Venezuelan government’s high-ranking officials informed President Hugo Chávez that they had information directly linking then-Brigadier General Henry Rangel Silva to a vast drug trafficking network operated from military facilities, but their report did not interrupt the speedy ascent of the officer recently named minister of Defense.

Documents exclusively obtained by El Nuevo Herald show that Chávez has had direct information, at least since 2007, that officials closely linked to his revolution were linked to drug trafficking operations, though the Venezuelan government has protected, not punished, these officials.

“There are enough elements directly linking [Brigadier General] Henry de Jesús Rangel Silva to the investigation and trial in the state of Lara of four officials and a civil employee,” said an internal report presented to Chávez in January that mentioned the detention of an Army officer who had been arrested while transporting 2.2 tons of cocaine.

“I respectfully request that a profound investigation and audit be launched of the properties of citizen [Brigadier General] Henry de Jesús Rangel Silva, and that his work activities be suspended until his role in the aforementioned events are cleared,” said the official signing the report.

Rangel Silva was not available Thursday to respond calls or emails from El Nuevo Herald.

Sources close to the case told El Nuevo Herald that Rangel Silva was never investigated and his ascent up the ladder of the Armed Forces chain of command, instead of being interrupted was rather accelerated. Rangel Silva reached the post of General in Chief, the highest possible ranking in Venezuela, in late 2010.

Rangel Silva, who was decorated this week for “his work in the fight against drug trafficking,” is one of the members of the country’s military whose properties were frozen in 2008 by the U.S. Treasury for his alleged links to drug trafficking and Colombian guerrillas.

Chávez, who has consistently denied the accusations against the general, named him minister of Defense early this month.

“They attack Rangel Silva because in him they attack the National Bolivarian Armed Forces and the revolution. There are so many things and when you see where [the denunciations] are coming from we almost envy him,” said Chávez in the swearing ceremony “[They accuse him] of I don’t know how many things through infamy, lies and intrigue; they don’t have a single piece of evidence because it is all false.”

Yet the information against the minister collected by Venezuela’s own authorities had been at least enough for officials of his government to formally accuse him before Chávez and request an investigation at a moment in which Rangel Silva headed the dreaded National Direction of Intelligence and Prevention Services.

Such request came from a follow-up of a 2005 detention of a truck with Army plates that carried 2,000 packs of cocaine.

The investigation, done in the context of such detention, led to the arrest of various members of the military and Defense official, Edgar Alfonso Rincón Rangel, who is a cousin of Rangel Silva.

Besides this relative, with whom Rangel Silva had a series of telephone conversations after his detention, Army officers who had staged the operation from military bases, were later arrested.