Last week the Annual Officers’ Conference of the GDF took place to discuss topics falling under the less than pithy rubric of ‘Enhancing national security and development through capacity building, empowering troops and strengthening community relations’. As is customary on these occasions the gathering was addressed by the Commander-in-Chief who echoed what all his predecessors before him have said, to wit, “Guyana has no interest in seeking confrontation or conflict …” He did say, however, that the issue of national security had to be taken more seriously, and that we could not afford to become complacent. “We have to have our own thinking process and think tank as to what are the threats we see regionally,” he told the officers.
President Irfaan Ali went on to say, “… We will partner with every single strategic partner that we have to ensure that this region remains peaceful and to ensure that our territorial integrity and security remains intact.” The public probably wrote all this off as representing some of the usual platitudes required for such occasions, but Chief of Staff, Brigadier Godfrey Bess imported a dimension into the conventional pronouncements which was novel. “…There is always an ever-present danger of Russia deploying troops to Venezuela and Guyana being caught in the diplomatic conundrum as it pursues critical bilateral relations with the US and China,” he was quoted as saying.
The concerns about Russian designs in Venezuela have arisen as a consequence of the current crisis over Ukraine, and while no one in any Western capital has any idea whether President Vladimir Putin really does intend to invade that country, his objectives in relation to our neighbour are less opaque. The London Guardian reported Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov as telling Russian television that he could neither confirm nor exclude sending military assets to Cuba and Venezuela if talks with Nato fail. Other officials have also had references to make on the subject, including Russia’s Ambassador to Venezuela.
Autocrats tend to hang together, and Russia has been assisting Venezuela for some time. How-ever, two weeks ago Reuters reported Defence Minister Diego Molano of Colombia as claiming that Venezuela was moving troops to their common border with technical assistance from Russia and Iran. He described it as “foreign interference.” His Venezuelan counterpart Vladimir Padrino was mocking in response: “Colombia, the country which Bogota’s oligarchy has converted into an appendix of the [US] South Command in our America, into a location of U.S. military bases (…) denounces interference in Venezuela…my God!” he tweeted.
The problem is that Colombia’s Arauca province on the one side and Venezuela’s Apure province on the other are centres of drug trafficking, smuggling and other criminal activity of all kinds, with armed factions of former Colombian guerrillas who either broke away from FARC or like the ELN never signed a deal with the government, fighting with each other to control the narcotics trade, among others. Bogotá has long accused Caracas of giving the groups shelter, something which unsurprisingly it has denied. As it is Colombia’s human rights ombudsman is reported as saying that in January this year alone clashes between the groups in Arauca left 66 people dead and displaced 1,200.
Last June, for example, the dissident FARC group attacked Colombian President Ivan Duque’s helicopter with small arms fire at the airport in Cucutá, while a few weeks earlier, the same group had detonated a car bomb inside the military base there, injuring 36 people, including a few US advisers. In both instances the Colombians blamed the Venezuelans for planning and financing the attacks.
Colombia raised its current concerns about Caracas being the beneficiary of Russian military equipment with the Russian Ambassador in Bogotá. However, Reuters reported that Russia had promised that any military equipment would not be used to attack Colombia, destabilise Latin America or find its way into the hands of illegal armed groups. Colombian Foreign Minister Marta Lucia Ramirez was quoted last week as saying that “… no military cooperation of Russia with Venezuela will ever be used for any military action against Colombia, nor any country in Latin America, nor to affect the stability of the region.”
Allison Fedirka of Geopolitical Futures has written that it was unlikely Russia would provide significant technical military assistance to Venezuela for practical reasons. She said it would require major funding and logistical capabilities that Russia already has tied up in its immediate neighbourhood, in addition to which Venezuela’s volatility obviates against any country installing valuable major assets there. Russia’s Ambassador to Caracas had already pointed out that the constitution of Venezuela prohibited the establishment of foreign bases on its soil, although not collaboration at its ports.
The danger, Fedirka considered, was of a different kind. Adverting to the earlier strategic approach of the Soviet Union in this region, when it supported radical and left-wing groups, she wrote: “Russia is more likely to repeat this strategy of supporting guerrillas and criminals in Latin America than it is to deploy major military assets. Both would divert U.S. attention and resources and give Russia leverage in negotiations, but the former involves far lower costs and risk.”
In this scenario the danger is that the clashes on the Venezuela-Colombia border could inflate to become a proxy war between the two global protagonists. The writer noted that in March last year a Russian soldier was said to have been involved in a military operation against a dissident FARC group in Apure, in addition to which there were unconfirmed reports that Russian private military contractors had trained Venezuelan troops. The ELN for its part, had claimed that two of its fronts were coordinating with Colombian and US authorities.
That aside, even if foreign bases cannot be set up in Venezuela, that would not prevent Russian troops from being resident in Venezuelan army bases, as has happened in the case of Cuban army experts, or from Russian mercenaries being employed.
As things stand neither Bogotá nor Caracas is interested in creating a frontline for a new Cold War in the hemisphere, although Fedirka warns that as long as the guerrilla groups remain active and US-Russian relations remain tense, danger will continue to lurk. From our point of view no kind of proxy confrontation, even if it is on the Colombian-Venezuelan border will be good news. These kinds of event tend to have ripple effects across neighbouring states.
Russian investment here is very minor in comparison with that of the Americans and Chinese, although at the moment Russia and China are close, and are at one on the subject of Nato. Venezuela’s Minister of Defence was reported as having complained that Nato was gaining ground in Latin America, and was using Colombia. It might be said that no one in this hemisphere has noticed Nato gaining ground here, and as for Colombia, it has observer status only in the organisation.
Exactly how heightened tensions between the US and Russia would play out in Guyana cannot be easily predicted. The issue of the validity of the 1899 Award is with the World Court, although Venezuela has not accepted its jurisdiction, and may well reject the outcome of the case. That is some time down the road, of course, but in the meantime this country has to keep a watchful eye on the development of a possible “diplomatic conundrum” as Brigadier Bess has called it.