While the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have dominated U.S. foreign and defense policies, U.S. policymakers continue to rank Colombia as vital to American national interests. The Colombian government of President Alvaro Uribe has been touted as the United States’ strongest ally in South America, as Venezuela’s leftist President Hugo Chavez—supported by Fidel and Raul Castro—stokes anti-American sentiment in the region. Hundreds of tons of Colombian cocaine, and to a lesser extent heroin, continue to flood into the United States each year. Revenues of this illegal drug trade have financed in large part Marxist guerrilla groups and rightist paramilitary vigilantes, according to U.S. and Colombian law enforcement authorities. The U.S. State Department assesses that these outlawed armed groups—left and right—could have a destabilizing influence on Colombia’s neighbors through spillovers of violence, narcotics, economic instability, and refugees.
The U.S. has helped Colombia confront this situation with hundreds of millions of dollars per year in economic, social, military, and law-enforcement aid over the past decade. But with the Democratic party taking control of both chambers of the U.S. Congress last January, the Bush administration is not going to get a “blank check” for Colombia, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) puts it. Democrats and Republicans have had differences over how much money to earmark for Colombia and on what, as well as over trade policy. Although not following party lines strictly, Democrats have apparently tended to look more than Republicans at social and development issues to try to address root causes of Colombian violence and drug trafficking, while Republicans have seemingly tended to put more emphasis than Democrats on military and police measures.
Lobbying for the pending free trade pact and to keep as much U.S. aid flowing to Colombia as possible, President Uribe visited Washington from May 2 to May 4. His visit produced mixed results, but the bottom line was that it did not accomplish what it set out to do. It did not sway the Democratic-controlled U.S. Congress to support the U.S.-Colombian Free Trade Agreement. Nor did it clear up doubts on the Paragate scandal, which has at least 14 of Uribe’s allies in Colombia’s Congress in jail, along with other politicians, on charges of ties to rightist illegal paramilitaries. The scandal also has his former intelligence director under judicial investigation and his vice president and defense minister embroiled in controversy over their meetings with paramilitary leadership long before they assumed their government posts. They and most of the other politicians in question deny any wrongdoing. Finally, Uribe’s visit did not make a decisive breakthrough to shore up support for the counternarcotics Plan Colombia, though odds are that something can eventually be worked out to continue some form of U.S. funding for the extension of Plan Colombia.
One American human rights activist, who questions the Colombian government’s record regarding the killings of labor unionists and other apparently politically inspired crimes, characterized the Uribe visit as a “disaster” for Uribe, who mostly answered Democrats’ tough questions with evasive generalities. Disaster may be too strong a word, but Uribe seemed to face a number of rough moments, including hecklers and protesters lying nearby wearing body bags.
In this atmosphere, it looks like the Colombian FTA faces steep challenges, the mixed results of Plan Colombia will be scrutinized further, and there will be more questions about the past and present of Uribe and those associated with him over alleged links to paramilitaries and drug traffickers.
Uribe and his family strongly deny having done anything illegal and call the accusations baseless and politically motivated, made by opponents who question the controversial Justice and Peace law he signed permitting more than 30
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