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Salas was even invited to visit La Santé, but he passed up the offer. As an independent journalist who pays his own way and has no back-up, he must use his real identity when going through frontiers or security controls. "I have never worked for any intelligence service, political party, or even for any one media outlet," says Salas, who produces his own undercover films and publishes books on his investigations. "I only work for my readers. They are the ones who end up paying for my investigations. I work alone, using my own money and passport. Journalistically, it would have been great to meet Ilich, but I couldn't do it."
In Venezuela's fringe community of political extremists, he bumped into people from Eta, the Túpac Amaru (a group of armed Venezuelan radicals who support Chávez), and other groups. Repeated requests for hands-on training eventually saw him invited to a camp in Venezuela, where he learned to handle pistols, rifles and machine guns, including a Kalashnikov AK-103, an Uzi sub-machine gun, the American M4 carbine and a Belgian-designed FN FAL. He also practised with a sniper's telescopic sight and received explosives training. "I learned all that a jihadist might need to take his message of terror to a city in Europe or the United States," Salas says. "There was nothing glamorous about it. It was just a question of learning to kill better."
His instructors included a Venezuelan army colonel, though Salas insists the camp was not run by the Chávez regime. "It just so happened that my instructors, as well as being supporters of revolutionary causes, were Venezuelan army officers."
His strangest discovery was the willingness of different extremist groups to blindly embrace the varied causes of others, even when they had nothing to do with one another. So it was that, as a supposed Palestinian Islamist, he found himself appearing in a video for the Túpac Amaru. Salas stood manfully beside leader Alberto Carías clutching a Heckler & Koch MP5-A3 sub-machine gun, as the latter urged armed revolutionary groups across South America to join forces.