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Saturday
Lagniappe
On
the warpath
Venezuelan
troops
By
The Economist
ON
FEW, if any, other occasions has a head of state issued detailed
orders for military mobilisation as jauntily as if
he were ordering pizza, and on live television. That is what
Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's president, did on March 2nd,
after Colombian forces bombed a camp just inside Ecuador, killing
Raúl Reyes, a senior commander of the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas.
"Minister of defence!" bellowed Mr Chávez,
on "Aló Presidente" ("Hello President"),
his weekly radio and television programme. "Send me ten
battalions to the border, including tanks." He also ordered
the forward deployment of his new Russian fighter-bombers,
threatening that if Colombia's president, Álvaro Uribe,
tried a similar raid on Venezuelan soil he would "send
over the Sukhois". The next day he broke diplomatic ties
with Colombia.
Venezuelan
troops (pictured above) and tanks duly moved to the more
populated points of the long border between the two
countries. Customs officials halted Colombian trucks at the
busiest crossing point, between Cúcuta and San Cristóbal.
What made this performance odd was that it was Ecuador, not
Venezuela, whose sovereignty had been violated. True, Colombia
has often accused Venezuela of harbouring guerrilla leaders
and tolerating camps near the border similar to the one bombed
in Ecuador. But did Venezuela's president have a guilty conscience?
"Maybe he knew what was coming," wrote Teodoro Petkoff,
a guerrilla leader in the 1960s who now edits an opposition
newspaper in Caracas. Mr Chávez's apparent over-reaction
was a pre-emptive attempt to "throw a veil over the revelations
he suspected might come from Raúl Reyes' computer," suggested
Mr Petkoff.
With
Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, following Mr Chávez's
lead, this week's events sent Latin America's diplomats scurrying
to prevent war enveloping the neighbourhood. But they also
laid bare that Colombia's government is coming close to breaking
the back of the FARC, and in the process threatening to shine
light on its murky relations with neighbouring governments.
When
Mr Uribe took office in 2002, the guerrillas were rampant.
His
predecessor had just halted peace negotiations because
the FARC had used a "demilitarised" zone created
to host the talks as a base for recruitment and for kidnapping
(many of the politicians it has held hostage were seized during
the talks). The guerrillas had some 17,000 troops; they blocked
main roads and bombarded small towns, kidnapping and killing
almost at will. To make matters worse, the state's inability
to provide security had spawned murderous right-wing paramilitary
groups.
Mr
Uribe's "democratic security" policy
has achieved a dramatic change. By expanding the security
forces, he has
driven the FARC from populated areas, while persuading most
of the paramilitaries to demobilise. Officials reckon they
have reduced the FARC's ranks to fewer than 11,000. But the
guerrillas withdrew to the vast tropical lowlands, to areas
they have controlled for 40 years. There they resisted a two-year
offensive by 18,000 troops. The army could not get near the
FARC's seven-man governing secretariat, of which Mr Reyes (the
nom de guerre of Luis Edgar Devia) was a member.
Seeking the secretariat
Thwarted, the security forces refined their strategy. They
put more effort into seeking the FARC's leaders using information
from guerrilla deserters and infiltrators, and from sophisticated
bugging equipment provided by the United States. Over the
past year, this has started to pay off. Two FARC regional
commanders have been killed and one captured. In January
and February alone, the army claims to have killed 247 guerrillas
and captured 226, with another 360 deserting. This pressure
has pushed FARC units to the borders with Ecuador, Venezuela
and Panama.
Last
month the government received a tip-off that Mr Reyes was
in a camp less than two kilometres (1¼ miles)
inside Ecuador. Mr Uribe authorised a bombing raid by Brazilian-made
Super Tucano aircraft, which killed at least 21 guerrillas.
Colombian troops then crossed the border to recover Mr Reyes's
corpse—and his laptop computers. (They left three wounded
women guerrillas unattended.)
Most
Colombians were jubilant that the government had struck at
the very
top of the FARC at last. Mr Reyes handled the guerrillas'
relations with the outside world; he was one of three deputies
to Manuel Marulanda, the FARC's elderly leader. For the first
time the security forces have shown that they are capable of
infiltrating and defeating the guerrillas through systematic
strikes, said Román Ortiz of Fundación Ideas
para la Paz, a Bogotá think-tank.
Mr
Uribe doubtless thought that Mr Correa could be mollified
over
the cross-border raid. But spurred on by Mr Chávez,
Ecuador's president sent 3,200 troops to the border and cut
diplomatic ties. He demanded an emergency meeting of the Organisation
of American States (OAS) to condemn Colombia, and set off on
a tour of regional capitals seeking support.
The laptop lode
Almost as important as the killing of Mr Reyes may be the capture
of his laptops. Apart from inside information on the FARC,
according to Colombian officials, they contain documents
which—if true—are embarrassing to Mr Correa but
highly damaging to Mr Chávez. As the FARC's top negotiator,
Mr Reyes appears to have met representatives of many governments.
According to one e-mail, he met Gustavo Larrea, Mr Correa's
security minister last month. Mr Larrea is alleged to have
proposed a formal meeting in Quito to discuss securing the
border and negotiating the release of some of the FARC's
700-odd hostages. Mr Larrea said that Colombian officials
knew of his meeting, which was purely to talk about the hostages.
Ecuadorean officials have long swapped complaints with their
Colombian counterparts about their mutual inability to prevent
the FARC from crossing the border. Ecuador claims to spend
$160m a year containing the spillover. It is also angry about
Colombia spraying coca fields on the border with weedkiller,
which it says drifts south on to other crops.
Nevertheless, Ecuador has given some help to Colombia. Mr
Correa claimed that last year his forces dismantled 47 FARC
camps inside Ecuador and on three occasions carried out joint
operations with Colombian troops. American surveillance aircraft
still patrol over Colombia from an air base in Ecuador, although
Mr Correa has promised not to renew the lease for this when
it expires in 2009.
Raul
Reyes: a trafficker in hostages
By
contrast, Mr Chávez has recently been unambiguous
in his support for the FARC. He fell out with Mr Uribe last
year over his attempt to act as a mediator for the hostages.
Since then he has cast aside his previous stance as an honest
broker seeking a peaceful solution to Colombia's internal
conflict. When the FARC turned over two hostages to him in
January, Mr Chávez hailed the guerrillas as a "true
army" whose status as belligerents should be recognised.
Raul
Reyes
No
other government in the region, not even Cuba's, echoed this
call. On "Aló Presidente" Mr Chávez
held a minute's silence in honour of Mr Reyes, whom he said
he had met three times over the years. He declared that Colombia
needed to be "liberated" from its "subservience" to
the United States.
By
contrast, Mr Chávez has recently been unambiguous
in his support for the FARC. He fell out with Mr Uribe last
year over his attempt to act as a mediator for the hostages.
Since then he has cast aside his previous stance as an honest
broker seeking a peaceful solution to Colombia's internal
conflict. When the FARC turned over two hostages to him in
January, Mr Chávez hailed the guerrillas as a "true
army" whose status as belligerents should be recognised.
No other government in the region, not even Cuba's, echoed
this call. On "Aló Presidente" Mr Chávez
held a minute's silence in honour of Mr Reyes, whom he said
he had met three times over the years. He declared that Colombia
needed to be "liberated" from its "subservience" to
the United States.
Another
document allegedly on Mr Reyes's computer showed that Mr
Chávez paid (or planned to pay) the FARC $300m. An
(unrelated) e-mail to Mr Reyes suggested that the FARC were
trying to obtain uranium for a "dirty bomb". All
this prompted some far-fetched exchanges. Mr Uribe said that
he would denounce Mr Chávez for "financing genocide";
in return, Venezuela accused Colombia's police chief, who revealed
the contents of Mr Reyes's laptop, of being a "drug trafficker".
"This is...a microphone war," said General Raúl
Salazar, a former defence minister. Like many other Venezuelans,
he doubts that it will become a real one. That is not least
because many army officers do not want war with Colombia and
find Mr Chávez's actions an "embarrassment",
said another former defence minister, General Raúl Baduel,
who is now a prominent opponent of the president.
So
what is Mr Chávez's game? One possible answer is
his obsessive search for an external enemy to shore up his
waning popularity at home. In December, his political blueprint
for a socialist Venezuela, with indefinite presidential re-election,
was defeated in a referendum. This came only a year after he
won a second six-year term with 63% of the vote, and was the
first time he had lost a national vote.
In
November Venezuelans are due to vote for mayors and state
governors. They are increasingly discontented about crime,
an inflation rate that has surged to 25% and shortages of
basic goods, including food and cooking gas. Because of Mr
Chávez's mismanagement of agriculture, Venezuela imports
much of its food from Colombia. Any lasting interruption
of trade would hurt both countries (see chart). Reputable
pollsters say that Mr Chávez's popularity has fallen
well below 50%. Visible faction fights have broken out in
his newly formed Unified Socialist Party of Venezuela.
Picking
a fight with Colombia and supporting the FARC are unlikely
to win him friends. One poll, by Hinterlaces, showed
89% opposed to a war and 87% opposed to the FARC. So the reason
for his military mobilisation may be to deter Colombia from
moving against the FARC camps in Venezuela where some Colombian
officials believe that Mr Marulanda is based. A more worrying,
though improbable, hypothesis is that Mr Chávez, a former
army officer, is throwing off all pretence at being a civilian
democrat and, fearing that he may not remain in power for long,
wants to launch an assault on what he sees as American imperialism
and its regional stooge, Mr Uribe.
Although
George Bush gave public support to Mr Uribe, other governments
in the region, led by Brazil, tried to drive a
wedge between Mr Correa and Mr Chávez. There were signs
that this might work. On March 5th Ecuador agreed to an OAS
resolution criticising but not formally condemning Colombia.
The OAS also agreed to investigate the bombing. Once the region's
diplomats have patched things up between these two countries
they face another, more intractable problem: Mr Chávez,
still with oil money but politically on the defensive, may
have thrown in his lot with an outlaw army of drug-traffickers.
The Economist is a leading business
magazine. Petroleumworld
does not necessarily
share these views
Editor's
Note: This commentary was originally published by The Economist,
print edition,
on Mar 6th 2008. Petroleumworld
reprint this article in the interest of our readers.
This commentary was originally air by Oilsandreview
on March 2008. Petroleumworld reprint
this
article
in the
interest of our readers.
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Petroleumworld News 08/01/08
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