Raul Reyes

Raul Reyes

Thursday, March 6, 2008

Intelligence analysts would be well served to always pay attention to what America’s competitors say as well as do when thinking critically about US national security. That is what my mentors taught me, and while I can see the world and that gives me an advantage over traditional analyst cells, if you just look and listen to what is being said and done, the answers will emerge.

The latest case in point was the termination on March 1, 2008, of Luis Edgar Devia Silva, AKA Raul Reyes, by Columbian military forces, the former Spokesman for the communist Columbian revolutionary organization known as FARC (The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia—The People’s Army). FARC Secretariat Raul Reyes was liquidated with his personal guard detachment approximately 4 kilometers inside Ecuador’s borders. The Columbian government’s decision to cross into the sovereign territory of a neighboring nation-state to conduct a military operation to kill a leader of an insurgency that has preyed upon Columbia for over 40 years was risky, but hands down spectacularly beneficial.

The mere existence of Raul Reyes exemplifies why the US intelligence budget for Central and Latin America should be increased exponentially. Raul Reyes was a thug; a mass murderer and a narco-trafficker that sought to overthrow the government of Columbia by military means and replace that democratically elected government with a perverse Stalinist form of governance. On Reyes’ watch with FARC, he planned and even participated in hundreds of highly visible kidnappings and murders of western and native individuals in Columbia. The kidnapped and murdered were journalists, corporate employees, government employees—so many that to survey their professions would cause the reader to envision a small town with all of the good people that make up its public and private services.

Reyes was also a notorious drug trafficker specializing in cocaine production and the architecture of operating drug factories and personnel required to staff those facilities. Again while under Reyes’ watch and leadership, he would oversee one of the largest cocaine production and distribution systems in South America that flooded the streets of the United States with tons of cocaine. Since drug trafficking and stable communities do not mutually coexist together, anyone that interfered with Reyes’ drug operations was murdered by military cells that comprised the main force of the FARC military wing. Raul Reyes was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people just in the scope of protecting and increasing the efficiency of FARC-sponsored cocaine production alone.

It is not known exactly how many lives were extinguished by Reyes as a high-level commander within the FARC communist revolutionary organization. FARC activities include conducting armed raids on innocent men, women and children using military weapons, explosive devices in terrorist attacks, targeted assassinations and other forms of terrorism as terror is defined against the Columbian government. It is amazing that the Columbian military was able to zero in on Reyes’ position while he was bivouacked on the Ecuadorian side of the border with Columbia. That tells us that either the Ecuadorians gave him up or the Columbians are increasing the sophistication of their intelligence gathering capability of the FARC movement.

Raul Reyes was a monster, and his liquidation was well deserved, indeed.

Now the leftist president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, doesn’t share this opinion. Chavez called the liquidation of Raul Reyes a “criminal act”, a “murder” of a “good man”. We have seen in history how deluded Marxists like to stick together because they are notorious for telling each other what they want to hear and all the other traditional back-scratching, but Chavez’s reaction to Reyes’ death was so over the top for a national leader that intelligence analysts have to consider if there isn’t some other motive for it.

What is going on is that Chavez wanted to immediately distance himself from the unexpected death of Raul Reyes. Why? Because that is what Chavez fears most about his own future. Hugo Chavez is always talking about plots to assassinate him on his leftist radio program when he preaches incessantly to the Venezuelan people. These assassination plots that linger in Chavez’s mind are of course the product of the United States and the Central Intelligence Agency specifically. Chavez knows that he is a troublemaker, but he wonders if anyone in Washington thinks he is enough of a troublemaker to actually do something about it. The assassination of Reyes then taps directly into Chavez’s own paranoia about being taken out by capitalists sent from the United States.

If you take a look at how Chavez reacted to Reyes’ untimely (timely would be more appropriate) demise, the Venezuelan president was really reacting to his own fears. Within hours of learning that Reyes was killed inside Ecuador, Chavez mobilized a minimum of ten Venezuelan infantry battalions and sent them to the border of Columbia. The media missed the psychological aspect of Chavez’s hot-headed response, but it represents a man who is paranoid about being assassinated himself as well as an unskilled military tactician that is ready to squander the lives of thousands of young Venezuelan soldiers to defend their president from an imaginary attack. As Chavez ordered his soldiers off against the imaginary threat, like the imaginary threat he consistently harbors about being assassinated, the Venezuelan president was actually telling the media where he was sending his soldiers to gather. Now if you are an infantry soldier, the last thing you want is a paranoid loudmouth like Chavez telling the international media where your foxhole is going to be, but that is exactly what Chavez did and continues to do even now.

The secondary objective to Chavez’s over the top response to Reyes’ termination was to ensure that FARC believed that he did not have anything to do with the act itself. Marxists like to stick together, but they will kill each other to advance their agenda even marginally, like other revolutionary groups do. We know that FARC receives support from Hugo Chavez in terms of monetary and military support, and we also know that elements of FARC cross into Venezuelan territory to seek safety and shelter, as Reyes’ troops did with Reyes himself when they camped out across the border with Ecuador. So not only did Chavez concern himself with what he believes is a plot to assassinate him by the US government, but from fellow leftist revolutionaries who probably wouldn’t have appreciated things very much if they believed that Chavez had anything to do with the killing of Raul Reyes.

The Columbian government claimed that they found a computer with documents on it that proved a Chavez-FARC connection. What would have been more interesting would have been documents demonstrating a Chavez meddling in the affairs of the leadership cell of FARC, not that such a situation exists, but it would have been enjoyable to see how an already paranoid Chavez would have responded to that.

More dangerously however is the fact that Chavez wouldn’t be moving such a large number of military forces around without the direct or indirect blessing of China and Russia. When Kosovo declared independence recently, Russian government officials claimed that it was a simple thing for the United States to allow separatist movements to occur in places like Kosovo because the US didn’t face such problems in its own hemisphere. Hugo Chavez’s decisions as president of Venezuela in the last 48 hours does move our hemisphere more into alignment with what the Russians desire.

To fellow analysts—look and listen to American competitors. The answers are there. In my next article I will be discussing the recent financial attacks upon the United States by the international community.

Christopher Farmer

MS, National Security

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