All Talk, Few Tanks in South America

The guerrilla camp where it all started was a silent ruin yesterday. Twisted remnants of shells and pink lipstick lay mashed in damp earth on the rim of a crater. Potatoes rotted in the heat amid sacks of corn and splintered wood.

The complex, believed to have capacity for some 50 male and female rebels, included a kitchen by a stream, an obstacle course, a flat screen TV and a notebook containing grammar lessons, slogans and pinings for a lost love.

Last Saturday bombs rained on the camp, killing at least 24 members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), including Raul Reyes, the most senior commander killed in 40 years of the group's Marxist insurgency.

It was a significant victory for Colombia's military which made some generals weep. Trouble is, the camp was in Angostura, a mile inside Ecuador. Colombia had flagrantly violated a neighbor's sovereignty.

A week later South America could appear on the brink of war. Thousands of Ecuadorean and Venezuelan troops and tanks have been ordered to their frontiers with Colombia. Both governments, leftwing allies, have severed diplomatic ties with what they brand a US-backed aggressor. Bogotá, sandwiched between the two, has refused to rule out future military incursions into Ecuador or Venezuela unless assured they were not harboring rebels.

"The US empire has taken over Colombia," said Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez, before heading for a Latin American leaders summit in the Dominican Republic which could ignite fresh fireworks. Nicaragua's president, Daniel Ortega, widened the crisis by announcing that his central American country was also cutting ties with Colombia.

Television pictures matched the rhetoric with scenes of Venezuelan mothers weeping as soldiers left for the border in army trucks. Venezuelan government supporters daubed graffiti over a Colombian consulate and pledged to form militias if hostilities broke out.

Venezuelan checkpoints choked off border trade, worth $6bn (£2.9bn) annually, and Chávez threatened to seize Colombian companies in Venezuela. Meanwhile 10 armored battalions with 9,000 men had put on the "sacred campaign boots" and were in the "theatre of operations", said General Gustavo Rangel Briceño, the defence minister.

On Venezuela's frontier yesterday, a landscape of valleys and gritty towns, the issue was not trust but visibility. San Antonio, a main border crossing, had yet to see a single soldier or tank.

The Simón Bolívar bridge over the trickle that is the River Táchira was watched by the usual handful of national guardsmen in olive green uniforms. "Just us," shrugged one. A few dozen soldiers in trucks were spotted heading into northern Táchira but local reporters who staked out vantage points across Táchira, Zulia and other border states waited in vain for other signs of reinforcements. It was easy for a 1,400-mile frontier to swallow up 9,000 men but there was widespread doubt that the stated deployments were real. A show of strength traditionally requires a show.

"We are reinforcing the frontier. We are on alert," said Vicente Cañas, the Chávez-aligned mayor of San Antonio. Where were the reinforcements? "Out there, you know, in the fields."

When Venezuelan media speculated about deployment locations the military accused them of treason, hardening suspicion that apart from the occasional truck the reinforcements were bluster.

The absence of visible deployments helped explain why, in dozens of interviews on the frontier, not one person thought conflict was likely. "No, no chance," said Luz Yañez, the Colombian consul. Diplomats and analysts agreed.

Despite his apparent military bluff there is no doubt Chávez is driving events. When Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, first learned of Colombia's incursion his rebuke was mild, possibly from embarrassment about a Farc camp operating from his territory.

That changed the next day when Chávez, speaking on his TV show Alo Presidente, ordered a troop mobilization and assailed Bogotá as a Washington lackey. Correa followed his ally's lead. When the Organization of American States, a regional body, implicitly condemned the raid Ecuador initially welcomed the resolution, but after speaking to Venezuela's leader Correa rejected the resolution. Nicaragua's wading in was also attributed to Chávez's influence.

The crisis has exposed a fault line in Latin America dividing Colombia, the Bush administration's key ally, Venezeula and its leftwing allies, and the rest of the region which has criticized Colombia but sought to defuse tension.

Though isolated at last night's summit, and widely accused of derailing hostage negotiations, President Álvaro Uribe's decision to strike the Farc has been popular with Colombians. Ecuadoreans have rallied behind their own president's increasingly hard line response to the incursion.

Despite his display of diplomatic clout it is Chávez who may emerge the loser. His theatrical response has gone down badly with Ecuadoreans as well as Colombians, according to opinion polls, and most Venezuelans seem bemused and dismayed.

Why, it has been asked, pick a fight over an incident which happened on the far side of the Andes? And why hold a silent tribute for the dead Farc commander but not the plane crash which killed 46 people in Venezuela the previous week? More pressingly, why restrict Colombian food imports when Venezuela is chronically short of dairy products?

A cartoon in the opposition Tal Cual newspaper captured the mood: a mother hugs a young soldier and tells him to be careful on the border. "I'll write every day," he says. She brightens. "Could you also send me milk and eggs?"

Last night Chávez signaled the crisis may have passed its peak. "People should cool off a bit, chill out their