Colombia Passport

The last days of Álvaro Uribe Vélez as president of the Colombians has been especially active preparing the setting for the next leader at the Nariño House. Putting things ‘at place’ inside and outside, the president has declared for example that those who denounced the existence of mass graves in Macarena are ‘enemies of the democratic security‘ and that peace process proposals are strategies of ‘terrorist in order to recover‘, while his government presented proves to OAS of guerrilla camps in Venezuela, causing the expected anger of Chávez with his subsequent breakdown of diplomatic relations with Colombia.

Everybody thinks that the reaction of Chávez is natural: he holds in his opposition to the US military posts in Colombia that Bogotá and Washington declare to be a way to fight drug trafficking in the region. It is without doubt his main argument to fear a possible US invasion over Venezuela to get control on its oil resources, although Venezuela is one of the main world oil providers to the US. Technically, it is little probable that the Obama administration would engage in an invasion to Venezuela, especially now that US does not find the way to withdraw in a political correctness way from Iraq and Afghanistan. Chávez by sure knows that Venezuela by itself is not considered at the same level of US national security’s risk as Washington considers Iran or it considers Libya, North Korea or Syria. However, even the rather tolerant Obama administration – if we compare it with the Bush’s – can feel annoyed by a Venezuela linking openly itself to nations like Iran, buying weapons to Russia and insisting that Venezuela will be invaded by the Americans at any time ‘through the puppet Colombian government.’ At the end you feel that the only country talking of a possible US invasion to Venezuela is only Venezuela and Chávez mentions it at any step of the debate with Colombia. Ahmadeinejad or Kim Jong-il, who have more probabilities to be invaded by Western forces than Venezuela, do not mention such case as Caracas does. Not even Sadam Hussein or Noriega thought they were going to be invaded by US, at least in the beginning. The good question is Why Chávez uses that figure of the invasion when Colombia puts any question to his government? The answer could be that he wants the reduction of the US influence over Latin America and especially over Colombia. It is not good to export his socialist political programs to a country where US has a strong alliance as Colombia. At the same time, the Chávez geopolitical project needs Colombia in order to grow.

It seems that the actions of president Uribe, by the other part of the northern South American borders, are unexpected. Those who think in that way know very little about the Colombian history and about the political tradition of president Uribe. Few days before the most affected businessmen of the Colombo-Venezuelan border were very optimistic with the words of Chávez promising to come to the Juan Manuel Santos possession in Bogotá. It reminded the optimistic words of the Venezuelan president when Barack Obama was elected president of the US to compare him with Bush few months after.

The serious accusations of the Colombian government over guerrilla presence in Venezuela are not new. When the Colombian political conflict goes out of the borders to countries like Venezuela and Ecuador, the song is the same: ´It is a Colombian internal problem´ as a way to prove innocence and take distance over it. What it is a historical demonstrable fact is that the 50 years Colombian political conflict has had the active presence of other countries of the region, more active than what it is possible to imagine, from the same US to Cuba, from Brazil to Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama, from Peru to Argentina and Chile. Everyone, at its own way, with good or bad intentions, has had to see with the oldest regional political conflict. It is not new that the Colombian guerrillas use to take refuge in the neighboring countries. The problem is if such event has been known and supported by Caracas and Quito or they are really innocent of it. The Colombian army bombing over the Raul Reyes camp on March 1rst, 2008 was in Ecuadorian territory. Reyes felt safe in that place. Why? Now well, if a government is innocent of it, if guerrilla camps are hidden there without their knowledge or if it is a false alarm, Why to deny it immediately without an open international investigation? The accusation is deeply serious and it is a causal of war by sure, because it means that the territory of a country is used by an organization that is internationally hold as terrorist to attack another country. It would be the most evident prove that the Colombian political conflict is not constricted to Colombia as Chávez suggests, but he is a willing participant in that conflict. When a political leader wants to participate in a conflict of other nation, it is because he wants something for his own benefit from that conflict.

If the government of Uribe came to be with the strong proposal to end the Maoist Colombian guerrillas, it is not strain therefore that Uribe will let it as a legate to the next government. Uribe took distance from former peace intentions like Pastrana´s and he does not believe in good intentions of the guerrillas, after the Pastrana-Marulanda peace process failure in 2002.

In the middle of the strong declarations of the Venezuelan government after Colombia presented its evidence of allegedly guerrilla camps in Venezuela, there are already some signs of a better understanding: Venezuelan Chancellor Nicolás Maduro said that his government wants to build a relation of respect and cooperation, but at the same time the Venezuelan vice-president Elías Ajua called president Uribe an outlaw and the Colombian ambassador to OAS a criminal. If the Venezuelan government wants to build such a respect, must start to study the most select principles of diplomacy. If serious accusations like the ones of Colombia are to be answer with insults, it creates more suspicious than a real work for the true.

Santos seems to be more Obama than Uribe. He is around the continent making friends and giving hopes to everybody. By sure, his speech of possession on August 7 will be a piece of good promises inside and outside. But at the end we are going to prove something: history is written and the future is frequently consequent with it.