Hugo "Not-A-Dictator" Chavez has been keeping (and lavishly funding) some fairly tawdry company as of late.

First reports of the documents recovered from laptops at the FARC camp spoke of promises by Chávez to deliver up to $300 million to a group renowned for kidnapping, drug trafficking and massacres of civilians; they also showed that Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa was prepared to remove from his own army officers who objected to the FARC's Ecuadoran bases.

But in their totality, the hundreds of pages of documents so far made public by Colombia paint an even more chilling picture. The raid appears to have preempted a breathtakingly ambitious "strategic plan" agreed on by Chávez and the FARC with the initial goal of gaining international recognition for a movement designated a terrorist organization by both the United States and Europe. Chávez then intended to force Colombian President Álvaro Uribe to negotiate a political settlement with the FARC, and to promote a candidate allied with Chávez and the FARC to take power from Uribe.

Chavez and his pals trying to topple democracies using terrorist groups? Say it isn't so! It'll be interesting to see how the pro-UN crowd reacts to any possible sanctions against Chavez, given the following:

[Chavez's] reported actions are, first of all, a violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1373, passed in September 2001, which prohibits all states from providing financing or havens to terrorist organizations. More directly, the Colombian evidence would be more than enough to justify a State Department decision to cite Venezuela as a state sponsor of terrorism. Once cited, Venezuela would be subject to a number of automatic sanctions, some of which could complicate its continuing export of oil to the United States. A cutoff would temporarily inconvenience Americans -- and cripple Venezuela, which could have trouble selling its heavy oil in other markets.

For now, the Bush administration appears anxious to avoid this kind of confrontation.

If only Bush believed in "the Bush doctrine", eh?

I also found this revelation interesting, but hardly surprising. I'd like to see some names. Anyone willing to bet against the proposition that a good number of these supporters' salaries are being paid by US taxpayers?

More documents from FARC leaders laptops are showing up in the Colombian media. Apparently, these documents are both explosive in their implications, yet also consistent with what FARC has been doing for decades. FARC is known to be close to leftists in Europe, North America, and throughout South America. So finding email messages between all those people should not be a surprise. But it is, because many leftists have turned, officially, against FARC of late, because FARC has evolved into a criminal organization, paying its way via drug dealing, extortion and kidnapping. But many leftists, often privately, still support FARC, and believe the Colombian rebels were forced into a life of crime by circumstances.

Poor dears.