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Now Joining the Fight Against Coronavirus: The World’s Armed Rebels, Drug Cartels and Gangs by Kevin Sieff, Susannah George and Kareem Fahim - Washington Post

In Afghanistan, the Taliban has dispatched health teams to far-flung provinces to confront the coronavirus. In Mexico, drug cartels are offering aid packages to those feeling its economic impact. In Brazil and El Salvador, gangs enforce curfews to prevent its spread.

As governments around the world have responded to the coronavirus, so too have armed insurgents and terrorist groups and drug cartels and gangs, a parallel underworld of public health policy and strategic messaging.

It is hardly the first time such groups have attempted to fill the role of government. But few crises in modern times have tested the limits of the world’s nation-states as the coronavirus has, providing an opening for armed groups to step in where presidents, police forces and parliaments have failed…

Read on.

U.S. Announces Narcoterrorism Charges Against Venezuela's Maduro

Masood Farivar - Voice of America

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday announced narcoterrorism charges against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and other top officials, accusing them of collaborating with a leftist Colombian guerrilla group to traffic cocaine to the United States.

The charges are likely to heighten tensions between the United States and Venezuela.  Relations deteriorated last year after the Trump administration recognized Maduro’s electoral rival as the country’s interim president and later imposed sweeping economic sanctions designed to remove Maduro from office.

In a sweeping indictment unsealed in New York, prosecutors accused Maduro of running a drug cartel in partnership with two Colombian guerrilla leaders and several top Venezuelan officials, including the speaker of Venezuela's national assembly; a former director of military intelligence; and a former general in the Venezuelan armed forces. 

The four men face charges of participating in a narcoterrorism conspiracy, conspiring to import cocaine into the United States and two weapons-related charges.  

In a separate indictment and criminal complaint, Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez was charged with conspiracy to distribute cocaine on board an aircraft registered in the United States, while Supreme Court Chief Justice Maikel Jose Moreno Perez was accused of money laundering in connection with receiving tens of millions of dollars and bribes to fix dozens of civil and criminal cases in Venezuela.

In all, 15 current and former Venezuelan officials, along with two leaders of the Colombian FARC group, were indicted. 

The dramatic charges were announced by Attorney General William Barr and other senior law enforcement officials at a virtual press conference.  

"Today’s announcement is focused on rooting out the extensive corruption within the Venezuelan government — a system constructed and controlled to enrich those at the highest levels of the government," Barr said. "The United States will not allow these corrupt Venezuelan officials to use the U.S. banking system to move their illicit proceeds from South America nor further their criminal schemes.” 

On Twitter, Maduro accused the United States and Colombia of conspiring against Venezuela.

It is only the second time in recent decades that the Justice Department has indicted a sitting foreign head of state, though one not officially recognized. In 1988, the Justice Department indicted Manuel Noriega, then the military ruler of Panama, on drug trafficking charges.  He was captured the following year during the U.S. invasion of Panama and subsequently spent 17 years in prison in the United States.   

Barr said the United States expects “eventually to gain custody" of Maduro, Venezuela’s president since 2013, and his associates, and will explore all options to arrest them. But Barr declined to say whether the United States would send in the military to capture them. 

“Some of them do travel, and that may be an opportunity,” Barr said. “Hopefully, the Venezuelan people will see what’s going on and eventually gain control.”

The State Department announced a reward of up to $15 million for information leading to the arrest and or conviction of Maduro.  Awards of up to $10 million were also announced for four other officials wanted by the Justice Department. 

In a statement, the department said the officials "violated the public trust by facilitating shipments of narcotics from Venezuela, including control over planes that leave from a Venezuelan air base."

FARC signed a peace deal with the Colombian government in 2016, ending more than 50 years of conflict.  But a group of 2,500 FARC dissidents, backed by the Maduro regime, remains involved in trafficking cocaine from Colombia to the United States via Venezuela and Central America, officials said.  

The indictment alleges that Maduro began cultivating FARC as early as 2006 when he was foreign minister and agreed to help the group in exchange for receiving $5 million.  He later agreed to keep the Venezuelan border open to the group to facilitate its drug trafficking, according to U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman of the Southern District of New York.

"The scope and magnitude of the drug trafficking alleged was made possible only because Maduro and others corrupted the institutions of Venezuela and provided political and military protection for the rampant narcoterrorism crimes described in our charges," Berman told reporters via video link. 

"As alleged, Maduro and the other defendants expressly intended to flood the United States with cocaine in order to undermine the health and well-being of our nation," Berman said.  "Maduro very deliberately deployed cocaine as a weapon."

Pentagon Deploying More Ships, Forces to Latin America

Carla Babb – Voice of America

PENTAGON - U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) plans to increase U.S. military presence in the Western Hemisphere while taking on funding cuts to partner security programs that help Latin American partners counter drug cartels.

In written testimony Wednesday, SOUTHCOM commander Admiral Craig Faller said the U.S. “only enabled the successful interdiction of about 9% of known drug movement” recently in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Faller told the House Armed Services Committee that he'd need significant assets to drastically improve that number, including dozens of ships.

“Recognizing these complex challenges in our neighborhood, we will see an increase in U.S. military presence in the hemisphere,” Faller said, speaking to reporters at the Pentagon after the briefing.

Partners Vital

The increase, which is coinciding with a Pentagon review of the command, will include more ships, aircraft and forces, said Faller, who declined to discuss numbers.

But the increase will not be enough to fully counter the threats, which is “why it's so important to get partners in the game," Faller added.

Last year, half of U.S. drug interdictions in the region were enabled by local partner forces, according to SOUTHCOM.

The need for more partner nation participation comes as the latest Pentagon budget slashes SOUTHCOM’s partner security program funds by about 20%.

"That reduction will mean we’ll have to make some choices and have to defund some programs … that have increased our partners’ ability to do things like counternarcotics,” Faller said Wednesday.

He added that the increased military presence would help the U.S. offset short-term losses to security cooperation program funding. But he acknowledged that “there might be some areas where we'll take risks as we look in the future.”

Georgian Scolds Administration

The Pentagon’s failure to prioritize the geographic command responsible for counternarcotics operations south of the United States has hurt Americans, Republican Representative Austin Scott of Georgia said during a House Armed Services Committee hearing on national security challenges in the Western Hemisphere.

"All of the additional money we've given [to defense] has been transferred to other priorities and not to the priority that is resulting in more deaths than any other area," Scott said, adding that the U.S. saw tens of thousands die last year from drug overdoses.

Scott scolded administration officials for giving the command “what’s left over” in intelligence and surveillance abilities after fulfilling other regions’ needs.

SOUTHCOM’s budget for this year is $1.2 billion, which is 1/14th of what was spent in Afghanistan alone.