Venezuela is not just another socialist Latin American dictatorship. In the last 5 years, law enforcement and the justice system have identified its regime as the leadership of an international drug cartel.

Narcosocialism and narcoterrorism are not unusual phenomena in the region, but the failure to remove Maduro, who heads the regime and a drug cartel from power means that the flow of refugees continues and the regime/cartel is becoming more aggressive about protecting its drug business.

Venezuelan soldiers conducted joint operations with Colombian rebels in the state of Apure earlier this year, as violence increased along a remote and often lawless stretch of the Colombia-Venezuela border, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch.

The report published on Monday said that in January a truce ended between the National Liberation Army, or ELN, and another rebel organization known as the Joint Eastern Command, leading to clashes, abductions and murders of civilians that forced more than 3,300 people to flee their homes in the Venezuelan state of Apure. In the Colombian province of Arauca, more than 3,800 people were displaced.

Human Rights Watch visited Arauca in February and spoke to humanitarian workers and refugees from Apure, who said that they witnessed how members of Venezuela’s national guard entered villages with the ELN rebels and took people away in trucks. Witnesses told Human Rights Watch that those who were snatched from their homes were accused of collaborating with the Joint Eastern Command.

The short version is that rival narcoterrorist groups are fighting over the drug business with Venezuela weighing in. 

ELN is a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla group while the Joint Eastern Command is a splinter group of FARC which is also a Marxist-Leninist terror operation. Both are in the drug business and have been reduced to fighting each other over the grimy capitalist business of drugs. 

Venezuela, once the socialist great hope, is fighting with ELN against a FARC splinter group.

Isn’t socialism wonderful? Forward, Comrades!

This is the final struggle
Let us gather together, and tomorrow
With the Internationale
Will arise the human race