Nicolás Maduro allegedly partnered with Venezuela’s most notorious gang to brutalize political dissidents abroad
Leftism always begets more government, and more government always begets an increase in abuses and usurpations. (Always is not hyperbole.)
Therefore, it is a fallacy to believe that there is any distinction between a government under the influence of political leftism, and a criminal cartel—when big enough and strong enough, both will pillage, both will plunder, and both will murder. That’s just what thugs do.
So, it should come as no surprise to anyone that a far-left regime is now allegedly outsourcing some of its violence and tapping a notoriously vicious criminal gang to handle the brutalization of its political dissidents abroad. Just today, Breitbart News published an article from Christian K. Caruzo, reporting on a news item from a Colombian broadcaster:
Venezuela’s socialist regime is using the Marxist National Liberation Army (ELN) terrorist organization and the Tren de Aragua transnational criminal organization to persecute Venezuelan dissidents abroad, according to a report published by Colombia’s Caracol Televisión on Sunday.
Caruzo relays that Caracol purportedly “based its report” on a number of “alleged secret documents” from the South American branch of the Pentagon (SOUTHCOM), as well as “testimonies” of those persecuted.
Also, per Caruzo:
Caracol claimed the documents showed that DGCIM has been acting in Colombia ‘for years’ in alliance with ELN and other criminal groups to access national security secrets and persecute opponents of the socialist regime.
Now, the DGCIM is the Venezuelan General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence; in 2022, an office of the United Nations determined that the state agency was one of Maduro’s favored agencies to commit state-sponsored “crimes against humanity” including “the use of extreme acts of torture, sexual violence, and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatments” on political dissidents.
Here are the details, again from Caruzo:
The Colombian news channel identified three dissidents targeted in Colombia and Chile.
The three dissidents in question met in Cúcuta, Colombia, on December 13, 2023, allegedly to discuss how to overthrow Maduro with ideas that were more ‘quixotic’ than real, and reportedly not armed. The group was reportedly unaware that the regime knew of their intentions.
By January of this year, the Dissident #1 had been kidnapped by the ELN and turned over Maduro’s regime, where the man “confessed” of his “intention to assassinate” Maduro. In February, Dissident #2 was kidnapped and murdered by a “group of men” who were impersonating local law enforcement; Chilean authorities determined the suspects (one of whom formerly worked for Maduro) to be “linked with” the Tren de Aragua gang. And, just a few weeks back, Dissident #3 narrowly escaped… a similar fate(?) after being chased down by six adult males walking along the street late at night.
As Thomas Paine wrote:
Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.
Government’s only legitimacy rests on the notion that it is functioning to secure individuals’ unalienable rights; when it abandons or (in the case of Maduro’s regime) ignores that imperative, government becomes “intolerable” because there is no difference (yet it’s worse, because we the people “furnish” and fund our oppressor) between the sufferings it sows and the oppression that would be inarguably be sown by overt criminal factions.
Image: DonkeyHotey, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, unaltered.