Venezuela: Political Situation Debate
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Victoria Atkins
Main Page: Victoria Atkins (Conservative - Louth and Horncastle)Department Debates - View all Victoria Atkins's debates with the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
(7 years, 3 months ago)
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Graham Jones (Hyndburn) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the political situation in Venezuela.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer, and I am grateful for this timely debate. I do not often speak about Latin America, but it is registered in the “Dod’s” directory as one of my interests. I am a long-standing member of the all-party parliamentary British-Latin America group, as well as chairman of the newly formed APPG on Venezuela.
As I said, I am grateful for this opportunity to speak on the situation in Venezuela. Latin America is an area of the world where Britain has a myopic view—partly due to the continent’s Spanish and Portuguese colonial past, and partly due to its own sense of history in relation to those two European nations and, of course, the Vatican. It is in British interests that there is a change of outlook on South America, Latin America and Venezuela, particularly given our exit from the European Union and the need to build new international bridges. Latin America is an important part of the planet that we should be mindful of in protecting the wellbeing of this fragile place that we all inhabit. I appreciate that our South American relationships have been somewhat skewed—rightly so, in my opinion—in terms of protecting the UK sovereignty of the Falkland Islands.
Although the issue of Venezuela has been a concern for a while, it landed on my constituency doorstep when constituent Andrea Adamson came to see me in June. Her son, Adam Cowell, of Oswaldtwistle, died of cocaine poisoning due to its purity. That unnecessary death in Hyndburn recently led the local coroner, Michael Singleton, to say:
“I can tell you from the inquests that I have recently conducted, and those that are going to be conducted by me within the next few weeks, that this is reaching epidemic proportions.”
He said:
“I am becoming increasingly concerned with the number of young people who are dying from cocaine toxicity.”
In relation to Adam’s case, the pathologist said:
“At the time of post mortem there was 8.4 micrograms of cocaine per millilitre of blood.
That is very high, anything over one is potentially fatal.”
The coroner said:
“I have been doing this job for 25 years and this has reached phenomenal levels.”
Mr Singleton went on to make a searing criticism of the UK’s failure to tackle the cocaine epidemic. His comments are online.
This so-called party drug has been responsible for the deaths of at least 17 young people in the Lancashire district in the last nine months. I promised Andrea that I would raise the issue of cocaine dealing, trafficking and production locally, nationally and internationally, for they are all part of one deadly supply chain.
This was a Daily Telegraph headline as long ago as June 2008: “President Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela has become the key trafficking route for most of the cocaine sold on Britain’s streets”. The report stated:
“Anti-drugs officials estimate that more than 50 per cent of all the cocaine consumed in Britain has been trafficked through Venezuela—under the ‘revolutionary’ regime of Mr Chávez. The figure could be as high as two thirds.”
In 1998, the last year before Mr Chávez came to office, Venezuela’s security forces made 11,581 drug-related arrests. By 2005, that had plummeted to just over 1,000, and the figure remains low to this day. That journalistic piece highlighted the Venezuelan gateway for cocaine into Europe and the United Kingdom. It alleged that Mr Chávez’s Administration had
“a longstanding relationship with Marxist rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). These guerrillas fund their insurgency by smuggling drugs”.
Back in 2008, The Guardian reported from FARC sources in Colombia
“that powerful elements within the Venezuelan state apparatus have forged a strong working relationship with Farc”
and
“that Farc and Venezuelan state officials operated actively together on the ground, where military and drug-trafficking activities coincide.”
The allegations were that the Chávez regime, alongside the Venezuelan military, supported the FARC rebels with military equipment in exchange for cocaine.
In 2012, The New York Times used radar information—when we look at the radar maps of flights out of Venezuela, we see that it is remarkable where they go—to show that Venezuela was
“one of the world’s busiest transit hubs for the movement of cocaine”,
with FARC Colombian guerrilla rebels able to operate “with…impunity.” The drug is coming from Venezuelan airports, not from inside Colombia. The flights by and large go to Honduras; it is going to the Caribbean and on to the United Kingdom.
In 2014, Reuters reported that the “Venezuela drug trade rings alarm bells”. It reported on a major French seizure:
“Hidden in a large ochre-colored container, the 1.4 tonnes of cocaine got past two dozen army checkpoints during a 500-mile journey from the Colombian border to the Venezuelan capital.
The drugs were stored for several days at the Simon Bolivar International Airport outside Caracas, then placed in 31 suitcases with false name-tags and put on an Air France flight to Paris on Sept. 10, 2013.
Ten days later, French police announced the biggest cocaine haul in their history—the shipment was worth about $270 million—after a meticulous operation involving French, British, Spanish and Dutch authorities.
The foreign agents kept Venezuelan authorities in the dark.”
The problem for the Minister and the Government is that the flow of drugs from Venezuela into this country continues unabated to this day. Only recently, during our general election, Spanish police seized more than 2 metric tonnes of cocaine—£1 billion-worth—from a ship with a Venezuelan flag in the Atlantic ocean.
There are ample stories of cocaine seizures, but the UK and EU Governments seem to have little success in stemming drug trafficking from South America and Venezuela in particular and to be unable to take firm action against a corrupt narco regime. The UK Government have had enough signals. Mr Chávez halted co-operation with the United States Drug Enforcement Administration way back in 2005.
Last year, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime—UNODC—stated that Venezuela has become more important in recent years as trafficking organisations move Colombian cocaine overland across a porous border and take advantage of the busy maritime traffic between the coast and the islands of the Caribbean and Europe.
In the UK, we have seen rising purity levels for cocaine, along with ease of supply and vibrant demand. My constituents and their families are bearing the brunt of that. Our own National Crime Agency identifies Venezuela as a producer country and a major transit country for cocaine coming to this country.
Early last month, The Times ran a warning headline: “Pure cocaine fuels rise in drug deaths”. Deaths linked to cocaine jumped by 16% between 2015 and 2016 to a record high of 6.4 deaths per million. That sharp rise was widely reported across all media. The Office for National Statistics report said:
“The National Crime Agency reports that there was a significant increase in both crack and powder cocaine purity at all levels in 2016, including user-level, which may partly explain the increase in deaths relating to cocaine.”
A decade on, little seems to have changed. The Chavistas continue, through the new President, Nicolás Maduro, to facilitate and funnel cocaine to the west. Last November, two of Nicolás Maduro’s nephews were convicted in a New York court of attempting to smuggle 815 kg—about £350 million-worth—of cocaine into the United States. Throughout that trial, details emerged suggesting that high-level Venezuelan officials had serious involvement in the drug trade. The court heard that the President’s nephews intended to use the presidential aeroplane hangar at Caracas’ international airport to move the drugs. It also heard that “government executives” and the Cartel of the Suns were the “only ones who worked” in drug trafficking in Venezuela, and that they were
“in charge of fumigating [eliminating] anyone who tried”
to get involved in the drugs trade in Venezuela.
Venezuela is a narco-state and the UK cannot have a policy of “do nothing”. The US Administration have acted. They have imposed sanctions on Venezuelan Vice-President Tareck El Aissami for facilitating shipments of narcotics on board planes leaving a Venezuelan airbase, as well as controlling drug routes through Venezuelan ports. Since appointing Mr El Aissami to the post, Mr Maduro has granted him expanded powers, including over the economy and expropriating businesses. The Guardian reported:
“Venezuela’s top convicted drug trafficker, Walid Makled…said he paid bribes through El Aissami’s brother to officials so they could turn a blind eye to cocaine shipments that proliferated in Venezuela over the past two decades of”—
so-called “socialist rule.” In March, the US Administration also announced sanctions against eight corrupt Venezuelan Supreme Court justices for stripping the opposition-controlled legislature of its powers.
Mr El Aissami joins a long list of senior Venezuelan Government officials who have been sanctioned or indicted by US law enforcement for complicity in drug trafficking to the United States. That includes Minister Néstor Reverol; the former head of military intelligence, Hugo Carvajal; sitting Governor, Henry Rangel Silva; former Interior and Justice Minister, Ramón Rodríguez Chacín; and several others. It also includes Diosdado Cabello, vice-president of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela—Maduro’s party—and an alleged member of the Cartel of the Suns.
Before briefly turning to the economic turmoil, which has been widely reported and I am sure colleagues want to speak about, I ask the Minister why it has been left to the US Administration to take action against this rogue regime, which has been operating with impunity for many years. When will the UK Government look into this issue in the interests of my constituents and UK citizens, and publish their findings? What measures can the UK Government take independently, as well as with the EU, on implementing individual sanctions? Finally, will the Foreign and Commonwealth Office facilitate a much-needed parliamentary visit to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime?
Victoria Atkins (Louth and Horncastle) (Con)
I thank the hon. Gentleman for eloquently setting out the woeful conditions in Venezuela and the very human impact that that regime has on people’s lives not only in Venezuela but in this country as well. In my previous life I prosecuted serious organised crime gangs, including drug traffickers. Will he join me in wishing that all Members of Parliament, including his leader, would condemn the Venezuelan regime and spread the message that anyone buying cocaine in this country is supporting organised crime?
Graham Stringer (in the Chair)
Order. As it is the first day back, may I just remind Members that interventions should be brief? A large number of people wish to speak in this debate and there is limited time, so I ask people to observe that rule.
Victoria Atkins
Let me try to bridge the gap between the right hon. Member for Warley (John Spellar) and Conservative Members. Is there not, indeed, a great deal of agreement in this Chamber about the woeful conditions in Venezuela? Is not my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Mr Clarke) simply saying that it would be nice if the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition joined us in condemning Venezuela and the way in which it is treating its people?
