VENEZUELA: Chavez Refuses to Be Drawn into Colombia’s Civil War

By Humberto Márquez Reprint | | Print |

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Sep 23 2004 (IPS) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez reiterated his refusal to be drawn into the armed conflict in neighbouring Colombia, after the murders of six Venezuelans by unidentified armed attackers near the border prompted Bogota to pressure him into supporting its Plan Patriot counterinsurgency strategy.

Relations between Colombia, ruled by hard-right President Alvaro Uribe, and Venezuela, which is governed by the left-leaning Chávez, have been acrimonious in the past few years.

But the tension has escalated along the border since a team from PDVSA, Venezuela’s state oil monopoly, and their military guards were attacked on Sep. 17 while inspecting an oilfield in La Charca, a rural district on the banks of the Sarare River and near the border, 700 km southwest of Caracas.

A Venezuelan officer and four soldiers were killed in the attack, along with a woman engineer from PDVSA, and two other members of the team were injured. The attackers, who have not been identified, escaped.

Colombian Defence Minister Jorge Uribe said “the army has reliable intelligence information indicating” that the main leftist rebel group, FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) was responsible for the incident.

His Venezuelan counterpart, General Jorge García, initially said the attackers may have been right-wing Colombian paramilitaries. But he later repeated what President Chávez said on Sep. 19 – that no hypotheses had been ruled out.

Last May, 130 Colombian paramilitaries dressed in Venezuelan military uniforms were captured on a farm near Caracas. The Venezuelan government said they were working for extremist factions of Venezuela’s anti-Chávez opposition movement and right-wing sectors in Colombia.

According to the government, they were waiting to receive weapons, in order to attack military installations to destabilise the country, or to assassinate Chávez.

Political scientist Alberto Garrido told IPS that based on the Sep. 17 incident, “Colombia is pressuring Chávez to revive the Procedimiento Operativo Vigente (POV), a military cooperation instrument agreed by Bogota and Caracas last decade to combat the leftist guerrillas as a common enemy.”

According to Garrido, who has written around a dozen books on Chávez and on the Colombian conflict, Bogota is taking advantage of the circumstances to try to draw Caracas into a confrontation with Colombia’s insurgents, “since (the largely U.S.-financed) Plan Colombia failed to squash the drug trade and began to be replaced by Plan Patriot, which is strictly a counterinsurgency strategy.”

The influential Bogota newspaper El Tiempo stated in an editorial that “the events of the past few days demonstrate that military cooperation is indispensable, in terms of the design and execution of coordinated plans, but with tasks that each of the armies carries out in its own territory.”

In other words, said Garrido, Colombia wants Venezuela to dust off the POV.

Colombian Interior Minister Sabas Pretelt called for “coordinated action by the Colombian and Venezuelan governments to combat these scoundrels who cause harm in both countries.”

In the view of analysts like Garrido and Roberto Giusti, a journalist with more than 20 years’ experience covering border issues, Colombia’s allegation that the attack was staged by the FARC is aimed at placing Chávez in a position of having to explain his refusal to consider the leftist insurgents enemies and decide to fight them.

Venezuelan Vice-President José Vicente Rangel said Wednesday that “the Venezuelan frontier borders a region populated with criminals, and does not, strictly speaking, border the Colombian state.”

“Criminals of all kinds take refuge there, not only different factions of Colombian guerrillas, but also paramilitaries, drug traffickers and common criminals. It is one of the most difficult borders,” said Rangel.

Despite that fact, “Venezuela has kept a close grip on security along the border. We have 20,000 members of the armed forces there, 180 security and vigilance centres, and two theatres of operations,” said Rangel.

Chávez, a retired paratroopers’ officer, announced on a visit to military outposts along the border Wednesday that Venezuela would purchase a fleet of Russian helicopters and other weapons to bolster river and aerial surveillance of border areas, at a cost of 40 million dollars.

In Bogota, the chair of the Senate foreign affairs commission, Manuel Velásquez, complained about “these expressions of verbal terrorism from the Venezuelan vice-president, which are aimed at justifying (the government’s) lax attitude towards the guerrillas. We demand respect.”

Addressing military officers along the border Wednesday, Chávez blamed Colombia and the United States for the armed conflict and its tendency to leak into Venezuela.

“The Colombian state must assume responsibility” for the Sep. 17 attack, he said.

“That is where the guerrillas and the paramilitaries come from, as well as the hired killers and the drug traffickers. We are victims of Colombia’s armed conflict. We cannot be cast now as the victimisers,” the president underlined.

He also held the United States responsible, stating that “those who attempt to dominate the world and stick their noses into things everywhere also have a lot to do with the escalation of this conflict. While U.S. soldiers are inciting war right here, it is inevitable that the conflict will leak over our borders,” said Chávez.

Colombia is the biggest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world, after Israel and Egypt. In addition, the United States has hundreds of military advisers and Green Berets training troops in the South American country.

“Instead of sending troops and arms, attempts should be made to achieve peace, brokered by the United Nations and Organisation of American States (OAS),” argued Chávez.

Venezuela, meanwhile, “will not enter into an alliance with any military group to wage war, but only to wage peace,” he added.

The president reiterated that Venezuela remains neutral, as it has been since his government took power in 1999, because “the factions in the armed conflict in Colombia will only become enemies of Venezuela if they penetrate our territory, violating our sovereignty.”

He added that “if the Colombian guerrillas turn in their weapons some day and become a peaceful political movement, then we might be able to forge alliances.”

The analysts who spoke to IPS pointed out that since FARC’s “National Conference on the Mountains” in 1993, the group has stuck to a decision not to carry out military actions in neighbouring countries – a stance that differed from the position taken by the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN), Colombia’s second-largest insurgent group, which has claimed responsibility for actions in Venezuela in the past.

If the FARC were responsible for the attack in La Charca, that means it would have violated a decision reached over a decade ago. Nor has the group claimed responsibility for the attack on its web site – another element that makes independent analysts doubt that the insurgent organisation was involved in the incident.

Moreover, after Chávez survived an Aug. 15 presidential recall referendum with flying colours – 59 percent of voters expressed their support for him – the FARC issued a statement congratulating the Venezuelan people.

And in interviews with the press, commanders of the powerful insurgent organisation have repeatedly expressed sympathy for the Venezuelan president’s “Bolivarian social revolution”, which has involved numerous programmes – in areas like literacy, health care, and food assistance – in favour of the poor.