Rafael Correa, José Mujica, Cristina Fernández, Evo Morales, Nicolás Maduro and Desiré Bouterse called for apologies over the presidential jet incident. Credit: Government of Venezuela

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Jul 5 2013 (IPS)

South American leaders demanded that the governments of France, Italy, Portugal and Spain provide explanations and public apologies to Bolivian President Evo Morales for refusing his presidential jet permission to fly through their airspace on his way home from Moscow.

Five presidents and other high-level representatives of the members of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) who held an extraordinary meeting Thursday in the central Bolivian city of Cochabamba said the denial of access to the four European countries’ airspace was a violation of Morales’ rights and immunity and of international law, and set a “dangerous precedent”.

They also decided to create a commission tol follow up on the formal complaints that will be brought before the United Nations and other international bodies.

The declaration was not signed by UNASUR as a bloc but by presidents Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Cristina Fernández of Argentina, Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, José Mujica of Uruguay and Desiré Bouterse of Suriname, as well as delegates of the governments of Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Guyana and Peru. Paraguay did not take part in the meeting because it is still suspended from the bloc as a result of the ouster of President Fernando Lugo in June 2012.

Although UNASUR announced Wednesday night that a summit would be held, the bloc failed to cobble together a quorum, and was unable to issue a declaration as a bloc, which would have required a consensus among the region’s 12 presidents.

Brazilian foreign policy adviser Marco Aurélio Garcia said President Dilma Rousseff was unable to make it to the meeting. Unofficial reports indicated that she did not attend because of the protests that have been raging in Brazil for the past two weeks.

In a communiqué isused Wednesday, Rousseff had expressed her “indignation” over the incident, saying it not only affected Bolivia but Latin America as a whole. Similar sentiments were expressed by presidents Ollanta Humala of Peru, Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, and Sebastián Piñera of Chile.

Nevertheless, the absence of the four leaders was interpreted by some as a breakdown in relations among the members of UNASUR.

“What happened to Morales in Europe and the absence of some of the presidents sent out a harsh message to the countries of ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our Americas) because of their policies of nationalisation of companies, mistreatment of ambassadors and incompliance with international agreements,” lawmaker Luis Felipe Dorado, with the centre-right opposition National Convergence party, told IPS.

As an example, he cited Morales’ proposal to withdraw Bolivia from the Inter-American Human Rights Commission.

Dorado also lamented that the president said Bolivia could do without the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund.

From pressure to protests

Prior to the meeting in Cochabamba, Fernández, Correa, Maduro and Bouterse took part in a rally in solidarity with Morales held by Bolivian social organisations.

In the rally, Morales – Bolivia’s first-ever indigenous president – said Spain’s ambassador to Austria had demanded to be allowed to inspect the presidential aircraft, while the Bolivian leader was in the Vienna airport from Tuesday evening to Wednesday morning.

His presidential jet has been rerouted and forced to land in Vienna, where it was grounded for 14 hours waiting for France, Italy, Portugal and Spain to revoke their airspace decision.

The incident was sparked by the suspicion that the plane was carrying whistleblower Edward Snowden, the former technical contractor for the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) who released dozens of top secret documents proving that the U.S. government has been tapping global internet and phone systems on a massive scale,

The Bolivian president said the Spanish ambassador, under orders from the deputy foreign minister of Spain, attempted to force his way onto the aircraft to make sure Snowden was not there.

Morales said he told the ambassador he was a president, not a “criminal” whose plane had to be inspected before it was allowed to continue its journey.

Argentine President Fernández said at the rally that “It is curious that the countries that talk about legal security and respect for international law and human rights have committed this unprecedented violation. They should apologise for once.”

Mujca said the four European governments had made an enormous mistake. “This is embarrassing for the old countries…we aren’t colonies. When one Latin American leader is insulted, we all feel insulted.” He called for apologies instead of “unfounded arguments.”

Maduro concurred. “This is abuse and contempt of Latin America’s people because we decided to be free and to carry out democratic revolutions,” he said, after accusing the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of organising the rerouting and grounding of Morales’ jet.

Correa also accused the “intelligence agencies” of the countries involved in the incident of coordinating the denial of access to their airspace. He also blamed Washington, and said the reactions against the countries governed by leaders and parties of “a new left” in Latin America were triggered by their “anti-colonialist stance.”

While the South American leaders were in Cochabamba, Morales supporters protested outside the embassies and consulates of France, Italy, Portugal, Spain and the United States.

In Santa Cruz de la Sierra, members of the ruling Movement to Socialism painted graffiti on the walls of the U.S. consulate.

Popular demands that the ambassadors from the four European countries be expelled found little echo among the ranks of the ruling party. But Morales said he would not be afraid to close down the U.S. embassy, because he had no doubt U.S. pressure was behind the “virtual kidnapping” of which he was victim.

UNASUR presidents back Nicolás Maduro’s triumph and fly to Venezuela for the inauguration. Credit: Presidenty of Peru

By Ángel Páez
LIMA, Apr 19 2013 (IPS)

Nicolás Maduro was recognised as president-elect of Venezuela by a Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) emergency summit held in Lima to discuss the situation in the highly polarised country, where a narrow electoral result triggered social and political tension.

Meanwhile, Venezuela’s electoral authority said it would audit the ballots that were not already scrutinised on election night, in response to opposition demands.

It was after 1:00 AM Friday when Peruvian President Ollanta Humala announced, at the end of a nearly three-hour debate behind closed doors, the bloc’s support for Venezuela’s election authorities, who had declared Maduro the winner of the Sunday Apr. 14 elections.

Humala publicly congratulated the leftwing Maduro, the political heir of the late Hugo Chávez (1954-2013), who stood by his side smiling and looking clearly relieved. On Friday Maduro will be sworn in.

“With this consensus agreement we want to express UNASUR’s position that we will always be involved in the task of accompanying, strengthening and cooperating in the processes of fortifying the democracy that we have today in the region of South America,” Humala said.

“The idea and spirit of UNASUR is to contribute to and cooperate in the solution of problems that can affect democracy,” he added.

A Peruvian official then read out the summit statement, whose second point indicated that UNASUR urged all sectors that took part in Venezuela’s presidential elections to respect the official results announced by the National Electoral Council (CNE).

The meeting hosted by Humala was attended by presidents Cristina Fernández of Argentina, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, Sebastián Piñera of Chile, Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, José Mujica of Uruguay, and Maduro himself, as president-elect of Venezuela.

Vice President Jorge Glas represented Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, who is on a tour of Europe, and ambassador Marlon Faisal Mohamed-Hoesein took part in representation of Suriname. The only active member of the bloc not represented at the meeting was Guyana.

Paraguay is still suspended over the June 2012 removal of President Fernando Lugo by the country’s legislature.

The chairman of Peru’s parliamentary commission on foreign relations, Víctor Andrés García Belaúnde of the opposition Popular Action party, stressed the significance of the emergency summit given the political standoff in Venezuela.

“The case of Venezuela is not similar to that of Honduras (where President Manuel Zelaya was ousted in 2009) or Paraguay. Venezuela is the fourth-largest economy in Latin America, and it is also a member and promoter of the creation of UNASUR, and this decision by the bloc will have repercussions throughout the entire continent, if not the world,” García Belaúnde told IPS.

The third point of the Lima announcement ratified what was stated in the Apr. 15 Declaration of the UNASUR Electoral Mission to Venezuela: that any complaint, question or request for an extraordinary procedure raised by any participant in the electoral process should be channelled and resolved within the existing legal framework and the democratic will of the different parties.

It went on to “take positive note of the CNE decision to use a methodology that would permit the total audit of the polling stations.”

In Venezuela, electronic voting machines produce a paper receipt, which voters deposit in boxes. On Sunday, 54 percent of the boxes were automatically scrutinised. The CNE has now agreed to audit the remaining 46 percent.

In the elections, Maduro took 50.8 percent of the vote, compared to 49 percent for opposition candidate Henrique Capriles, a difference of 270,000 votes. On Monday Capriles called publicly for a total recount, and thousands of opposition protesters took to the streets to back that demand. On Wednesday he filed a formal request with the CNE.

The decision to audit the rest of the ballot receipts, which according to the CNE is the only option provided in the regulations for the law on electoral processes, was accepted by Capriles, who said “with this we are where we want to be.”

In the end, the opposition leader did not fly to Lima as had been speculated ahead of the UNASUR meeting.

The fourth point of the UNASUR declaration called for a halt to any “attitude or act of violence that jeopardises the social peace of the country”. It also expressed “solidarity with the injured and the families of the fatal victims of Apr. 15, 2013” and called for dialogue and the “preservation of a climate of tolerance for the good of the entire Venezuelan people.”

Seven people were killed and 61 injured during the unrest on Monday, according to Attorney General Luisa Ortega.

After the UNASUR declaration was read out, Maduro lifted his right fist and hit his chest in a sign of victory.

While the summit was taking place, a group of Venezuelans gathered outside of Peru’s presidential palace, beating pots and pans and waving signs protesting the presence of the president-elect. But they were drowned out by a larger number of Peruvian sympathisers of Maduro and the late Chávez (who died of cancer on Mar. 5, after 14 years in power).

Legislator Freddy Otárola Peñaranda of Peru’s governing Nationalist Party, a member of the foreign relations commission, said UNASUR’s decision was in line with the fundamental principle that each country must resolve its own domestic problems.

“With this resolution, UNASUR is helping our Venezuelan brothers and sisters to find peaceful solutions to their problems under the principle of respect for the self-determination of peoples, “he told IPS.

“Venezuelans have to work out their own internal questions, without meddling by anyone,” he added.

Farid Kahhat, head of the international politics department at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, said that once Venezuela’s CNE agreed to audit the boxes with the ballot receipts, a UNASUR declaration was no longer necessary.

But he told IPS it was important that the bloc called for dialogue between the Venezuelan government and the opposition, and that it did not merely back Maduro’s victory.

People in the streets and squares of the Colombian capital are breathing easier. The air is fresh with hope, in contrast to the former leaden and fearful atmosphere of eternal violence and interminable conflict.

Ignacio Ramonet

The war in Colombia is one of the longest-running armed conflicts in the world. It began (or intensified) when Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, an immensely popular social leader who advocated social justice, including financial system reform and land reform, was murdered by the oligarchy on Apr. 9, 1948.

Since then the number of casualties has reached the hundreds of thousands. Today, in a continent that is overwhelmingly at peace, this conflict – Latin America’s last guerrilla war – is like a vestige of another era.

Travelling around the country and talking with diplomats, intellectuals, social workers, journalists, academics or local residents in low-income neighbourhoods, the conclusion that can be drawn is that this time, intentions are serious.

Things have apparently been on the move since President Juan Manuel Santos, in office since August 2010, publicly announced in early September that the government and the insurgents would be starting peace talks, first in Oslo and then in Havana, with the governments of Norway and Cuba as guarantors and of Venezuela and Chile as observers.

Colombians have confidence in the peace process; they feel that internal and external circumstances allow them – prudently – to dream. What if peace were, at last, possible? During the last 65 years of war, it is not the first time that the authorities and the rebels have sat down to negotiate.

Why has President Santos, who was an implacable opponent of the guerrillas as defence minister under former president Álvaro Uribe, chosen the path of negotiation? Because this time, he says, “the stars are aligned to end the conflict.” In other words, the national and international situations could not be more propitious.

In the first place, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) are no longer what they used to be. They remain the most formidable guerrilla force in Latin America, with 20,000 combatants. And the FARC is the only guerrilla army that has not been defeated by force of arms in Latin America. But satellite tracking and massive use of drones (unmanned spy planes) now allow their communications and movements to be tracked.

Secondly, the killings of the FARC’s top commanders (by means of the Israeli technique of selective killings) have made it more difficult for the guerrillas to regroup. In addition, some odious combat methods used by the FARC, such as kidnapping, summary execution of prisoners and indiscriminate attacks on civilians, have provoked rejection by a significant part of civil society.

The FARC are far from defeated, and could probably continue the conflict for years. But they are certainly not able to win it; the opportunity for a military victory has vanished. Peace talks, if they lead to a dignified agreement, would let them leave the field walking tall, to join political life.

But when Santos decided, to widespread surprise, to embark on peace negotiations with the insurgents, it was not only because the FARC were weakened militarily. It was also because the landowning oligarchy opposed to land reform (Colombia is practically the only country in Latin America that, because of the landowners’ blinkered attitude, has not redistributed land) were no longer the dominant power.

In the last few decades, a new urban oligarchy has become established, with far more power than the rural elites.

During the worst years of the war, the large cities were cut off from the countryside. It was impossible to travel overland from one place to another, and the portion of Colombia that was usable was limited to a sort of archipelago of cities. To these large cities came the millions of people fleeing the conflict, and dynamic, growing local economies were developed, based on industry, services, finance, import-export and other sectors.

Today, this is the economy that predominates in the country, and is to a certain extent represented by Santos, just as Uribe represents the large landowners who are opposed to the peace process.

The urban oligarchy wants peace for economic reasons. First, the cost of peace – probably a modest land reform – will be borne by the big landowners. The urban elites are not interested in the soil, but in the subsoil: pacification would allow exploitation of Colombia’s immense mineral resources, for which China is an insatiable market.

The urban business community also perceives that, if peace is achieved, the present excessive military expenditure could be devoted to reducing inequality, which continues to be enormous in the country. The entrepreneurs know that Colombia is heading towards a population of 50 million, a significant critical mass in terms of consumption, if average purchasing power rises.

They are aware of the redistribution policies taking place in several Latin American countries (Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and others) that have reactivated domestic production and promoted the growth of local businesses.

Meanwhile, Latin America is experiencing a high point in terms of integration, with the recent creation of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), in which Colombia plays an important role.

Given these dynamics, the war is an anachronism, as Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has often claimed. The FARC know that this is the case. The time has come for both sides to lay down their arms.

Current events in Latin America show that, in spite of the hurdles, gaining power by peaceful, political means is possible for a progressive organisation. This has been proved in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Uruguay and Brazil, among other countries.

Many perils must still be faced. Opponents of peace (Pentagon hawks, ultra-rightwing members of the military, landowners and paramilitaries) will try to sabotage the process. But everything seems to indicate, while negotiations continue in Havana, that the end of the conflict is approaching. At last.(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Ignacio Ramonet is the editor of Le Monde Diplomatique in Spanish.