POLITICS/LATAM-US: Albright’s Tour a ‘Tribute’ to Democracy

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Aug 19 2000 (IPS) - U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s South American tour stood out as much for the countries she visited as for those that were left off the itinerary.

Albright described her tour through Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Ecuador as a “tribute” to countries in the region that were working out their problems “in democracy.”

On the other hand, she expressed concern over the situation in Colombia, Peru, Venezuela and Paraguay, sources of continuing concern for the government of President Bill Clinton, whose second term ends in January.

While conflict-torn Colombia is Clinton’s single biggest headache in South America, there is also concern over the situation in Peru, where President Alberto Fujimori was elected for a third consecutive term and was sworn in amidst a climate of tension, unrest and protests that the recent elections were far from clean.

Albright stated in Brazil that if Fujimori wished to win the respect of the international community, he would have to adopt measures designed to strengthen democracy, such as guaranteeing a well-functioning judiciary, a well-integrated information and intelligence system, and armed forces firmly under the control of civilian authorities.

Although in a less explicit manner, she also expressed Washington’s astonishment at the stops scheduled by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez on his tour this month of Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which included visits to Iraq and Libya, where he met with Saddam Hussein and Mu’ammar Gadhafi.

The Venezuelan president’s visit to Iraq and meeting with Hussein were the first by any Western leader since the 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the ensuing Gulf War.

U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher recently said that Washington had a hard time understanding Chávez’s decision.

Argentina’s foreign ministry suggested that Albright minimise the significance of Chávez’s visits to Iraq and Libya, while it committed itself to helping ease the tension between the United States and Venezuela.

With respect to Paraguay, Albright’s tour took place two days after the elections for a new vice-president — to replace the late Luis Maria Argaña, who was assassinated — which once again highlighted the serious institutional problems facing democracy in that country, where elections are tainted by cries of foul play, and rumours and threats of a coup d’etat have become all too common.

Albright’s lightning tour, during which she averaged less than one day in each country, took place just three months before the U.S. presidential elections, and at the end of two consecutive terms with Clinton at the helm.

Although she has recently been occupied with the pressing question of the Middle East, the official did not want to end her stint at the head of the State Department without a visit, no matter how brief, to the countries of South America, a region that has made great progress in consolidating democracy amidst financial ups-and-downs, after long periods of dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s.

In Argentina, Albright met with human rights groups working to clarify the abuses of the 1976-83 de facto military regime, and visited the reconstructed headquarters of the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association, the 1994 terrorist bombing of which left a death toll of 86.

In both cases, the secretary of state pledged support through the declassification of U.S. documents.

But Albright’s most outstanding backing for human rights organisations was expressed in Chile, where she termed the legal ruling that stripped former dictator Augusto Pinochet of the immunity from prosecution he enjoyed as a life senator, thus paving the way for him to be tried for human rights abuses, as “historic.”

To each of the presidents with whom she met, the U.S. official expressed her country’s concern over the violence in Colombia, where the military, rebel groups, paramilitaries and drug traffickers are involved in a decades-old armed conflict.

The United States will shell out 1.3 billion dollars in mainly military aid for the ‘Plan Colombia’ — an anti-drug and “peace” strategy of the government of Andrés Pastrana.

Albright’s stopover in Ecuador was apparently focused on rewarding, with a pledge of food aid, that country’s agreement to allow the United States to set up a military base in the port of Manta, near the border with Colombia.

With that single exception — which triggered protests from sectors of Ecuadorean civil society — none of the presidents visited by Albright committed anything more than moral, institutional or, at the most, technical support to the government of Pastrana, who will receive Clinton later this month in the Colombian port city of Cartagena.

Brazilian foreign minister Luiz Lampreia frankly stated that his country did not have “the same level of commitment as the United States to Colombia’s anti-drug trafficking programme,” nor did it feel any interest in taking part in any joint international action in Colombia.

Argentine President Fernando de la Rúa, meanwhile, marked a distance from his predecessor Carlos Menem (1989-99) — who offered Washington to send troops in the case of a military intervention of Colombia — by pledging “institutional” support for his “friend” Pastrana, while respecting the principle of “non-intervention.”

Albright replied that she had already made it clear that she was not seeking anything for Colombia, much less financial aid, but that she merely wanted to underline the fact that the armed conflict there was of fundamental concern to the Clinton administration.

Something similar occurred in Chile, where President Ricardo Lagos expressed his country’s readiness to support social initiatives in Colombia focused on the search for peace and reconciliation. He clarified, however, that this did not include any sort of participation in peace talks with the guerrillas.

Economic questions also figured on Albright’s agenda in the region, although for the first time they were pushed to the backburner by the Clinton administration’s aim to give closure to the relations it forged in eight years of government.