James Petras
A major diplomatic and political conflict has exploded between Colombia and Venezuela, after the revelation of a Colombian government covert operation in Venezuela that involved the recruitment of Venezuelan military and security officers in the December 13 kidnapping of a Colombian leftist leader, Rodrigo Granda.
After investigation by the Venezuelan Ministry of the Interior, and reports and testimony from journalists and other knowledgeable political observers, it is determined that the highest echelons of the Colombian government, including Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, planned and executed this onslaught on Venezuelan sovereignty.
Once direct Colombian involvement was established, the Venezuelan government demanded a public apology from the Colombian government, while seeking a diplomatic solution by blaming Colombian presidential advisers. The Colombian regime took the offensive, launching an aggressive defence of its involvement in the violation of Venezuelan sovereignty and, beyond that, seeking to establish in advance, under the rationale of "national security", the legitimacy of future acts of aggression.
As a result, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has recalled the Venezuelan ambassador from Bogota and suspended all state-to-state commercial and political agreements pending an official state apology. In response, the US government gave its unconditional support to the Colombian violation of Venezuelan sovereignty and urged the Uribe regime to push the conflict further. What began as a diplomatic conflict over a specific incident has turned into a major, defining crisis in US and Latin American political relations with potentially explosive military, economic and political consequences for the entire region.
In justifying the kidnapping of Rodrigo Granda, the Colombian leftist leader, the Uribe regime has promulgated a new foreign policy doctrine which echoes that of the Bush administration: the right of unilateral intervention in any country in which the Colombian government perceives or claims is harboring or providing refuge to political adversaries (which the regime labels as "terrorists") who might threaten the security of the state.
The Uribe doctrine of unilateral intervention echoes the preventive war speech, enunciated in late 2001 by US President George Bush. Clearly Uribe's action and pronouncement is profoundly influenced by the dominance that Washington exercises over the Uribe regime's policies through its extended US$3 billion military aid program and deep penetration of the entire political-defence apparatus.
Uribe's offensive military doctrine involves several major policy propositions:
1) The right to violate any country's sovereignty, including the use of force and violence, directly or in cooperation with local mercenaries.
2) The right to recruit and subvert military and security officials to serve the interests of the Colombian state.
3) The right to allocate funds to bounty hunters or "third parties" to engage in illegal violent acts within a target country.
4) The assertion of the supremacy of Colombian laws, decrees and policies over and against the sovereign laws of the intervened country.
While the immediate point of aggression involves Colombia's relations to Venezuela, the Uribe doctrine lays the basis for unilateral military intervention anywhere in the hemisphere. Uribe's doctrine is a threat to sovereignty of any country in the hemisphere: its intervention in Venezuela and the justification provides a precedent for future aggression.
Colombia's adoption and implementation of the extraterritorial policy as part of its strategy of unilateral intervention is not coincidental, as the Colombian security forces have been trained and advised by US and Israeli secret agencies. More directly, through its US$3 billion dollar military aid program, Washington is in a command-and-control position within all sectors of the Colombian state and thus able to determine the security doctrine of the Uribe regime.
More importantly, Uribe has been a long-time, large-scale practitioner of death-squad politics prior to his ascendancy to the presidency and prior to receiving large-scale US aid. By borrowing the Bush Doctrine from his patron-state, Uribe has internationalised the terror practices which he has pursued for the past 20 years within Colombia.
Prior to its recent spate of high profile transborder kidnappings (Simone Trinidad was seized in Ecuador, Granda in Venezuela), the Uribe regime has engaged in frequent interventions, kidnapping and assassinating popular leaders and soldiers from bordering countries, and providing material and political support to would-be golpistas (coup participants), especially in Venezuela.
Dozens of Colombian refugees fleeing marauding death squads have been pursued into Venezuela and killed or kidnapped over the past three years by Colombian paramilitary and security forces. Six Venezuelan soldiers were killed by Colombian security forces in an "unexplained" incident. More recently, in 2004, more than 130 Colombian paramilitary forces and other irregulars were infiltrated into Venezuela to engage in terrorist violence to trigger action by Venezuelan-US coup-makers. Shortly thereafter Colombian security forces and the US CIA intervened in Ecuador to kidnap a former peace negotiator of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Colombia's major guerrilla group.
What is new and more ominous is that the Uribe regime's de facto policy of extra-territoriality has been converted into a de jure strategic doctrine of unilateral military intervention. Colombia no longer pretends to be engaged in a "covert" selective policy of violating other countries sovereignty but has publicly declared the supremacy of its laws and the right to apply them anywhere in the world, where it unilaterally declares its case for national security.
Colombia's gross violations of Venezuelan and Ecuadorian sovereignty is a policy clearly endorsed and dictated at the highest levels of the Colombian state and endorsed at the highest level of the US government by its principal diplomatic spokesperson in Colombia, Ambassador Anne Woods Patterson, who said: "We endorse Uribe's action 100%".
The "Granda incident" is not simply an isolated diplomatic incident that can be resolved through good faith bilateral negotiations. The kidnapping is part of a larger strategy involving preparations — ideological, political and military — for a large-scale, political-military confrontation with Venezuela.
The enunciation and practice of the Uribe Doctrine has several purposes. One is in line with US and Colombian elite policy: To overthrow the Chavez regime. Chavez opposes the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as its plans to invade Iran. In Latin America, Chavez opposes the US-dominated Free Trade of the Americas Pact.
Secondly the Uribe doctrine seeks to destroy Cuban-Venezuelan trade ties, in order to undermine the Cuban revolutionary government.
Thirdly, the Uribe doctrine is aimed at maintaining Venezuela as an exclusive oil exporter to the US at a time when the Chavez government has signed trade agreements to diversify its oil markets to China and elsewhere.
Fourthly, and most probably most important from the strict perspective of the Uribe regime's survival, the Colombian government is profoundly disturbed by the positive social impact which the Chavez welfare policies have on the majority of Colombians living in poverty, especially his newly announced agrarian reform, and his defence of national public enterprises (especially the state petroleum company) within the framework of free and democratic institutions.
Uribe's austerity policies, his military and paramilitary forces displacement of 3 million peasants, his promotion of greater and greater concentration of wealth and the slashing of social services, and worse, the systematic long-term large-scale violations of human and democratic rights stand in polar opposition to Venezuela under Chavez, which provides a viable, accessible and visible alternative easily understood by vast numbers of Colombians who migrate to Venezuela.
By intervening in Venezuela, by supporting US and its local coup-makers, Uribe hopes to undercut the political appeal of revolutionary politics, whether it takes the form of electoral, guerrilla and/or social movements. Uribe, who sends 130 paramilitary forces to terrorize Venezuela, supports a failed violent coup and then provides asylum and material support to the exiled senior members of the coup and who blatantly bribes Venezuelan soldiers to betray their country to perpetuate a kidnapping, accuses Chavez of harboring terrorists and calls for an "international conference" on "terrorism".
Uribe's purpose in calling for a regional conference is not to discuss the state terrorism which is endemic to and embedded in his regime (with US backing), but to justify the Uribe doctrine of unilateral intervention and to mobilise other regional US clients in support of its internal war and to pressure the Chavez regime to subordinate itself to Colombia's security doctrine.
Chavez has recognized the growing security threat posed by the kidnapping and has terminated state-to-state economic and military projects and recalled his ambassador from Bogota. He has proposed to Uribe a bilateral meeting of heads of state to resolve differences with regard to the kidnapping and related incidents. But no amount of diplomatic manoeuvring on the part of Venezuela's foreign ministry nor aggressive propaganda campaign by the Colombian security state can obviate the fact that the Colombian state is bent on a course of direct military confrontation with Venezuela. The Colombian threat to Venezuela's sovereignty has been taken by Venezuela's right-wing opposition as a welcome intervention. This was manifest in the Congressional debates following the kidnapping of Granda when opposition members of congress condemned the Venezuelan government's defense of national sovereignty and justified Uribe's intervention in Venezuela.
The kidnapping of Granda and the subverting of a few Venezuelan officials can serve as a wake-up call for the Venezuelan leadership to the real threats to national sovereignty which emanate from the US-backed Uribe doctrine. The threat is real, it is systemic and it is immediate.
President Uribe has the backing of an imperial power but Chavez has the backing of the overwhelming majority of Venezuelans and the fact that they will be willing to fight to defend their land, their government and their right to live as a sovereign people. The question of Venezuelan sovereignty is now not simply a question of diplomatic manoeuvres but of organising the mass of the Venezuelans into becoming a military deterrent to any armed aggression.
[This is abridged from Counterpunch. Visit <http://wwww.counterpunch.org>.]
From Green Left Weekly, February 2, 2005.
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