EL NULA, VENEZUELA — Father Acacio Belandria says openly what others in this run-down town in southwestern Venezuela are afraid to: Colombian rebels are all over the place.
The 78-year-old Jesuit priest says his parishioners are increasingly complaining of extortion, kidnapping threats and killings by the leftist guerrillas, and that Venezuelan armed forces and President Hugo Chavez are either unable or unwilling to stop them.
The rebels' "presence is active and interventionist," the priest said as he sat in the spartan rectory of San Camilo Roman Catholic Church, about 20 miles from the Colombian border. "The question I ask myself, and what people in the countryside are asking, is, why can't or won't the government defend its sovereignty?
"The rebels used to come here just to rest and recuperate," he said. "Now they have made this their territory."
The presence of Colombian "irregulars" on the Venezuelan side of the border has been a fact of life for more than a century, as civil conflicts in Colombia have pushed those groups to seek refuge in the mountains and jungles that separate the two countries.
Their presence has grown in recent years, government, business and military sources agree. They point to the aggressive military action taken by conservative Colombian President Alvaro Uribe to deny rebel groups sanctuary in the border zone.
But Colombian and U.S. government officials also are convinced that the leftist Chavez tolerates the rebels in Venezuelan territory for political purposes. Corrupt Venezuelan authorities also are suspected of being involved in drug trafficking activities with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the largest Colombian rebel group.
This month, a Colombian engineer named Jorge Andres Sierra, who was released after 20 months in captivity by the smaller National Liberation Army, or ELN, told a radio reporter in Bogota that his captors held him in Venezuela for part of that time. Guerrillas described Venezuela to him as a "friendly territory" with which they had a "nonaggression pact," Sierra said.
Relations between the neighboring countries have soured in recent months, with Chavez accusing Uribe of being a U.S. puppet and Uribe responding that Chavez is trying to legitimize terrorism by cozying up with FARC rebels.
Residents in other communities along the frontier are making similar complaints about rebel activities.
