Laht.com: Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez and Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe signed five agreements in the areas of finance, import and trade of vehicles in local currencies, and energy, including Colombia supplying electricity from Puerto Inara to Venezuela's San Fernando de Atabapo. Chavez said Venezuela and Colombia had "relaunched relations" and that "nothing was going to disturb them again." The two countries had reset their relationship in all spheres, he added.

Chavez' remarks came during a meeting Tuesday at the president palace, Miraflores, with his Colombian counterpart, Alvaro Uribe. The two leaders have been at loggerheads in the past, but it appeared that Chavez was out to consign all that to history. Time was when the populist Chavez made no secret of his dislike of Uribe, a conservative in both economics and politics.

In Chavez' view, Uribe was far too committed to the free market economics of the "neo-liberalism" the Venezuelan leader claims to despise. As such Uribe, the United States' strongest ally in the region, was also depicted as a stooge of Washington, and a willing one at that. For his part, Uribe was aware of Colombian suspicions that guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) were taking refuge on Venezuelan territory. Chavez even voiced support for the FARC at one stage. Things came to a head when Uribe launched a military strike at a FARC camp on Ecuadorian territory last year. Quito broke diplomatic relations, and has yet to restore them.  While he protested loudly, Chavez didn't go further than recalling Venezuela's ambassador. And he changed his tone, calling on the FARC to lay down its weapons, after Franco-Colombian hostage Ingrid Betancourt and several others were rescued in an operation involving the Colombian military.

Given these past differences, Tuesday's talks were said to have focused on economic rather than political issues. One problem is a big imbalance in trade between the two countries. Of total bilateral trade of $7.2 billion in 2008, no less than $6 billion consisted of Colombian exports to Venezuela. Among those shipments are autos, eggs and chicken -- all items in which Chavez would like to see Venezuela self-sufficient. Colombia even exports some natural gas to Venezuela, of all things. The reason for this is lack of gas delivery infrastructure in parts of western Venezuela. While Colombia doesn't need Venezuela's oil or gas, or at least not yet, Colombia meets many of Venezuela's needs, and is the second largest trading partner after the United States.

Uribe said that he and Chavez had discussed plans to set up a Venezuela "strategic fund," the purpose of which he didn't make clear. He called for "social responsibility and transparency" in investments made between the two countries. "We two governments are going to work together so that there aren't any attempts at corruption, and everything we do will be to guarantee that transparency generates confidence," the Colombian president said.  This might have been a bit near the bone for Chavez. While Colombia in relative terms gets quite good marks on the anti-corruption scale, Venezuela is well towards the opposite end.  But Uribe didn't seem to be out to score points. It's likely that what he had to say next was rather more welcome to Chavez' ears. Capital, he said, had to be "a factor of social wealth" and not a matter of "speculation and corruption." With respect to this, he continued, Chavez and his government had expressed a concern that the government of Colombia shared. Uribe conceded that with