Pulling Strings

Venezuelan strongman [T]hugo Chavez continues to beat the drums of war with his neighbors and his latest actions to support the terrorist group FARC, which operates in neighboring Colombia, threatens to break into a wider war. Chavez is sending troops to the border in support of FARC, which would be a very strong sign that Chavez is clearly lining up with terrorist groups and seeking to destabilize his neighbors for his own benefit.

Colombia had gone after FARC troops that went into Ecuador, which happens to be led by a Chavez sympathizer. Chavez is trying to claim that he's simply protecting the international order and preventing further harm against a sovereign nation, all the while Colombia gets screwed for trying to protect itself against ongoing narco-terrorism by FARC.

The crisis erupted after Colombia bombed and sent troops inside Ecuador in a weekend raid that killed a Colombian rebel leader in his jungle camp in a major blow to Latin America's oldest guerrilla insurgency.

Governments from France to Brazil sought to defuse the crisis in the Andes, where Washington ally Colombian President Alvaro Uribe faces left-wing leaders fiercely opposed to U.S. free-market proposals for the region.

Traffic was normal in San Antonio at the main border crossing point between Venezuela and Colombia and while Venezuela and Ecuador said they had reinforced their borders, there was no immediate sign of any mobilization.

Venezuela state TV offered blanket coverage of the crisis but it showed no images of tanks, planes or troops moving and no other media reported military movements in the border area.

Colombia said it would not send extra troops to its frontiers with Venezuela and Ecuador.

Bogota justified its operation on Monday by saying international law allows such actions against "terrorists" and accused Ecuador of permitting the Marxist FARC rebels to take refuge in its territory.

"We have never been a country for ventures either in politics or in military matters," Colombian Vice President Francisco Santos told a U.N. human rights commission in Geneva. "We have always been respectful of the principal of non-interference."

But Ecuador, a close ally of the larger, richer Venezuela, said Colombia deliberately violated its sovereignty and urged Latin American governments to pressure Bogota so that it does not repeat its "aggression."

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who is struggling to fix chronic food shortages in the OPEC nation, sent tanks to the border and threatened to counterattack with Russian-made jets should Colombia unleash a similar raid in Venezuela.

Chavez, who urged governments to side against Colombia, also closed his embassy in Bogota and fellow leftist Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa expelled Colombia's ambassador from Quito. Chavez and Correa both called conservative Uribe a liar.

With Chavez warning war could break out, there was immediate impact on the economies of the three Andean nations which share active trade ties.

UPDATE:
Colombia, for its part, has filed a complaint with the UN against those nations harboring FARC, especially Ecuador. Colombia also claims to have uncovered documents in a raid against a FARC camp in Ecuador that shows there to be ties between FARC and the Ecuadorian government.

Colombia, after bombing a rebel camp in Ecuador last weekend, filed a complaint with the United Nations asking neighboring countries to stop harboring terrorist organizations.

Documents found by Colombian troops at the destroyed camp show ties between the rebels and the government of Ecuador's President Rafael Correa, Colombian police Chief Oscar Naranjo said late last night.

The links, if proven, would violate a UN Security Council resolution which calls on countries to ``deny refuge to those that finance, plan or commit acts of terrorism,'' and to prevent such elements from ``using their respective territories for that end,'' Colombia's Vice President Francisco Santos told UN members at a meeting in Geneva.

``On our continent there are those who intentionally violate this obligatory mandate,'' Santos said, without naming any countries.

The documents that outlined the ties belonged to Raul Reyes, reputedly the second in command of Colombia's biggest guerrilla group, who was killed March 1 in by the Colombian attack in Ecuadorean territory, Naranjo said.

UPDATE:
It gets better than that. Columbia is claiming that Chavez sent $300 million to the FARC terrorists.

Colombia’s police chief, Gen. Oscar Naranjo, said documents recovered from a slain rebel leader’s computer indicate Chavez recently sent $300 million to Colombian guerrillas. He said another document indicates the rebels sent money to Chavez when he was a jailed coup leader more than a decade ago.

Naranjo said the files were recovered from a laptop owned by the rebel known as Raul Reyes, who was killed Saturday in a Colombian commando raid on a camp just across the border in Ecuador.

“A note recovered from Raul Reyes speaks of how grateful Chavez was for the 100 million pesos (about $150,000 at the time) that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, delivered to Chavez when he was in prison,” Naranjo told a news conference in Bogota.