opinion

Washington politicians play to
their most ignorant constituents
by Eric Jackson

Back to hoary tales of terrorists seeking weapons of mass destruction. Back to the Tequila Effect mentality, wherein supposedly sophisticated US investors know so little about Latin American that they can't distinguish among Mexico, Argentina and Panama. Back to strange beliefs about how the War on Drugs can be and is being won. Back to Cold War nightmares about wild-eyed Latin American dictators exporting totalitarian revolution. Back to Plan Colombia.

The Washington discourse about the recent international crisis over the Colombian incursion into Ecuador to kill rebel leader "Raúl Reyes" and several other persons of Colombian or Mexican nationality harks back to all of those legends, and has precious little to do with present realities.

Colombia's FARC guerrillas are popularly seen here in Panama as a bunch of thugs. So is the Colombian government. So are the paramilitaries that have been aligned with the Colombian government and have attacked Panama several times. These are opinions that I share. To a lot of Panamanians, all Colombians are hoodlums and that unfortunate prejudice is unfair and unbecoming. But suffice to say that this country owes its independent existence largely to a general agreement that we don't want to be part of Colombia's endless armed conflicts.

Set aside all of those preconceived notions and assess the backdrop to the crisis:

• FARC is holding hundreds of hostages, including soldiers and cops it captured in battle, wealthy Colombians whose families it is shaking down for ransoms, foreigners of nationalities whose governments actively support efforts to suppress FARC, and politicians or other prominent figures of political factions other than their own;




• There is an international movement to free these hostages, to which the Uribe administration in Bogota gives a certain amount of lip service but hardly ever listens and at key junctures actively opposes;




• Governments of neighboring countries, including Venezuela, Ecuador, Panama and France (the latter being a neighbor if you take into account that French Guiana, Martinique and Guadeloupe are all considered departments of France) have made various diplomatic efforts to free the hostages;




• The governments in Bogota and Washington have time and again stymied these efforts by in one way or another insisting on a military solution to the hostage problem, when the usual result of forcible attempts to free people held by FARC is dead hostages;




• Despite the Uribe government's opposition, Hugo Chávez did manage to broker the relsease of several of FARC's political hostages;




• The US government intercepted a satellite phone conversation between Chávez and Reyes about further hostage releases and from the data collected tracked the latter to a remote camp just inside Ecuador and sent the information, along with sophisticated weapons that could make it precisely deadly, to the Colombian forces;




• Reyes was killed and the efforts to secure the release of more hostages were set back;




• Uribe, who had previously staged attacks within his neighboring countries through his allies the AUC paramilitaries, used the occasion to declare that his government has a right to pursue rebels across international boundaries;

  
  

• The Colombian government further made a series of declarations about the alleged contents of a laptop it said that it seized from the camp in Ecuador, claiming that it showed how Venezuela had given $300 million to FARC, how FARC had financed the election campaign of Ecuador's President Rafael Correa, and how FARC was about to obtain 50 kilograms of enriched uranium to make a weapon of mass destruction;




• On their faces the documents that the Uribe administration claimed incriminated Chávez and Correa turned out not to say what they were purported to say, and meanwhile arms control experts in the United States dismissed the uranium claim as improbable given US abilities to monitor the movements of highly radioactive materials;




• Two of the countries on Colombia's borders, Venezuela and Ecuador, took Uribe's claim of a right to send his forces across borders to be a specific threat to them and moved units of their armies to their border areas; and




• In the OAS and at the Rio Group summit in Santo Domingo, Colombia's incursion into Ecuador was rejected as unacceptable. The United States was the only government in the Americas that voiced its support for Colombia's action --- it really had to, as it had set the crisis into motion in the first place.

These are the realities in this region. Even the most right-wing Latin American governments didn't support Uribe's claims about a right to attack across borders. Not Mexico. Not El Salvador. Not Guatemala or Honduras or Paraguay.

And what did we hear from Washington? Stuff about Venezuelan aggression. Allegations about Ecuador as a state sponsor of terrorism. Calls for Colombia's neighbors to get involved in the Colombian civil conflict on Uribe's side. A declaration by George W. Bush that "we oppose any act of aggression that could destabilize the region." A declaration by Hillary Clinton that "By supporting the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia Chávez is, in open fashion, taking the side of illegal groups that are threatening Colombian democracy."

Never have we heard Senator Clinton acknowledge the series of scandals linking the Uribe government to the AUC paramilitaries, nor did we ever hear her denounce the AUC and its Bogota sponsors on any of the many occasions that they attacked Panama. None of the Democrats acknowledged that the Colombian government's attack across the border into Ecuador was seen as a provocation by every other country that has a border with Colombia. Nor have we heard any of that from the Republican side of the aisle.

All we hear from the old political leadership in Washington is this tired script about how there are a bunch of leftist bad guy dictators in Latin American countries whose people stupidly elected them and who are infringing upon an exclusive US right to address problems that are right on their borders but are far away from the frontiers of the United States. Strike the words "Fidel Castro" and insert the words "Hugo Chávez" and it's the same screed we have been hearing since the 1960s.

Only a few members of Congress will admit that all the money that the US government has poured into Colombia has financed plenty of death squad violence, numerous Colombian government proxy attacks across the borders of several neighboring countries and vast environmental damage from herbicide spraying but yielded none of the results that is was supposed to bring about.

FARC has ceded ground in the face of offensives, but its forces are intact and as dangerous as ever. There has been neither victory nor progress in the War on Drugs. There have just been shifts in Colombian drug production from cocaine to heroin, switches to different smuggling routes and increased power for Mexican drug cartels at the expense of Colombian drug lords.

And the nature of the thing that Plan Colombia is supposed to defend? Colombian democracy is about union organizers and independent journalists and members communities that want to live in peace without taking sides in the armed conflict being shot down with impunity. It's about a President Uribe who rose to prominence on the strength of his daddy's drug running fortune, who has always been closely allied with the most vicious of right-wing paramilitaries, being portrayed as something he's not to the American people.

The OAS is, after all, headquartered in Washington. The Rio Group summit in the Dominican Republic was, after all, covered by all of the world's major news organizations. Yet still, despite US and Colombian isolation in those places, we're not hearing calls for a reality check from Capitol Hill.

The Washington politicians are for the most part not ignorant. They're just playing their constituents for fools. If the elections of 2008 are to be a milestone of change, the punishment of this sort of behavior by the voters is as good a place as any other to start.