The truth is that the Extraordinary Official Gazette of Venezuela is the post-modern version of Pandora’s box. Recently, I published official evidence regarding the naturalization granted by the regime of Hugo Chavez on August 9, 2004, to Arturo Cubillas Fontan and Maria Asuncion Arana Altuna, two of the 11 ETA terrorists extradited to Venezuela in 1989.
If that evidence wasn’t already incriminating enough for the Venezuelan leader, it gets even better, as I dug deeper into the Gazette and found more official evidence of the connection between Hugo Chavez and the FARC: who remembers Rodrigo Granda Escobar, the FARC chancellor, arrested in Caracas in December 2004 while attending a bolivarian akelarre as an honored guest, leading to Chavez’s subsequent suspension of relations with Colombia?
Well, the regime of Hugo Chavez granted the naturalization letter to Rodrigo Granda on July 9, 2004 (exactly one month before it was given to Cubillas), through a resolution from the Ministry of Interior and Justice, led by Lucas Rincón Romero, published in Extraordinary Official Gazette number 5722 (see page 18).
With Granda, there are now three individuals who, given their known ties to terrorist organizations like ETA and FARC, have received Venezuelan citizenship from the Hugo Chavez administration. It’s worth noting that Granda’s lawyer argued at the time that the terrorist could not be extradited to Colombia because he was a Venezuelan citizen, just as Cubillas and his official Venezuelan defenders have claimed regarding the request made by the Spanish National Court.