José Antonio Colina assures that the US “will seek to attack very specific points” in Venezuela in phase two of its operation against the so-called Cartel of the Suns.
MIAMI, United States. – The former Venezuelan military man and political analyst José Antonio Colina stated in interview with CubaNet that the United States military operation against drug trafficking off the coast of Venezuela would enter a second phase with “specific attacks on Venezuelan land,” while maintaining that there is no evidence that the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) of Cuba participate in drug trafficking activities in that country, although they do in indoctrination, intelligence and repression tasks.
According to Colina, the current US administration went “from the narrative of declaring the Cartel of the Suns as a terrorist organization” to “a military operation in international waters off the Caribbean Sea to prevent the widely known drug trafficking route from eastern Venezuela to Central America, Mexico and the United States (…) from continuing to operate.”
The former military man also recalled that, in about four weeks, United States troops “have destroyed six boats coming from eastern Venezuela, in which some 16 people, presumably drug traffickers, have died.”
The former officer maintained that, due to the pressure on the high seas, “this drug trafficking route has been minimized to almost 0%.” He added that President Donald Trump himself announced a “phase two,” aimed at “attacking very specific targets on Venezuelan soil, but that are linked to the Cartel of the Suns.” Among those targets, Colina mentioned “collection centers, piers, places where they are accumulating or storing drugs.”
Regarding the so-called Cartel of the Suns, Colina stated that it “has existed” since “approximately 1990” and that it took its name from the figures (suns) that appear on the epaulettes of “ranking military personnel,” who are, according to the interviewee, “the main leaders of this drug trafficking cartel.”
To support his statement, Colina cited the former military man and former Venezuelan politician Hugo Armando Carvajal Barrios (El Pollo Carvajal)who was director of Military Counterintelligence and has provided information on the participation of soldiers in drug trafficking; and the testimony of the former Chavista general convicted in the United States Clíver Antonio Alcalá Cordones. He also referred to the former commander of the Bolivarian National Guard (GNB) Néstor Luis Reverol Torres, who has an open trial in the United States for drug trafficking, as well as the accusation of the United States Department of Justice that indicates Nicolás Maduro as the main leader of the Cartel of the Suns and offers a $50 million bounty on his head.
As a summary of this picture, Colina stated: “Every time someone is accused of being a drug trafficker and is in Venezuela, what does Nicolás Maduro do? (…) In Venezuela they accuse you of being a drug trafficker and what you get is recognition, a decoration or they place you in a more important position.”
On the other hand, Colina said that “the only impact that the Cuban regime has at this time is only to give statements in which it has clearly said that it is only going to support Maduro politically; it is not willing to support him in the face of a military escalation or an escalation of force.” And he emphasized: “I cannot say that the Cuban military is involved in drug trafficking in Venezuela in this case, nor that they have advised him.” [a Maduro] in that matter.”
However, he assured that Cuban participation in the Venezuelan repressive architecture “is absolutely true.” According to his testimony, since the time of Hugo Chávez “there was a strong presence of elements of the Cuban military in Venezuelan territory, with the first intention of indoctrinating, of ideologizing the Venezuelan Armed Forces.”
The former military man specified that later the Cuban agents “began to have a greater presence in the intelligence agencies, in spying on the Venezuelan military themselves and in indoctrinating and teaching the intelligence bodies, the police forces, in (…) how they could torture peaceful protesters in order to extract information from them.” Finally, he added that the current military territorial organization in Venezuela “is a model (…) copied and traced from Havana.”
Regarding future scenarios, Colina considered it unlikely that Nicolás Maduro will take refuge in Havana in the short term and estimated that, in the coming weeks, “we are going to see phase two [de la ofensiva de Estados Unidos]specific attacks on Venezuelan land, at specific points (…), on the eastern coast.” He even said that there could be “the neutralization or extraction of a general who is part of the Cartel of the Suns.”
However, it does not foresee the immediate capture of Maduro due to a “political variable”: “The United States is going to neutralize Nicolás Maduro (…) if and only if it has the certainty, conviction and security that the transition will be led by the right people.” And he specified: “When I talk about the right people, I talk about people from the opposition: in this case María Corina Machado and Edmundo González Urrutia.”
In his opinion, until Washington is “convinced that the opponents (…) are capable of directing the transition with the force structure that gives them governability, they are not going to act until the end.”
The interview closed by highlighting that “these are very important moments (…) not only for Venezuela and the end of this narco-dictatorship, but for the entire region.”
