And now for a Latin American war?

by James Neilson

What Chávez is doing is providing himself with an excuse to order a preemptive strike against Colombia. Whether he will do so or not is impossible to say, but for an individual of his temperament backing down will not be at all easy.

Openly allying oneself with a guerrilla movement in a neighbouring country is in itself an act of war. Colombia’s government would certainly be entitled to take action should it have reason to think Chávez is sending the FARC arms and funds or letting them have sanctuary in Venezuelan territory.

To most people, the notion that Latin America could be about to see a full-scale war between two important countries may seem ridiculously far-fetched, but that is certainly not the view of Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez. According to him, his Colombian counterpart, Álvaro Uribe, in cahoots with that well-known enthusiast for wars in foreign parts, George W. Bush, is planning to invade Venezuela and could do so any day now. Given the circumstances, that looks most unlikely. Uribe is tremendously popular at home and would have little to gain by indulging in a military adventure against a country that has spent billions of dollars arming itself to the teeth. As for Bush, the last thing he wants right now is to see oil prices go through the roof, as they surely would if Colombia and Venezuela went to war.

Of course, claiming that a foreign country is about to mount an invasion is something aggressive rulers very often do. Hitler made out that Czechoslovakia and then Poland had designs on the Reich, so by intimidating the Czechs and crushing the Poles he was only acting in self-defence. What Chávez is doing is providing himself with an excuse to order a preemptive strike against Colombia. Whether he will do so or not is impossible to say, but for an individual of his temperament backing down will not be at all easy. Furthermore, by making both his compatriots and his neighbours jittery, he has created a situation in which any minor border skirmish could ignite what would be the biggest conflagration Latin America has witnessed since Paraguay and Bolivia flung themselves at each other’s throats back in the 1930s or even the War of the Pacific of fifty years before that.

Sensible people everywhere take it for granted that Chávez’s bark, like that of his “brother” the Iranian Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is far worse than his bite. They see him as a loud-mouthed demagogue whose fiery words are for internal consumption only. But perhaps it would be worthwhile to consider the possibility that he really believes his own rhetoric. And even if he does not take it entirely seriously, there is always the risk that he will feel obliged to show the world that he means exactly what he says.

Chávez has made himself popular among leftists the world over by making it his business to confront the “US empire” at every turn. In addition to treating Bush, or Mr Danger as he calls him, as the devil incarnate, alleging that wherever he goes he leaves behind him a sulphurous stench, he has spent a great deal of money on weaponry and on training militias in preparation for the day his enemy decides the time has come to put an end to his “Bolivarian” revolution. After years of this, Chávez must be feeling a bit galled by Bush’s reluctance to play his allotted part in the drama he has written. To a person of his characteristics, that would be reason enough to stir things up.

Though Chávez’s regime is still strong, the man was clearly rattled by his defeat in a referendum that was designed to ensure he stayed in power for decades to come so he could transform Venezuela into a version of Cuba with oil. He was also humiliated by the failure of the FARC guerrillas to deliver the child Emmanuel who, as it turned out, was not in their keeping but in an orphanage in Bogotá. Though later on the FARC did do him a favour by releasing two high-profile female captives, his attempt to convince the Europeans that they were not terrorists at all but a legitimate political movement that controlled territory and, to boot, Bolivarians like him, made it clear that his own relationship with people who for decades have been at war with Colombia’s democratic governments was far closer than most others would prefer to think. For several weeks now, Chávez has been talking as though the FARC were in fact his proxies. Not surprisingly, his attitude has greatly alarmed Colombia’s government and most of its citizens.

Openly allying oneself with a guerrilla movement in a neighbouring country is in itself an act of war. Colombia’s government would certainly be entitled to take action should it have reason to think Chávez is sending the FARC arms and funds or letting them have sanctuary in Venezuelan territory. In order not to feel forced to make a move, it has chosen to treat Chávez’s statements as so much hot air in the hope that they will turn out to be just that. The US has adopted a similar approach.

Given the circumstances, such reticence is wise, but to judge from Chávez’s recent behaviour he finds it provocative and in response ups the ante. Just how far he is willing to do is still anybody’s guess, but he seems so determined to imagine himself making a heroic last stand against a predatory empire whose troops “will have to pass over our dead bodies” before reaching their objective that what others hope is merely a wild fantasy could easily turn into reality. Should that happen, it would have catastrophic consequences for large numbers of Venezuelans and Colombians who would much rather get on with their lives than be used as cannon fodder in a war that would not only be sure to cause enormous harm to the two countries involved but could also have extremely disagreeable repercussions in the rest of Latin America where many would be only too happy to blame everything nasty that happens on Yankee imperialism.

Source: Buenos Aires Herald