CUCUTA, Colombia — Venezuela and Ecuador reinforced their borders with Colombia on Tuesday as the three nations traded increasingly bitter accusations over Colombia’s cross-border strike on a leftist guerrilla base in Ecuador.
Rejecting a Colombian apology as insufficient, Ecuador sought international condemnation of the attack during an emergency meeting of the Organization of American States, convened in Washington to help defuse one of South America’s most volatile crises in years. Venezuela’s justice minister declared that war “has already begun.”
Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa called his Colombian counterpart, Alvaro Uribe, a “bold-faced liar.”
Uribe demanded the International Criminal Court try Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez for genocide. President Bush accused Chavez of “provocative maneuvers.”
Colombia said documents found at the base in Ecuador showed rebels wanted to make a radioactive dirty bomb. But the documents it shared with reporters didn’t support the allegation, indicating instead that the rebels were trying to buy uranium to resell at a profit.
Uribe said Chavez should be prosecuted for allegedly financing the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC. Uribe cited the documents in a laptop seized in the jungle camp that he said showed Venezuela recently made a $300 million payment to the rebels.
Venezuela and Ecuador dismissed all the allegations as lies.
At the moment, it’s mostly a war of words, and other nations tried Tuesday to keep it that way, although many said Colombia was wrong to send troops into Ecuador. The Saturday raid killed 23 guerrillas, including rebel spokesman Raul Reyes, who was engaged in hostage talks with Venezuela, France and other countries.
Despite troop movements and general saber-rattling, Uribe said he would not allow his nation to be drawn into open war. His more than 250,000 soldiers — U.S.-equipped, -trained and -advised — would outnumber the 172,000 active troops Venezuela and Ecuador have between them.
“Colombia has never been a country to go to war with its neighbors,” Uribe said. “We are not mobilizing troops nor advancing toward war.”
Venezuela was sending about 9,000 soldiers — 10 battalions — to the border region as “a preventive measure,” retired Gen. Alberto Muller Rojas, a former top Chavez aide, told The Associated Press.
Ecuador said it sent 3,200 troops to the border Monday.
Venezuela’s agriculture minister, Elias Jaua, said Venezuela had closed the border — which sees annual trade worth $5 billion — to imports and exports.
Ecuador’s $1.8 billion annual trade with Colombia continued freely Tuesday, said Carlos Lopez, Ecuador’s undersecretary of immigration.
In Washington, Ecuadoran Foreign Minister Maria Isabel Salvador said Colombia’s apology wasn’t enough, demanding that the OAS condemn the incursion, appoint a commission to investigate it and call an urgent meeting of the region’s foreign ministers in the next week.
Despite the withering rhetoric of Uribe, Chavez and Correa, the biggest losers in Reyes’ death appeared to be the hostages the rebels want to swap for jailed guerrillas.
France’s foreign ministry said Uribe knew France was communicating directly with Reyes in an attempt to secure the release of former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, a dual French national who has become a cause celebre in Europe.
The rebels said Tuesday that Reyes died “completing a mission to arrange, through President Chavez, a meeting with (French) President (Nicolas) Sarkozy” aimed at securing Betancourt’s release. Correa claimed his government, too, was talking to the FARC about securing freedom for hostages. He alleged Reyes’ killing stymied those efforts.
Several Latin American leftist leaders have suggested the U.S. was intimately involved in executing the raid by 60 Colombian commandos that killed Reyes. On Tuesday, a spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command would neither confirm nor deny American military participation.
