CHAVEZ TIED TO COLOMBIA REBELS

CARACAS, Venezuela - Dissident military officers say the government of
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has provided intelligence help and
unhindered operations in Venezuelan territory to guerrilla groups fighting
the government of neighboring Colombia.

Several of the officers, who recently declared themselves in disobedience
and demanded Mr. Chavez's resignation, say the government also has opposed
their efforts to combat guerrillas active on Venezuelan territory.

Also, the Colombian newsmagazine Cambio reported recently that the
Venezuelan military had sold and at times even given planeloads of arms to
the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which is classified as a
terrorist group by the U.S. government.

Retired Gen. Alberto Mueller said the Venezuelan attitude has been motivated
by long-standing border disputes with Colombia. The principle is "the enemy
of my enemy is my friend," he said.

Mr. Chavez has not publicly addressed the dissident officers' charges, some
of which have been published by Venezuelan news outlets.

However, he has accused the officers of intending to carry out a coup. In
the past, Mr. Chavez has denied all charges of support for Colombian
guerrillas.

National Assembly Deputy Edis Rios Becerra, a member of Mr. Chavez's Fifth
Republic Movement party who represents the border state of Zulia and serves
on the assembly's defense commission, says the military does all it can to
prevent guerrilla activity in Venezuela.

The armed forces "are in condition and obligation to repel any Colombian
guerrilla action," he said.

But Gen. Nestor Gonzalez, who until late last year commanded operations in
an area along the Colombian frontier, said that in May 2001 his troops
detected several guerrilla encampments in Venezuelan territory, but top
government officials resisted taking action against them.

"The most pathetic part of the situation was that when Hugo Chavez was
advised, he took no measures and asked, 'How can we cohabit with the
guerrillas?'" Gen. Gonzalez said. "That for me was unacceptable."

Ultimately, Gen. Gonzalez said, he was able to carry out an operation
against the guerrillas and the drug plantations they sponsor but still
experienced resistance from higher up.

Later, he said, he discovered that agents of the national police service,
the DISIP, were working in his region, collecting military information on
Colombia and passing it to the guerrillas.

"The intelligence organizations put themselves on the side of the
guerrillas, and being on the guerrillas' side, they opposed the Colombian
army, and we couldn't accept that," Gen. Gonzalez said.

As a result of his protests of these policies, Gen. Gonzalez said, in August
2001 he was transferred to direct the military school in Caracas.

Colombia's 38-year-old civil war pits two guerrilla armies, the FARC and the
smaller National Liberation Army, against the U.S.-backed Colombian
government and its outlawed paramilitary allies.

All the fighting groups have been accused of human rights violations in the
war, which kills thousands of people each year, most of them civilians, and
the three irregular forces are classified as terrorist groups by the U.S.
government.

The United States recently loosened restrictions to permit anti-drug aid to
be used directly against the guerrillas and paramilitaries. The United
States also plans to train Colombian troops near the Venezuelan border to
protect an oil pipeline that guerrillas have bombed more than 100 times in
recent years.

Reports of guerrilla encampments located in Venezuelan territory have
continued, and early this year a Colombian general said his troops had been
attacked by guerrillas from Venezuelan soil. Mr. Chavez called the
accusation a lie.

Another dissident officer, Gen. Pedro Pereira, former chief of staff of the
armed forces' unified command, said that early this year a military plane
suffered mechanical troubles and crashed in Venezuelan territory near the
border. The military started a search for the plane, Gen. Pereira said, but
the Ministry of Defense ordered it halted.

"I suppose that they didn't want the armed forces to go farther into there,"
said Gen. Pereira, who believes the guerrillas have camps and arms stores
hidden in the region. "It's quite obvious that [the government] is looking
for a way to favor the guerrillas in that area."

Gen. Pereira said the FARC located the plane and then indicated its location
to the Venezuelan military.

A third dissident, Marco Antonio Ferreira, a national guard officer and
former director of the agency in charge of monitoring the entry and exit of
foreigners in Venezuela, said that many Colombians, some of whom he
suspected were guerrillas, were given free transit across Venezuela.

The most dramatic and specific recent charges were reported this month in
Cambio, based on sworn declarations to Colombian prosecutors by a FARC
defector known as "the Technician."

The Technician said that in June 2001 a group of Venezuelan military
officers visited FARC guerrilla encampments to negotiate the sale of machine
guns, shells and explosives.

As a result, the Technician said, by early this year a single border- area
FARC runway was receiving as many as six small plane flights from Venezuela
per day, each loaded with 14 boxes of submachine gun shells.

The Technician said some of the arms shipments were given to FARC, Cambio
reported. The dissident Venezuelan officers said weapons have disappeared
from military warehouses, although where they have gone is not clear.

Accusations that the leftist Mr. Chavez supports Colombia's guerrillas,
which want to install a Marxist government, have dogged him for years.

Although Mr. Chavez has repeatedly called the reports unfounded, they have
aggravated relations with Colombia and the United States, Venezuela's two
largest trading partners.

Venezuela is one of the United States' top petroleum suppliers, and the U.S.
government has had an often-touchy relationship with the populist Mr.
Chavez, who has befriended several U.S. enemies, including Iraqi dictator
Saddam Hussein.

Venezuelan border-area residents say that shortly after assuming power, Mr.
Chavez declared a sort of truce with the guerrillas, who had previously
carried out several massacres of Venezuelan troops.

There also have been repeated reports of contacts between the Chavez
government and Colombian guerrillas. The FARC have, in turn, signaled
support for Mr. Chavez's Bolivarian Revolution through pro-Chavez
transmissions from clandestine guerrilla radio stations located along the
border.

Gen. Gonzalez said that in May he received a message from a FARC leader
saying the guerrillas were friendly toward Venezuela's military and would
not attack them. Gen. Gonzalez said he did not reply.