‘Venezuelan troops trained rebels to fire rockets’

Bloomberg

Venezuelan soldiers loyal to embattled President Nicolas Maduro have trained members of South America’s most dangerous guerrilla force to use heat-seeking anti-aircraft missiles, according to Colombian authorities.
National Liberation Army fighters were instructed in how to use the Russian-manufactured IGLA surface-to-air missile system, according to General Luis Navarro, Colombia’s top-ranking soldier. The Marxist force known as the ELN has long used Venezuelan territory as a refuge and has a close ideological affinity with Maduro’s socialist government, which the US is trying to topple.
Colombia’s intelligence services don’t know whether the ELN actually has acquired its own missile launchers, nor do they know whether the training was organised by a faction within Venezuela’s military or sanctioned at the highest levels in Caracas. The ELN received training clandestinely rather than at Venezuelan army bases, Navarro said.
“These are weapons used by the Venezuelan armed forces,” he said in an interview at a Bogota air base. “We have the clear evidence and the necessary intelligence to affirm that the ELN is considered as part of the defense of the revolution of the Maduro regime.”
Maduro is mobilising everything he can in his struggle to cling to power as the US and its allies openly call for a military rebellion while simultaneously trying to cripple the government’s finances with sanctions.
After the most recent uprising failed, violent protests erupted across the country, and at least four people died in the crackdown that followed.
Washington backed the uprising, and President Donald Trump refuses to rule out armed intervention.
After Maduro’s intelligence services broke up several previous plots, he took steps to reduce his dependence on the armed forces, increasingly turning to gangs of armed civilian supporters, as well as Cuban and Russian advisers. The ELN, which has spread beyond the Colombian border region deep into Venezuela, frequently defends the Maduro government in its statements.

Information Warfare
Israel Ramirez, a senior ELN commander who is widely known by the nom de guerre Pablo Beltran, said in a recorded message from Havana that “there is no military agreement of any kind between the armed forces of Venezuela and the ELN.”
One version of the weapon, called the IGLA 9K38, has a range of 3.2 miles and a flight ceiling of 3,400 metres, according to the CIA’s website. It costs $60,000 to $80,000 each, though it’s available much more cheaply on the black market, according to the CIA. It can be shoulder-fired and home in on the heat from an aircraft’s engine.
“At the moment, we don’t have this type of anti-aircraft weapon,” Ramirez said. The ELN nevertheless managed to bring down two Colombian military helicopters in the past two years, one with rifle fire and one with explosives, he said.
The Colombian army didn’t provide documents or pictures that would definitively prove its claim. Venezuela’s information ministry didn’t reply to an email seeking comment.
The ELN’s senior leaders discussed the Russian missiles at a meeting, according to one demobilised mid-level ELN commander who said he was present. Many top commanders gathered near the town of El Nula, in Apure state on the Venezuelan side of the border.
At this meeting, a member of the ELN’s ruling council told the group the Venezuelan government was going to provide machine guns and Russian-made rocket launchers, the man said in a March interview. If Maduro’s situation erodes, he can count on the ELN to fight on his side, the man added.
“For the Maduro government, the ELN is like an armed rearguard, which in case of a major conflict could help them a lot,” said Ariel Avila, a Bogota political analyst who wrote the book “The Hot Border Between Colombia and Venezuela.”