BY CASTO OCANDO

The Venezuelan government, with help from Cuban military advisors and leftist Colombian guerrillas, is operating a secret paramilitary training camp in a closed-off tourist campground near here, former participants and government critics say.

The camp offers six-week courses for a rolling contingent of 400 to 1,000 participants, including a first-phase political indoctrination with texts printed in Cuba and a second phase of guerrilla training for the most loyal students that includes the use of light and heavy weaponry and use of explosives, they added.

One complaint filed in April with a prosecutor's office in the surrounding state of Tachira requested an investigation of the secret operations conducted by the Cubans, including ideological instructions based on the philosophy of Ché Guevara and Fidel Castro as well as speeches by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

If the allegations are confirmed, it would heighten tensions between Chávez's leftist government, the conservative government of President Alvaro Uribe in neighboring Colombia and the Bush administration in Washington.

Although the Chávez government has not responded to the allegations, local officials in the area have acknowledged the existence of the camp and the presence of Cubans, while denying that the activities at the Tapo-Caparo National Park involve paramilitary activities.

CUBAN PRESENCE

Gerardo Luna, the pro-Chávez mayor of the Panamericano municipality adjacent to the reserve acknowledged the presence of Cuban trainers but said the camp is a training center for people involved in social welfare missions for the national government.

''Not at any moment is there paramilitary training and much less terrorist training,'' Luna told El Nuevo Herald.

The campground, roughly 125 acres in size and a two-hour drive from San Cristobal, capital of Tachira, is closed off by a military checkpoint. A park spokesperson told El Nuevo Herald that the campground was ``closed for remodeling until the end of the year.''

According to Desarrollo Urbanite Caparo, a private tourism company that organizes trips to the area, its services have been suspended for the time being because ''the government has taken the installations'' until January.

Witnesses interviewed by El Nuevo Herald say the camp is cloaked in secrecy and run under strict military discipline to train Venezuelan civilians who support Chávez in the type of guerrilla war that the president has repeatedly vowed to launch in case he's ousted from power, either by a military coup or the U.S. invasion he has repeatedly alleged has been planned.

''When I arrived, I expected to attend a course on training for social organizations, and I met with a military course,'' said 28 year-old Berta, a resident of Maracaibo who agreed to talk about her experience on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

Berta said she was kicked out in February after she began to complain against the military-styled regimen and to question the lessons.

''I don't like military education and the entire course, the way subjects were approached, the Cuban instructors and the type of people that enroll in the course, made me reject it,'' she said.

Berta said she was expelled in February, but managed to take with her a copy of the textbook, published in Cuba and now in the hands of the Tachira prosecutors.

The lake around the campground ''has gone from being a center traditionally open for nautical sports and excursions, to a center for political-ideological indoctrination and paramilitary training since the beginning of this year,'' said former national Congressman Cesar Pérez Vivas, who filed the complaint with Venezuelan prosecutors.

The camp offers ''training of a military type for the participants, and they select those that have a greater vocation for a workshop on asymmetric [guerrilla] war, which is nothing but paramilitary training that teaches civilians to shoot and techniques for the making explosives out of gas cylinders and other artifacts,'' said Pérez, now the opposition candidate for governor of Tachira.

FARC INVOLVEMENT

Pérez added that some of the trainers come from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the largest leftist guerrilla force in the neighboring country. ''We have information that in the workshops on asymmetric war and explosives, there have been people linked to the FARC,'' he said.

''There is a close ideological relationship between the Venezuelan government and the Colombian guerrilla that allows this type of cooperation in training,'' said Carlos Casanova, a former member of the state legislature.

Also active in the camp, Pérez added, is the Francisco Miranda Front, a paramilitary Venezuelan organization whose website says it was created to promote Chávez's ''Bolivarian revolution,'' and which has been allegedly involved in several violent attacks on the president's critics.

One person who has free access to campground told El Nuevo Herald that groups of about 450 Venezuelans are constantly arriving, most of them from the states Zulia and Merida primarily. The most recent group arrived in mid-August and was made up of qbout 1,000 people, the source added, asking for anonymity out of fear of government reprisals.

Some supporting evidence for the alleged cooperation between FARC trainers and the Venezuelan government has come from e-mails found in the computers of the FARC leader known as Raúl Reyes, killed by the Colombian army earlier this year. The e-mails were made public by Colombian authorities.

In an April 2005 e-mail, another FARC leader known as Iván Márquez sent Raúl Reyes a request for guerrillas to train about 100 Venezuelan ''squad leaders'' -- presumed to be members of the armed forces reserve corps created by Chávez.

A 2007 e-mail from Marquez to Reyes reported that the Venezuelan minister of interior and justice at the time, Ramón Rodríguez Chacín, wanted the FARC to ``transmit our experience in the guerrilla war.''

Last month, the U.S. government accused Rodríguez Chacín and two senior Venezuelan intelligence officials of helping Colombian FARC guerrillas with weapons and drug trafficking. Rodríguez Chacín had resigned as minister just days earlier.

Also named in the U.S. Treasury Department accusation were Gen. Hugo Carvajal, head of military intelligence, and Gen. Henry Rangel Silva, head of the secret police known as Disip. The U.S. action freezes any assets the three men may have under U.S. jurisdiction.