Jul 22, 6:51 PM EDT

Venezuela severs ties with Colombia

By CHRISTOPHER TOOTHAKER
Associated Press Writer
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CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- President Hugo Chavez severed Venezuela's diplomatic relations with Colombia on Thursday over claims he harbors guerrillas, and he charged that his neighbor's leader could attempt to provoke a war.

Chavez said he was forced to break off all relations because Colombian officials claim he has failed to move against leftist rebels who allegedly have taken shelter in Venezuelan territory.

Chavez acted moments after Colombian Ambassador Luis Alfonso Hoyos presented a meeting of the Organization of American States in Washington with photos, videos, witness testimony and maps of what he said were rebel camps inside Venezuela and challenged Venezuelan officials to let independent observers visit them.

Neither Chavez nor his OAS ambassador directly responded to the Colombian challenge to let people visit the alleged site of the camps.

In Washington, Hoyos said that roughly 1,500 rebels are hiding out in Venezuela and he showed fellow diplomats numerous aerial photographs of what he identified as rebel camps on Venezuelan territory.

Hoyos said that Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's government has repeatedly asked for Venezuela's cooperation to prevent guerrillas from slipping over the 1,400-mile (2,300-kilometer) border that separates the two countries. He insisted that several rebel leaders are hiding out in Venezuela.

"We have the right to demand that Venezuela doesn't hide those wanted by Colombia," Hoyos said, urging the OAS to investigate Colombia's claims.

OAS Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza told reporters after the four-hour session that his organization couldn't mount an inspection mission without Venezuela's consent.

Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro announced that Chavez's government had closed its embassy in Bogota and demanded that Colombia's ambassador in Caracas leave the country within 72 hours.

Maduro said Colombia had forced Venezuela's hand, accusing Uribe of blatantly lying about the rebel presence in Venezuela.

Uribe "has put political and economic relations into a hole," Maduro said.

Venezuela is considering other possible measures to protest "Colombia's aggressions against our country," Maduro told state television without elaborating. He hinted the military might take steps to guarantee the sovereignty of Venezuela's airspace.

Chavez's envoy to the OAS, Roy Chaderton, said the photographs that Hoyos showed diplomats didn't provide any solid evidence of a guerrilla presence in Venezuela.

Chavez suggested the photographs could be bogus, saying Uribe "is capable of anything."

The Venezuelan leader, a former paratrooper, contended Uribe could seek to spur an armed conflict with Venezuela before he leaves office next month.

"Uribe is even capable of setting up a fake camp in one of the jungles on the Venezuelan side to attack it, bomb it and bring about a war between Colombia and Venezuela," Chavez said.

The socialist leader has argued in the past that U.S. officials are using Colombia as part of a broader plan to portray him as a supporter of terrorist groups to provide justification for U.S. military intervention in Venezuela.

Chavez, who appeared alongside Argentine football star Diego Maradona, said the United States is using Colombia to undermine Venezuela's efforts toward regional integration. He said he has doubts that Colombia's president-elect, Juan Manuel Santos, will stray from Uribe's U.S.-backed military policies.

"Hopefully he'll understand that leftist and right-wing governments can live together," Chavez said of Santos.

During a visit to Mexico, Santos declined to comment on Venezuela's action, saying he felt it was best for the current government of Uribe to handle the situation.

Laura Gil, a political analyst and columnist for the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo, said she didn't expect the conflict to last very long because Chavez appeared to direct his comments at Uribe while raising the possibility that relations could be restored under Santos.

"Santos will have the opportunity to think about dialogue," she said.

Gil suggested Santos may be able to repair damage and "reach some type of Venezuelan cooperation" if he respectfully expresses Colombia's guerrilla-related concerns in private rather than making them public.

Chavez insisted Venezuela is doing everything possible to prevent members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the smaller National Liberation Army from crossing into Venezuelan territory.

"We pursue them," he said.

Venezuela's opposition echoed Colombia's accusations.

"We have a government that shelters and protects Colombian guerrillas," said Luis Carlos Solorzano of the Copei opposition party.

Solorzano said rebels have taken shelter in the states of Zulia, Tachira, Barinas, Portuguesa, Cojedes, Aragua and Apure, leaving behind their camouflage fatigues and hiding out in sparsely populated rural areas. The military and other state security forces don't bother the guerrillas, he added.

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Associated Press writers Luis Alonso Lugo in Washington and Vivian Sequera in Bogota contributed to this report.

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This could get ugly fast, if cooler heads don't prevail.

.

Jeremy McDermott:

Published Date: 30 July 2010
By Jeremy McDermott
PRESIDENT Hugo Chavez is again beating the drums of war after Colombia presented what it assured was evidence of 39 camps in Venezuelan territory housing 1,500 Marxist rebels, all seeking to overthrow the government of President Alvaro Uribe.
The result was Chavez issuing a blanket denial, calling the evidence a hoax and giving all Colombian diplomats 72 hours to leave the country. He is moving troops up to the border and putting the armed forces on to their highest state of alert, tellinADVERTISEMENT

g Venezuelans that the US and Colombia are poised to launch an attack and he was ready to respond in what would become a "100-year war".

The issue of Colombian rebels (principally the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - FARC) using Venezuela is nothing new. Indeed it has been a running sore in the relations between Colombia's right-wing President Uribe and the avowedly socialist Chavez.The two men do not like each other: "I blame Uribe, sick with hatred, he's headed straight to the garbage heap of history," said Chavez.

While the numbers and locations of the camps can be questioned, the fact that Venezuela is a key rearguard area and logistic base for the rebels is beyond dispute.

Yet there is also some Colombian internal politics in the mix, as Mr Uribe decided to take the matter to the Organisation of America States (OAS) just a fortnight before he hands over power, giving his successor and former defence minister Juan Manuel Santos the equivalent of a diplomatic hospital pass.

Rumours here in Bogota are that Uribe has been unhappy at key appointments Santos has made for his government and his plans to rebuild relations with neighbouring Venezuela. Of course the shadow of Uncle Sam still hangs over the region and more specifically over Colombian and Venezuelan relations. Colombia is Washington's closest ally in the region and has received $4.7 billion in US aid over the last 10 years in the name of the wars on drugs and terrorism. The Colombian rebel groups, numbering 10,000 between them, are on international lists of terrorism groups and up to their necks in drug trafficking.

For Venezuela, the US is still the evil empire, although this is less convincing under Barak Obama than it was under George W Bush. Last year Chavez froze diplomatic relations with Colombia over the agreement allowing US military access to seven Colombian bases and instituted a form of economic embargo on Colombian imports, forcing a drop of 70 per cent in bilateral trade.

It is to recuperate this that president-elect Santos wants to improve relations, also working on the premise that if relations are better he might have a better chance of broaching the issue of guerrilla presence in Venezuela. The US has called the presentation of evidence of this presence by Colombia very worrying, but so far has stayed on the sidelines.



While Chavez has frequently threatened to send his state-of-the-art Russian fighter planes into Colombia, he has another weapon against the US: the largest reserves of oil outside the Middle East. "If there was any armed aggression against VenezADVERTISEMENT

uela from Colombian territory or from anywhere else, promoted by the Yankee empire, we would suspend oil shipments to the United States, even if we had to eat stones here," he said earlier this week.

Yet despite all the bravado, neither the US or Colombia are rattled by the threats. With declining oil production (having reneged on deals with international oil companies Chavez is having trouble getting his black gold to the surface), Venezuela can ill-afford to stop selling to its best customer.

Colombia, while it is outclassed in technological terms by more than $2 billion worth of Russian hardware Chavez has bought, has a military three times the size of Venezuela's, battled hardened after 46 years of civil conflict.

There has been lots of noise and sabre rattling and there is certain to be a great deal more. But nobody believes that Venezuela and Colombia are about to come to blows.

The main beneficiaries from all this drama are of course the Marxist rebels. They may have to move their camps now, but their roots in Venezuela are likely to extend and deepen, providing them with the perfect launch pad and safe haven from which to plan the next stage of their campaign, this time against their hated enemy, Juan Manuel Santos.

l Jeremy McDermott reports for The Scotsman from South America.

BOGOTÁ, Jul 30, 2010 (IPS) - "There are alarming links between increased reports of extrajudicial executions of civilians by the Colombian army and units that receive U.S. military financing," John Lindsay-Poland, lead author of a two-year study on the question, told IPS.

Lindsay-Poland is Research and Advocacy Director for the U.S.-based Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), which presented a new report, "Military Assistance and Human Rights: Colombia, U.S. Accountability, and Global Implications", in Bogotá Thursday.

The report, produced in conjunction with the U.S. Office on Colombia (USOC), studies the application in Colombia of the so-called Leahy Law, passed in 1996, which bans military assistance to a foreign security force unit if the U.S. State Department has credible evidence that the unit has committed gross human rights violations.

The Leahy Law is one of the main U.S. laws designed to protect against the use of U.S. foreign aid to commit human rights abuses.

"If the Leahy Law was fully implemented, assistance would have to be suspended to nearly all fixed army brigades and many mobile brigades in Colombia," Lindsay-Poland said.

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52333

Benny they are going to kick your buddy hugos ass but good

A process of South American diplomacy could resolve the Colombia-Venezuela dispute. The US should keep its distance
by Mark Weisbrot

In March I wrote about the Obama administration's contribution to the election campaign under way in Venezuela, where voters will choose a new national assembly in September. I predicted that certain things would happen before September, among them some new "discoveries" that Venezuela supports terrorism. Venezuela has had 13 elections or referenda since Hugo Chávez was first elected in 1998, and in the run-up to most of them, Washington has usually done something to influence the political and media climate.

[B]The intentions were already clear on March 11, when General Douglas Fraser, the head of the US Southern Command was testifying to the US Senate. In response to a question from Senator John McCain about Venezuela's alleged support for terrorism, Fraser said:

"We have continued to watch very closely … We have not seen any connections specifically that I can verify that there has been a direct government-to-terrorist connection."
The next day he recanted his testimony after meeting with the US state department's top official for Latin America, Arturo Valenzuela.[/B]

This made it clear that the "terrorist" message was going to be a very important part of Washington's campaign. Even the Bush administration had never forced its military officers to retract their statements when they contradicted the state department's political agenda in Latin America, which they sometimes did.

Unfortunately, the campaign continues. Last Thursday, Colombia's ambassador to the Organisation of the American States (OAS) accused Venezuela at an extraordinary meeting of the OAS of harbouring 1,500 guerillas, and asked for the OAS to take action. The timing was noteworthy to many observers. President Lula da Silva of Brazil noted that it "seemed strange that this occurs a few days before [President] Uribe [of Colombia] leaves office. The new president has given signals that he wants to build peace [with Venezuela]. Everything was going well until Uribe made this denunciation."

Venezuela responded by breaking diplomatic relations with Colombia. It had previously cut off much of its trade with Colombia over the past two years, in response to Colombia's agreement with Washington to expand its military presence at seven US military bases in Colombia. Since Venezuela had been Colombia's largest trading partner in the region, it is possible that the new president, Juan Manuel Santos, was looking to improve relations for business reasons if nothing else. He had invited Chávez to his inauguration.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/jul/28/colombia-venezuela-washington-south-america

July 2010 Last updated at 15:21 ET Share this pageFacebookTwitterShareEmailPrint

Venezuela has sent extra troops to its border with Colombia "in case of attack"
Colombia has emphatically denied it plans to attack Venezuela.

The denial follows accusations by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez that his Colombian counterpart, Alvaro Uribe, is "capable of anything".

A spokesman for the Colombian government called President Chavez's remarks "deceptive" and said Bogota had never even considered an attack.

On Friday, President Chavez said he had sent extra forces to the border to boost Venezuela's defences.

'Brother nation'
In a phone call to Venezuelan state television, he said the deployment included soldiers, air units and special forces.

Colombian government spokesman Cesar Velasquez said claims that Bogota was planning to attack its "brother nation" were an attempt by President Chavez to deceive his people.

Colombia-Venezuela relations

Continue reading the main story
March 2008: Caracas sends troops to border after Colombian raid into Ecuador to kill Farc rebels
July 2008: Colombia and Venezuela make up after release of Farc hostage Ingrid Betancourt
November 2009: Venezuela sends 15,000 troops to border after Colombia-US deal on use of Colombia military bases
June 2010: Juan Manuel Santos elected President of Colombia. Caracas previously said his election "could lead to war in the region"
July 16, 2010: Caracas describes as provocation Bogota's announcement that Colombian rebels are sheltering in Venezuela
July 22, 2010: Colombia presents what it says is evidence for its accusations at OAS meeting. Venezuela breaks off diplomatic relations
"Colombia has gone through the proper international channels and will continue to insist on the application of international law to ensure Venezuela complies with its obligation not to harbour Colombian terrorists," he added.

Venezuela severed relations with Colombia last week after a heated meeting at the Organization of American States.

Bogota had called the extraordinary session of the regional body to formally complain about Venezuela allegedly tolerating Colombian rebel camps on its territory.

The Colombian ambassador presented videos, photos and maps, which he said proved that 1,500 members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) and National Liberation Army (ELN) were operating inside Venezuela.

President Chavez angrily denied the accusation and immediately severed diplomatic ties with Colombia.

The breakdown of relations was addressed at a meeting of the South American regional group Unasur (Union of South American Nations) on Thursday in Ecuador, but the foreign ministers gathered there were unable to resolve the crisis.

They agreed to hold another meeting "at the highest level" to renew their mediation efforts.

Liberate Colombia!

CARACAS JOURNAL
Building a New History by Exhuming Bolívar
By SIMON ROMERO
Published: August 3, 2010


CARACAS, Venezuela — The clock had just struck midnight. Most of the country was asleep. But that did not stop President Hugo Chávez from announcing in the early hours of July 16 that the latest phase of his Bolivarian Revolution had been stirred into motion.
Enlarge This Image

Meridith Kohut for The New York Times
Venezuelans waiting under a banner of Bolívar to buy reduced-rate food at a government office in Caracas.
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Times Topics: Venezuela | Hugo Chávez
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Meridith Kohut for The New York Times
Museum visitors looking at the box that Bolívar had been buried in.

Marching to the national anthem, a team of soldiers, forensic specialists and presidential aides gathered around the sarcophagus of Simón Bolívar, the 19th-century aristocrat who freed much of South America from Spain. A state television crew filmed the group, clad in white lab coats, hair nets and ventilation masks, attempt what seemed like an anemic half-goose step.

Then they unscrewed the burial casket, lifted off its lid and removed a Venezuelan flag covering the remains. A camera suspended from above captured images of a skeleton. Insomniacs here with dropped jaws watched live coverage of the Bolívar exhumation on state television, with narration provided by Interior Minister Tareck El Aissami.

For those unfortunate enough to have dozed off, there was always Twitter.

“What impressive moments we’ve lived tonight!” Mr. Chávez told followers in a series of Twitter messages sent during the exhumation that were redistributed by the state news agency a few hours later. “Rise up, Simón, as it’s not time to die! Immediately I remembered that Bolívar lives!”

Even Venezuelans used to Mr. Chávez’s political theater were surprised by the exhumation, which pushed aside issues like a scandal over imported food found rotting in ports, anger over an economy mired in recession and evidence offered by Colombia that Colombian guerrillas are encamped on Venezuelan soil.

With all this going on, Venezuelans have been scratching their heads in recent weeks over the possible motives for Mr. Chávez’s removal of Bolívar’s remains from the National Pantheon.

The president offered his own explanation. It involves the urgent need to do tests to determine whether Bolívar died of arsenic poisoning in Santa Marta, Colombia, instead of from tuberculosis in 1830, as historians have long accepted. A commission assembled here by Mr. Chávez has been examining this theory for the past three years.

Their work is based on claims among some Bolivarianólogos, as specialists here on the history of Bolívar are called, that a long-lost letter by Bolívar reveals how he was betrayed by Colombia’s aristocracy. By deciphering the letter using Masonic codes, they suggest the conspiracy was even broader, including Andrew Jackson, then president of the United States, and the king of Spain.

Findings presented at a medical conference this year in the United States have encouraged Mr. Chávez further. At the conference, Paul Auwaerter, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University, said Bolívar likely died of arsenic ingestion, an assertion seized upon by state media here to support the claim that Bolívar was murdered.

It matters little that Dr. Auwaerter says his research has been misconstrued, since an ingestion of arsenic could have been unintentional through arsenic-containing medications common in that era or contaminated drinking water. “I do not agree with President Chávez’s theories,” he said by e-mail.

Undeterred, the government here says it will get to the bottom of Bolívar’s death. The attorney general attended the exhumation, making it clear that the authorities view the mystery of Bolívar’s bones as the equivalent of a crime scene and a matter of national importance.

The exhumation could serve multiple purposes. If Mr. Chávez can say Bolívar was murdered in Colombia, he could try to use that against Colombia’s current government, with which Venezuela’s relations are cold, while reinforcing his longstanding claims that Colombians and others are plotting to assassinate him.

It would also allow Mr. Chávez to rewrite a major aspect of Venezuela’s history. The president already closely identifies himself and his political movement with Bolívar, renaming the country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, his espionage agency the Bolivarian Intelligence Service and so on. Portraits of Bolívar hang alongside Mr. Chávez’s in federal government offices.

This country’s intelligentsia fixates on Bolívar’s legacy and the use of Bolívar not just by Mr. Chávez but by rulers stretching back to the 19th century.

Slip into a bookstore and titles like “Divine Bolívar,” “The Cult of Bolívar,” “Thought of the Liberator” and “Why I’m Not Bolivarian” line the shelves. Scholars argue over how it was possible for one 20th-century dictator, Juan Vicente Gómez, to have conveniently shared the dates of his birth and death with Bolívar’s.