficking. It also likely includes the infiltration of rightwing death squads/drug traffickers over the Colombian border into Venezuela, to destabilize Venezuela. They accuse Chavez of letting FARC guerillas use Venezuela's territory. The latter accusation has been debunked, in at least one border region of Venezuela, where, instead of FARC guerrillas--which Venezuela had been accused of harboring (accused by the former president of Colombia, mafia don Alvaro Uribe)--the Venezuelan military found the Black Eagles, a death squad/drug trafficking mafia from Colombia. They were trying to set up their organization in Venezuela. (Uribe and his cohorts are notorious for their ties to such groups.)

Our MIC (the Pentagon, et al) think a lot like Bushwhacks, i.e., they are notorious for LYING and for "projection" (accusing others of their own crimes). I found my "rule of thumb" for Bushwhacks essential in understanding Bushwhack talk (its jabberwocky, in its "Alice in Wonderland" version of the world). But, really, the pioneer of warmongering jabberwocky is the Pentagon itself and, now, the entire world police state called "Homeland Security."

With almost every accusation and innuendo by Stratfor, in their interpretation of these cables, the opposite could well be true, and it is also more than plausible that THEY and their "subscribers" were involved in acts of mass murder and terrorism in Colombia (slaughter of trade unionists and other leftists; displacement of FIVE MILLION peasants from their farm lands, by state terror, which the U.S. MIC provided billions of dollars and "training" for) and efforts to export their murder and mayhem to Venezuela.

Bear in mind that, according to Amnesty International, 95% of the murders of trade unionists in Colombia were committed by the Colombia military (about half) and their rightwing paramilitary death squads (the other half), and only 2% were committed by the FARC. The Colombia military is funded and "trained" by the U.S. military, which works very closely with the Colombia military out of bases in Colombia. Among the atrocities committed were the Colombian military luring youths with promises of jobs, murdering them and dressing their bodies up like FARC guerrillas, to earn bonuses and promotions and to impress U.S. senators with their "body counts" (the notorious "false positives" scandal), and mass killings of villagers and peasant farmers, one of them in close association with a Pentagon/USAID "pacification" program.

Stratfor's blather about "terrorism" is beyond hypocritical. It is an effort to SMEAR a government (Venezuela's) which does NOT kill and terrorize people, with the crimes of a government that DOES kill and terrorize people: our own, and that of our proxy during the Bush Junta, Alvaro Uribe's Colombia.

Stratfor's "analysis" of Santos/Chavez relations (on the FARC and other issues) is therefore highly suspect. They have axes to grind, war profits to make, oil and land they want to control, crimes to cover up and a whole lot of other motives--including sheer bloody-mindedness--to misinterpret, distort and lie.

It speaks directly about Colombia. Authors, Oliver Villar and Drew Cottle. It's new, released in 2011.

I'm just at the beginning, having read only the introduction, and I've been tempted to P.M. the entire introduction to you to show you how much you'd appreciate seeing this book! You would recognize, according to them, immediately, you have been exactly on the right road from the first concerning this drug war.

It's just a matter of time before enough people get so sick of this the truth will start getting out, big scale, for the world to finally find impossible to ignore. It's been going on far, far too long, and destroyed so many people, crudely surrendering them to the insatiable appetite of defective human beings' greed.