After two days of talks in Caracas, the China National Offshore Oil Corporation signed a deal to help develop the Boyaca 3 bloc in the Orinoco belt—part of Venezuela's effort to boost oil sales to China to 1 million barrels per day from the current 400,000 bpd. Under President Hugo Chávez, Venezuela has tried to reduce oil exports to the US and sought new markets. The US remains the main destination for Venezuela oil, with sales averaging around 1 million bpd.

The US-based Colombia Support Network (CSN) is calling for letters to Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot (wsj.ltrs@wsj.com) to protest a Dec. 14 opinion piece about the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó in the northwestern Colombian department of Antioquia. In the article the paper's Latin America correspondent Mary Anastasia O'Grady repeated charges from a former rebel commander, Daniel Sierra Martinez AKA "Samir", that despite the community's claim of rejecting the presence of all weapons and armed groups, it is really a "safe haven" for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). "Samir" also claimed that when he was a rebel leader, "the supposed peaceniks who ran the local NGO"—the faith-based human rights group Justice and Peace—"were his allies and an important FARC tool in the effort to discredit the military," O'Grady wrote.

Dole Food Company and Chiquita Brands International paid a Colombian terrorist organization to perform protection services that included murdering trade unionists, demobilized paramilitary José Gregorio Mongones said in an affidavit released Dec. 6. The testimony is the centerpiece of two civil lawsuits against Chiquita and Dole filed by family members of victims of paramilitary violence in Colombia. Both lawsuits accuse the companies of funding the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), the country's largest paramilitary organization, formally demobilized in 2006.

In a statement released on the Internet, Colombia's two rebel guerilla armies, the FARC and ELN, announced they intend to unite. "Our only enemy is North American Imperialism and its oligarchic lackeys," the statement said. The head of the Colombian armed forces, Gen Freddy Padilla, dismissed the news. "This alliance is impossible," he said. "They dispute territory to control drug-trafficking and have killed one another in the south [of the departments of] Bolívar and Arauca." (BBC News, Dec. 17)

The US-based Colombia Support Network (CSN) reported on Dec. 10 that for the last several weeks Colombian human rights attorney Jorge Eliécer Molano-Rodríguez had "received worrisome visits to his apartment building by individuals who refused to give their names to the building watchman, and his companion has been stalked by strange men.... Molano's legal work has involved him in some of Colombia's most controversial cases, representing, among others, families of victims of the Palace of Justice murders; of the Feb. 21, 2005 massacre of members of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó; and of the Army's 'false positives' kidnapping and murder of civilian youths in San José de Guaviare, and in Bolivar and Cesar departments."

According to former employees of the Stella D'oro Biscuit Co. in New York City, CITGO, the US subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela, SA (PDVSA) oil monopoly, attempted to buy the company's Bronx plant in early October to save the jobs of 136 unionized workers but the Connecticut-based private equity firm that owned the company ignored the offer. The facility was closed on Oct. 8.

A US government investigation has found evidence of a massive drug smuggling operation out of Venezuela, linking a powerful trafficker who is accused of supplying arms to Colombian guerrillas with a fugitive Venezuelan businessman, according to a report in Miami's El Nuevo Herald. At the center of the investigation is Walid Makled, whose family controlled Venezuela's leading airline and operated one of the largest cargo facilities at Puerto Cabello, the country's second largest port.

Washington's embassy in Ecuador Dec. 11 denied any US involvement in Colombia's 2008 raid on a FARC camp at Angostura in Ecuadoran territory. A new report by Ecuador's government says US military personnel stationed at the Pentagon's forward operating location (FOL) at Manta air base helped with intelligence to plan the attack. The embassy statement said "these accusations were made before... [T]he embassy strongly rejects them. Manta's FOL was not involved by any means, neither with the Colombian raid in Angostura nor giving intelligence information." (Xinhua, Dec. 11; NYT, Dec. 10)