Chavez Threatens War After Columbia Kills FARC Communist Rebel

Kevin Spacey, Sean Penn, Naomi Campbell, and Danny Glover were unavailable for comment.

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - President Hugo Chavez ordered Venezuela's embassy in Colombia closed and told the military to send 10 battalions to the border after Colombian troops killed a top rebel leader.

Chavez told his defense minister: "move 10 battalions for me to the border with Colombia, immediately." He ordered the Venezuelan Embassy in Bogota closed and said all embassy personnel would be withdrawn.

The announcements by Venezuela's leftist leader pushed relations to their tensest point of his nine-year presidency, and Chavez warned that Colombia could spark a war in South America.

He called the U.S.-allied government in Bogota "a terrorist state" and labeled President Alvaro Uribe "a criminal."

Chavez condemned the slaying of senior rebel commander Raul Reyes and 16 other members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, [the military wing of the Columbian Communist Party, -ed] saying they were killed while they slept in a camp across the border in Ecuadorean territory.

He said Colombia "invaded Ecuador, flagrantly violated Ecuador's sovereignty."

"It wasn't any combat. It was a cowardly murder, all of it coldly calculated," Chavez said on his weekly TV and radio program, "Hello, President."

"We pay tribute to a true revolutionary, who was Raul Reyes," Chavez said, recalling that he had met the FARC rebel in Brazil in 1995 and calling him a "good revolutionary."

Is there any remaining doubt that Hugo Chavez is an actual Soviet Union-style authoritarian communist, and not a "social-democrat" as the media and Hollywood Left try to paint him?