BOGOTA -- José Misael Valero Santana, who, according to Colombian prosecutors, led a paramilitary force of about 2,000 members in five Venezuelan border states, was arrested Wednesday.

Valero Santana, 39, was sentenced in Colombia to 40 and 25 years' imprisonment for multiple homicide. On four occasions, he skipped trial.

Valero Santana's arrest happened by chance at an immigration checkpoint on the border with Venezuela. He identified himself using a false Colombian identity card with the name José Ernesto Amaya Amado, but his true identity was discovered when his fingerprints were checked against police files.

Valero Santana's paramilitary forces in Venezuela operate in the states of Táchira, Mérida, Barinas, Lara and Trujillo, according to testimony collected by the Colombian Prosecutor's Office.

One of the warrants pending against him in Colombia corresponds to the attempted assassination in Bogotá of Congressman Wilson Borja in December 2000, when Borja was president of the National Federation of Workers, or FENALTRASE. The attempt was made with antitank rockets. The explosions left Borja gravely wounded and killed a woman who sold coffee on the street.

Colombian court files show that Valero Santana operated in Colombia in coordination with the National Army and the paramilitary United Self-defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), with which he staged, with the aid of Colombian hired hitmen, an organization of death squads that operated in the Venezuelan state of Táchira.

The first assassins taken by Valero Santana to Venezuela were trained at a camp in a farm in the Colombian municipality of Puerto Santanander, on the border with Venezuela.

The existence of the camp was confirmed to El Nuevo Herald by an army general who is currently in prison, as well as by army Maj. Mauricio Llorente Chávez, sentenced to 40 years for complicity in three massacres committed by paramilitary forces in the border region of Catatumbo.