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The helicopter headed west, rotors scything the air, towards the border with Colombia and a setting sun.
The jungle canopy below was so thick that even at treetop level it was impossible to see what, or who, might be on the ground.
The Venezuelan Mil Mi-35 combat transport
helicopter was like a steel sauna, and when it touched down in a clearing the crew quickly opened the doors. It made no difference. The air outside was hot and sticky.
While other helicopters flew overhead, soldiers from the 12th Infantry Brigade fanned out into the trees, assault rifles at the ready, to reclaim a patch of Venezuela.
The frontier with Colombia, a red line on military maps, was just a few metres away, but the jungle made no distinction - and neither did the guerrillas and armed groups which roved this no man's land near Boca de Grita in Zulia state, on the 2250km border.
A Venezuelan patrol had discovered a secret training camp with weapons, huts and tunnels - and General Jesus Gonzalez, head of strategic operations, had come to oversee its destruction.
"We've found uniforms, night-vision equipment, stashes of drugs, the lot," he said, tramping over debris.
This South American jungle is rife with snakes, mosquitoes and disease but for four decades it has sheltered the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), guerrillas battling the Colombian state in South America's longest-running conflict. It has seemed endless, a saga of brutality and suffering seeping from one generation to the next. However, something has happened which may hasten its end.
Venezuela's President, Hugo Chavez, a self-styled socialist revolutionary revered as an icon and ideological soulmate by the rebels, announced that the game was up.
"At this point in Latin America, an armed guerrilla movement is out of place. Guerrilla wars are history. Enough of all this war. The time has come to sit down and talk peace."
It was an astonishing U-turn, made all the more dramatic for being broadcast live on TV and radio and addressed directly to the rebels, who are known to avidly follow Chavez's speeches on transistor radios.
He stopped short of demanding their surrender but urged unilateral concessions such as the freeing of hostages the Farc have held in mountain camps for years.
The effect on Farc morale was expected to be devastating. Colombia, which has accused Chavez of funding and arming the rebels - a claim he denies - welcomed the statement. So did Washington, the Bush Administration's first kind words about its Venezuelan bete noire in a long time.
Analysts said Chavez distanced himself from the guerrillas for several reasons - of which the most important was probably that Farc is losing. In recent months it has suffered one blow after another, leaving the organisation punch-drunk and possibly mortally wounded.
The guerrillas are believed to have several bases inside Venezuela, but the one destroyed near Boca de Grita was more likely used by right-wing paramilitary narco-traffickers. Nevertheless, it showed Venezuela's military stepping up efforts against drug trafficking, the Farc's main income source.
The Farc was born out of a civil war which had consumed more than 200,000 lives by 1958. When the army pursued left-wing survivors and peasants in the Andean mountains south of Bogota in the 1960s, they struck back.
At its height in the late 1990s the Farc boasted 19,000 fighters and controlled cities. The Berlin Wall had fallen, Marxism was discredited and rebels in other countries had been defeated or joined mainstreampolitics.
But the Farc fought on. Pro-government death squads murdered its political activists, and there was another compelling incentive to remain outlaws - cocaine.
From 2002 the military tide also began to turn. President Alvaro Uribe used US military aid to turn Colombia's police and army into formidable counter-insurgency forces.
The guerrillas retreated deeper into jungle redoubts bordering Venezuela and Ecuador, taking an estimated 700 hostages with them. But now those sanctuaries are no longer safe.
Since its foundation the Farc's seven-man ruling secretariat had been untouchable. In March it lost three members, the worst month in the guerrillas' history.
Nearly 300 guerrillas are deserting every month, according to a Government programme to "re-insert" members into civilian life.
Admiral David Rene Moreno, second-in-command of Colombia's armed forces, said: "The Farc are now so weak that they'll have to negotiate peace with the Government very soon. Just today, for example, another 18 handed themselves in."
Adam Isacson, a Colombia analyst for the Washington-based Centre for International Policy, warned of a messier, prolonged outcome, with the Farc fragmenting.
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