Assassination in Venezuela

The state prosecutor for Venezuela, Danilo Anderson, was assassinated by a car bomb in Caracas around midnight last night.

Quoting the report by VHeadline:

At this time, the indications are that the driver’s body is indeed Anderson and already government officials are describing the incident as a further act of terrorism by radical opposition groups who are determined not to accept electoral defeat.


The state prosecutor for Venezuela, Danilo Anderson, was assassinated by a car bomb in Caracas around midnight last night.

Quoting the report by VHeadline:

At this time, the indications are that the driver’s body is indeed Anderson and already government officials are describing the incident as a further act of terrorism by radical opposition groups who are determined not to accept electoral defeat.

Police say the vehicle belonged to Danilo Anderson, who has been leading the investigation of some 400 persons accused of using massive sums of money from the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to fund anti-democratic efforts to overthrow the elected government of President Hugo Chavez Frias who has immediately canceled plans to fly today to a weekend regional conference in Costa Rica.

The explosions reportedly came around midnight and police officials say the explosions may have been caused by bombs detonated by remote control … similar in modus operandi to bombings which took place in February last year at the Spanish Embassy, Colombian consulate and the Teleport building in Caracas where Organization of American States (OAS)/Carter Center ‘Friends of Venezuela’ negotiations were taking place.

The Interior and Justice Minister Jesse Chacon has made it clear that the assassination will not stop the investigation of the use of NED funding to destabilize Venezuela.

This is very troubling. The Venezuelan opposition and its US backers have certainly not shrunk from using violence in the past. But this is a major assassination of a major government official – a tremendous escalation of violence, again putting at risk all of the progress in Venezuela and threatening to replace it with chaos. That, of course, is the goal behind such acts, and the beneficiaries (the Venezuelan elite and the US) are equally clear.

Author: Justin Podur

Author of Siegebreakers. Ecology. Environmental Science. Political Science. Anti-imperialism. Political fiction. Teach at York U's FES. Author. Writer at ZNet, TeleSUR, AlterNet, Ricochet, and the Independent Media Institute.