U.S. Military Bases in Colombia: Uribe’s Constitutional Hopscotch

Updated on 24 November 2009 (for updates please scroll to the bottom of this post)

In one of Gabriel García Márquez’s novels, the narrator explains that the gringos have even taken the water from one of Colombia’s bays. Last week, the U.S. and Colombia signed an agreement that suggests that the gringos are now also after Colombia’s—and perhaps Venezuela’s—land and skies. The signing of the agreement confirms the news, first reported in this blog on 3 July 2009, that the U.S. military will use, and almost certainly acquire operational control over as many as seven Colombian bases (it seems that the number is going up every other month; although Colombia’s own Cambio magazine reported it could be five, international media said at first it was three, then four, then five, and now it is ‘at least’ seven). The bases in question range from the Palanquero Air Force Base near Bogotá to Colombia’s main naval bases on the Pacific and Caribbean. Apparently the until recently secret agreement also includes a clause that allows the U.S. military free use of all of Colombia’s civilian airports.

Alas, the move has required an intricate constitutional hopscotch on Uribe’s part. According to Colombian laws, Congress needs to approve new treaties and any agreement involving the movement of foreign troops through the country. Aware no doubt that members of Colombia’s legislative branch might not approve of U.S. use of Colombia’s bases, Uribe has come up with what looks, to this blogger at least, like a legal fiction that is as complex as it is misleading. His lawyers have argued that, far from involving a new treaty, let alone the movement of foreign troops across Colombian territory, the ‘Complementary Agreement for Cooperation and Technical Assistance in Defense and Security’ with the United States is no more than a kind of supplement to three or more existing treaties. Aspects of each of these pre-existing treaties allegedly provide the ‘framework treaties’ (‘tratados marco’) with which to implement the new agreement. Of course, the new U.S. bases are not being described as new bases, let alone as U.S. bases. Given that nothing has really changed, or so Uribe’s argument goes, the president of Colombia is entitled to use his powers as the director of Colombia’s foreign policy to give the U.S. military (and its ominous civilian contractors) what is, in effect, free use of Colombia’s military infrastructure.

We owe it to President Lula of Brazil to have cut through this argument in the course of the historic UNASUR meeting that took place in Argentina’s San Carlos de Bariloche on 28 August 2009. After Uribe claimed that the agreement with the U.S. did not constitute a significant change to existing policy, and that the U.S. had had access to Colombian bases for decades, Lula posed the obvious question: if that was the case, why was any agreement whatsoever required with the U.S.?

These and other interventions during the UNASUR gathering revealed the extent to which, less than a year after arriving to power, the Obama-Clinton presidency has managed to do what no other U.S. government has done in the 180 or so years since most South American countries obtained their independence from Spain: to unite South American countries in condemning U.S. policy in the region. It was extraordinary to watch live on television (UNASUR had live TV coverage at the insistence of Uribe himself), how leader after leader stood up either to express doubts about, or even to flatly condemn the U.S. bases in Colombia. Even Perú’s President Alan García, the other major U.S. ally in the continent, was forced to qualify his support for Uribe during the course of the televised meeting. One has to wonder, in this sense, who advised Uribe to insist on wall-to-wall TV coverage; perhaps Uribe thought that other leaders might be cowed into silence if they knew that the media spotlight was shining on them. The effect appears to have been exactly the opposite, which says something about the perceived strength of anti-American feeling across the continent.

As predicted by this blog, even before the agreement was formally signed, it was already providing further incentive for a beefing up of Colombia’s neighbours’ armed forces. In late July Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez went shopping for fighters and helicopters in Russia, and in September Brazil announced an agreement in principle to buy France’s Rafale fighters. For its part, Ecuador has accepted an offer by Venezuela to donate six of its older Mirage fighters to the Ecuadorean Air Force. While not all of the transactions can be attributed directly to the establishment of the U.S. bases in Colombia, there can be little doubt that the bases will fuel the concern of leaders throughout the region. Many will calculate that, at the very least, they must make it as difficult as possible for the U.S. (or its Colombian proxy) to launch the kind of strikes that Reagan launched against Libya in 1986. The hope must be that current or future U.S. leaders will hesitate to launch such attacks if there is a likelihood of U.S. casualties. Venezuela’s and Ecuador’s leaders most also be hoping that, if Uribe knows that his neighbours can strike back at him, he may be less eager to follow the instructions of his U.S. masters.

Unfortunately, this means that the U.S. bases are already paying rich political dividends for the Obama-Clinton presidency: whether this was the plan or not, precious resources that Venezuelan and other regional leaders ought to have poured into improving the lot of the poor are being devoted to the acquisition of advanced weapons systems. It seems likely that, sooner or later, arms traders will succeed in tempting one or more regional leaders with multi-million dollar bribes of the kind that have made Britain’s BAE notorious. If or when this happens, then the right-wing opposition of Chávez and other progressive leaders in the continent will have their work cut out for them.

Asked in a recent BBC World Service interview what he thought of President Obama, Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa politely suggested that Obama was a very nice man, but that he was not in control of the U.S. military ‘machine’ or of the CIA. EcoLogics suggests that Obama is as much in control of these as any other U.S. president has been (which is not to say that he is completely in control); when it comes to the United States, it has always been the case that perorations of democracy on the home front have often been flatly contradicted by policies vis-à-vis countries that the U.S. considers to be a part of its ‘sphere of interest’.

Obama confirmed this practice when he effectively reversed his policy vis-à-vis Colombia’s appalling human rights record. Before the elections, and in a speech given to the AFL-CIO in Philadelphia on April 2nd, 2008, Obama said that he would ‘oppose the Colombia Free Trade Agreement if President Bush insists on sending it to Congress because the violence against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements’. Despite evidence provided by Human Rights Watch that Uribe’s government continues to tolerate, if not itself engage in murderous actions against left-wing activists, Obama now appears to have changed his mind about Colombia: in his remarks after a meeting earlier this year with Uribe, Obama was quoted as saying that

We discussed, most prominently, the interests of both countries in moving forward on a free trade agreement. This is something that has been discussed for quite some time. I have instructed Ambassador Kirk, our United States Trade Representative, to begin working closely with President Uribe’s team on how we can proceed on a free trade agreement. There are obvious difficulties involved in the process and there remains work to do, but I’m confident that ultimately we can strike a deal that is good for the people of Colombia and good for the people of the United States. […] I commended President Uribe on the progress that has been made in human rights in Colombia and dealing with the killings of labor leaders there, and obviously we’ve seen a downward trajectory in the deaths of labor unions and we’ve seen improvements when it comes to prosecution of those who are carrying out these blatant human rights offenses.

Obama’s comments came hard on the heels of the news of the new ‘complementary’ agreement. We can only deduce that Obama’s increasingly complimentary disposition towards Uribe is a function of a quid-pro-quo involving the U.S. bases in Colombia.

Updates (most recent first)

24 November 2009: Many of Uribe’s political opponents believe that he will stop at nothing—he even changed the constitution during his presidency to allow himself to get re-elected not once, but twice. The fruits of this change are finally becoming evident to Colombians themselves. Uribe is now trying to put an end to Colombia’s centuries-old system of checks and balances by brow-beating the one institution that has refused to be cowed: the Supreme Court. After the court failed to rubber stamp Uribe’s choice for a prosecutor general, Uribe has engaged in a war of words with the leading supreme court judge, accusing him of lying. The equivalent in the United States would be for Obama to accuse the chief justice of lying, an act with the greatest political and constitutional consequences. What next? Will Uribe accuse supreme court president Augusto Ibañez of being a ‘terrorist’ and sick the paramilitaries on him? As noted by Human Rights Watch, it would not be the first time that the ruthless politician accuses his political opponents of being ‘terrorists’.

Talk about ‘toxic spiritual rubbish’

It seems that the Roman Catholic Church’s leadership in the Vatican has perfected a technique that we might describe, in the now seemingly ancient tradition of Marxist analysis, as ‘ideological inversion’. It involves turning history upside down, and politics inside out.

Just a few months after Rome’s man in Tegucigalpa, Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, came out in favour of the US-supported coup that deposed the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya, the good Joseph Ratzinger, better known as Pope Benedict XVI, has denounced what he describes as ‘political colonialism‘ in Africa.

Eh?

This blogger is left reeling by the historical revisionism, to not say contradiction which Ratzinger’s denunciation dissimulates. Even if we forget the Church’s own historical role in Latin America and in Africa itself, we cannot overlook the part that Ratzinger  played whilst he was the head of the modern version of the Holy Inquisition: between 1981 and 2005, Ratzinger was the ‘Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith’. As this blog has documented in an analysis of Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga’s intervention in Honduran politics, Ratzinger made it his business to stamp out any hint of liberal, let alone liberation theology throughout the Church. During his pre-papal spell as the head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger was, in effect, the éminence grise of the Roman Catholic Right, and spent over 20 years pursuing anyone who dared to espouse left-wing, or even centre-left views within the Church. (Perhaps this is a good reason to refer to Ratzinger as ‘his Eminence’).

So it is richly ironic to hear the same man, clothed now in the garb of Pope Benedict XVI, denouncing ‘political colonialism’ and the spreading of what he describes, somewhat comically, as materialist ‘toxic spiritual rubbish’. How extraordinary that the man who has arguably done the most to undermine left-wing critiques of the consumer culture that really took off during the Reagan and Thatcherite era is now preaching, albeit from a right-wing perspective, about the pitfalls of that selfsame culture!

That he should use some of the vocabulary that was once so maligned by his own office is particularly ironic. EcoLogics is reminded of a story that seems especially appropriate in these times when the Right is rediscovering the discourse of the Left. In the 1850s, Charles Nisard was an ‘under secretary’ of the French Ministry of Police charged with repressing the street literature that the French authorities found subversive. This allowed him to amass a collection of the so-called ‘colportage’ booklets, which he evidently read rather assiduously. Indeed, he became so fascinated by them that he went on to publish one of the first studies about their use of the Parisian argot.

Ratzinger, like Nisard, is one of countless political figures who have done their best first to destroy, but then to redeploy so-called ‘subversive’ discourses. So it is that we now have Pope Benedict XVI denouncing colonialism in Africa even as he himself prohibits the use of condoms in the same continent, and as his man in Honduras works with coup plotters to try to ensure that the left is banished for good from that country. The world goes round and round, does it not Joseph?

Obama’s rendition

Updated 2 December 2009

Some news in the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will continue the Bush administration’s practice of sending terror suspects to third countries for detention and interrogation, but will monitor their treatment to ensure they are not tortured, administration officials said on Monday.[...] The administration officials, who announced the changes on condition that they not be identified, said that unlike the Bush administration, they would give the State Department a larger role in assuring that transferred detainees would not be abused. [...] “The emphasis will be on insuring that individuals will not face torture if they are sent over overseas,” said one administration official, adding that no detainees will be sent to countries that are known to conduct abusive interrogations.

There is really not much to say beyond what this blogger wrote in a post published on February 6, and which was titled The Day that Obama’s Hope Died. Hillary Clinton, the head of the State Department, supported the Iraq War, and recently refused to describe the coup d’etat in Honduras as that: a coup. Why should we be reassured that people abducted by the CIA (or perhaps by a private contractor like Blackwater, now renamed as a ridiculous ‘Xe Services’) will escape torture, or as the NY Times has so often called it, ‘torment’?

No, this policy exists because it provides the U.S. government with a way of circumventing its own country’s legislation—legislation that was designed to prevent the illegal abduction and torture of people by the U.S. military, and secret services after the Vietnam and Nixon era excesses—excesses that now seem almost timid by comparison to what is happening today. The Obama policy makes a mockery of the notion of due process, and of the recent U.S. protestations over Scotland’s release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. Then again, perhaps it is the other way: if a country feels it can kidnap and torture at will, then of course the head of its FBI would have opposed the application of due process in the Lockerbie case.

The confirmation that renditions will continue means that the slightly ridiculous Reagan era appellation ‘evil empire’ now actually applies to the U.S.. This regardless of the party in power, and the individual who sits in the Oval Office. Doubtless many good people in the U.S. are despairing in much the same way that many of us beyond the U.S. are; the fact nevertheless remains that the Obama administration has effectively sanctioned, and now almost certainly made permanent, the Bush-era authoritarianism. No wonder Obama does not want the U.S. equivalent of a Truth Commission.

How paradoxical—and how tragic—that Obama now inhabits almost exactly the same political place that Bush did: despite his far greater intelligence and worldliness, he too, is but a pawn of the forces that are desperately trying to maintain U.S. ascendancy by recourse to kidnapping and torture.

Update 2 December:  Obama is on course to be a one-term president

The above title would have been unthinkable even a few months ago. Our memories of the despair and desolation generated by the Bush-Cheney administration were still fresh, but rather more importantly, so were the Obama invocations of a new dawn of U.S. politics—this in both the domestic and the international scene. Alas, as early as the beginning of February 2009—some would argue long before—it began to be clear that there would not really be a regime change in what Hugo Chávez rightly describes as ‘el imperio’, the empire. In a post titled ‘Obama, Miliband, and Torture‘, this blog reported on the moves that were afoot in the new administration to quietly reintroduce extraordinary renditions and even the possibility of torture via the backdoor of the classification so used and abused by Bush-Cheney, enemy ‘non-combatants’ and ‘terrorists’. Another post titled ‘The Day that Obama’s Hope Died‘ documented the extent to which Obama had surrounded himself with a coterie of Clinton-era operatives, most of whom were and remain hard-core neoliberals, and political apparatchiks very much in the spell of the kind of corporate welfarism that has long dominated U.S. politics.

In these and other posts, EcoLogics suggested that Obama was thus in some respects a change for the worse: while Bush-Cheney was so obvious and unsubtle in their politics that you could see them coming a mile away, Obama-Clinton are far more astute and are better able to dissimulate the ongoing U.S. abuse of its power. Witness what happened in Honduras (a crass, but not unclever way of eliminating a Chávez ally in Central America), and what is happening now in Colombia. In both cases, we see a return to big stick diplomacy, covered by ambiguous U.S. policy statements in the public domain, and completely unambiguous politics of intervention within the countries themselves. This is precisely the kind of practice that I alluded when I suggested in this blog’s About page that ‘we may face a return to what is, in some respects at least, an older and more hegemonic modus operandi, in Gramsci’s sense of the term.’

The news that Obama is now set to send an extra 30,000 troops to Afghanistan even as he protests rather loudly that those self-same troops will start coming back in July 2011 confirms this point, albeit in a way that most probably signals the beginning of the end of Obama presidency. It may be argued that an army of occupation such as the U.S. has in Afghanistan can only negotiate its way out of conflict from a position of strength. But such a position is undermined the moment it becomes clear that it is only a matter of time before U.S. domestic politics force that army to leave. The crude power of the Soviet army, unconstrained as it was by the niceties of public opinion, failed to put an end to the mullahs’ might in the 1970s and 80s. What on earth has persuaded Obama-Clinton that they can achieve a different outcome by undercutting themselves in the manner that they just have? If the war is morally bankrupt (which it is), and if it has thus far been fought on entirely the wrong military premises (which it has), America’s generals will now have to deal with the fact that the Taliban simply have sit back and wait for the marines to leave. On the home front, Obama’s political commanders will soon discover that this contradictory manoeuvre will satisfy neither the increasingly hysterical Republicans, nor all those on the political centre-right and centre-left who voted for Obama in order to effect regime change within the U.S.. Obama has just opted for a policy which is the military anologon of his economic policy: in both cases, he has allowed himself to be persuaded by right-wing advisers to enact half-measures which will fail to secure political victory in the upcoming elections, as well as the military and economic fortunes of el imperio in the near future.

Was the Obama Administration involved in the Honduran Coup?

We don’t know—though as noted by critical commentators throughout Latin America, the initial silence of the Obama administration spoke louder than words, and now Hillary Clinton isn’t exactly busting a gut to pressure Micheletti and his cronies to reinstate Zelaya.

Here is an article by Nikolas Kozloff in Counterpunch that sheds light on one possible motivation for direct U.S. involvement in the Honduran coup (beyond the more traditional corporate motivations)

Zelaya, Negroponte and the Controversy at Soto Cano: The Coup and the U.S. Airbase in Honduras

Obama: yes you can have it both ways

This blog recently praised Obama for his initial intervention in the wrongful arrest of Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates. Alas, in the end Obama felt compelled to engage in what amounted to a tactical retreat over the affair: the denunciation of the offending policeman was transformed into an opportunity to ‘drink a beer’ with him.

Earlier, this blog published a series of articles that chronicled another Obama retreat: in the days that followed the coup d’etat in Honduras, the Obama administration refused to recognise the event for what it was—a vintage coup on the part of Honduran oligarchy, led by a former member of congress turned dictator, Roberto Micheletti. As the leaders of Latin American countries took turns condemning the coup, a hitherto silent Obama was embarrassed into admitting that Zelaya was the rightful president, and that Zelaya should return to the presidency. Even after Obama accepted this, Hillary Clinton refused to call the coup a coup.

As noted in the post about the intervention of Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, Zelaya’s return was blocked by Micheletti, his accomplices in the military, and the Honduran Roman Catholic Church. The last few weeks have seen a textbook example of hegemonic diplomacy: the U.S. agreed to let Óscar Arias, the president of Costa Rica, act as a mediator, and stood by as Micheletti refused to compromise on the power that he usurped on June 28. Each attempt by Arias to find a way forward has watered down the requirements for the Micheletti camp, even as it has reneged on the original objective of the full restoration of President Zelaya’s democratic powers. As noted by a number of critical commentators, the end result has been that Micheletti and Co. have had time to consolidate their grip on power, even as Zelaya has been left to fly around the continent, ineffectually trying to persuade the U.S. and other countries to force Micheletti out of power.

The subject of today’s post is the startling ideological inversion that Barak Obama has deployed to deflect criticism over the U.S.’s role in the coup—a role which at the very least has involved ‘looking the other way’, but which may well have involved direct U.S. government backing for the conspirators. The coup was at least a year in the making, and so may well have been planned with the assistance of the Bush administration.

According to news reports reaching EcoLogics, Obama is now saying that

‘”The same critics who say the US has not intervened in Honduras are the same people who say we are always intervening and Yankees need to get out of Latin America,” he said, accusing such opponents of “hypocrisy.”’‘”You can’t have it both ways”’.

EcoLogics wonders if Obama called the good Cardinal Rodríguez to ask him for advice on how to turn political reality on its head. Latin American history is littered with U.S. attempts to impose leaders that have been politically and economically convenient. It is, for example, now factually documented that this is what happened in Chile in 1973.

This being the case, there is no contradiction in suggesting that, as Obama puts it, the ‘Yankees’ should ‘get out of Latin America’ (if and when they meddle with the countries’ internal affairs); and suggesting that, if the U.S. really wanted to, it could either bring down the Micheletti dictatorship, or at the very least, make things so hot for the golpistas that they would have no choice but to negotiate with Zelaya.

The point is not to say that the U.S. should intervene, but rather, that it is disingenuous for the Obama administration to pretend that its hands are tied. This is the point that Obama has neatly dissimulated by accusing his critics of hypocrisy.

By way of a postscript: Obama should be careful about how he bandies about the H word: have a look at what Frank Rich has to say about Obama’s policy on healthcare; like a growing number of Democrats, Rich rightly warns Obama that unless he stops ‘punking’ his followers, he has less than four years left in the presidency.