Venezuela deploys troops to Colombian border

updated 1:49 p.m. ET March 4, 2008

BOGOTA, Colombia - Hundreds of Venezuelan troops moved Tuesday toward the border with Colombia, where trade was slowing amid heightening tension over Colombia’s cross-border strike on a rebel base in Ecuador.

The Organization of American States scheduled an emergency afternoon meeting in Washington to try to calm one of the region’s worst political showdowns in years, pitting U.S.-backed Colombia against Venezuela’s leftist President Hugo Chavez and his allies. Colombian and Ecuadorean officials, meanwhile, traded accusations in the United Nations and the International Criminal Court.

The escalation of tensions was triggered over the weekend when Colombia troops crossed the border with Ecuador and killed Raul Reyes, a top commander of the Colombian FARC rebels who had set up a camp there.

Chavez, who sympathizes with the leftist rebels, condemned the killing and angrily ordered about 9,000 soldiers — 10 battalions — to Venezuela’s border with Colombia. He warned Colombian President Alvaro Uribe that any strike on Venezuelan soil could provoke a South American war.

Colombia’s defense minister said Monday that he would not be provoked into mobilizing troops in response.

President Bush said the United States will stand by Colombia and criticized Venezuela’s government for making “provocative maneuvers.” Colombia has received some $5 billion in U.S. aid to fight drugs and leftist rebels since 2000.

Retired Venezuelan Gen. Alberto Muller Rojas, a former top Chavez aide, told The Associated Press the troops were being sent to the border region as “a preventative measure.”

Soldiers boarded buses and trucks at the Paramaracay base in central Venezuela Tuesday morning, and battalions also were moving out from the northern state of Lara, pro-Chavez Gov. Luis Reyes said.

The Venezuelan military has been tightlipped about troop movements. Venezuela’s armed forces include about 100,000 troops, Muller Rojas said. Colombia’s U.S.-equipped and trained military has more than twice as many.

Colombia to seek trial of Chavez
Uribe said his government would ask the International Criminal Court to try Chavez for “genocide” for allegedly financing the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or FARC, the country’s main rebel group. He cited a reference to a $300 million Venezuelan payment in documents found in a laptop the Colombians said belonged to Reyes.

The biggest losers from the killing of Reyes appeared to be the hostages that FARC rebels have held for years, pending a swap with rebel prisoners.

Ecuador and France said they had been communicating with Reyes, trying to secure a hostage release, when Colombia’s air force crossed the border to bomb his jungle camp. Along with Reyes, 20 other rebels were killed.

“I’m sorry to tell you that the conversations were pretty advanced to free 12 hostages,” Ecuador’s leftist president, Rafael Correa, said in a nationally televised address. “All of this was frustrated by the war-mongering, authoritarian hands” of the Colombian government.

French Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Pascale Andreani confirmed that France was in contact with Reyes as well, and that “the Colombians were aware of it.”

Colombia said documents in Reyes’ laptop indicate that Correa’s internal security minister met recently with a FARC envoy to discuss deepening relations with Ecuador, and even replacing military officers who might oppose that.

Publicly, there had been no indication of even preliminary progress in securing the release of any of the 40 hostages the FARC wants to swap for hundreds of jailed guerrillas.

Those hostages include three U.S. military contractors and former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, a dual French national who has become a cause celebre in Europe.

Saturday’s raid followed right on the heels of last week’s release by the FARC of four hostages to Venezuela’s justice minister, Ramon Rodriguez Chacin. The minister said the raid proved the “intent of the fascist Colombian government is to hamper the handover of hostages, because that is the path of peace.”

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