Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

*** Chavez successor puts workers in uniform, uses troops as police.  On 22 May, Venezuela’s new president, Nicolas Maduro, announced in an address to the first class of graduates from the Universidad Bolivariana de los Trabajadores (UBT), that he had ordered the military high command to proceed as rapidly as possible to establish a workers’ militia, to be called Milicia Obrera Bolivariana (MOB).  This, he said, would fill the need to strengthen “in face of fascism and the bourgeoisie, the worker-military alliance — the alliance of the Bolivarian national armed force (FANB) with all the workers of the fatherland”.

Maduro added: “The working class will be ever more respected, and all the more so if the workers militias have 300,000, 500,000, one or two million workers in uniform, armed and trained for the defence of the fatherland”.  The authorities of the Universidad Militar Bolivariana and the UBT have been ordered to get together so that the workers and their teachers should attend the military academies and go to the factories, in order to set in motion a process of “civic-military self-formation".

The workers’ militia initiative came two weeks after Maduro had announced the launch of a new anti-crime drive, the 20th since the beginning of Chavez’s first term in office in 1999.  This drive involves the deployment of the military in ‘pilot’ areas around the country.  According to Maduro, the officers of the armed forces had shown great enthusiasm for going out “in a civic-military union to protect the people”.  Interior & justice minister, Miguel Rodriguez Torres (a retired general who served previously as head of Sebin, the national intelligence service), explained that the new plan, codenamed “Patria Segura” (Safe Fatherland), would involve the deployment of about 3,000 members of the three armed services in 500 ‘pilot’ areas across the country.  The first of these, he said, would be two municipalities in the opposition-ruled state of Miranda: Sucre and Baruta. 

Maduro has been making great efforts to ensure that the armed forces remain the bulwark of the regime. In early May, he announced the launch of a ‘special mission’ to improve social benefits for the military as well as pay.

*** Tunisian salafists.  Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began, is now thought to be home to between 3,000 and 4,000 jihadist Salafists.  The jihadist strongholds include neighbourhoods in the western suburbs of Tunis.  The feeling among local sources is that the Muslim Brotherhood-connected Ennahda movement, which leads the coalition government, cannot long defer a showdown with the jihadists.  In February, the assassination of leftist leader Chokri Belaid by jihadists led to the resignation of the former prime minister and the replacement of three important ministers from the Ennahda party with technocrats.