Doug wrote: > What's all this mean - not just this story but the whole crisis? > Where's it all going?
This is sheer speculation of mine. It seems to me that Uribe is being buffeted by many forces, internal, external, and he's not completely decided as to his political strategy. For now, his impending political goal is reelection. And the anti-FARC rhetoric plays well internally. For the time being. But then, at least for now, in Santo Domingo, he's feeling in a raw way the peer pressure from the rest of the region, which goes somewhat counter to the pressure from Washington. Clearly, Washington wants the war in Colombia to continue. There are many plausible reasons why. Since he ran for president for the first time, Uribe positioned himself as a loyal ally of the U.S. He's a sincere anti-communist. So, one dominant side of Uribe wants to continue the war because he and his patrons benefit from it. It's some money from Washington. It shouldn't be hard to google estimates of how much Bogota receives from Washington annually. Historically, Uribe was a promoter of the right-wing paramilitaries. That's a big incentive. Then the paramilitaries have links with the drug lords. So they play Washington and Washington allows them to do so. Uribe's family (if not Uribe himself) had or have links with the drug lords. There are close relatives of Uribe in jail in Europe for serious drug trafficking. That's all documented. (Chavez just hinted at the meeting that he had his own computer left by an assassinated Colombian drug lord in Caracas that may link Uribe to the drug mafia.) There's a military impasse in the Colombian civil war. I can't believe that Uribe doesn't realize that the militaristic approach (finishing the FARC) is not viable. As Chavez says it in that video, neither the guerrillas (FARC, ELN, etc.) can in the foreseeable future overthrow the government nor the government can finish the guerrilla. Chavez was very persuasive in showing them that he has never sent (and will never send) a cent or a gun to the FARC or to any other insurgent force in Latin America. It's entirely credible, IMO. The roots of the guerrilla in Colombia are really deep. In spite of the rancor, it seems as if the military, extremely corrupt and rotten, have found a modus vivendi in the civil war and are not really committed to fighting against the guerrilla, in spite of the prodding by the demagogues in Bogota and Washington. That's very understandable. Not textually, but Correa just said something along these lines: "How do you want us to kick the FARC from Ecuador? That's Colombia's conflict. You said that, if you hadn't told us the coordinates of the exact place you bombed in Ecuador, we wouldn't have even known of it. You are probably right. You say that Ecuador allows this or that guerrilla chief in its territory every now and then, yet how many guerrilla chiefs operate with impunity inside the territory of Colombia? You want us to control them. Why don't *you* control them, at least those within Colombia? Who wants to have a civil war in a neighboring country. With peace, it'd take us 3,000 soldiers to patrol that border. We know need tens of thousands of soldiers. We spend millions of dollars in all that [he gave a more precise figure that I couldn't retain], and we get no help from anybody else [subtext: you are funded by the U.S.], aside from the lives of our soldiers and peasants from the area. Every time you say that a FARC group has infiltrated Ecuador you're admitting that a FARC group was in Colombia and crossed the border into Ecuador without problem. Where are the Colombian armed forces then? Why doesn't Colombia secure its own borders? Entire areas of the Colombian territory are under the control of the guerrillas or are nobody's land. It's your conflict! And the consequences of bad policies in dealing with that conflict [subtext: your taking the militaristic approach pushed by Washington that doesn't lead to the alleged intended goal of ending the conflict] fall on us, the neighbors. How you deal with your conflict is a sovereign decision of Colombia, but the consequences of bad ways of dealing with the conflict spill over to us." It seems to me that there's a weaker side of Uribe who would want to get along with the rest of Latin America. But the incentives may not be sufficiently large for him to shift. He just agreed to apologize, to not repeating the sin, etc. -- but I doubt it'll stick. The pressures from Washington, the military bosses/drug mafia/Colombian oligarchs/Colombian mass media is brutal. It seems to me that Chavez hasn't totally given up on him. He attacks him so frontally and brutally, because he wants to elevate the cost of not getting aligned with the rest of Latin America. If you look at the video in the page I sent, you'll see a very cool Chavez and a fidgety, nervous Uribe. You can almost feel his discomfort. Chavez looks very comfy in his skin. Chavez's act -- if I may call it so with all due respect to the man -- is to increase the political cost, if not domestically inside Colombia, at least regionally and globally (France under Sarkozy tends to play along with Chavez on the issues of humanitarian help to the hostages of the FARC). And in this I include the *opportunity cost*. It's also about, you know, material interest$. The Colombian economy is highly dependent on trade with Venezuela. Whenever he has a chance, Chavez dangles that opportunity cost in Uribe's face. He evokes the prospect$ of serious international economic cooperation in South America and the Caribbean. Chavez is really good at making these descriptions of future prosperity and regional independence vivid and tangible. And the picture Chavez is painting is increasingly looking as a serious counterweight to whatever Washington may offer Colombia now. Maybe Michael can say more -- or correct my impressions. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
