As Colombia prepares to inaugurate a communist leader who's "worse than Chávez," as former president Alvaro Uribe put it, things aren't exactly tranquil in next-door socialist hellhole Venezuela.

Here's the news from that dump: 

Colombia's President Ivan Duque suggested on Saturday that FARC dissident leader "Ivan Márquez" was killed in Venezuela.

In a tweet, Duque said that military intelligence was "verifying" whether the former political chief of the now-defunct guerrilla group FARC was killed in the neighboring country.

Marquez founded the "Segunda Marquetalia" group in 2019 after abandoning the ongoing peace process with two dozen of his former subordinates.

The group previously confirmed that three other founding members of the guerrilla group were killed in Venezuela.

Who was Marquez?  Why should we care?

Well, he was one of the media darlings who negotiated the FARC peace treaty with post-Uribe Colombia through the good offices of Fidel Castro, the treaty that was resolutely rejected by the Colombian voters in a referendum shortly before election of President Trump — and ignored by authorities.  After that, Marquez, a hard-faced thug who was a top FARC leader, got himself a congressional seat, free press, and other unearned goodies in exchange for "peace," which was horrible stuff, given his record of terrorism and crime against the country over the course of decades.  It would be like giving Osama bin Laden a congressional seat here in exchange for an agreement from him to be nice to us.  Marquez whooped it up with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez; Gustavo Petro, the newly elected communist president of Colombia, who himself was a former narco-terrorist; and the mainstream media as the new face of "peace." 

Of course it didn't work.  Marquez soon returned to terrorism and drug-dealing as a leader of FARC dissidents, taking haven in FARC's favorite safe-haven hideout, Chavista Venezuela.

It didn't work out very well for him. The thug was apparently rubbed out by other drug dealers. Seems that's the kind of place Venezuela has become — a narco-state so revolting that the drug-dealers are in open war with one other because the spoils are so big.  Many of these drug-dealers are either allied or actually in Venezuela's military, and some of the Venezuelan generals have been identified as actual cartel leaders.    

Venezuela experts Pedro M. Burelli and Ambassador Michael Skol had some stellar insights on what a sump of drug corruption — a veritable narco-state — Venezuela has descended into.  I wrote about their presentation here.  One of them noted, "The more (the U.S. foreign policy establishment) learned about Venezuela and its impossible ingrained drugs-and-oil-and-gangs-and-tainted-military corruption situation, the more people wanted 'to run away from it.'"

Well, what a lovely place.  The kindest thing that can be said about Marquez is that he won't be missed.

Why should we care?  Because it demonstrates the extent to which Venezuela has become a violent narco-state now that Joe Biden is irrelevant and crazed leftists are being elected across the region.  Venezuela is a top exporter of illegal aliens through the region and now into the U.S., and drugs are significantly interwoven with this dynamic.  As migrants surge across the border, you can bet that some among them are drug-dealers setting up shop here.  There might be stepped up drug-dealer warfare in Venezuela now that Colombia's still-there FARC terrorists and the Venezuelan military duke it out in a quest for absolute power.

It goes to show that peace treaties with FARC are all garbage, and the only solution for people of this kind is total military defeat.  Marquez should not have been blown away by fellow drug-dealers, but by the Colombian military acting in concert with its allies in Latin America.  Nobody wanted to do anything like that, though.  That FARC peace treaty brought no peace in either Colombia or Venezuela; it just brought new rounds of thuggery.  Now we see a big rubout.  There will be plenty more violence and migrant exoduses to come from it.

Image: Wikipedia, public domain.