Ecuador on Thursday called for a presidential summit of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) to deal with the diplomatic breakdown between Colombia and Venezuela over Colombian rebels allegedly in Venezuela.
“We invite the heads of state to meet so they can directly take on and deal with the issues we’ve addressed in this meeting,” Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said after four hours of closed-door discussions with his UNASUR colleagues.
A leadership summit of the UNASUR, he added, “will be very useful to Colombia and Venezuela in paving the road” to a peaceful resolution of their diplomatic crisis.
The UNASUR foreign ministers meeting was the latest step in a diplomatic row stemming from Colombia’s claim that some 1,500 guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN) — both of which have been fighting Bogota for decades — are now operating from Venezuela.
Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro said his government had requested the meeting to respond to the “grave threats and grave attacks” on it by the government of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.
While accusing the Uribe government of “slander, manipulation, lies” against the country and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Maduro said he would propose ways “we can retake the path of peace.”
Colombian Foreign Minister Jaime Bermudez said he would appeal to his South American colleagues for help in preventing Colombian rebel forces from taking refuge in Venezuela, or elsewhere.
“Colombia comes with a clear willingness to ask for an efficient cooperation mechanism so that neither the FARC nor the ELN, nor any criminal group can be present in Venezuelan territory, with the collusion of the authorities, or in any part of the world,” Bermudez said.
However, he said he did not have high expectations for the UNASUR meeting.
Chavez broke off diplomatic relations with Colombia after denouncing its charges as a pretext for “armed aggression.”
Bermudez said his country “has lots of evidence, lots of information” on the guerrilla presence in Venezuela.
Meanwhile, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva announced he would travel to Caracas and Bogota on Friday next week for talks with Chavez and Uribe, as well as with Colombian president-elect Juan Manuel Santos, who takes office on Saturday next week.
However, Uribe complained that Lula was approaching the crisis as if it were merely a conflict of personalities. The Brazilian leader is “ignoring the threat for Colombia and the continent that the presence of FARC terrorists in [Venezuela] represents,” he said in a statement.
“The only solution that Colombia accepts is to not allow the presence of the terrorists ... on Venezuelan territory,” Uribe said.
Separately, the head of the US Southern Command urged Venezuela to investigate charges that leftist guerrilla leaders operate from its territory.
“There is no reason to assume that it is not valid,” General Douglas Fraser said in a talk on Thursday at a Washington think-tank.
Fraser, who is responsible for all US military activities in Latin America, said the US was looking at the evidence, adding that it was “an allegation that needs to be treated seriously.”
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