Colombia says rebels hide in Venezuela

www.alertnet.org 25 Feb 2003 00:33

BOGOTA, Colombia, Feb 24 (Reuters) - Colombia on Monday said Marxist guerrillas hide in Venezuela, intensifying a diplomatic war of words between the two South American neighbors.

"The case of the frontier with Venezuela is worrying because of its length, its level of traffic, and the presence of members of violent groups who use the neighboring country to hide," the Colombian government said in a news release.

Relations between the two countries nose-dived last week when Colombia's Interior Minister Fernando Londono accused Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chavez of frequently meeting Colombian Marxist guerrillas.

An angry Chavez hit back in his "Hello President" television program on Sunday, threatening to break off diplomatic relations with Colombia and accusing it of celebrating when it seemed he had been overthrown in a coup last year.

"We will insist to the Venezuelan government on the need for the forces stationed on either side of the frontier to cooperate, as we have repeatedly asked President Hugo Chavez," said the Colombian government, warning that Venezuela could "end up as a branch of the Colombian tragedy".

Colombia's armed forces have in the past accused Chavez, a former paratrooper turned populist politician, of allowing guerrillas to cross the 1,400-mile (2,200-km) border, much of which is thinly populated jungle and savanna.

But until now relations at the government level were more civilized, despite the differences of ideology and personality separating the flamboyant Chavez from the right-leaning Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.

Colombian soldiers suspect Chavez, a friend of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, of ideological sympathies with rebels fighting a four-decade-old war which claims thousands of lives a year.