'Colombia will not be provoked by Venezuela'

Colombia will not be provoked into armed conflict with Venezuela despite the neighbouring country's aggressive rhetoric and its dynamiting of two cross-border pedestrian bridges, Colombia's Defence Minister said yesterday.

"We will not be provoked. The insults bounce off us," Gabriel Silva told local radio a day after Venezuelan troops dynamited the two suspended wooden plank pathways connecting the countries.

Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez this month ordered his army to prepare for war after Colombia signed a military cooperation pact with Washington allowing US troops increased access to its territory to run anti-narcotics surveillance flights.

Mr Chavez says the agreement could set the stage for a US invasion of oil-rich Venezuela, a claim that Washington and Bogota dismiss. He calls Colombian President Alvaro Uribe "a traitor" to the region for signing the deal.

Venezuela says the narrow bridges were illegally built and used by smugglers. But Colombia's Foreign Ministry issued a statement calling the destruction of the bridges "an aggression against the civilian population and the frontier communities".

Tensions run high on the 2,200-kilometre border, an area rife with Marxist Colombian rebels and other groups involved in smuggling cocaine, guns and other contraband.

Mr Chavez has halted the import of some Colombian goods, clamping down on the $7 billion trade relationship between the countries. He refuses to meet with Mr Uribe, calling him a "Mafioso" linked to right-wing paramilitary criminals.

Mr Silva was to meet with military commanders near the Venezuelan border, but he said no troop build-up was planned.