The next shoe drops in Colombia's cross-border raid into Ecuador to get the FARC

I ended my earlier post Capture of Victor Bout related to raid on FARC in Ecuadorby saying "So, we wait for the next shoe to drop." Here from the BBC is a shoe dropping:

Farc rebel link files 'genuine'
International police agency Interpol says Colombian officials did not tamper with computers which they claim provide proof Venezuela financed Farc rebels.

The hard drives were purportedly seized after a raid on a rebel camp in Ecuador at the beginning of March.

Although Interpol certified the authenticity of the files, not their contents, correspondents say their tests add credence to Colombian claims.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez vehemently dismissed the allegations. [Snip]

Both Venezuela and Ecuador say that any contacts with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) were solely made as part of a humanitarian effort to free hostages held by the left-wing guerrillas.

Authenticity confirmed
Colombian forces attacked the Farc camp located just across the border in Ecuador on 1 March.

The computers they seized contain files which, according to Bogota, show that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was personally involved in financing and supplying arms to the rebels.

They also suggest that Ecuador maintained links with the Farc.

The Colombian authorities asked Interpol to check the files after Mr Chavez accused them of faking the documents.

Interpol head Ronald Noble said his team had not analysed the information contained on the drives, as Interpol's remit extended only to certifying the authenticity of the documents, not their contents.

Mr Noble said that deep forensic analyses showed Colombia did not modify, delete or create any files, although it did not always follow internationally accepted methods when handling the computers.

"We are absolutely certain that the computer discs our experts examined came from a Farc terrorist camp," he said.

But he was quick to stress that the fact that the files had not been tampered with did not prove that the information contained within them was totally accurate.

There are a lot of reports in the Internet about this Interpol report, but none add anything significant to BBC report above.

So we wait for more shoes headed groundward.

Is Russia involved with FARC in Colombia?

Comments by Victor Bout and Russia's complaints in how he is being treated in Thailand after his arrest lead Emptywheel to wonder how the arms to the FARC, the arrest of Victor Bout and the Colombian cross-border attack against the FARC camp in Ecuador are related.

Mother Jones provides a detailed description of the DEA sting that nabbed Victor Bout. The article gives an interesting summary of Bout's career:

FOR SOMEONE SO POLITICALLY connected in so many places, Bout's personal history, all the little pieces that make up the man, has remained the stuff of urban legend. He is variously described as having been born in the Soviet republics of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, or Ukraine. He is married and has a daughter who lives in Spain, as well as a brother named Sergei in Moscow, also believed to be active in the arms-smuggling business. He is known to hold as many as five passports in various aliases and speaks at least six languages, including Russian, Uzbek, Portuguese, French, English, and perhaps several African dialects. As a young man, his language talents were developed at the Soviet Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow, a primary recruiting vehicle for the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence service. Whether Bout became a GRU officer remains unknown (there is speculation he joined the KGB), but his post-Soviet career bears a striking similarity to one of the GRU's primary Cold War tasks: the provision of weapons to communist movements around the world. Bout, for his part, was unimpressed by Marxist politics, but the basic mechanics of moving large quantities of military equipment to remote locations he might easily have mastered while in the GRU's employ.

After the Soviet Union's implosion, Bout went into business for himself, using his connections to gain access to mountains of former Warsaw Pact weapons and ammunition and buying up the old military cargo aircraft required to move them. There were plenty of paying customers to be served, and in the years that followed, Bout served them all, often working for both sides of a conflict to double his profit. He armed the Taliban and the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone, Charles Taylor's regime in Liberia, UNITA in Angola, various Congolese factions, and Abu Sayyaf, a militant Islamic group in the Philippines. As recently as 2006, says Farah, the arms dealer was believed to be making shipments to the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia and Hezbollah in Lebanon, among many others.

We can hope that more comes out on this story. Something is swimming around in sewers here, and it's as big as the Lake Ness Monster. We may get lucky and learn what it is.

Capture of Victor Bout related to raid on FARC in Ecuador

It doesn't surprise me that the recent attack by Colombian forces 1.8 KM into Ecuador which killed the second ranking man in the FARC was based at least in part on Intelligence supplied by the U.S. The American Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has a long-standing relationship with the Colombian government and a clear reason to want the FARC taken down, since it is a revolutionary movement that is financed by a combination of drug profits (based on drugs smuggled through Colombia, up Central America and Mexico, and into the U.S.) and kidnappings.

Nor am I surprised that Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout was arrested in Thailand Thursday. Bout is reputed to have sold and smuggled arms in a lot of hot spots around the world, sometimes on contract to U.S. government agencies. His reputed connections to U.S. agencies has apparently been a major reason why he has avoided capture as long as he has. His capture in Thailand was apparently based on a U.S. warrant through the DEA.

It is the connection between the capture of Bout and the raid into Ecuador that killed FARC deputy commander Luis Edgar Devia Silva (known as "Paul Reyes") that surprises me. This connection is suggested by the involvement of the DEA in Bout's capture as well as the claims that the warrant is for selling arms to the FARC.

The cross-order raid into Ecuador to kill Reyes has upset both the President of Ecuador and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, but It appears that both Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa were allowing the FARC to operate from sanctuary behind the Ecuadoran border

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe leveled allegations of his own, saying he would bring charges of state-sponsored terrorism against leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez at the International Criminal Court, citing evidence from the dead rebel's laptop computer that Chavez gave $300 million and other resources to the FARC.

The truth of Uribe's charges has yet to be confirmed. It is known that Chavez wants the FARC to be considered a legitimate political movement within Colombia rather than merely as a terrorist organization. Uribe's allegations fit that context, but that doesn't make them true.

If the allegations of Chavez's support to FARC prove out, then his movement of troops to the border of Colombia to be little more than bombast to cover the fact that he has been caught attempting to destabilize Colombia. The arrest of Victor Bout in Bangkok under a DEA warrant suggests that there is a lot we don't know, and that we need to know.

So, we wait for the next shoe to drop. It shouldn't be too long.