Washington tries to pit Colombia against Venezuela

Using the same old pretext of fighting drug trafficking and terrorism, Washington is pitting one Latin American country against another in an attempt to regain its former uncontested dominance of the region. This time, as several times before, it is using Colombia against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, through his Organization of American States ambassador and close collaborator Luis Hoyos, accused Venezuela on July 22 of harboring in its territory members and encampments of the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN).

Responding to Uribe’s latest aggression, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez broke relations with Colombia. Days before, Chávez had accused Colombia of violating Venezuelan airspace in the border region. Colombia had previously provoked Venezuela with paramilitary and army infiltration through the shared border.

Chávez called an emergency meeting of the Unión de Naciones Suramericanas to discuss this conflict and to propose a regional peace plan. Most Latin American countries value UNASUR for allowing them to settle regional conflicts without U.S. interference. The Colombian regime prefers the Organization of American States precisely because it includes its U.S. master. Therefore the UNASUR meeting held in Quito, Ecuador, July 29 was fruitless.

Why now?

President Uribe leaves office Aug. 7 when newly elected Jose Manuel Santos, also an ultra-rightist, will replace him in the Nariño presidential palace. There has been a great deal of speculation regarding the timing of this accusation against Venezuela. Regardless of Uribe’s personal reasons, his accusation continues, in a more hostile way, the campaign to discredit Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. Santos has made some weak statements implying he wants to improve relations with Venezuela.

Venezuela is preparing for its Sept. 29 regional elections. Both the Colombian and U.S. regimes are supporting the campaign to help destabilize Venezuela by pulling the masses’ support away from Chávez.

Santos needs to improve the country’s economy, particularly in the region near the 1,400-mile Colombia-Venezuela border, whose economy has suffered from the sour relations. Venezuela used to be the second market for Colombian exports before diplomatic relations deteriorated over the years.

Who is Santos?

But Santos’ policies just continue Uribe’s doctrine, albeit with a mellower tone. Unlike Uribe, Santos himself is part of the elite Colombian oligarchy. His family owns the main national daily newspaper, El Tiempo. Santos was Uribe’s defense minister and thus responsible for the criminal bombing in Ecuador on March 1, 2008, which killed FARC leader Raul Reyes and other FARC members, plus three Mexican students.

Santos was also responsible for the “false positives,” that is, youths killed and later falsely presented as FARC guerrillas. Trained in U.S. and British universities, Santos was instrumental in Uribe’s election campaign. He also promoted the deadly “Democratic Security.”

Santos also used the services of the U.S.-based The Rendon Group, which provides public relations and strategic planning, to promote Plan Colombia. TRG has a division called Irregular Warfare Support that “assists our government and military clients in developing new approaches to countering and eroding an adversary’s power, influence and will.” (www.rendon.com)

Colombia’s deadly recent history

The same day Hoyos angrily charged Venezuela with supporting the guerrillas, a public hearing was taking place in Colombia revealing the existence of the largest common grave in recent history in all of Latin America. An international delegation of unionists, British and European parliament members, and other representatives from Spain and the U.S., announced the gruesome discovery of 2,000 bodies in a grave in the small town of La Macarena, just 125 miles south of  Bogotá, the capital.

The bodies are presumably those of the false positives, confirming the accusations made by peasants and other poor people from the area. These include the Mothers of Soacha, a group of women who accuse the Colombian army of killing their sons after offering them jobs but later disappearing them throughout 2007-2008.

Under Plan Colombia, U.S. ally Uribe was responsible for an increase in assassinations and repression against Colombian unionists, activists and others. A recent report by the U.S. Fellowship of Reconciliation and the U.S. Office on Colombia revealed a relationship between extrajudicial executions of civilians and U.S. military funding:

“The study reviewed data on more than 3,000 extrajudicial executions reportedly committed by the armed forces in Colombia since 2002 and lists of more than 500 military units assisted by the United States since 2000.

“We found that for many military units, reports of extrajudicial executions increased during and after the highest levels of U.S. assistance,” according to John Lindsay-Poland, lead author of the study. (Inter Press Service, July 30)

U.S. militarization of the region

Plan Colombia was launched with the pretext of combating drug trafficking, as were the seven new military bases that the Pentagon has access to in Colombia. But the above revelations, known to the Colombian people for years but now confirmed by a U.S.-based organization, expose the lie behind the militarization of the region, which has been steadily increasing over the last few years.

Besides promoting Plan Colombia, Washington has ordered the Fourth Fleet in regional waters, including rivers. It has 11 military bases in Panama; Mexico and Haiti have been militarized; there are military bases in Aruba and Curacao (close to Venezuela); and a second U.S. base has been established in Honduras.

And now Costa Rica, a country long regarded for its culture of peace, has bowed to Washington’s request to deploy 46 U.S. Navy warships, 200 helicopters and 7,000 Marines.

The military coup that Washington orchestrated in Honduras was a warning to the other member nations of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of America (ALBA).

The U.S. effort to encircle Venezuela militarily is Washington’s neoliberal response to the yearning for peace, equality, and social and economic justice of the diverse peoples in the whole continent. It is a war against the ALBA countries, particularly against Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador.

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