opinion

Meanwhile Venezuela and Ecuador have deployed elements of their armed forces along their borders with Colombia and Chávez is warning that any incursion into his country like the one into Ecuador would be a cause for war.

What's particularly destabilizing is Uribe's claim of a right to cross into other countries in pursuit of FARC. He's not just threatening Venezuela and Ecuador, but by implication Panama, Peru and Brazil as well. But let us step back and view the history of this to understand the nature of Uribe's claim.

There has been a string of scandals in which people of Uribe's political faction have been forced out of public life in disgrace because of their ties to the now mostly demobilized United Colombian Self-Defense (AUC) paramilitary group. In Washington mythology the AUC was this rogue element, a terrorist response to FARC terrorism. In reality the AUC was an irregular auxiliary of the Colombian government forces, which was repeatedly sent to attack Panama, Ecuador and Venezuela and, as brutal as FARC was and is, the worst human rights offenders in a Colombian conflict among bunches of thugs.

Now, however, the AUC is theoretically and to a great extent in reality demobilized so that means of projecting Colombia's civil conflict beyond its borders is no longer available to Uribe. Thus the brazen and lawless declaration of some "right" to attack neighboring countries with Colombia's regular military.

Was Ecuador harboring FARC, or was the remote border area just impossible for that little country's government to control? Panama has had that latter problem along our border with Colombia as well. The answers to the questions that Uribe raises about his neighbors's relationships with FARC are important.

To try to negotiate with FARC about keeping the peace in border areas or to get the rebels' many hostages released is a legitimate thing for governments of neighboring countries to do. To officially recognize that Colombia is and for a long time has been at war and that FARC is one of the belligerent parties --- as Venezuela does --- is substantially more controversial from the standpoint of international law. To provide aid and shelter for a rebel army that's waging an armed conflict against a neighboring state would be a lawless thing to do.

The people of the Americas have a right to know what the score really is, and would be foolhardy to just take Uribe's claims about Venezuela's and Ecuador's roles at face value. We and our governments really can't deal with this situation in any sort of positive way if we don't know the true relationships among Colombia's rebels and the governments of neighboring states.

Leave it to the guy who led the United States to a catastrophic war in Iraq for a lie to oppose fact finding in this case. Why might Washington oppose the finding of facts?

We do know that a few days before Colombia's incursion into Ecuador, the US Southern Command's Admiral Stavridis was in Panama, and the day after he left there was a shootout at sea between Panamanian police and a boatload of alleged FARC guerrillas. Was this a coincidence, or did Stavridis come here to tell the Panamanian government that there would be this offensive against FARC and demand that the Torrijos administration get with the program? What, if any, US involvement was there in the Colombian incursion into Ecuador? George W. Bush has a record and a reputation that would lead many to suspect that it's questions like these that he prefers to hear neither asked nor answered by international fact finders.

If there are people in the American government stupid enough to see some sort of an advantage to be gained from war and instability in northern South America, that's first of all because they're listening to the same Miami ideologues who have been giving bad advice about Cuba and all of Latin America for decades, and second because they have little respect for the needs and aspirations of most of the people in these parts.

However, what is likely to happen is not an all-out war but an order imposed by the region's more powerful players, especially Brazil. The Brazilians have a long border with Colombia and Uribe well knows that he can't push them around like he might do with Ecuador or Panama. Hugo Chávez survived the 2002 coup attempt not only due to loyal troops and public support in Venezuela, but because Brazil let it be known that a US-directed coup in a country along its border would not be tolerated.

Brazil should have a say in this crisis, by all rights more so than the United States. But to resolve the crisis in the most just and sustainable fashion we should find out which South American leaders' word is good and which can't be trusted and we should learn all the surrounding details of this grave incident.

Before you embark on a mission of revenge, dig two graves.

Also in this section: