WASHINGTON—If anyone thought Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe, who will be succeeded Aug. 7 by Juan Manuel Santos, was going quietly into that good night, they were wrong. The Western Hemisphere has been shaken by his government’s expose of the sanctuary that Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez has provided to two Colombian terrorist groups, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN).

Uribe’s ambassador to the Organization of American States presented photos, videos, satellite maps and testimonies as evidence that 1,500 guerrillas enjoy protection in 14 camps along the Venezuelan border with Colombia. Ivan Marquez, a member of the FARC’s high command, is based there.

Venezuela’s complicity with FARC is no scoop. In December 2004, Colombia used bounty hunters to capture FARC’s international spokesman, Rodrigo Granda, in Venezuela. In March 2008, Colombia took out a FARC camp headed by Raul Reyes two kilometers inside Ecuador, a Chavez ally. A video posted by a Spanish journalist on YouTube shows the guerrillas in La Gabarra, a village in the Guasdualito area inside Venezuela’s Apure region. Not suspecting the hidden microphone, a military boss from a nearby Venezuelan base admits he is aware of them.

But this time the evidence is overwhelming. Chavez has reacted, in the words of former Colombian Vice President Humberto de la Calle, like a husband who comes home at 3 a.m. with lipstick on his face and, when confronted by his wife, walks out furiously, slamming the door. Caracas has broken ties with Colombia, which does not alter the status quo since ties were frozen a year ago. For the umpteenth time, Chavez has announced preparations for a war he does not intend to wage, that his army would swiftly lose, and that he knows Colombia is too prudent to join.

In saner times, Chavez would not survive this exposure. But positioning himself outside of international law has never cost him much. He knows he is in violation of U.N. antiterrorism resolution 1373. But he also knows that the OAS is a dysfunctional organization headed by Jose Miguel Insulza, a man intimidated by Chavez’s government; that the United States will not attack Venezuela; that Brazil is too ideologically sympathetic with Chavez and interested in a sphere of influence that counterbalances the U.S.; and that he controls his army sufficiently to pre-empt any rebellion.

Caracas is also aware that President-elect Santos has a more accommodating personality than Uribe. Before the outgoing president ordered the expose, Santos was on a mission to repair relations with Venezuela. He had announced that Maria Angela Holguin, a nonideological Venezuelan expert, will be his foreign minister, that his emphasis will be on achieving economic growth (i.e. not security), and that he welcomed Chavez at his inauguration. Chavez is calculating that once Uribe is out of the picture, he will have a less obsessed foe.

None of which bodes well for the prospects of Chavez getting rid of the FARC and the ELN. Except that Uribe, a popular departing president, will not shut up. He has placed the international community in an awkward position by revealing a degree of collaboration hard to find anywhere else between a state and the terrorist groups of a neighboring country—comparable situations usually involve terrorists harassing a neighboring country from a territory over which the national state is sovereign in name only. Even if Chavez survives this, Venezuela is under notice that everything inside its territory will be meticulously revealed. The warning may scare some allies of Caracas. Since Raul Reyes’ camp was targeted inside Ecuador, that country’s president, Rafael Correa, has apparently broken ties with FARC.

Some Colombians initially criticized Uribe for rarifying the climate of the handover of power. Actually, Uribe has done Santos a favor. No government with this much evidence of a neighbor’s complicity in crime can afford to sit on it; sooner or later, Santos would have had to confront the situation—and bear the cost Uribe has now assumed. Should it have been revealed later on that Colombia did nothing, Santos would have been pummeled for jeopardizing the success of the “democratic security” policies of recent years.

At the very least, Latin America has a right to know the truth about Venezuela, whose government, not content with instituting a dictatorship, is propping up the region’s most unsavory characters—the latest being Suriname’s President-elect Desi Bouterse, a former dictator accused of multiple murders and convicted of cocaine trafficking in the Netherlands.