May 15 (Bloomberg) -- Interpol, the international police agency, said computer files that may link Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez to Colombia's biggest guerrilla group are authentic and weren't tampered with by the Colombian government.

Files found on three laptop computers, three USB flash drives and two external hard disks seized during a Colombian cross-border raid into Ecuador on March 1 are original files that belonged to Raul Reyes, second in command of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble told reporters in Bogota.

``Our role in this was purely technical and Interpol did not evaluate content,'' Noble said.

Interpol inspected only a fraction of the 37,872 documents on the drives, Noble said, adding that 64 Interpol officials participated in the analysis over the past two and a half months since the Colombian government turned over the computers. It would take more than 1,000 years to forensically investigate all of the 39.5 million pages of information the files contained, he said.

The files also implicate Ecuador's President Rafael Correa in having ties to the FARC, as the group is known, according to Colombian authorities.

Both Chavez and Correa have denied providing any assistance to the FARC.

To contact the reporter on this story: Helen Murphy in Bogota at Hmurphy1@bloomberg.netMatthew Walter in Caracas at mwalter4@bloomberg.net;

Last Updated: May 15, 2008 14:41 EDT