At the root of the crisis, according to the communique, lie Bogota's efforts to justify an agreement now in the works that would allow the stationing of US military personnel at Colombian bases. "The Colombian government, fleeing its own responsibilities, wants to justify the installation on its territory of up to five military bases of the world's principal military power, alleging that three rocket-launchers supposedly belonging to the Venezuelan army reached the hands of an irregular group," the ministry said.

Colombia says Swedish rocket-launchers sold to Venezuela in the 1980s were recently found at a camp of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, designated a terrorist organization by Bogota, the United States and the European Union.  Sweden has confirmed the arms sales to Venezuela, which took place a decade before Chavez was elected, and asked the current government in Caracas to explain how the weapons ended up in the possession of the FARC.

"As is customary, the Colombian government doesn't explain how thousands of weapons in the hands of irregular groups circulate in its territory, but cynically demands that Venezuela explain the origin of three of them," the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry said. "Why not demand that the United States or Israel explain how thousands of weapons made in those countries are in the hands of guerrilla armies in Colombia?" the statement adds. "According to the already hackneyed script of the Colombian elite, the 60 years of internal war are not the responsibility of Colombia but of neighboring countries, with a particular preference for those where forces of the left now govern." Colombia's current administration, the communique said, "has become a latent danger to the entire region."

Washington, which provides Bogota with $500 million a year in military aid and has hundreds of military advisers and contractors on the ground in the Andean nation, says it needs bases in Colombia to replace the US Forward Operating Location at Ecuador's Manta airbase. Ecuador's leftist President, Rafael Correa, declined to renew the treaty that allowed the US military to conduct counternarcotics operations from Manta for the past 10 years.

The latest crisis in Venezuela-Colombia relations comes six months after the two countries ended a spat sparked by Bogota's March 2008 strike on a FARC camp in Ecuador, an attack that killed the guerrilla group's No.2 and 25 other people, inclu