CONGRESSIONAL TESTIMONY
________________________________________________________________________
The Crisis in the
Testimony
before
The
Subcommittee on the
Committee on
Foreign Affairs
April 10, 2008
Ray Walser,
Ph. D.
Senior Policy
Analyst for
The Heritage
Foundation
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*******************
My name is Ray Walser. I am the Senior Policy Analyst for
On the night of February 29, 2008,
a group of guerrillas/terrorists of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC) and sympathizers bedded down for the evening in a rustic but well-established
encampment in the jungle near the
Suddenly, in
the first hour of March 1,
Called Operation Phoenix by the Colombians, the punitive strike aimed a carefully coordinated blow at the commander of the FARC’s Southern Front and the number two man in the leadership of the insurgent/terrorist force. It was viewed by the operation’s architects in Bogotá as a significant blow to the FARC’s seemingly invulnerable leadership structure.
Reyes argued the Colombian government was no ordinary guerrilla fighter! For years, he played a conspicuous role as a godfather to the FARC on matters as diverse as war fighting, murder, kidnapping, drug trafficking, hostage-taking and hostage-negotiations, dealing with foreign governments, meeting with a steady stream of sympathizers and presumably working to secure international backing for the FARC. While recognized as a public face of the FARC to the outside world of the extreme and violent Left, he was in the eyes of the Colombian courts a notorious criminal fugitive with over 100 charges or convictions for murder, kidnapping and extortion outstanding.
The Colombian military strike against Reyes and FARC guerrillas ignited a diplomatic crisis that was perhaps the most acute witnessed in the Hemisphere in the last decade. Now, more than a month after the initial incidents, the threat of direct conflict between nations has largely subsided but the polarization and loss of cooperation and trust between nations, particularly between Ecuador and Colombia, will have serious repercussions throughout the Andean region, especially if foreign governments further align themselves with the FARC and the so-called revolutionary forces active in and around Colombia.
The basic facts of the raid are no longer in dispute. The Colombian military had been hunting Reyes for years and earlier operations to eliminate him were frustrated on several occasions. Clearly the Colombians would have preferred to strike against the elusive Reyes on Colombian territory, but this proved difficult. The Colombians were able to able to fix Reyes’ location in a well-established safe haven on Ecuadorian soil, reportedly by tracing phone conversations with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.
President Álvaro Uribe and the Colombians surely weighed the cost and benefits of the operation before launching it. Since previous cross border incidents had produced minimal consequences, perhaps they believed the attack would cause no significant fallout.
The Colombians reported that fighter aircraft that delivered the bombs on the FARC camp did not enter Ecuadorian air space. Four Colombian Blackhawks, however, carrying special forces and judicial police did cross the frontier after the initial bombardment. The Colombian force exchanged fire with the surviving members of the FARC band and a Colombian solider died in the firefight.
Colombia’s President
Uribe admitted to considered notifying the Ecuadorian government in advance of
the operation but did not for fear of someone warning Reyes, and perhaps also
for fear of a negative response. It was
not until after the attack was underway did President Uribe telephoned
President Rafael Correa of
On March 2, the Colombian government began releasing selective documents recovered from the computers belonging to Reyes. The FARC documents in the form of letters and e-mails between members of the FARC leadership indicated close connections between the FARC and the political leadership of Ecuador and Venezuela, not just on matters relating to the exchange of political hostages the FARC holds, including former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and three U.S. citizen contractors, but also information regarding contacts with Ecuadorian Minister of Security Larrea about establishing a more permissive operating environment for the FARC in Ecuador and about friendship and support offered by President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.
The partial release of documents
exposed the extensive web of the FARC’s foreign ties and friendships. If
On the other hand, as the crisis
mounted,
Given the
high value assigned to the target, the Colombians took a calculated risk. Perhaps they believed mistakenly they could
strike without serious repercussions in the largely ungoverned, unpoliced space
where the FARC, not the government of
On balance, the Colombians, when presented with an opportunity to strike punitively at a dangerous terrorist capo dei capo, they did not let the opportunity slip. I believe leaders in the U.S government would have acted similarly to protect the lives of its citizens.
The reaction of the government of
On March 2, President Correa denounced
the raid as “an act of aggression” and expelled the Colombian ambassador. He also called several hemispheric presidents
and demanded the prompt involvement of the OAS.
On March 3,
Correa and his senior officials set
out within the first 24 hours to disentangle themselves from any possible
connections with the FARC. Correa
dismissed the Colombian efforts to link his government with the FARC via the
computer files as a comedy [“una cantinflada”].
The refusal to recognize the potential validity of the information contained in
the FARC files was equally advanced by the Foreign Minister
President Correa visited five
countries to argue the Ecuadorian position on the incident and to pressure for a
sharp condemnation of
Ecuador’s officials attempted to paint a positive image of their government’s non-involvement in the Colombian conflict, to deny any complicity with the FARC in providing havens and to demonstrate that Ecuador was doing all that was possible to keep the FARC out of Ecuador.
In my view, in their zeal to defend national sovereignty and to win a diplomatic contest with Colombia, President Correa and high Ecuadorian officials rendered a one-sided version of very nuanced and difficult case, obscuring inconvenient facts such as the failure of their civil and military intelligence to locate an established guerrilla encampment that could be reached in a matter of days by visiting Mexican Leftists.
On Sunday, March 3, President Hugo
Chávez of
Chávez proceeded to reaffirm
solidarity with
In my view the response of the President of Venezuela was to encourage what one Latin American commentator called “the diplomacy of microphones.” How far Chávez intended to go with his brand of brinksmanship remains unclear. But if he had wanted to manufacture an incident and provoke a shooting war, he had all the opportunities.
The Organization of American States- 1
The incident was one of the gravest
challenges to the OAS in the last decade. Under Secretary General José Miguel
Insulza, the OAS moved swiftly to defuse the crisis and reduce it to manageable
proportions. On March 4, the OAS
convened its permanent council.
“The territory of a State is inviolable; it may not be the object, even temporarily, of military occupation or of other measures of force taken by another State, directly or indirectly, on any grounds whatsoever. No territorial acquisitions or special advantages obtained either by force or by other means of coercion shall be recognized.”
As Secretary General Insulza noted, “this principle is one of the cornerstones of the international legal order and, in particular, the inter-American legal system, and a principle that has always been indisputably linked to the principle of peaceful settlement of controversies between States and cooperation to safeguard peace, security, and development.”
The debate in the OAS centered on often-repeated prohibitions against the violation of territorial sovereignty enshrined in numerous instruments of the Inter-American and international system versus an equally recognized right of self-defense, between the protection of state sovereignty and the duty not to allow one’s territory to be used to harm others. At the core of the debate was the clash between classic upholders of an overarching set of international laws and realists who rigorously defend their right and obligation to protect the lives and safety of their people in an essentially anarchical international environment.
The initial OAS resolution issued
on March 5 reaffirmed “the principle that the territory of a state is
inviolable and may not be the object, even temporarily of military occupation
or other measures of force taken by another State, directly or indirectly, on
any ground whatsoever.” The permanent
council instructed the OAS Secretary General to lead a mission to
The Rio Group
It was fortuitous that most regional
heads of state of the Hemisphere were already committed to meeting in the
The gathering of most presidents of
the region [
Although at one point, during President Uribe’s initial speech, President
Correa stormed out of the session, he returned.
Uribe yielded to the demand for a public apology for the March 1 incident
and a promise there would be no repeat of attacks on Ecuadorian soil. Dominican President Leonel Fernández engineered
a meeting of Presidents Correa and Uribe, including handshakes and abrazos.
The march toward war yielded to promises
of peace and renewed friendship.
The passage of a resolution by the Rio Group greatly defused the animosity
built up in the previous six days. The
key text of the resolution stated:
“We reject the violation of the territorial integrity of Ecuador, and consequently reaffirm the principle that the territory of a State is inviolable and cannot be the object of military occupation nor other measures of force taken by another State, direct or indirectly, whatever the reason."
Wrote the
The Organization of American States – 2
The foreign minister gathered for the OAS ministerial meeting on March 17. After lengthy discussion, the OAS agreed to a resolution, the final text of which called on all OAS members and the involved parties:
To reject the incursion by Colombian military
forces and police personnel into the
To take note of the full apology for the events that occurred and the pledge by Colombia, expressed by its President to the Rio Group and reiterated by its delegation at this Meeting of Consultation, that they would not be repeated under any circumstances.
To reiterate the firm commitment of all member states to combat threats to security caused by the actions of irregular groups or criminal organizations, especially those associated with drug trafficking.
To instruct the Secretary General to use his good offices to implement a mechanism for observing compliance with this resolution and the restoration of an atmosphere of trust between the two Parties.
The ministers
charged the OAS with encouraging
While the OAS resolution appeared
to vindicate
The
The initial response of the
In the OAS debate on March 17, the
On March 18, President Bush spoke
of the connections between the FARC and
A U.S. position that stands up for a vital friend and partner in the
Hemisphere and recognizes the transnational, destabilizing threats posed by the
narco-terrorists of the FARC and those who support and sympathize its
activities is, I believe, fully consistent with the security interests of the
American people.
Observations/Conclusions
The March crisis in the
The crisis for these reasons was also contained by the active diplomacy of the OAS and the Rio Group and by the reluctance of the parties themselves to escalate the crisis to the point of war.
The crisis, nevertheless, will likely
have enduring and troubling repercussions. The three nations most involved in the
conflict are drifting away from any collective recognition of the need to resolve
either the problem of the FARC and other irregular combatant and criminal
forces and to enhance regional cooperation in the fight against the drug trade. The political will needed to confront the
true enemies of organized, legal states is becoming lost in a growing thicket
of ideological divisions, personal rivalries and myopic decision-making. At a time when the FARC is increasingly exposed
as a murderous, narco-terrorist group lacking political legitimacy in
The longer-term fissures underlying the March crisis will be difficult to resolve as long as there is a loss of common understandings and a clash of rival paradigms for Latin America’s future political and economic course: a battle between a generally liberal, democratic, free-market philosophy based on partnership with the U.S. and the new Bolivarian brand of activism which holds the view that there should be no enemies on the Left, even if the parties operating under the mantle of “revolutionary internationalism” are prepared to follow the path of armed violence and rebellion and have unalterable terrorist and narcotics-trafficking tendencies.
Where there is an increased need for cooperation among governments to control ungoverned space, to act in concert against narcotics-trafficking and to curb and eliminate the actions of irregular forces is giving way to bitter political rivalries and partisanship. The region is in the process of creating, as one veteran Latin American official observed, a classic zero-sum game.
Another troubling facet of the
crisis is the reluctance of many in the hemisphere, adhering to the
long-established principle of non-intervention to speak out openly and
forcefully against the FARC and to join with the people of Colombian in
repudiating acts of terrorism by all parties. This laissez-faire attitude gives further
oxygen to the fire that has consumed
Finally, a central concept in the war
against drugs has been the recognition that strong regional cooperation from
source-to-market is necessary if progress is to be made in the anti-narcotics
fight. The breakdown in cooperation with
two of the five countries that border upon
The March 1 incident is a stark reminder of the serious governance and security problems that prevail in parts of the hemisphere. The presence of immense ungoverned spaces and the continued existence of severe transnational and terrorist threats demonstrate the need to overhaul or transform existing practices of international law. In a world of inviolable, sovereign states, what rights, what mechanisms do nations, operating in a real time world, have to defend themselves against elusive terrorist or insurgent forces operating in ungoverned space beyond its borders, especially if these hostile forces operate with the tacit support of another sovereign state that is either unable or unwilling to enforce its borders and remove the belligerent force?