Colombian guerrillas 'blessed' by Chavez

A local Venezuelan governor has accused President Hugo Chavez's administration of supporting Colombian leftist guerrillas' campaign against the Bogota government.

An established Chavez critic, Tachira State Governor Cesar Perez, alleged that the Venezuelan government refrained to tackle left-wing Colombian rebels and limited its campaign to fighting rightist militia groups, which, he purported, run their operations from cross border headquarters in the western state of Tachira.

"The guerrillas are there with the government's blessing and the military has orders to leave them alone," AP quoted Perez as saying on Wednesday.

"The government only fights the paramilitaries, and I think it's good they fight them, but the government has to do the same with the guerrillas, and it isn't doing that," he added.

The Venezuelan authority made a complaint about the local law enforcements' 'modest' fire power and charged the government with stripping the border security forces in his native province of their heavy weaponries supposedly needed to combat Colombian paramilitaries.

"Almost half of the police officers don't even have revolvers," the governor said in reference to Tachira State policemen.

The Venezuelan government denied all the charges and countered Perez's claims via similar accusations, saying that the government critic allows Colombian fighters onto Venezuelan soil in order to undermine the Caracas rule.

Venezuela has over 2000 kilometers of land borders with the western neighbor where the ultra left anti-government Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have been fighting the government in Bogota for over 45 years.

Relations between the two South American states have also been marred in the wake of a US-Colombia military pact inked in July, which would allow the United States to station troops in seven Colombian bases.

The move drew Venezuela's fire, with Chavez's socialist administration threatening on Sunday to declare an 'all-out' conflict against Colombia in case of 'continued' US provocation in the area.