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Venezuela a growing source of narcoticsVenezuela - Illegal drug cultivation is said to be increasing amid these dark green mountains since Venezuela's abandonment more than a year ago of its eradication program. The Perija range, which straddles the Colombian border near the Caribbean coast, has long been a source of concern for drug-control officials because its steep, remote slopes offer prime conditions for cultivating and hiding illicit crops.

For more than a decade, the Venezuelan military with United States cooperation carried out annual eradication campaigns involving hundreds of soldiers who chopped down and yanked out clandestine fields of marijuana, opium poppies and coca, the raw material for cocaine. But last year, as Venezuela experienced social and political upheaval including an aborted military-led coup in April, the country carried out no eradication.

"[The mountains] are full" of drug crops, said a national guardsman in the town of Machiques who participated in past eradications but requested anonymity. "The places we destroyed have regrown." In fact, drug acreage in Venezuela is tiny compared with the numbers in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, long centers of illegal drug exports. In 2001, Venezuela eradicated 117 acres of coca and 96 acres of poppy crops, while the other three eliminated tens of thousands of acres. Still, nobody is certain how much illegal drug cultivation exists in Venezuela, since it has no monitoring program.***

Venezuela, U.S. are at odds over war, but oil flows***CARACAS, Venezuela, April 2 (Reuters) - The U.S. ambassador to Venezuela on Wednesday fended off President Hugo Chavez's sharp criticism of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, but said U.S. oil imports from its key South American supplier were flowing normally. The leftist Chavez, who has irked Washington in the past by befriending Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, has deplored Iraqi civilian casualties and said the U.S.-British attack on Iraq applied the "law of the jungle" to world affairs.***