a legal military practice but an “opaque” policy

A commander of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB) reported this week the destruction of an “invader plane” from Colombia, the fourth in four days. The aircraft violated Venezuelan airspace, the commander said.

“The FANB will guarantee the integrity of our sovereign space through military defense,” warned the senior official. “Illegal invasion and drug trafficking will be eradicated to the minimum.”

Disabling or shooting down aircraft used for drug trafficking is a fairly common legal military practice in Latin America.

But the government of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela does not offer enough information about these operations, which experts describe as “opaque”, while they serve to show off their military capacity.

Venezuelan officials and the military frequently speak of “neutralizing” aircraft without specifying details, such as whether they were shot down in the air or disabled on the ground.

The protocols of “interception, persuasion or disablement” of aircraft in Venezuela are executed without the State providing sufficient information, he told the voice of america Rocío San Miguel, lawyer and president of the Venezuelan NGO Citizen Control for Security, Defense and the Armed Forces.

“The policy of shooting down, rendering useless, capturing caches by boat or light aircraft, and detaining drug pilots continues to be opaque,” ​​he added.

The Venezuelan army has shot down 22 planes so far this year and 300 in the last decade under the Control Law for the Comprehensive Defense of Air Space, enacted in 2012 by the late President Hugo Chávez, which allows the State shoot down planes that fly over Venezuela for illicit purposes.

The law establishes that an aircraft may be “subject to interception, persuasion or disablement measures” when “it is designated a target of interest, because it is unknown”, if it fails to comply with air traffic regulations, does not have identification signs or a flight plan, or provide false information.

It could also be shot down if it is presumed that “the flight violates national sovereignty or its usefulness is connected to illegal activities”, or “when the aircraft is identified as hostile, for disobeying interception or persuasion measures”.

The Strategic Operational Command is the official body authorized to decide the interception, persuasion and disablement of any aircraft in the country.

under the law

The laws that allow the shooting down of drug trafficking aircraft are not atypical in the region.

The figures that Venezuela offers of disabled aircraft are small compared to those of its neighbor, Colombia, where the Air Force disabled 200 planes allegedly destined for drug trafficking in 2020 alone, according to reports of local media.

Venezuela approved its law before other nations, such as Bolivia, Peru and Argentina. Ecuador promoted a bill of this nature just last year.

In Argentina in 2016, the then president Mauricio Macri published a decree authorizing the neutralization of this type of aircraft. Peronism, which is usually close to the ideologies of the Maduro government, criticized him for being an “institutional error” and for establishing a “death penalty without trial.”

According to a dossier from the Argentine Congress, seven Latin American countries had some type of regulation for these operations, at least until 2016: Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. Of these, Peru, Honduras and Colombia have the oldest regulations in this regard.

Venezuela flaunts its “powerful” defense system

The Strategic Operational Command of the Bolivarian Armed Forces of Venezuela, known as Ceofanb, has assured in official statements that it has “a powerful aerospace defense system” to prevent groups or individuals that represent an “external threat” from entering the country.

While the Venezuelan government does not routinely provide details of the location or disposition of its military assets, Venezuelan officials often boast of their attacks on foreign criminal groups they have dubbed “tancol”—Colombian drug-trafficking armed terrorists—often offering clues to clandestine airports, camps, laboratories and drug trafficking planes.

In June, both Maduro and the Ceofanb commander celebrated that Venezuela destroyed 257 drug trafficking and “terrorism” “structures” in the first five months of this year, including clandestine laboratories and landing strips.

Last September, US President Joe Biden sent a memorandum to the State Department warning that Venezuela has done little or nothing in its international obligations against drug trafficking.

Maduro’s foreign ministry repudiated the accusations from the White House. The Venezuelan government assures, on the contrary, that it seized 51.47 tons of drugs in 2021, its highest number in 10 years. It also reported last month that it had seized 22 tons of drugs in the first half of 2022, a higher figure for the same period last year.

Both Maduro and the Minister of Defense, General Vladimir Padrino López, have warned of the alleged intentions of the governments of the United States and Colombia to attack them militarily.

Russian anti-aircraft systems in Venezuela

Governments opposed to Chavismo in the region and independent experts warned during the government of Hugo Chávez (1999-2012) and also in the first years of the Maduro administration, starting in 2013, on an arms race in Caracas, with Russia as the main supplier.

Those purchases included very sophisticated anti-aircraft systems, such as the S-300 VM Antey-2500. This weaponry has the capacity to shoot down aerial targets such as ballistic and cruise missiles or aircraft, within a radius of 200 kilometers and up to 30,000 meters of altitude, according to a report by the Venezuelan civil association Control Ciudadano para la Seguridad, Defensa y Fuerza Armada.

Little is known about these hirings and deployments, since the National Assembly, then with a Chavista majority, decreed the confidentiality of the military agreements with Russia and Belarus.

It was known by spokesmen for the governments of Chávez and Maduro that these contracts include the training of dozens of Venezuelan cadets in Russia to be able to operate and repair these anti-aircraft defense systems.

Russian government officials said nine years ago that Venezuela had begun to build its anti-aircraft defense with S-300s, ZU-23 anti-aircraft guns, and Buk-2M and Pechora-2M missile systems.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, still in office today, said at the beginning of 2020 after visiting Caracas that both countries would expand their military-technical cooperation to “increase defense capacity” against possible armed threats.

Opponents of Chavismo both inside and outside Venezuela accuse Presidents Chávez and Maduro of having protected foreign guerrilla and criminal groups in Venezuelan territory since the beginning of the 21st century.

The interim government of opposition leader Juan Guaidó, recognized as president by 50 nations, frequently accuses Maduro of having links to drug trafficking in exchange for protection and money.

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