And the extent of President Chávez’s capacity for interference was revealed last Sunday by an almost gleeful Colombian police chief, General Oscar Naranjo, as he read from documents obtained from the laptop of the slain FARC leader suggesting that Venezuela and Ecuador were linked to the Colombian guerilla organization. The allegations were not minor. Included among them were charges that the Venezuelan President had given (or was in the process of giving) US$300M to the FARC; that the Colombian rebels were in discussions with Venezuela about the transfer of weapons; that Mr Chávez had accepted around US$150,000 from the Colombian rebels when he was in jail after a failed coup in 1992, and had expressed himself “grateful”; that Venezuelan Interior and Justice Minister Ramón Rodriguez had met with Reyes; that FARC leader Manuel Marulanda had written President Chávez saying, “We, the FARC, will always be ready, in the case of gringo aggression, to lend our modest knowledge in defence of the Bolivarian revolution”; and that President Chávez himself had met with FARC leaders some time after he lost the December 2 referendum last year.
President Chávez immediately fired off a salvo of his own, producing a laptop seized in Venezuela implicating General Naranjo in drug-trafficking. It had all the impact of a damp squib, since even supposing there were substance to this allegation, it did not constitute a refutation of Colombia’s claim of Caracas’s active support for the FARC.
Mr Chávez’s temper could not have been improved by a report on the Colombian radio station, RCN, which cited military sources as saying that it was a phone call from none other than the Venezuelan head of state himself which had revealed the location of Reyes. RCN’s report, which was quoted by El Universal in Caracas, claimed that the call had been made on February 27 following the delivery of the four FARC hostages to Venezuela, and that President Chávez had been “thrilled,” and had phoned Reyes to tell him that everything had gone well. The Colombian intelligence agencies detected the call, said RCN, and established that Reyes was in Colombia near the border with Ecuador. He subsequently crossed the border, however, and “then the raid was launched.”
According to the Caracas daily, RCN went on to make the allegation – again based on military sources – that FARC supreme leader Manuel Marulanda was “taking shelter in Venezuela.” The report said that he was “ill,” and was staying at a ranch not very close to the border. The radio station also made the assertion that President Chávez had moved his troops to the frontier with Colombia in order to protect Marulanda, and to prevent a repetition of the sortie into Ecuador, this time on Venezuelan soil. It is impossible to know, of course, whether any of this is true; all that can be said where the matter of Marulanda is concerned is that President Chávez reacted precipitately to the Ecuador incursion, thundering away at Bogotá even before President Correa of Ecuador had had a chance to open his mouth on the subject. And as the international press has repeatedly pointed out, his territory was not the one which was violated. Mr Chávez threatened that if Colombia attempted anything of the kind in Venezuela then there would be a military response, but considering that he has always insisted he was not giving FARC safe haven, why should he speak as if Colombia had cause to cross the Venezuelan border? Of course, given the fact that Mr Chávez is by disposition intemperate, it may be dangerous to read too much into his statements.
As for President Correa, he has emerged from the episode sounding somewhat hollow. General Naranjo did not spare Ecuador either when reading from the documents said to originate from Reyes’s laptop. According to the Associated Press he claimed that Reyes had met Ecuador’s Minister of Internal Security, and the two had discussed Mr Correa’s “interest in making official relations with the FARC.” Furthermore, Ecuador’s government was said to regard Mr Uribe as a “danger to the region,” while an envoy from President Correa was claimed to have indicated that Quito was prepared to “co-ordinate” its social development plan with FARC along the Colombian border.
General Naranjo also said that Mr Correa was interested in the release of a hostage. President Uribe himself at the Rio summit on Friday added the accusation that the FARC had contributed money to President Correa’s election campaign. The angry Ecuadorian head of state retaliated by calling his Colombian counterpart a “liar”; it was an insult which was bandied around South America rather a lot last week.
In his five-nation spin to canvas support against Colombia, President Correa had admitted the meeting between his security minister and a FARC representative, but said it was in connection with negotiations to free 12 hostages, including the French-Colombian Ingrid Betancourt and three Americans. “All of this was frustrated by the war-mongering, authoritarian hands” of the Colombian government, he was quoted by the Associated Press as saying. He also told the media that Ecuador had dismantled 47 Colombian rebel camps in its territory last year, while his security minister said that shortly before Reyes died, the guerillas had agreed to vacate Ecuador.
From President Uribe’s point of view, once he knew Reyes’s location there would have been no point in alerting the Ecuadoreans, because he had good reason for believing they had no interest in capturing the guerilla leader. Not only had Colombia complained frequently about the guerillas using Ecuador as a base to no avail, but President Correa had followed President Chávez in proposing that the FARC should be recognized as legitimate belligerents in a civil war. It might be added that the possibility had been hinted at in Caracas that FARC-occupied territory bordering Venezuela could be recognized.
Mr Correa, in short, had declared his hand in advance so President Uribe could perhaps afford to take a calculated risk. Despite the fact that he has been obliged to apologize and Colombian actions have been condemned at the Rio summit, nevertheless, for him the risk has paid off because Ecuador and Venezuela have now been exposed. President Chávez who is always quick to react to a change in wind direction, was all smiles at the end of the Rio meeting and responded warmly to President Uribe; President Correa, on the other hand, while going through the motions could barely mask his anger.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that what Venezuela and Ecuador (and possibly their other left-wing allies as well) had been intending to do was to isolate Colombia and undermine its government through the agency of FARC, with a view especially to severing the Colombian connection with the United States. Their cover for dealing with the guerillas was hostage release negotiations. Never mind that FARC is engaged in attempting to overthrow a democratically elected government; never mind that it is the largest narco-trafficker in the region; never mind that it has kidnapped many hundreds of citizens and still holds some 750 or so, most of whose families cannot afford the ransom for their release; and never mind that its activities to a greater or lesser degree have had a destabilising effect on the social fabric of the entire continent – all of that is unimportant to the promoters of the Bolivarian project.
This is one of those paradoxical situations where Colombia was undoubtedly wrong, but nevertheless the consequences of what she did are unlikely to be regretted by the genuine democratic forces in this hemisphere.
