Posted on 03/27/2004 2:09:58 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
CARACAS - Julián runs a small office supply shop in downtown Caracas, but his main income comes from the dilapidated government immigration offices nearby.
Julián readily admits that he moonlights as a purveyor of fraudulent Venezuelan passports and national identity cards, and an expediter of real ones.
And he gladly ticks off the prices he offers, usually to illegal immigrants: about $260 for a fake passport and $80 for a fake national identity card known as a cedula. It's a lot more for real ones, depending on how fast his clients want them.
In the post-Sept. 11 era, Venezuela's trade in false documents has alarmed U.S. officials, in light of allegations that leftist President Hugo Chávez's government has issued fake IDs to leftist guerrillas in neighboring Colombia, Arabs with suspicious backgrounds and Cuban intelligence agents.
The trade is indeed widespread and at times worrisome, a month-long Herald review of the allegations found.
Two Venezuelan Muslims -- one who attended two of the same U.S. aviation schools as one of the Sept. 11 hijackers, another arrested with a grenade in London -- may have false documents, the former head of Venezuelan immigration told The Herald.
But the trade has been going on for decades, mainly linked to corrupt employees in the immigration department, known by its Spanish acronym DIEX, and apparently has not increased significantly under Chávez, The Herald also found. Chávez has denied the allegations.
`HISTORIC PRACTICE'
''I've been doing this long before Chávez became president,'' said Julián, who asked that his last name not be published. ``It's a traditional, historic practice in our country.
U.S. officials said their main fear is that Islamic radicals, hiding their true identities with Venezuelan documents, could slip into the United States, past terrorist ''watch lists,'' and stage another Sept. 11-style attack.
''The sale of cedulas and passports . . . did not start with Chávez. But we are more concerned now because terrorists can exploit a corrupt system to hurt us,'' said a top U.S. government official familiar with Venezuela.
Washington already has taken action. In recent months, the U.S. Consulate in Caracas has denied visas to Venezuelans carrying flimsy ''temporary'' passports or regular passports that were renewed multiple times after the initial expiration date of five years.
RAN OUT
Stuart Patt, a State Department spokesman, said the single-sheet temporary passports were issued by the Venezuelan government in the last few months after it ran out of the more secure regular passports.
''In general,'' Patt said, ``Venezuelan passports are not very reliable documents. They are susceptible to fraudulent use.''
Colombian officials, who have long alleged that Chávez is helping the guerrillas, say that scores of the rebels killed or captured near the eastern border with Venezuela were carrying Venezuelan cedulas.
''We know they can buy them easily there,'' one army general in Bogotá said recently. ``They can buy them easily here, too, by God. We Colombians are famous around the world for making false documents.''
''But there's so many of them these days that we have to ask: Is it a business or is it a policy?'' the general added.
The cedula is the primary national identification document in Venezuela, serving as proof of birth for Venezuelans and residency for foreigners.
PAPERS FOR BRIBES
But retired national guard Gen. Marco Antonio Ferreira, who resigned as head of DIEX in April 2002, said that some of the agency's branch offices outside Caracas long have issued cedulas to illegal migrants in exchange for bribes.
He gave The Herald a computerized list of more than 3,000 names of people holding what he suspects are real but fraudulently obtained documents.
They carry the numbers for blank cedulas that were sent to provincial branches but then ordered withdrawn for a number of reasons, chief among them that the branches had a surplus of blank forms, Ferreira said.
MIDDLE EAST NAMES
Ferreira's lists of suspect cedulas included more than 300 people with Middle Eastern names. A U.S. Homeland Security Department official checked the names against a terrorist watch list and found no matches.
But Ferreira said he suspected that the Venezuelan ID cards carried by Hakim Mohamed Ali Diab Fattah and Hazil Muhammad Rahaman Alan were false. Venezuelans are required to obtain cedulas at age 7. Ferreira said the two Muslims obtained theirs when they were 19 and 24.
Diab Fattah, 30, was detained in the United States after taking lessons at two of the same aviation schools attended by Sept. 11 hijacker Hani Hanjour. He was deported to Venezuela in 2002. Rahaman, 38, was arrested in London last year after a hand grenade was found in his luggage at Gatwick airport. He is awaiting trial there.
'EXPRESS' RESIDENCY
Concerns over Venezuela's ID system deepened in January when the Chávez government implemented a new immigration initiative: ''express'' residency and naturalization for foreign nationals living illegally in Venezuela.
Opposition leaders said the system will compromise the nation's security and that Chávez is only trying to increase the number of voters who may support him if electoral officials approve the recall referendum against Chávez sought by his political opponents.
But Venezuelan immigration officials argue that legalizing longtime illegals strengthens national security -- the same argument President Bush used recently when he proposed granting temporary work permits to illegal immigrants.
'SAFEGUARD' SECURITY
''Regularization is a policy which will not only resolve the situation of illegal foreigners but will also seek to safeguard the security of the state,'' Hugo Cabézas, current head of DIEX, was quoted as saying recently by the Caracas daily El Universal.
Thousands of illegal migrants signing up for the express program -- most of them Colombians who fled here when their country was awash in political bloodshed and Venezuela's oil-fueled economy was humming along -- now mob the DIEX building almost daily.
And for those not willing to stand in line, there are still many fake-ID dealers nearby like Julián, known here as gestores, Spanish for brokers or middlemen.
``Many of the businesses around the DIEX have gestores. Here, I photocopy documents, and others plastify the cedulas. But thats just part of what we really do. Many people around here survive on selling cedulas and passports.
Hugo Cabezas and Tareck el Aissami were appointed last month as director and deputy director of the Identification and Immigration Directorate, in charge of border controls and issuing passports and national ID cards. The agency also works with electoral authorities on voter registration.
Both were top student leaders at the University of the Andes in the western city of Merida, described by senior school officials as a virtual haven for armed Chávez supporters and leftist guerrillas.
.........Allegations that Chávez's leftist government issued ID documents to Islamic radicals surfaced most recently in the newsweekly U.S. News and World Report. ''Venezuela is providing support -- including identity documents -- that could prove useful to radical Islamic groups,'' the magazine reported last month, quoting senior U.S. military and intelligence officials...... ***
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.