Chavez Sends 10 Battalions to Colombian Border

[MASTERBAKER]

Orders the embassy closed in Bogota
CNN's Carlos Guillen reports
Added On March 2, 2008


(CNN) -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Sunday ordered 10 battalions of military forces to the country's border with Colombia, and ordered the closure of Venezuela's embassy in Colombia's capital city of Bogota.


Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez says Colombia violated Ecuador's sovereignty.

Chavez made the moves in reaction to an operation carried out at dawn Saturday by Colombia's national police and its air force in Ecuador, which resulted in the death of the second-in-command of the FARC rebels group, Luis Edgar Devia Silva, known as "Raul Reyes."

FARC is the Spanish acronym for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The Marxist group has been trying for some 40 years to overthrow the Colombian government and is estimated to be holding 750 hostages in the jungles of Colombia.

In the past two months, Chavez has brokered FARC's release of six of them. Reyes, who was a member of the seven-man FARC leadership council known as the general secretariat, played a key mediation role in their release.

Also killed was Guillermo Enrique Torres or "Julian Conrado," who was a key FARC ideologue.

"The Colombian oligarchy says it was combat," said Chavez, whose leftist politics have been credited for his warm relations with the rebel group. "It was not combat. It was a cowardly murder, coldly prepared in its entirety. The truth is coming out."

"We don't want war, but we will not allow the North American empire -- which is the master -- and its sub-President [Alvaro] Uribe and the Colombian oligarchy to divide, to weaken us. We will not allow it."

Chavez said Saturday that the Colombian government had violated Ecuador's sovereignty and added that, had the operation been conducted on Venezuelan soil, he would have declared war against Colombia.

"Colombia's government recognizes -- in a happy and irresponsible attitude -- that it has violated the sovereignty of a neighbor country, and that's worrisome," he said.

"President Uribe, think well. Don't think about doing that over here, don't think it. Because it would very serious, a military raid in Venezuelan territory would be casus belli [cause for war]. There is not any excuse."

Also on Saturday, Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa told reporters in Quito that Uribe told him the raid occurred after a FARC column fled across the border and fired at Colombian forces, who "had to defend themselves."

But Correa said his forces investigated Uribe's claims and discovered that the Colombian planes attacked the guerrillas as they slept in a camp 2 km ( 1.2 mi) inside Ecuador.

"Of course Ecuadoran air space was invaded," he said.

He said Colombian ground forces then crossed into Ecuador and retrieved Reyes' body, leaving the others.

"We will not permit this outrage," he said. "Either President Uribe was misinformed and will have to sanction his commanders who deceived him, breaking every international bilateral proceeding by entering our territory or Uribe simply lied. In either case, the situation is extremely grave and the Ecuadoran government is disposed to go to the ultimate consequences."

Chavez called Uribe a "liar," a "criminal" and a "gangster."

"Colombia is a terrorist state, a subject of the biggest terrorist in the world, the United States government, and all of its imperialist apparatus," Chavez said to applause.

Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos denied that Colombia violated Ecuadoran airspace in the operation..

The White House said Sunday it was "monitoring the situation."


"This is an odd reaction by Venezuela to Colombia's efforts against the FARC, a terrorist organization that continues to hold Colombians, Americans and others hostage," spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.

FARC has justified hostage-taking as a legitimate military tactic in a long-running and complex civil war that also has involved right-wing paramilitaries, government forces and drug traffickers.

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="450" height="370" wmode="transparent" data="http://www.liveleak.com/player.swf?autostart=false&token=a5b_1204514879"><param name="movie" value="http://www.liveleak.com/player.swf?autostart=false&token=a5b_1204514879"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><param name="quality" value="high"></object>

 

[QueEx]

<font size="5">
Will Chavez and His Neigbhors Go to War?</font size>

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez pauses during his
weekly broadcast 'Alo Presidente' in Caracas, March 2,
2008. Miraflores Palace / Reuters


Few world leaders rattle a saber as flamboyantly as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez does. On Sunday, in a piece of vintage Chavez theater, he ordered thousands of troops and tanks to the border with Colombia after that country's military had ventured a mile into Ecuador on Saturday to kill Raul Reyes, a top commander of Colombia's FARC guerrillas. The left-wing Chavez called conservative Colombian President Alvaro Uribe a "criminal" and a "lapdog of the U.S. empire," warning ominously that "this could be the start of a war in South America."

Don't bet on it.

Sure, Chavez and Uribe, two of Latin America's most outsized egos, loathe each other. Each has significantly fattened his military arsenal in recent years, and tensions have rarely been this high between their countries. Nor are they alone on the Latin street when it comes to martial upgrading: Brazil's 2008 federal budget, for example, includes a 53% increase in military spending, leading many to wonder if Latin America is undergoing an arms race not seen since the heyday of military rule across the continent. But that doesn't mean that either Chavez or Uribe can afford an armed conflict.

There are at least six reasons to doubt that the bluster could morph into bullets:

• Trade:

Venezuela and Colombia's economies are too interdependent. Bilateral trade reached $5.5 billion last year, a 25% increase over 2006. Colombia buys Venezuela's petroleum products — Chavez controls the hemishere's largest reserves — and Venezuela needs Colombia's agricultural produce even more. Despite the massive windfall Venezuelans have accrued from $100-a-barrel oil, they face sharp food shortages and the region's highest inflation rate. If Chavez were to exacerbate the situation by entering a war, his political popularity — which has dropped since he lost a referendum last year in which he sought greater powers and an unlimited tenure — would plummet.

• Colombia's Military Revival:

A decade ago, the Miami-Dade County police force could have defeated the Colombian military. Back then, in fact, the Marxist guerrillas of the FARC had the upper hand in Colombia's four-decade-old civil war. But since Uribe took office in 2002, the armed forces have grown and modernized impressively enough to land body blows against the FARC, as demonstrated by Reyes' stunning demise. Chavez may have spent $4 billion over the past decade to buy everything from AK-47 rifles to Russian Sukhoi fighter planes, but the Venezuelan armed forces haven't seen real action since Chavez himself, then an army paratrooper, led a failed coup in 1992. So, Venezuela is likely at a military disadvantage — especially since many of its soldiers and officers aren't enthusiastic about either Chavez or the FARC. "There are too many Venezuelan generals who won't want to go to war over the FARC," says Michael Shifter, of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washinton, D.C. "Would they follow Chavez's orders?"

• Crude Facts:

Right now, Venezuela can't risk any threat to its oil industry, which still accounts for a third of the nation's gross domestic product, half of government revenues and 80% of export earnings. Even the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), of which Venezuela is a founding member, reports that Venezuelan crude production is still well below the more than 3 million barrels a day that the state-owned oil monopoly, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), pumped before it suffered a debilitating management strike in 2002 and 2003. Experts agree that the shortfall in output is largely due to insufficient investment in infrastructure — the kind of facilities and equipment that often become ripe targets in a war.

• What Would the Neighbors Say?

Neither Uribe nor Chavez needs any more bad international publicity right now. Uribe's domestic approval ratings may be higher than the Colombian sierras; but he can't secure a free trade agreement with the U.S., for example, because Congress is too wary of his government's alleged ties to Colombia's bloodthirsty right-wing paramilitary armies and because of human rights abuses by the Colombian military. Nor is he getting global kudos for sending his troops over a neighbor's border on Saturday in an operation denounced by Ecuador's leftist president and Chavez-ally Rafael Correa as a brazen violation of sovereignty. But the hemisphere has cooled considerably towards Chavez's antics; and his defense of the FARC, which earns hundreds of million dollars a year via ransom kidnapping and protecting cocaine trafficking, isn't winning him much international sympathy. A war on his western border could also prove how freely the FARC roams inside Venezuelan territory — an allegation Chavez denies, along with the assertion by Colombian police that seized FARC documents show a long political and financial alliance between the Venezuelan leader and the Colombian rebels.

• A Hard Sell at Home:

If Chavez has learned one thing from his idol Fidel Castro, it's how to summon the threat of the U.S. to distract his countrymen from problems at home. And if there is one thing Uribe has learned from his pal George W. Bush, it's how to manipulate the terrorist threat to amass greater executive power. But a cross-border war would most likely backfire on both men — especially Chavez, whose strategy this time may have been a miscalculation, as Venezuelans haven't exactly taken to the streets to answer his martial call. Chavez plans to seek another referendum on constitutional amendments such as abolishing term-limits before his current term ends in 2012. A big part of his argument to his countrymen will be that only he can stand up to Washington and its Latin American proxies. Venezuelans' tepid response to his Sunday tirade indicates that he faces an uphill battle to remain in office unless he starts resolving their domestic woes.

• The Red Line:

Chavez, who considers himself the modern heir of South America's 19th-century independence hero, Simon Bolivar, still likes to wear his red army beret. But according to a recent Chavez biography, he once told a U.S. diplomat that for all his bellicose rhetoric, "I know where the red line is. And I'm not going to cross that line — I just go up to that little edge." He demonstrated some sense of the limits on his power by conceding defeat in the referendum last year when critics had widely expected him to reject it and cross the red line into Castro-style dictatorship. Chavez and Uribe both went up that "little edge" over the weekend; but the hemispheric hope is that both are well aware of the catastrophic folly involved in stepping over that boundary.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1719158,00.html

 

[Actor4Truth]

[FLASH]http://www.youtube.com/v/n4jMzKxYB74[/FLASH]

Sombodys gonna make some $$$$$

 

[blackbull1970]

If they go to war, I wonder how it will affect the cocaine drug trade.

Peace.

 

[actinanass]

If they go to war, I wonder how it will affect the cocaine drug trade.

Peace.

up for grabs.....

 

[QueEx]

If they go to war? What war?

Chavez is merely taking a page out of his hombre Ahmadenijad's book: have your foreign policy in a posture (Iran: stirring shit up in Lebanon and Gaza - with possible retaliation by the U.S./Israel) (Venezuela: stirring shit up with Columbia) that suggests a remote possibility that the flow of oil might be disrupted or curtailed within an oil producing country that causes the price of oil to go through the damn roof. Chavez doesn't have to fire a shot; just move troops around and continue spewing anti-American rhetoric -- and watch the price of oil suck the life out of our economy.

QueEx

 

[Mr.O]

Why are they going to war again?

 

[followup]

They invaded. BRB with a link...

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/03/07/samerica.summit/index.html

SANTA DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (CNN) -- The presidents of Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador have signed a declaration to end a crisis sparked when Colombian troops killed a rebel leader and 21 others inside Ecuadoran territory.

"With the promise not to ever again assault a brother country and the request for forgiveness [by Colombia], we can consider this very serious incident resolved," said Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa.

Correa, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe shook hands Friday at the end of what had been a contentious meeting of the Rio Group of Latin American leaders.

In the accord, the leaders condemned Colombia's action and affirmed that no country has the right to violate the territory of another. Correa and Chavez also accepted Colombia's apology for the incident and accept that Uribe will not repeat it.

In a nod to Colombia's concerns, the declaration also committed all the countries to fight threats to national stability from "irregular or criminal groups," The Associated Press reported.

Steps were taken immediately to defuse tensions, AP reported. Colombia pledged not to seek genocide charges against Chavez at an international court, while Nicaragua said it would restore the diplomatic relations it severed with Colombia a day earlier, according to AP.

Chavez said trade with Colombia should "keep increasing," two days after saying he didn't want even "a grain of rice" from his neighbor, AP reported.

The goodwill gestures capped a summit in which Correa and left-leaning ally Chavez verbally pummeled Uribe, with Correa chiding him for "insolence" and urging him to "stop trying to justify the unjustifiable."

Uribe in turn called Correa a communist.

The diplomatic spat began Saturday when Colombian troops and police crossed into Ecuador and killed 22 people. The dead included Luis Edgar Devia Silva, known as "Raul Reyes," the second-in-command of the leadership council of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC in its Spanish acronym.

Reyes was the first member of the seven-member leadership council, known as general secretariat, to be killed by Colombia in the 44 years the rebel group has been fighting to overthrow the government.

The Colombian army said Friday that a second member of FARC had been killed. Ivan Rios, nom de guerre of Manuel de Jesus Munoz, was one of six remaining members of FARC.

FARC is estimated to be holding at least 700 hostages in the jungles of Colombia and has been accused by the United States of being a terrorist organization.

Colombia had justified the attack by saying it was necessary to counter a threat to its national security.

The government said it seized laptops from the attacked rebel camp showing that Venezuela gave $300 million to the rebels and that senior Ecuadoran officials met with FARC rebels.

Ecuador and Venezuela denied the allegations, promptly condemned the raid and moved troops to their borders with Colombia.

"I have never done it and will never do it," Chavez said of the allegations he gave $300 million to the rebels, AP reported. "I could have sent a lot of rifles to the FARC. I will never do it because I want peace."

 

[actinanass]

If they go to war? What war?

Chavez is merely taking a page out of his hombre Ahmadenijad's book: have your foreign policy in a posture (Iran: stirring shit up in Lebanon and Gaza - with possible retaliation by the U.S./Israel) (Venezuela: stirring shit up with Columbia) that suggests a remote possibility that the flow of oil might be disrupted or curtailed within an oil producing country that causes the price of oil to go through the damn roof. Chavez doesn't have to fire a shot; just move troops around and continue spewing anti-American rhetoric -- and watch the price of oil suck the life out of our economy.

QueEx

This is why I'm for building new refineries, and drilling for our OWN oil *which we know we have* so we become way more energy independent. The problem is, we have people who feels like its better to import than make. This is a bipartisan situation as well.

 

[World B Free]

Orders the embassy closed in Bogota
CNN's Carlos Guillen reports
Added On March 2, 2008


(CNN) -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Sunday ordered 10 battalions of military forces to the country's border with Colombia, and ordered the closure of Venezuela's embassy in Colombia's capital city of Bogota.


Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez says Colombia violated Ecuador's sovereignty.

Chavez made the moves in reaction to an operation carried out at dawn Saturday by Colombia's national police and its air force in Ecuador, which resulted in the death of the second-in-command of the FARC rebels group, Luis Edgar Devia Silva, known as "Raul Reyes."

FARC is the Spanish acronym for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The Marxist group has been trying for some 40 years to overthrow the Colombian government and is estimated to be holding 750 hostages in the jungles of Colombia.

In the past two months, Chavez has brokered FARC's release of six of them. Reyes, who was a member of the seven-man FARC leadership council known as the general secretariat, played a key mediation role in their release.

Also killed was Guillermo Enrique Torres or "Julian Conrado," who was a key FARC ideologue.

"The Colombian oligarchy says it was combat," said Chavez, whose leftist politics have been credited for his warm relations with the rebel group. "It was not combat. It was a cowardly murder, coldly prepared in its entirety. The truth is coming out."

"We don't want war, but we will not allow the North American empire -- which is the master -- and its sub-President [Alvaro] Uribe and the Colombian oligarchy to divide, to weaken us. We will not allow it."

Chavez said Saturday that the Colombian government had violated Ecuador's sovereignty and added that, had the operation been conducted on Venezuelan soil, he would have declared war against Colombia.

"Colombia's government recognizes -- in a happy and irresponsible attitude -- that it has violated the sovereignty of a neighbor country, and that's worrisome," he said.

"President Uribe, think well. Don't think about doing that over here, don't think it. Because it would very serious, a military raid in Venezuelan territory would be casus belli [cause for war]. There is not any excuse."

Also on Saturday, Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa told reporters in Quito that Uribe told him the raid occurred after a FARC column fled across the border and fired at Colombian forces, who "had to defend themselves."

But Correa said his forces investigated Uribe's claims and discovered that the Colombian planes attacked the guerrillas as they slept in a camp 2 km ( 1.2 mi) inside Ecuador.

"Of course Ecuadoran air space was invaded," he said.

He said Colombian ground forces then crossed into Ecuador and retrieved Reyes' body, leaving the others.

"We will not permit this outrage," he said. "Either President Uribe was misinformed and will have to sanction his commanders who deceived him, breaking every international bilateral proceeding by entering our territory or Uribe simply lied. In either case, the situation is extremely grave and the Ecuadoran government is disposed to go to the ultimate consequences."

Chavez called Uribe a "liar," a "criminal" and a "gangster."

"Colombia is a terrorist state, a subject of the biggest terrorist in the world, the United States government, and all of its imperialist apparatus," Chavez said to applause.

Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos denied that Colombia violated Ecuadoran airspace in the operation..

The White House said Sunday it was "monitoring the situation."


"This is an odd reaction by Venezuela to Colombia's efforts against the FARC, a terrorist organization that continues to hold Colombians, Americans and others hostage," spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.

FARC has justified hostage-taking as a legitimate military tactic in a long-running and complex civil war that also has involved right-wing paramilitaries, government forces and drug traffickers.

Orders the embassy closed in Bogota
CNN's Carlos Guillen reports
Added On March 2, 2008


(CNN) -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Sunday ordered 10 battalions of military forces to the country's border with Colombia, and ordered the closure of Venezuela's embassy in Colombia's capital city of Bogota.


Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez says Colombia violated Ecuador's sovereignty.

Chavez made the moves in reaction to an operation carried out at dawn Saturday by Colombia's national police and its air force in Ecuador, which resulted in the death of the second-in-command of the FARC rebels group, Luis Edgar Devia Silva, known as "Raul Reyes."

FARC is the Spanish acronym for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The Marxist group has been trying for some 40 years to overthrow the Colombian government and is estimated to be holding 750 hostages in the jungles of Colombia.

In the past two months, Chavez has brokered FARC's release of six of them. Reyes, who was a member of the seven-man FARC leadership council known as the general secretariat, played a key mediation role in their release.

Also killed was Guillermo Enrique Torres or "Julian Conrado," who was a key FARC ideologue.

"The Colombian oligarchy says it was combat," said Chavez, whose leftist politics have been credited for his warm relations with the rebel group. "It was not combat. It was a cowardly murder, coldly prepared in its entirety. The truth is coming out."

"We don't want war, but we will not allow the North American empire -- which is the master -- and its sub-President [Alvaro] Uribe and the Colombian oligarchy to divide, to weaken us. We will not allow it."

Chavez said Saturday that the Colombian government had violated Ecuador's sovereignty and added that, had the operation been conducted on Venezuelan soil, he would have declared war against Colombia.

"Colombia's government recognizes -- in a happy and irresponsible attitude -- that it has violated the sovereignty of a neighbor country, and that's worrisome," he said.

"President Uribe, think well. Don't think about doing that over here, don't think it. Because it would very serious, a military raid in Venezuelan territory would be casus belli [cause for war]. There is not any excuse."

Also on Saturday, Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa told reporters in Quito that Uribe told him the raid occurred after a FARC column fled across the border and fired at Colombian forces, who "had to defend themselves."

But Correa said his forces investigated Uribe's claims and discovered that the Colombian planes attacked the guerrillas as they slept in a camp 2 km ( 1.2 mi) inside Ecuador.

"Of course Ecuadoran air space was invaded," he said.

He said Colombian ground forces then crossed into Ecuador and retrieved Reyes' body, leaving the others.

"We will not permit this outrage," he said. "Either President Uribe was misinformed and will have to sanction his commanders who deceived him, breaking every international bilateral proceeding by entering our territory or Uribe simply lied. In either case, the situation is extremely grave and the Ecuadoran government is disposed to go to the ultimate consequences."

Chavez called Uribe a "liar," a "criminal" and a "gangster."

"Colombia is a terrorist state, a subject of the biggest terrorist in the world, the United States government, and all of its imperialist apparatus," Chavez said to applause.

Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos denied that Colombia violated Ecuadoran airspace in the operation..

The White House said Sunday it was "monitoring the situation."


"This is an odd reaction by Venezuela to Colombia's efforts against the FARC, a terrorist organization that continues to hold Colombians, Americans and others hostage," spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.

FARC has justified hostage-taking as a legitimate military tactic in a long-running and complex civil war that also has involved right-wing paramilitaries, government forces and drug traffickers.

 

[QueEx]

<font size="5"><center>The FARC's Guardian Angel</font size>
<font size="4">A serious and potentially explosive question: What to do about the
revelation that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez forged a strategic
alliance with the FARC aimed at Colombia's democratic government. </font size></center>

Washington Post
By Jackson Diehl
Monday, March 10, 2008; Page A15

Latin American nations and the Bush administration spent the past week loudly arguing over what censure, if any, Colombia should face for a bombing raid that killed one of the top leaders of the FARC terrorist group at a jungle camp in Ecuador. More quietly, they are just beginning to consider a far more serious and potentially explosive question: What to do about the revelation that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez forged a strategic alliance with the FARC aimed at Colombia's democratic government.

First reports of the documents recovered from laptops at the FARC camp spoke of promises by Chávez to deliver up to $300 million to a group renowned for kidnapping, drug trafficking and massacres of civilians; they also showed that Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa was prepared to remove from his own army officers who objected to the FARC's Ecuadoran bases.

But in their totality, the hundreds of pages of documents so far made public by Colombia paint an even more chilling picture. The raid appears to have preempted a breathtakingly ambitious "strategic plan" agreed on by Chávez and the FARC with the initial goal of gaining international recognition for a movement designated a terrorist organization by both the United States and Europe. Chávez then intended to force Colombian President Álvaro Uribe to negotiate a political settlement with the FARC, and to promote a candidate allied with Chávez and the FARC to take power from Uribe.

All this is laid out in a series of three e-mails sent in February to the FARC's top leaders by Iván Márquez and Rodrigo Granda, envoys who held a series of secret meetings with Chávez. Judging from the memos, Chávez did most of the talking: He outlined a five-stage plan for undermining Uribe's government, beginning with the release of several of the scores of hostages the FARC is holding.

The first e-mail, dated Feb. 8, discusses the money: It says that Chávez, whom they call "angel," "has the first 50 [million] available and has a plan to get us the remaining 200 in the course of the year." Chávez proposed sending the first "packet" of money "through the black market in order to avoid problems." He said more could be arranged by giving the FARC a quota of petroleum to sell abroad or gasoline to retail in Colombia or Venezuela.

Chávez then got to the plans that most interested him. He wanted the FARC to propose collecting all of its hostages in the open, possibly in Venezuela, for a proposed exchange for 500 FARC prisoners in Colombian jails. Chávez said he would travel to the area for a meeting with the FARC's top leader, Manuel Marulanda, and said the presidents of Ecuador, Nicaragua and Bolivia would accompany him. Meanwhile, Chávez said he would set up a new diplomatic group, composed of those countries and the FARC, plus Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, for the purpose of recognizing the FARC as a legitimate "belligerent" in Colombia and forcing Uribe into releasing its prisoners.

In "the early morning hours," the FARC envoys recounted in a Feb. 9 e-mail, Chávez reached the subject of whether the release of Ingrid Betancourt, a former Colombian presidential candidate who is the FARC's best-known hostage, would complicate his plan to back a pro-FARC alternative to Uribe. "He invites the FARC to participate in a few sessions of analysis he has laid out for following the Colombian political situation," the e-mail concluded.

Assuming these documents are authentic -- and it's hard to believe that the cerebral and calculating Uribe would knowingly hand over forgeries to the world media and the Organization of American States -- both the Bush administration and Latin American governments will have fateful decisions to make about Chávez. His reported actions are, first of all, a violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1373, passed in September 2001, which prohibits all states from providing financing or havens to terrorist organizations. More directly, the Colombian evidence would be more than enough to justify a State Department decision to cite Venezuela as a state sponsor of terrorism. Once cited, Venezuela would be subject to a number of automatic sanctions, some of which could complicate its continuing export of oil to the United States. A cutoff would temporarily inconvenience Americans -- and cripple Venezuela, which could have trouble selling its heavy oil in other markets.

For now, the Bush administration appears anxious to avoid this kind of confrontation. U.S. intelligence agencies are analyzing the Colombian evidence; officials say they will share any conclusions with key Latin American governments. Yet those governments have mostly shrunk from confronting Chávez in the past, and some have quietly urged Bush to take him on. If the president decides to ignore clear evidence that Venezuela has funded and conspired with an officially designated terrorist organization, he will flout what has been his first principle since Sept. 11, 2001.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/09/AR2008030901429.html

 

[QueEx]

<IFRAME SRC="http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20080304/index.htm" WIDTH=760 HEIGHT=1500>
<A HREF="http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20080304/index.htm">link</A>

</IFRAME>

 

[QueEx]

<font size="5"><center>If Colombia and Venezuela went to war,
who'd win?</font size></center>

By Phil Gunson and Pablo Bachelet | McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Friday, March 14, 2008

WASHINGTON — Colombia's military recently had one of its finest moments: the killing of a senior leader of FARC, a resilient guerrilla group that had never lost a member of its top leadership in combat.

At the same time, U.S. officials and military analysts say, Venezuela fumbled an effort to rush troops and tanks to the border with Colombia in response to the deadly March 1 attack, on a FARC camp in Ecuador.

The Colombian raid triggered a short-lived crisis. But military experts say it also showed the contrasting security philosophies of Venezuela's socialist President Hugo Chavez and Colombia's conservative President Alvaro Uribe.

Colombia, with U.S. help, has assembled a nimble infantry-based and intelligence-reliant counterinsurgency force capable of striking at guerrilla units and leaders deep in the jungle.

The Venezuelans have done just the opposite: They've spurned all contacts with the U.S. military and instead opted mostly for big-ticket purchases of Russian jet fighters, attack helicopters and submarines while forming, training and arming reserve and militia units loyal to Chavez.

The result is that Venezuela's military is impressive on paper but also in many ways a paper tiger, according to defense experts, shaped more to preserve Chavez's grip on power than to fight an effective war.

Colombia, said John Cope, with the Institute for National Strategic Studies of the National Defense University, has become "an extremely good professional force," while the Venezuelan army is "trying to figure out the ins and outs of an approach to a military organization that puts a high emphasis on civic action and humanitarian issues — which means they're probably not spending an awful lot of time training."

The contrast of the two militaries is more than an academic exercise. Few analysts believe that Chavez, a fiery critic of U.S. policies, will provoke a war against Uribe, a stalwart Washington ally.

Rather, the concern is that someone could light a match in the still-combustible environment.

"I think the real concern is not that Chavez intends to provoke a war, although that can't be ruled out, but that there's more of a possibility that, with all the rhetoric he's using, that some bright young lieutenant colonel will decide to take action on his own and cause a skirmish that could escalate," said a senior U.S. intelligence official, who agreed to be interviewed on condition of anonymity.

Observers on both sides of the border are busy updating the facts and figures on the two forces.

In sheer manpower, Colombia has an edge. Jane's Sentinel Security Assessment places the Colombian armed forces, not including Colombia's sizable police force, at 263,000, more than double Venezuela's 115,000.

Colombia's forces are modeled on the U.S. military, with seven army divisions, three naval units and eight air commands being coordinated by five geographically based U.S.-style joint commands. According to Jane's, the idea is to ensure closer cooperation between the different branches of the military.

In a process that began before Uribe took office in 2002, the Colombian military has shifted its focus on counterinsurgency and counter-drug-trafficking, putting together helicopter-based and other highly mobile battalions and special-forces units.

Many of the units have been trained by the 500 or so U.S. advisers in the country with part of the estimated $600 million in military aid that Washington provides annually to Colombia.

Colombian and U.S. officers also maintain a Joint Intelligence Center in the southern base of Tres Esquina, which gathers information from communications intercepts and images from U.S. spy planes, listening stations and satellites, according to Jane's.

True to its counterinsurgency strategy and its partly mountainous, partly jungle terrain, Colombia has no combat tanks.

In contrast, Chavez has severed all military ties with the United States, which in turn has stopped selling him weapons and replacement parts.

Chavez has promoted the concept of asymmetric warfare, essentially preparing reserves and militias for a guerrilla war against an invader, presumably U.S. troops. Observers say he could end up creating a militia force of some 300,000.

But his regular armed forces are regarded as logistically challenged, and U.S. officials believe the army struggled to move its tank units toward the Colombian border after Chavez gave the order on March 2. Venezuela has nearly 200 French AMX-30, AMX-13 and British Scorpion 90 tanks.

Half of the army's six divisions are based in the western half of the country, closest to the border with Colombia.

There are also doubts about the military's equipment maintenance. A foreign military officer who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of his job said the gun-sights on some of the tanks had been rendered inoperable by attempts to service them without help from foreign technicians.

"It's all image," said Cope, who added that Chavez seems more interested in reorganizing the military so that it's less of a threat to him. The military briefly forced Chavez from office in 2002.

The growing militia units can quickly mobilize to defend his government should the regular military turn against him, Cope said, and Chavez has pulled together the better-trained units from all branches under one "operational strategic command."

Venezuela has a big edge over Colombia in the air. It has purchased 10 Russian-made Mi-35 "flying tank" attack helicopters that can carry eight soldiers and have both anti-tank and air-to-air capacity.

Right after ordering the 10 battalions to the Colombian border, Chavez also threatened Uribe with "sending over the Sukhois" — advanced Russian jet fighter-bombers that make the Colombians' aged French Mirages and Israeli Kfirs look puny.

Colombia recently acquired 15 155mm cannon from Spain to offset a perceived Venezuelan artillery advantage. And in February, it spent $200 million to purchase 24 newer Kfir C10 fighters.

Colombia's Cessna A-37B Dragonflies and Brazilian Super Tucano turboprops, which bombed the camp in Ecuador with lethal accuracy, could be blasted out of the sky by the two dozen Sukhois-30s purchased by Chavez, but Venezuela's pilots are still reported to be training to fly them.

<font size="4">COLOMBIA</font size>

Strengths:

• Large armed force of 263,000.

• U.S.-supplied helicopters such as Black Hawks provide counterinsurgency mobility.

• Brazilian Super Tucano turboprop planes provide lethal and accurate firepower.

• Quickly responds to intelligence tips.

• U.S.-style "joint commands" integrate army, air force, navy and national police.

Weaknesses:

• Aging air force of Mirages and Kfirs.

• No tanks.

• Some units seen as only adequately trained; human-rights questions remain.

<font size="4">VENEZUELA</font size>

Strengths:

• Firepower provided by Russian-supplied weaponry, including 24 Sukhoi-30 jet fighter-bombers, 10 Mi-35 helicopter gunships and 100,000 AK-103s assault rifles.

• 189 AMX-30, AMX-13 and Scorpion 90 tanks.

• Artillery firepower with 155mm and 105mm howitzers.

• Addition of modern Russian submarines in 2009.

Weaknesses:

• No combat experience.

• Logistical problems.

• Mission to support "Bolivarian revolution" distracts from training, demoralizes ranks.

• Chavez favors loyalty over professionalism.

Source: Jane's Sentinel Security Assessment.[/list]

(Miami Herald staff writer Carol Rosenberg contributed to this report from Miami. Gunson is a Miami Herald special correspondent who reported from Caracas, Venezuela.)

McClatchy Newspapers 2008

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/30387.html

 

[QueEx]

<font size="5"><center>
Change of Heart

Reverse Course

About Face

???

</font size></center>


<IFRAME SRC="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7443080.stm" WIDTH=780 HEIGHT=1500>
<A HREF="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7443080.stm">link</A>

</IFRAME>

 

[QueEx]

<font size="5"><center>
First Honduras, now Colombia:
What'll provoke Chavez next?</font size><font size="4">

Chavez withdrew his ambassador from Colombia Tuesday threatening
to break diplomatic relations over protests by Colombian President
Alvaro Uribe that three grenade launchers found in the hands
of Colombia's biggest guerrilla group had been sold by
the Swedish government to Venezuela in 1988</font size></center>

President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, ParsPix/Abaca Press/
MCT


McClatchy Newspapers
By Tyler Bridges
July 29, 2009


CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chavez has put relations with neighboring Colombia in the deep freeze again, sparking concerns about the mercurial leader's next moves.

Chavez withdrew his ambassador from Colombia Tuesday and threatened to break diplomatic relations to protest complaints by Colombian President Alvaro Uribe that three grenade launchers found in the hands of Colombia's biggest guerrilla group had been sold by the Swedish government to Venezuela in 1988.

Chavez denied Uribe's charge, which seems to provide more evidence of ties between Chavez and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, who've been waging a 45-year battle to overthrow Colombia's democratically elected government.

Tommy Stromberg, the political counselor at the Swedish Embassy in Bogota, Colombia, said Wednesday that his government has been pressing Venezuela for weeks to explain how the three shoulder-fired AT4 grenade launchers and ammunition ended up with the FARC.

"We're waiting for the content of the actual response," Stromberg said by telephone.

Uribe went public with his charge after getting no response from Venezuela, a spokesman said Wednesday in Colombia. He spoke days after his government angered Chavez by announcing that it would allow the U.S. military to expand its anti-drug presence in Colombia.

It's yet another source of frustration for the Venezuelan leader, who's sought in vain to return Manuel Zelaya, the ousted president of Honduras and a close ally, to power.

Honduras had been part of Chavez's anti-U.S. alliance, which also includes Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Ecuador.

Colombia, in contrast, has become one of the staunchest U.S. allies in Latin America.

While Chavez's bark has proven worse than his bite in past diplomatic crises, a deteriorating economy at home and his inability to orchestrate Zelaya's return make his next moves unpredictable as he tries to regain the offensive.

"Among those who consider (Chavez) an enemy, I'm sure they fear what he might do next as he ratchets up tension in the region," said Robert Pastor, a longtime Latin American expert who teaches at American University. "But history shows that he can be hostile in his language, but when there is pushback he usually retreats."

Chavez can thunder against Uribe, a longtime antagonist, but he faces more difficulty in explaining away the concerns of the Swedish government.

In a sign of the brittle atmosphere, Miguel Insulza, secretary general of the Organization of American States, the regional body that includes nearly all the nations of the hemisphere, called on Venezuela and Colombia Wednesday to avoid escalating the diplomatic tiff.

Fernando Morgado, the president of Consecomercio, a Caracas-based business association, expressed concern over Chavez's threat to act against Colombian imports and Colombian companies that operate in Venezuela.

Venezuela is a major importer of Colombian milk, meat and car parts, which can become scarce because of Chavez's price controls.

Nonetheless, Chavez threatened to cut off the imports.

"We can get them from any other country," Chavez said.

Venezuela's principal exports to Colombia — oil, sugar and rice — cross the border as contraband because the Chavez price controls make them much cheaper in Venezuela.

Colombian officials have released documents that it says show that Chavez's government sympathizes with the FARC and gives senior guerrilla leaders refuge in isolated areas in western Venezuela.

Electronic documents that Colombian forces found last year on laptops belonging to Raul Reyes, a slain FARC commander, seemed to confirm the Chavez government's assistance, including evidence suggesting that FARC leaders sought to obtain bazookas from senior Venezuelan military officials.

The attack that killed Reyes just inside Ecuadorean territory prompted Chavez in March 2008 to break off diplomatic relations with Colombia and send troops to the border. Uribe and Chavez later smoothed over relations and promoted efforts to increase bilateral trade.


http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/72696.html