U.S. Plan Raises Ire in Latin America

By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, August 8, 2009

BOGOTA, Colombia, Aug. 7 -- A U.S. plan to deploy troops and station aircraft at several Colombian military bases has generated controversy across Latin America, with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez warning that it could lead to war and the president of Brazil saying that he did not like the idea of an expanded U.S. presence in the region.

A senior State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said by phone from Washington on Friday that the plan would give the United States access to Colombian bases from which to carry out vital counter-drug surveillance flights over the Pacific, a conduit for cocaine smuggled to Mexico and on to the United States. "Our ability to have broad coverage in that area was important," he said.

But since Colombian authorities revealed details of the proposed agreement last month, Chávez has said the United States might use the bases as a platform for an invasion of his oil-rich country. "We're talking about the Yankees, the most aggressive nation in the history of humanity," Chávez said Wednesday in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital.

A woman in Rio wears a mask that reads in Spanish: "Get Uribe Out." Concerns about the U.S. anti-drug plan prompted Colombia's Uribe to visit other leaders. (By Ricardo Moraes -- Associated Press)

The reaction from Caracas was no surprise to Washington officials, whom Chávez frequently accuses of plotting against his government. But moderate, European-style leftist governments in South America, most of which have good relations with the United States, have also raised concerns that the proposed U.S. presence is greater than Washington needs for its anti-drug efforts.

Hurdle for Obama

That indignation poses a new challenge for the Obama administration, which has been trying to improve relations with governments that had openly opposed the Bush administration. But political analysts, as well as officials in Colombia, said the secretive nature of the talks between Washington and Bogota had proved counterproductive.

"There just didn't seem to be any serious consultation beforehand," said Michael Shifter, a Colombia expert at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, adding that the controversy "was completely avoidable."

On Friday, President Obama tried to soothe nerves in Latin America, telling reporters in Washington that the United States was simply upgrading its security agreement with Colombia. "There have been those in the region who have been trying to play this up as part of a traditional anti-Yankee rhetoric," Obama said, adding, "We have no intent in establishing a U.S. military base in Colombia."

The concerns expressed in the region prompted Colombian President Álvaro Uribe to embark on a three-day South American trip this week to reassure fellow leaders, including populists such as Bolivia's Evo Morales and moderates such as Chile's Michelle Bachelet. Morales and Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner did not offer support for a Colombian-U.S. deal, but Bachelet and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva toned down their initial criticisms to say that the proposal is a sovereign matter.

Still, after Uribe met with Lula in Brasilia on Thursday, Brazil's foreign minister, Celso Amorim, told reporters that his country had asked Colombia to be more transparent about the proposed accord. "We will have to see if that Colombian transparency satisfies, or does not satisfy, our doubts," Amorim said. The plan was expected to be the main topic of discussion when Latin American officials meet in Ecuador on Monday for a regional defense summit.

Colombian authorities said last month that under the accord, which may be signed this month and would last 10 years, U.S. aircraft could be stationed at up to five Colombian air bases and U.S. naval vessels could dock at two Colombian ports, one on the Caribbean and the other on the Pacific. Up to 800 U.S. military personnel and 600 private contractors could use the bases, meeting a cap of 1,400 that was set in 2000 when Congress approved $1.3 billion in anti-narcotics aid for Colombia. As of June 19, there were 268 U.S. military personnel in Colombia and 308 civilian contractors.

The Uribe administration has stressed that the bases would remain under Colombian command, with U.S. missions requiring Colombian approval and base security handled by Colombian troops. U.S. planes would be unable fly over a third country unless the United States had a separate agreement with that country. "These are not American bases, but Colombian," Gen. Freddy Padilla, chief of the armed forces, said Tuesday at a summit with U.S. military officers in the coastal city of Cartagena. "But we will provide the possibility for them to use our installations."

U.S. military officers and specialists working for U.S. companies that carry out anti-drug operations already use several Colombian bases.

Colombian officials said the base that would have the biggest U.S. presence under the accord is Palanquero, in Puerto Salgar, a steamy river town a four-hour drive from Bogota. Hundreds of service members can be housed there, and its hangars can accommodate more than 100 aircraft.

End of Ecuadoran Deal

The idea of using Colombian bases comes as a decade-long U.S. presence ends at the coastal air base in Manta, Ecuador, which U.S. forces used to patrol the Pacific. Then-candidate Rafael Correa railed against the U.S. presence during his 2006 presidential campaign and, once in office, did not renew an operating agreement with Washington.

Correa's government also accused U.S. forces operating out of Manta of having helped the Colombians carry out the bombing of a Colombian rebel camp in Ecuador last year that killed two dozen guerrillas.

The senior State Department official said talks with the Uribe administration over use of Colombian bases began "long before" Ecuador decided to end the U.S. presence at Manta. "We thought it made sense," he said.

Colombia's vice minister for defense, Sergio Jaramillo, said in an interview Friday that officials have become increasingly concerned about the smuggling of cocaine into Mexico via speedboats and semi-submersible vessels operating out of clandestine Pacific ports. "One must not underrate the significance or danger of losing the capability that the U.S. had in Ecuador," he said.

Jaramillo said the planes that had been in Manta "were the ones that were giving us the intelligence to do the interdiction operations we were doing in the Pacific."

In Venezuela, though, Chávez scoffs at those arguments, his rhetoric ratcheting up in recent days since Colombia accused Venezuela of providing Colombian guerrillas with antitank rocket launchers.

Chávez denied the allegation and recalled his ambassador from Colombia. In the wake of the base controversy, he has announced an economic counteroffensive that includes suspending the participation of Colombia's state oil company in operations in Venezuela's richest oil belt. He also said plans to import 10,000 cars from Colombia had been called off and threatened to cut other Colombian imports.

"The only way this situation returns, let's say, to calm is for Colombia to refuse to give its territory to the United States," Chávez told reporters Thursday.

Increased U.S. Military Presence in Colombia Could Pose Problems With Neighbors

By SIMON ROMERO

CARACAS, Venezuela — A plan to increase the American military presence on at least three military bases in Colombia, Washington’s top ally in Latin America, is accentuating Colombia’s already tense relations with some of its neighbors.

Venezuela, Ecuador and Nicaragua, which are members of a leftist political alliance that is led by President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and backed by his nation’s oil revenues, have all criticized the plan, saying it would broaden the military reach of the United States in the Andes and the Caribbean at a time when they are still wary of American influence in the region.

Despite a slight improvement in Venezuela’s relations with the United States in recent months, Mr. Chávez has been especially vocal in lashing out at the plan. Speaking on state television here on Monday night, he put Venezuela’s diplomatic ties with Colombia under review, calling the plan a platform for “new aggression against us.”

Colombia’s foreign minister, Jaime Bermúdez, on Tuesday defended the negotiations, which are expected to produce an agreement in August, asking neighboring countries not to interfere in Colombia’s affairs. “We never expressed our opinion in what our neighbors do,” he said, pointing to Mr. Chávez’s attempts to strengthen ties with non-Western nations. “Not even when the Russian presence became known in Venezuelan waters, or with relations with China,” he added.

The United States has been negotiating the increase of military operations in Colombia in recent weeks, faced with Ecuador’s decision to end a decade-long agreement allowing E-3 AWACs and P-3 Orion surveillance planes to operate from the Manta Air Base on Ecuador’s Pacific Coast.

While American antidrug surveillance flights would sharply increase in Colombia, the world’s top producer of cocaine, the agreement would not allow American personnel to take part in combat operations in the country, which is mired in a four-decade war against guerrillas. A limit of 800 American military personnel and 600 American military contractors would also remain in place, officials involved in the talks said.

Still, depending on how the accord is put in place, American troop levels in Colombia could climb sharply. The United States currently has about 250 military personnel in the country, deployed largely in an advisory capacity to Colombia’s armed forces, William Brownfield, the United States ambassador to Colombia, said last week.

Colombia, which has already received more than $5 billion in military and antidrug aid from the United States this decade, has found itself isolated diplomatically as Mr. Chávez presses ahead with his efforts to expand Venezuela’s oil diplomacy while eroding American influence in the hemisphere.

Other countries chafe at Colombia for different reasons. Colombia’s diplomatic relations with Ecuador have soured since Colombian forces carried out a raid on a Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, rebel camp on Ecuadoran territory last year. A festering boundary dispute with Nicaragua has also made for tensions between Colombia and Nicaragua’s president, Daniel Ortega, an ally of Mr. Chávez.

But with Venezuela itself, Colombia remains locked in a complex game of interdependence.

Its sales of manufactured and agricultural goods to Venezuela remain resilient despite Mr. Chávez’s occasional outbursts directed at his ideological opposite, Colombia’s president, Álvaro Uribe. And faced with disarray in its oil industry, Venezuela relies on imports of Colombian natural gas, narrowing the possibility of a severe deterioration in ties between the two countries despite their sharply different views of cooperation with the United States.

Venezuela's Drug-Trafficking Role Is Growing Fast, U.S. Report Says

By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 19, 2009

BOGOTA, Colombia, July 18 -- A report for the U.S. Congress on drug smuggling through Venezuela concludes that corruption at high levels of President Hugo Chávez's government and state aid to Colombia's drug-trafficking guerrillas have made Venezuela a major launching pad for cocaine bound for the United States and Europe.

Since 1996, successive U.S. administrations have considered Venezuela a key drug-trafficking hub, the Government Accountability Office report says. But now, it says, the amount of cocaine flowing into Venezuela from Colombia, Venezuela's neighbor and the world's top producer of the drug, has skyrocketed, going from an estimated 60 metric tons in 2004 to 260 metric tons in 2007. That amounted to 17 percent of all the cocaine produced in the Andes in 2007.

The report, which was first reported by Spain's El Pais newspaper Thursday and obtained by The Washington Post on Friday, represents U.S. officials' strongest condemnation yet of Venezuela's alleged role in drug trafficking. It says Venezuela has extended a "lifeline" to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which the United States estimates has a hand in the trafficking of 60 percent of the cocaine produced in Colombia.

The report, scheduled to be made public in Washington on Monday, drew an angry response from Chávez, whose government has repeatedly clashed with the United States. Speaking to reporters in Bolivia on Friday, the populist leader characterized the report as a political tool used by the United States to besmirch his country. He also said the United States, as the world's top cocaine consumer, has no right to lecture Venezuela.

"The United States is the first narco-trafficking country," Chávez said, adding that Venezuela's geography -- particularly its rugged 1,300-mile border with Colombia -- makes it vulnerable to traffickers. He also asserted that Venezuela had made important gains in the drug war since expelling U.S. counter-drug agents in 2005, a measure the GAO says made Venezuela more attractive to Colombian traffickers.

"Venezuela has begun to hit narco-trafficking hard since the DEA left," Chávez said, referring to the Drug Enforcement Administration. "The DEA is filled with drug traffickers."

Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) commissioned the GAO study in February 2008, asking the nonpartisan agency to determine whether Venezuela was "in the process of becoming a narco-state, heavily dependent [on] and beholden to the international trade in illegal drugs."

In a statement about the GAO report, Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the findings "have heightened my concern that Venezuela's failure to cooperate with the United States on drug interdiction is related to corruption in that country's government." He said the report underscores a need for a comprehensive review of U.S. policy toward Venezuela.

The release of the report is expected to provide ammunition to some Republican lawmakers who have criticized the Obama administration's efforts to reinstate the deposed president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, a close ally of Chávez. U.S. diplomats have said that despite his ties to Chávez, Zelaya should be returned to power to serve the six months left in his term.

A Democratic aide in Congress who works on Latin American policy issues suggested that the call for a review of U.S. policy toward Venezuela could interfere with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's bid to improve relations with Caracas, which were badly frayed during the Bush years. "The administration inherited a messy bilateral relationship and deserves a chance to put it on a more even keel," the aide said.

The GAO report describes how cocaine produced in Colombia is smuggled into Venezuela via land and river routes, as well as on short flights originating from remote regions along Colombia's eastern border. Most of the cocaine is then shipped out on merchant vessels, fishing boats and so-called go-fast boats. Though most of it is destined for U.S. streets, increasing amounts are being sent to Europe, the report says.

The GAO contends that corruption in Venezuela, reaching from officers in the National Guard to officials in top levels of government, has contributed to the surge in trafficking.

In September, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control designated three Venezuelan high-ranking officials, all close aides to Chávez, as "drug kingpins" for protecting FARC drug shipments and providing arms and funding to Colombian guerrillas. They are Hugo Armando Carvajal Barrios, director of the military's Intelligence Directorate; Henry de Jesús Rangel Silva, head of the Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services; and Ramón Rodríguez Chacín, former interior and justice minister.

News of the GAO report came as Colombian officials in Bogota released an internal FARC video in which the rebel group's second-in-command, Jorge Briceño, reads the deathbed manifesto, written in March 2008, by the then-supreme commander, Manuel Marulanda. In the video, seized in May from a FARC operative and obtained by the Associated Press, Marulanda stresses the strategic importance of "maintaining good political relations, friendship and confidence with the governments of Venezuela and Ecuador."

Marulanda's letter also laments that a trove of internal e-mails, many of them compromising Venezuelan and Ecuadoran officials, fell into the hands of Colombian authorities that month. Briceño, reading the letter to a group of guerrillas in a jungle clearing, announces that among FARC "secrets" that were lost is information about the "assistance in dollars" to Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa's 2006 presidential campaign.

Venezuela did not immediately respond to the video. But on Saturday, Correa, an ally of Chávez, denied receiving campaign funds from the FARC and suggested the video was a "setup."

"There is a setup to damage the image of the country and the government," he said in a radio address.