Colombia: Chavez, rebels in 'armed alliance'

Other Latin American leaders including Mexico’s Felipe Calderon and Chile’s Michelle Bachelet offered to mediate.

“A situation like this requires an explanation from Colombia to Ecuadoreans, to the Ecuadorean president and to the entire region,” Bachelet said. “We are very worried.”

At the scene of the attack, Ecuadorean troops covered their faces with bandannas to ward off the stench from bodies splayed on the ground in their underwear. Scattered among the corpses were pieces of clothing, shoes, guns, grenades and a refrigerator.

Soldiers also found three wounded women at the camp — a Mexican philosophy student injured by shrapnel and two Colombians — who were evacuated by helicopter to be treated.

Colombian commandos had removed the cadavers of Reyes and one other rebel.

Indignant, Chavez said “they wanted to show off the trophy” and called it “cowardly murder, all of it coldly calculated.”

“This could be the start of a war in South America,” Chavez said. He warned Uribe: “If it occurs to you to do this in Venezuela, President Uribe, I’ll send some Sukhois” — Russian warplanes recently bought by Venezuela.

“This is saber-rattling, trying to make a point,” said Adam Isacson, an analyst for the Washington-based Center for International Policy, adding that Chavez “has all but said that the FARC will be safe in Venezuela, and that the Venezuelan armed forces would respond to a similar Colombian incursion into Venezuelan territory.”

The situation pushed tense relations between Venezuela and Colombia to a new nadir, though few seem to have an appetite for war. Isacson cautioned that the countries share robust trade, the militaries “are not enthusiastic” and the populations of the neighbors “are hardly consumed by war fever.”

Chavez has increasingly revealed his sympathies for the leftist FARC, and in January asked that it be struck from international terror lists. The group funds itself largely through the cocaine trade and kidnaps for ransom and political ends.

Colombia said military commandos, tracking Reyes through an informant, first bombed a camp on the Colombian side of the border. It said the troops came under fire from across the border in Ecuador and encountered Reyes’ body when they overran that camp. Correa called this version an outright lie — “It was a massacre,” he said.

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