CARACAS – Venezuelan authorities reported Saturday the capture of an alleged Colombian female paramilitary chief and said her presence in the country is further “evidence” of the “continued aggressions” of Colombia against the government of Hugo Chavez.

Colombian citizen Magaly Janeth Moreno Vega, alias “Perla,” was captured Thursday by the Cicpc scientific and investigative police force in the city of Maracaibo near the Colombian border, Interior Minister Tarek El Aissami said.

In a statement on state television, the minister said that Moreno Vega is wanted by Interpol of Colombia for the crime of homicide, and is linked to a Colombian investigation on the suspected penetration of paramilitaries in the government of Alvaro Uribe.

“This detention forms part of the evidence of the escalating violence promoted by the Colombian government against our people and our government,” El Aissami said.

He said that Venezuelan authorities are interrogating the suspected Colombian paramilitary chief and are “processing some highly important information” in their possession.

“And we are determining the possible committing of crimes” punishable under Venezuelan law, the minister said, without specifying when the alleged paramilitary will be deported to Colombia.

He quoted information from the Colombian press saying that Moreno Vega was the “assistant and confidante of ex-Colombian Attorney General Luis Camilo Osorio, the current Colombian ambassador to Mexico.”

“That is to say, a paramilitary chief was the confidante of the attorney general...which shows the institutional and moral decay of the Alvaro Uribe government, and that (Colombian) institutions survive with the support of drug mafias and paramilitaries,” El Aissami said.

Meanwhile the Colombian government on Saturday thanked Venezuelan authorities for the detention of “Perla,” an ex-official of the Cucuta prosecutor’s office, who passed information to paramilitary groups, was subsequently tried and sentenced but managed to escape in 2005.

Colombian Defense Minister Gabriel Silva also said that in Caracas, Moreno is being described as a “person who (supposedly) has relations with paramilitary groups and is considered a person who proves the presence of paramilitaries in Venezuela.”

All that, Silva said, “is false,” adding that Magaly Janeth Moreno Vega “is a criminal” suspected of “conspiracy to commit crime and possible homicides,” who was “tried in Colombia in 2005 and escaped” from the country.

“Interpol has issued an arrest warrant for Moreno,” the minister said.

Silva repeated that “we’re very pleased to see how, for the first time in many years, Venezuela is going ahead and capturing Colombian criminals inside its borders.”

While Venezuela, like Uribe’s critics in Colombia, accuses Uribe of ties to paramilitary forces, Bogota says Venezuela has been harboring and even providing weapons to leftist guerrillas that have fought a decades-old struggle against a succession of Colombian governments.

A peace process of the AUC paramilitary association with the government of President Alvaro Uribe led to the demobilization of some 31,000 combatants between 2003-2006. In recent years, however, new paramilitary groups have been reported that are said to be made up of those who had demobilized.

Venezuela and Colombia, which share a 2,219-kilometer (1,379-mile) border, are going through a new period of tension in their bilateral relations as a result of the military pact between Bogota and Washington allowing U.S. soldiers the use of seven Colombian bases.

That military accord is seen by Chavez as a threat to this leftist political program and as a platform from which to prepare an imperialist “aggression” against Venezuela.

Separately, Chavez said Friday that the destruction of two “illegal” footbridges on the Colombian border are part of the “routine” military actions to safeguard an area devastated by “drug traffickers and paramilitaries” from the neighboring country.

He also slammed a supposed “media operation” rolled out “from Colombia” with the presumed support of the big international media that present his government “as the aggressor,” when, he said, it’s just the opposite.

“Right now in Europe the Europeans must think that Chavez ordered a bridge blown up like the Brooklyn Bridge or the Golden Gate” in the U.S. cities of New York and San Francisco, Chavez told delegates of leftist parties meeting in Caracas.

The structures demolished “weren’t bridges, they were some illegal footbridges, handmade,” the likes of which Venezuela has been “taking down, neutralizing, destroying for years,” the Venezuelan president said.