Colombia says will not be provoked by Venezuela

Colombians walk next to a destroyed bridge that crosses into Colombia's Norte de Santander department (near end), in Ragonvalia November 19, 2009. Venezuelan soldiers on Thursday blew up two makeshift foot bridges that stretched across the border to Colombia in the latest incident to stoke a diplomatic dispute between the Andean neighbors.

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Colombia will not be provoked into armed conflict with Venezuela despite its neighbor's aggressive rhetoric and dynamiting of two border bridges, Colombia's defense minister said on Friday.

"We will not be provoked. The insults bounce off us," Gabriel Silva said a day after Venezuelan troops blew up two wooden plank pedestrian bridges 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 U.S. troops greater access to its territory to run anti-narcotics surveillance flights.

Chavez says the agreement could set the stage for a U.S. 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.

"I would go to war with Colombia in tears, but it is not in our hands to do it or not to do it. It's not even Colombia, it's the North American empire," Chavez said at a meeting of leftist parties on Friday.

"The Yankee empire is preparing for war in Latin America."

Chavez said the flimsy foot bridges that were destroyed had been built illegally and used by smugglers. But Colombia's Foreign Ministry issued a statement calling their destruction "an aggression against the civilian population and the frontier communities."

WADING ACROSS THE BORDER

Residents of the northern border area where the bridges had were blown up waded through the thigh-high Tachira River to get to work and school and to shop for food.

"It's scary because the rocks are slippery. I'm afraid of falling," Mery Garcia, a pregnant Venezuelan woman trying to cross the water to get to her doctor's office on Colombia's side of the border, told local TV.

Colombia said it would denounce the dynamiting of the bridges at the United Nations and the Organization of American States in Washington.

Tensions run high along the 1,375-mile (2,200-km) border, an area rife with Marxist Colombian rebels and other groups involved in smuggling cocaine, guns and other contraband.

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

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

"What we cannot accept is aggression against the civilian population or against our territory. We are already prepared for that," Silva said.

Uribe, Washington's most reliable ally in left-tilting South America, is widely seen as a hero for attracting investment and making Colombia's cities and highways safer with his U.S.-backed crackdown on drug-running FARC guerrillas.

Chavez's popularity has slipped this year amid high inflation, electricity blackouts and water rationing. Critics say he is stoking tensions with Colombia to try to divert attention from Venezuela's domestic problems.

(Editing by Anthony Boadle and Chris Wilson)