Venezuela's Chavez To Talk With Colombian Rebels

CARACAS, Venezuela -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Sunday he has decided to open direct talks with Colombian guerrilla leaders to discuss ways of lessening the impact of its 30-year-old civil war on Venezuela.

A left-leaning nationalist who rose to fame as the leader of a failed coup in Venezuela in 1992, Chavez has irked officials in Bogota since taking office in February with repeated offers to act as a mediator in Colombia's fragile peace process.

Colombian President Andres Pastrana has given only a lukewarm response to Chavez's advances to meet with guerrilla leaders and stressed that Colombia intends to solve its problems on its own. But a recent flurry of kidnappings of Venezuelans by groups operating in Colombia has highlighted the issue for Chavez's government.

``The Colombian government is in no position to guarantee us security along our frontiers,'' Chavez said in his weekly radio program ``Hello President''. In a hardening of his recent tone, Chavez said that he had would go ahead with talks with Colombia's Marxist guerrilla groups with or without Pastrana's blessing.

``We have decided to open conversations with the Colombian guerrillas, firstly, to seek to contribute to the process of peace and, secondly to assure Venezuelans greater safety and to keep the conflict on the other side of the border, because it is not a Venezuelan fight,'' Chavez said.

The 45-year-old president has said he received an invitation for talks from the leader of Colombia's largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), soon after taking office. He said he informed Pastrana immediately after receiving the letter, but was not given a firm reply.

In the past, Chavez has said he would meet leftist guerrilla leaders in Colombia only with President Andres Pastrana's permission, but reserved the right to meet with them on Venezuelan soil at any time.

Chavez has said that Colombia could turn into ``a small Vietnam'' and insisted on the need for an international solution to end a war that has cost 35,000 lives in the last decade and is the longest-running civil conflict in the Western Hemisphere.

The former paratrooper turned president confirmed that he would use a meeting Wednesday with Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso to discuss the peace process in Colombia, as well as bilateral issues. The talks are due to take place in Santarem, in the northeastern Brazilian state of Para.

Foreign Minister Jose Vicente Rangel, also speaking on the radio show, said Venezuela had increased military activity along its western frontier with Colombia, which stretches for more than 1,240 miles (2,000 km), because Pastrana's government ``has practically abandoned the border and does not take care of it as it should.''