COLOMBIA-VENEZUELA: Lula Steps In to Ease Bilateral Tensions

By Humberto Márquez Reprint | | Print |

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Jan 20 2005 (IPS) - Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva hopes to soothe the escalating tensions between Colombia and Venezuela, sparked by the kidnapping of a FARC rebel leader in the Venezuelan capital and further aggravated by Washington, which has thrown its full support behind the Colombian government.

“We don’t view this as a conflict that demands mediation, but obviously if Brazil, and President Lula in particular, can do something to facilitate dialogue between friends, then we are going to do it,” said Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim.

The rift between Colombia and Venezuela, which has already led to the suspension of bilateral cooperation and integration programmes, erupted barely a month after the 12 countries of the continent joined in Cuzco, Peru to sign the founding charter of the South American Community of Nations, an initiative pursued with particular enthusiasm by Brazil.

“The key issue in this conflict is that it marks the launch of the Andean phase of Plan Colombia and its military adjunct, Plan Patriot, with a frontal attack on the guerrilla forces that has spilled over the Colombian borders into the rest of the region,” political analyst Alberto Garrido told IPS.

Plan Patriot is a Colombian military offensive aimed at penetrating territory under the control of the country’s leftist rebel groups, the largest of which is the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC). It is largely viewed as the military phase of Plan Colombia, a U.S.-financed anti-drug and counterinsurgency strategy.

According to Garrido, the Venezuelan government of leftist President Chávez is viewed as a “problem” for the execution of these plans.

As the bilateral conflict escalated last week with an exchange of accusatory government communiqués, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, William Wood, announced that his government backed Colombian President Álvaro Uribe “100 percent,” while the foreign ministries of Peru and Mexico called on the sparring nations to pursue the path of dialogue.

During her Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice referred several times to Venezuela, calling it a ônegative force in the region” because of the difficulties it is purportedly causing for its neighbours.

“I think it’s extremely unfortunate that the Chavez government has not been constructive,” she said.

Analysts like Garrido highlighted the contrast between the almost total absence of the theme of Latin America during the presidential debates leading up to the re-election of George W. Bush in November and Rice’s repeated references to Venezuela this week while outlining Washington’s future foreign policy.

On Wednesday, during a meeting with Uribe in Leticia, a southern Colombian town on the Amazon River, Lula offered to help ease the current tensions between Colombia and Venezuela.

Uribe and Chávez have both separately expressed a desire to reach some form of agreement, while the Colombian and Venezuelan foreign ministers, Carolina Barca and Alí Rodríguez, have been particularly obliging.

“President Lula has offered to facilitate a dialogue to which Foreign Minister Rodríguez and I are fully committed,” Barca announced in Leticia, accompanied by Amorim.

The conflict was ignited last December by the kidnapping in the Venezuelan capital of Colombian rebel leader Rodrigo Granda, often referred to as the FARC “foreign minister”.

The kidnapping was perpetrated by members of the Venezuelan armed forces and police, who nabbed Granda in downtown Caracas and then drove to the Colombian border, turning him over to that country’s authorities in the town of Cúcuta, located just over the other side.

The kidnappers were paid a reward of 1.5 million dollars by the Colombian government, according to investigations carried out in Venezuela.

Nevertheless, the Colombian authorities continue to insist that their police force arrested the guerrilla leader in Cúcuta, and therefore deny Chavez’s accusations that Venezuela’s sovereignty was violated by an operation organised in Bogotá and executed through the paying of bribes to members of the Venezuelan military and police.

Political analyst Carlos Romero told IPS that the involvement of Venezuelan army officers in the kidnapping must have especially stung Chávez, a retired lieutenant-colonel who continues to refer to himself as a “soldier”.

Why did Colombia choose this particular moment to launch an operation that was bound to endanger the good economic, political and personal relations that Uribe and Chávez have shared since mid-2004, after overcoming a series of prior frictions and suspicions?

Romero believes that the Colombian president wants to demonstrate that his country is living up to its role as a “privileged ally” of the United States in the region.

The kidnapping was meant to prove that the Colombian government “is taking the war on the guerrillas seriously, and is now moving to bring down the leadership of the rebel groups, ending the former ambiguity of armed clashes on the one hand and tolerance on the other,” he said.

Garrido believes that a key concern in the implementation of Plan Patriot is that the Colombian government “cannot successfully defeat the guerrilla groups if they have the protection of the Chávez government, which has declared its neutrality towards the Colombian conflict.”

As such, the recent actions undertaken by Colombia and the statements made in Washington may be an attempt to force Chávez into backing down and changing his stance.

Instead, however, Chávez has firmly stood his ground, suspending cooperation with Colombia on joint development projects, cutting back on supplies of oil and other trade, demanding an apology from Bogota, and firing back at the criticisms levelled at him by Rice.

Many observers maintain that the United States is fanning the flames of the conflict with Colombia to destabilise the Chávez government, undermine the newly created South American Community of Nations, and sabotage the project to build a pipeline that would cross Colombia and open the gates to the Pacific Ocean for Venezuelan oil.

It is undoubtedly the danger of a further escalation in Colombian-Venezuelan tensions, particularly in light of the launching of Plan Patriot and a second term for the Bush administration, that has spurred Lula and others to step forward and attempt to defuse the crisis as soon as possible.