FEATURE-Colombia's war creeps over border into Venezuela

21 May 2003 12:01:26 GMT By Pascal Fletcher

MACHIQUES, Venezuela, May 21 (Reuters) - In the dawn light, it looked like an official road block.

There were red traffic cones on the road and the armed men guarding it wore camouflage uniforms that seemed similar to those used by Venezuela's National Guard.

But the Venezuelan bank executive making his daily early morning drive to work in western Zulia state had the fright of his life when the four men pointed their automatic rifles at him and ordered him out of the car.

"Their leader said they were guerrillas and that they needed my car to get to Colombia," the executive, who asked not to be named, told Reuters. The gang, who he said spoke Spanish with Colombian accents, threw the traffic cones into the car trunk and sped off towards the Colombian border.

Such hold-ups are common in Venezuela's neighbor Colombia, where a bloody four-decade-old war pits leftist rebels against government troops and right-wing paramilitaries.

But the executive's recent experience took place more than 30 miles (50 km) inside Venezuela, near Rosario on the main road leading south from Maracaibo, Venezuela's second-biggest city and a major oil producing zone in the world's No. 5 oil exporter.

Ranchers and farmers in the Zulia border region say that Colombian guerrillas and paramilitaries are increasingly encroaching into Venezuelan territory, bringing with them an increase in killings, kidnappings, robberies and extortion.

And they complain that left-wing President Hugo Chavez' government is doing little, if anything, to stop it.

WAR SPILLOVER

The spillover of Colombia's war into Venezuela is a point of friction between the two Andean neighbors. Their 1,400-mile (2,200 km) frontier is a rugged patchwork of mountain, jungle, savannah and rich pastureland.

Venezuela and Colombia earlier this year accused each other of not protecting the border. The war of words threatened to damage relations, and Chavez met his Colombian counterpart Alvaro Uribe in April to defuse the crisis.

In a surprisingly cordial encounter, they pledged to work together to try to keep the border secure.

But their smiles did little to dispel the fears of Venezuelan ranchers at Machiques, a prosperous farm town surrounded by lush grazing land near the frontier.

The ranchers say that guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Colombia's biggest rebel group, are roaming freely in the nearby Sierra de Perija mountains which straddle the border.

They said that from this stronghold sprinkled with drug traffickers' poppy fields, the guerrillas are foraying into Venezuela, raiding farms, extorting money and kidnapping landowners.

"The guerrillas are not even hiding any more ... they're setting up road blocks," Fabricio Rincon, president of the Machiques Ranchers' Association, told Reuters.

He said there had been five kidnappings of local farmers in the area so far this year, the most recent in early May.

Colombian officials and army commanders, and Venezuela's fiercely anti-Chavez media, have repeatedly denounced what they say are FARC camps located inside Venezuelan territory.

Chavez, a former paratrooper who was first elected in 1998 and survived a coup last year, rejects these accusations and insists Venezuelan troops will repel any incursions.

BORDER REINFORCED

This month, Chavez ordered two army ranger brigades, more than 4,000 men, to join the 20,000 troops Venezuela says it already has guarding the frontier.

But commanders admit that, apart from the main crossing points, it is almost impossible to police the whole frontier. "It's not a line, a fence you can see...There's dense jungle," Venezuela's Interior Minister Gen. Lucas Rincon told Reuters.

Opponents of Chavez, including landowners he condemns as wealthy "oligarchs," accuse the president and the armed forces of tolerating and even collaborating with the guerrillas, who are termed "terrorists" by the Colombian and U.S. governments.

"Our armed forces don't do any intelligence work or patrolling," said Adonay Martinez, leader of the Maracaibo Lake Ranchers' Association.

Critics point to Chavez' anti-capitalist rhetoric, his self-declared "revolution" in favor of social justice and his close alliance with Cuba's communist President Fidel Castro as evidence that he sympathizes with the Colombian rebel cause.

"We do not support any guerrillas," the populist president said recently, dismissing these criticisms.