Bogotá and Caracas tensions at crisis point

<a href=news.ft.com>Financial Times By Andrew Webb Vidal Published: April 22 2003 21:33 | Last Updated: April 22 2003 21:33

Trembling with fear, Juana points to a Venezuelan army helicopter thudding overhead, its down-draught peeling apart the dense jungle that blankets the no-man's land between Colombia and Venezuela.

"It was one of those," says Juana, a Colombian peasant who fled across the Río del Oro river into Venezuela after, she claims, Venezuelan aircraft strafed two Colombian villages, dispersing warring rightwing and leftwing Colombian paramilitary and guerrilla factions. "They flew low, there were explosions, and the paramilitaries ran into the forest."

Juana and several hundred other refugees are witnesses to the latest and most acute case of mounting tension between Colombia's pro-US government, led by Alvaro Uribe, and the militaristic leftwing Venezuelan administration of President Hugo Chávez.

Conflicting official accounts of last month's incident provide a backdrop for a summit meeting on Wednesday at which the two men - Mr Uribe, a workaholic, Mr Chávez a bombastic former paratrooper - will try to resolve their differences.

But any accord may only paper over the cracks in the countries' worsening relations. This would complicate Plan Colombia, the US-sponsored anti-narcotics and counter-insurgency programme, which would be dealt a blow if guerrillas and coca crops continued to seep out of Colombia into neighbouring countries.

Intelligence reports suggest the presence of Colombian guerrillas in Peru and Brazil, while drug crop cultivation has risen in Peru and Bolivia. But the situation on Colombia's border with Venezuela is the most critical. Mr Uribe's government is investigating what witnesses say were air strikes last month close to the villages of Tibú and La Gabarra in Colombia's Norte de Santander province, a seemingly unprecedented hostile act.

Martha Luca Ramrez, Colombia's defence minister, said the incursion appeared to have been a "potentially grave" incident in which the Venezuelan military came to the rescue of the 18,000-strong Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc).

At the time, Mr Chávez said he had ordered the air force to bomb an area "close" to the border after "irregulars" fired a missile at a helicopter and engaged with troops "inside" Venezuela. Local National Guardsmen said the air strikes occurred on Colombian soil a week after rightwing paramilitaries from the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), who were pursuing Farc units into Venezuela, clashed with the Venezuelan army.

Both countries have engaged in a war of words. This month Bogotá protested at accusations by José Rangel, Venezuela's vice-president, that the Colombian army colludes with the AUC.

"There are areas where Venezuela borders a de facto paramilitary state," said Mr Rangel, who has appealed for national unity in support of the Venezuelan military. "Colombia cannot continue dumping all of its delinquents and paramilitaries on its frontier."

Colombian officials suspect the Chávez government is stoking tensions to divert attention from growing economic difficulties and to rally nationalist sentiment, perhaps to cow and divide domestic opposition. The Venezuelan economy is expected to shrink 15-20 per cent this year, and opposition groups are seeking a referendum to unseat Mr Chávez. But the tensions are also being driven by opposing political sympathies.

"Uribe and Chávez are not naturally predisposed to be friendly to each other, and any spark on the border can exacerbate tensions," says Miguel Diaz, analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Mr Uribe, the US's staunchest ally in South America, is launching a military offensive against the Farc, and wants to pursue the rebels "across borders" - which the AUC already appears to be doing.

Mr Chávez, a former army officer who sees his Bolivarian revolution spreading across Latin America, strongly opposes Plan Colombia, on the grounds that it will push refugees and the warring combatants into Venezuela. A breakdown in relations between Bogotá and Caracas would all but terminate already limited cross-border security co-operation, analysts say, probably increasing the ease with which the Farc uses Venezuela as a sanctuary.

Top Venezuelan military officers deny allegations by Bogotá that they are turning a blind eye to Farc training camps in Venezuela, but concede that irregulars may, occasionally, cross the border. "Do Colombian subversives cross into Venezuela? It's possible," says General Julio Quintero, commander of the army's 2nd Infantry Division, in San Cristóbal. "However, our mission is to expel them back to Colombia."

But Venezuelans in the border region are already alarmed by the growing presence of the Fuerzas Bolivarianas de Liberación (FBL), a leftwing paramilitary group that, cattle-ranchers say, has been created with help from Chávez officials as a kidnapping and extortion "franchise" of the Farc. "There is no doubt the guerrillas are here," says Genaro Méndez, president of the local ranchers' association. "The issue is that other groups have now been formed, such as the FBL, trained by the Colombian guerrillas."

Additional reporting by James Wilson in Bogotá