Laht.com: Interior & Justice Minister Tarek El Assaimi said police seized a one-ton stash of marijuana at La Fria in the south-western state of Tachira, and that two Venezuelan citizens had been arrested in possession of it.

Contacting state television by telephone, the Minister said the haul had been found in a truck travelling on a highway to the west of the country. The operation leading to the seizure was part of the government's "integral plan" of crime prevention and citizen security, which included a "frontal and decisive struggle" against drugs trafficking.

El Assaimi also said that a Cessna 208 light aircraft had been detected on radar screens making an "irregular flight" in Falcon state, and had been intercepted by a unit from the National Guard, which had been alerted by the National Anti-Drugs Office (ONA). The crew of the aircraft managed to get away but the guardsmen found three suitcases containing dollars, which were now being evaluated by officials from the National Guard, the State Prosecutors Office and the ONA. "We have no doubt that this was an organization presumably dedicated to narcotics trafficking."

In Lara state, a spokesman for the scientific and investigative police, CICPC, said that two suspected members of El Merengue -- a gang wanted for extortion, drug dealing and car theft -- had been caught in the state capital, Barquisimeto. Fifteen packages of cocaine had been taken in this operation, CICPC said.

El Assaimi's statement, and the fact that he went to some effort to make sure it got into the public domain, were uncharacteristic of an official who usually says little or nothing about Venezuela's at times astonishingly high rate of violent crime -- or the evidently limited ability of the authorities to deal with it. The statement itself was enough to spark speculation about what might lie behind the Minister's atypically open attitude on this occasion. One theory was that he simply had a success to talk up, but it was also noted that Venezuela is under suspicion of not pulling its full weight in the war against drugs.

Such suspicions were current before President Hugo Chavez had a famously rough run-in with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) of the United States earlier this decade. That ended with him halting bilateral anti-drugs cooperation and ordering the DEA to stop all its operations in Venezuela.

Seen in that light, El Assaimi's high-profile statement was seen as an attempt to repair some of the damage to Venezuela's image in the anti-drugs world. "Through this plan, we continue expressing on the basis of results the effectiveness of this integral proposal, that contemplates not just the repressive and operational order, and implies arrests, confiscations and intelligence work, but also fortifies making our communities conscious of this subject," he said.

But this did not mean he was about to plunge into a talking about crime in general as, elsewhere, the slaughter went on unabated.

In each of two separate incidents in recent days, two young men were shot dead for reaso