The governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro have provided economic, political and military support to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP)[a] and the National Liberation Army (ELN).
[citation needed] Before the 2002 coup attempt, discontent within the military started when President Hugo Chávez forced them to assist the FARC, a militant Colombian guerrilla group involved in illegal drug trade, with setting up camps in Venezuelan territories, providing ammunition to fight the Colombian government, supplying ID cards so they could move freely through Venezuela and sending members of Bolivarian Circles to their camps to receive guerilla training.
Pacheco declared that in the dialogue heard in the video between the Venezuelan operation commanding officer and the head of the FARC's 33rd front, Rubén Zamora, there is talk of good relations between the two parties.
[11][12] According to Greg Palast, the claim about Chavez's $300 million is based on the following (translated) sentence: "With relation to the 300, which from now on we will call 'dossier', efforts are now going forward at the instructions of the cojo [slang term for 'cripple'], which I will explain in a separate note."
[16] Later that year, the Secretary General of the Organization of American States, Jose Miguel Insulza, testified before the U.S. Congress that "there are no evidences [sic]" that Venezuela is supporting "terrorist groups", including the FARC.
Venezuelan foreign minister Nicolás Maduro initially denied the existence of these camps and rejected the proposal to visit the area together with international observers to verify the claims.
[19] In 2010, leader of the Spanish separatist group ETA Iñaki de Juana Chaos fled to Venezuela from Northern Ireland in 2010 while appealing an extradition order in Spain.
[21][22] On 8 February 2017, a joint CNN and CNN en Español year-long investigation called "Passports in the Shadows" (Spanish: Pasaportes en la sombra) - based on the information provided by a whistleblower and subsequent investigations, reported that employees of the Venezuelan embassy in Baghdad, Iraq has been selling passports and visas to persons from Middle Eastern countries (specifically Syria, Palestine, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan) with dubious backgrounds for profits.
The investigation also found that between 2008 and 2012, Aragua Governor Tareck El Aissami ordered for hundreds of Middle Eastern individuals to obtain illegal passports, including members of Hezbollah.
[23][24] The Venezuelan foreign minister, Delcy Rodríguez, denied the government's involvement when questioned by the reporters during the Seventy-first session of the United Nations General Assembly and accused the network of performing what she described as an "imperialistic media operation" against Venezuela for airing the investigation.
"[28] Venezuelan National Commission of Telecommunications director Andrés Eloy Méndez accused CNN en Español of instigating religious, racial and political hatred, violence and other themes.
[38] In 2019, the opposition-led National Assembly of Venezuela designated the colectivos (irregular, leftist Venezuelan community organizations that support Nicolás Maduro, the Bolivarian government and the Great Patriotic Pole) as terrorist groups due to their "violence, paramilitary actions, intimidation, murders and other crimes", declaring their acts as state-sponsored terrorism.