The Minister of People’s Power for Defense, G / J Vladimir Padrino López, announced this Monday the creation of a Special Temporary Comprehensive Defense Operational Zone in three municipalities of Apure, specifically José Antonio Páez, Muñoz and Rómulo Gallegos.
In an address offered in the company of the members of the Military High Command, he pointed out that said measure was ordered by the President of the Republic, Nicolás Maduro, to guarantee citizen peace, respect for human rights and the integrity of the territory and peace in Apure state.
This special Defense Zone will be commanded by G / D Alejandro Benítez Marcano. Additionally, the “Negro Primero” 94th Special Integral Brigade was activated, a unit that will be under the command of G / B Wilfredo Medrano Machado, general officers who will coordinate the actions for the eviction of Colombian irregular groups and narco-terrorists from the area.
He pointed out that within the framework of these actions, a special plan will be carried out in a civic-military union for the three border municipalities, Páez, Muñoz and Rómulo Gallegos, «with a series of special measures to protect the people and evict all these irregular groups in our territory, little by little Apure will return to normality”.
During the press conference offered at the Miraflores Palace, during which he presented a balance of the actions deployed in response to the attacks registered for two weeks in the border area of the Apure state, specifically in the José Antonio Páez municipality, Padrino reported that eight FANB personnel have lost their lives, while 34 have been injured.
He specified that the operations have managed to deactivate 16 explosive devices, “to date we have processed 33 people, nine camps have been dismantled and we are deployed to dismantle them all. They will all leave Venezuela,” he stressed.
The US wants to Balkanize the border
In this context, Padrino López accused the United States government of trying to destabilize the border area between Venezuela and Colombia with the aim of starting an armed conflict against the country.
«The imperial plan is, I repeat, to outsource the conflict in order to Balkanize Venezuela, to venture into Venezuela to seize a territorial space for its logistics operations, accompanied by the DEA, which is the largest drug cartel in the world and cause destabilization with those armed groups, destabilize the border and come to the center of the country from the west,” he denounced.
He assured that as part of this plan «Colombia left the border territory to these criminal gangs», therefore Venezuela is advancing a plan to strengthen defense operations and border control and stop those plans.
He summarized that in the last 15 days the FANB has faced in Apure “a war outsourced by Colombia of violent armed groups that have been fragmented, after the peace agreement was broken due to the lack of coherent serious public policies of the Colombian State that did not has shown interest in solving the problem for more than 70 years”.
He said that Colombia registers more than 8 million victims of violence, almost 300,000 victims of homicides, around 46,000 victims of forced disappearances and 7 million internally displaced by the war.
Finally, he emphasized that Venezuela, in a civic-military union, will keep the Bolivarian Shield deployed «to keep everything that comes from Colombia at bay, acting in accordance with the law, with the Constitution in hand and respecting Human Rights (…) Apure is Venezuela and we are going to defend it! ”, Minister Padrino López concluded.
