Colombia withdrew its consul-general from the Venezuelan city of Maracaibo after President Hugo Chavez said the diplomat would be expelled, said Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s foreign minister.
An intercepted telephone call played on state television showed the diplomat “talking in a strange way,” Chavez said in a speech today. The call indicated a possible plan to use anti- Chavez governors in Colombian border states to sow disunity in Venezuela, Chavez said.
“I recommend that they think carefully, because if they try, they’ll regret it all their life,” Chavez said.
Venezuela expelled its U.S. ambassador Sept. 11. That move followed Bolivian President Evo Morales’s expulsion of the U.S. ambassador to that country. Morales said the U.S. Embassy supported secessionist leaders in Bolivia.
Venezolana de Television, the state news channel, played the tape and said it was of Carlos Galvis Fajardo, Colombia’s consul-general in the second-largest city in Venezuela, talking with Jose Obdulio, an aide to Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.
Comments by the person identified by the TV station as the consul included that the new governors of Zulia and Tachira states are “very good friends and I think that for our work there, it has to be marvelous.” He later referred to Tachira’s new governor, Pablo Perez, as “a very, very special friend here of ours.”
The television station didn’t say how it got the tape.
The conflict follows a diplomatic rift between Colombia and Venezuela in March, in which Chavez ordered tanks to the border after Colombia bombed a guerrilla encampment in neighboring Ecuador. The countries have a heavy cross-border trade, including natural gas provided by Colombian state oil company Ecopetrol SA and Chevron Corp. that is piped to Venezuela.
Chavez also said he had his military on alert to take over police departments in Venezuela if they showed signs of opposing the central government.
Calls to Colombia’s embassy in Caracas and to the consulate in Maracaibo outside business hours weren’t answered.(Bloomberg)
