Venezuela sending a committee of specialists to Bogotá to try and gather more information

Caracas Daily Journal (Vincent Bevins): Though it is almost certain that the two men who turned up in a Táchira hospital are not high-ranking guerrilla officers, and especially not newly appointed FARC second-in-command "Joaquín Gómez", it is still possible they are rebels or fugitives of some kind. Therefore Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro announced that he would send even more extensive information on the men, since their fingerprints and ID cards turned up nothing.

Colombian Foreign Minister Fernando Araújo said that Maduro "offered that he would send some more information so that the complete identification could be possible."

Colombia had already announced that the fingerprints and ID cards did not correspond to any known fugitives or guerrilla rebels, but perhaps what was sent "wasn't sufficiently clear."
But it seems impossible that one of the men is Gómez. Piedad Córdoba stepped forward to deny exactly that. "I know Gómez, I've had the opportunity to spend time with him, and that is not Joaquín Gómez, I don't hold back in these types of circumstances."

The Colombian and Venezuelan governments have shown a striking level of coordination, and on an especially controversial issue, just days after the embassies were re-established.
But perhaps, if they hadn't, the Bush administration might have had more ammunition for its scary and on-going campaign to possibly link the Chávez government to terrorism.
Bush earlier this week was harshly critical of the Chávez administration, holding up Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's government as a model of democracy in the region.
Condoleezza Rice continued the onslaught Wednesday, saying that the claims of links to terrorism were being seriously investigated.

"We will watch the situation and act accordingly," Rice said. "Borders are important. But borders cannot be a means by which terrorists hide and engage in activities that kill innocent civilians," she said in Brazil, where she was met with protests. Her comments come a day after President Bush said that Venezuela's response to the recent crisis in Colombia and Ecuador was "the latest step in a disturbing pattern of provocative behavior by the regime in Caracas."

• It must of course be assumed that putting troops next to a border is more provocative than sending them across and killing people, many of whom likely weren't rebels.

The Venezuelan National Assembly also had similar responses. President Cilia Flores said that the Bush government was "destabilized," because the events in the Dominican republic hijacked a war it wanted. She said that Bush was "totally confused because it wasn't what he had wanted, apart from the fact that he knows he has his days numbered in office, he is going out the back door with the largest possible rejection that an American president can receive."