Colombia shows new rebel documents that link Venezuela

The electronic documents -more than a dozen -were shown to The Associated Press on Friday.

They detail alleged meetings between senior Venezuelan officials -including that country's chief of military intelligence and interior minister -and top leaders of the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Some discuss the procurement of weapons, others rebel training for Venezuelan home defense forces.

Venezuelan officials maintain that Bogota is manipulating the truth.

"The whole thing is like a movie. Fiction is fiction, reality is reality," Bernardo Alvarez, Venezuela's ambassador to Washington, said Friday.

The documents shown to the AP are among 11,000 that Colombian officials say they found in laptops, external drives and memory sticks recovered in a March 1 cross-border raid in Ecuador that killed rebel leader Raul Reyes and 24 other people.

Some 2,000 of the documents had been erased but were recovered through computer forensics, a senior Colombian official told the AP.

Colombia released several dozen documents immediately after the raid, and since then has periodically shown more to reporters. A Washington intelligence official vouched for the documents' authenticity, saying they were delivered to U.S. intelligence agencies in March.

The U.S. and Colombian officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the matter's sensitivity.

The documents seen by the AP are all allegedly internal communications between FARC commanders, chiefly messages from Ivan Marquez, the rebels' main representative in Venezuela. Several discuss what Colombian officials interpret as an open-ended Venezuelan loan of at least US$200 million to obtain arms.