Caracas Chronicles

Seuxis Hernández managed to complete a college education, being a communist, in difficult Colombia. He was unharmed during the extermination campaign against the members of Union Patriótica, the party formed by demobilized M19 guerrilleros, and took the name of a murdered friend, Jesús Santrich, as an alias. He became a FARC commander even when he was losing his sight to a degenerative disease. Not only did he survive the war with Colombian forces strengthened by U.S. military aid while other historical FARC commanders fell, but he was invited to the talks that ended with a historical peace agreement and a seat for him in Congress. Then, he renounced the peace agreement and was detained under drug trafficking charges. Finally, he escaped prison and was given unofficial protection in Venezuela by the Maduro regime.

So, Jesús Santrich was one of the two main commanders of the dissident FARC, the guerrilla who chose to go back to arms instead of submitting to the compromises of the peace agreement. From Venezuela, he commanded hundreds or thousands of guerrilla troops involved in drug and human trafficking, extortion, kidnapping and gold mining in our country and Colombia. He enjoyed the support of a dictatorship that’s openly opposed to the countries that had put a bounty on his head, Colombia and the U.S. 

All the actors tangled in the dissident FARC mess—the different guerrilla groups, the Duque administration, the Maduro regime, and Cuba—are interested in spreading their side of the story, as we should expect from a conflict like this. It’s very likely that, as tends to happen with so many things in Venezuela, we’ll never know exactly where, when, and how Santrich met his end. 

Yet he was still ambushed and killed in the country where he expected to keep going without being held accountable for his many, horrendous crimes. He was 53 and known as El Viejo.

A Cloudy Mystery and a Bad Mark

So far, the Venezuelan regime hasn’t confirmed his death, but Segunda Marquetalia, the dissident FARC group he led, announced he was murdered by Colombian special forces in an incursion in Venezuela territory. Another version says Jesús Santrich was in the mountains of Perijá, on the border with Colombia, where he was overseeing the reorganization of dissident FARC fronts in the neighboring Colombian region when his caravan was ambushed by mercenaries seeking a reward for capturing him. A third version points at Venezuelan forces as the responsible for his death. And a fourth version—the more plausible in my opinion—says he was ambushed in an Apure camp by guerrillas loyal to a.k.a. Gentil Duarte, the former FARC chief leading a war against Santrich’s Segunda Marquetalia and the Venezuelan regime in Apure. 

All the actors tangled in the dissident FARC mess—the different guerrilla groups, the Duque administration, the Maduro regime, and Cuba—are interested in spreading their side of the story, as we should expect from a conflict like this. It’s very likely that, as tends to happen with so many things in Venezuela, we’ll never know exactly where, when, and how Santrich met his end. 

One thing we can say for sure: the Maduro government proved unable to guarantee the security of an ally who was claimed by the DEA. And this is a problem for the chavista regime, already stressed by the ongoing conflict in Apure. 

If, as we reported in our last Political Risk Report, there are members of the still active guerrilla considering to desert dissident FARC for Gentil Duarte’s 10th Front that has resisted the pressure of FANB and took eight Venezuelan soldiers as prisoners, the fall of such a big fish like Santrich weakens the stimuli for being loyal to chavismo and the surviving commander of Segunda Marquetalia, a.k.a. Iván Márquez. This doesn’t mean that free agents will turn into freedom fighters against Maduro, but that they find more reasons to make their own way in the illegal economies that prosper in Venezuela. 

It should be said that being a fugitive guerrillero isn’t a desired status. In 2008, a.k.a. Raúl Reyes, the military chief of the then powerful FARC, was killed by Colombian special forces during a raid on his camp in Ecuador. Yet, it’s also true that taking Venezuela as a sanctuary is, to say the least, risky. 

It’s a practice that goes way back: all kinds of outcasts from both countries have been jumping the border for centuries, to flee persecution or to hit and hide, just like the Gentil Duarte front is doing now against Venezuelan forces. Fugitive Peruvian MRTA guerrilleros, militants of the Spanish Republic or the Chilean socialist government, and toppled strongmen like Argentina’s Juan Perón landed in Caracas. Before Chávez, and after he came to power, many Basque terrorists or ETA leaders lived at ease in Venezuela, even if the government (or the patrons that enjoyed their cuisine in Caracas restaurants) knew who they were. Sicilian and Neapolitan mafia bosses like Salvatore Greco, who died from natural causes in Caracas in 1978, hid in Venezuela’s ample Italian community. 

But you can get caught if you have political heat on you. When the regime of Peru’s Alberto Fujimori collapsed in 2000, his right hand Vladimiro Montesinos fled to Venezuela. Chávez protected him, refusing to acknowledge his presence in the country until Montesinos was found by Peruvian intelligence and Chávez decided to hand him over in 2001. Later, in 2004, the financial mind of FARC, Rodrigo Granda, was snatched by Colombian agents in Caracas and taken to Colombia. The humiliated Chávez reacted by breaking diplomatic ties with the neighbor.   

Now, the death of Jesús Santrich seriously questions sanctioned Venezuela as a safe haven in the current climate of intense persecution. It makes evident for the dozens of Colombian and Venezuelan people claimed by the U.S. or wanted by their enemies that the Maduro regime cannot impede that someone who threatens them—mercenaries, traitors, foreign agents, rogue local agents, etc—could reach them. When you need bandits to protect your income and your power, the last thing you want is to have a particularly illustrious one being hunted down and shot under your roof.