Venezuelan gen'l: Colombia border a haven for armed gangs
Venezuelan gen'l: Colombia border a haven for armed gangs
Published August 31, 2015/
EFE
By Indira Guerrero
The top Venezuelan military officer on the border with Colombia said in an interview with EFE that the busiest stretch of the boundary has become "an aircraft carrier for paramilitary activity."
The paramilitary activities along the border posed "a threat to the security of the nation ... (that) managed to affect the (Venezuelan) state," Maj. Gen. Efrain Velazquez Lugo said 10 days after President Nicolas Maduro closed the border crossing between San Antonio del Tachira and the Colombian city of Cucuta.
"We were losing Venezuelan territory there, because that was practically a bastion of Colombian paramilitary activity, and every day there were more, so that was an aircraft carrier within Venezuela," he said referring to the towns of the state of Tachira.
Velazquez said that the investigations conducted last year in the border region on smuggling concluded that the smuggling gangs "are the same groups that we call paramilitary terrorists."
Contraband has long been an issue on the 2,219-kilometer (1,378-mile) border, as the Venezuelan government uses subsidies and price controls to hold down the cost of fuel and staple foods, making it possible for Colombian smugglers to profit by reselling cheap goods from Venezuela.
More:
http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2015/08/31/venezuelan-genl-colombia-border-haven-for-armed-gangs/
(This article published by Fox "News" latino was taken from Spain's E.F.E.)