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Ignoring Outrage, Obama Set to Expand Pentagon Presence in Colombia

By Moira Birss

Imagine that you live in a nice house in a tense neighborhood. Your neighbors haven’t been too pleased with you lately, and you have a terrible roach infestation running havoc in your house. But perhaps there’s hope.

A big, strong guy lives down the street, and is offering to help out. He has big guns and says he has just the spray to get rid of those pesky roaches if you just let him crash at your place.

I’m not the first to have used the tough-neighbor analogy when discussing a current proposal for seven U.S. military bases in Colombia, but others have failed to mention all the problematic side effects of inviting the neighbor to stay.

This neighbor has a very sketchy reputation and just may try to take advantage of your sister, not to mention raid your fridge and clog up your toilet. His presence will really upset your neighbors, even the ones with whom you have been friendly.

Although he says he’s only staying at your house to help with the roaches and maybe intimidate the troublesome folks next door a bit, he always seems to get involved in other things: He traipses around in the neighbors’ gardens and hassles his host’s family members.  Besides, his record in getting rid of the roaches isn’t all that exemplary.

Is it really worth it?

Perhaps this analogy simplifies matters too much, but I’m not the only one playing with rhetoric. Barack Obama continues to defend the expansion of U.S. military operations in Latin America, arguing that the U.S. is not establishing bases in Colombia but simply extending existing agreements with the country.

Under U.S. military terminology—using euphemisms that call to mind George W. Bush’s "Clear Skies Initiative"—the proposals for Colombia would not be bases because they would not be property of the U.S, but instead be called Forward Operating Locations, or Cooperative Security Locations. 

Nonetheless, the U.S. would still have control over what happens in those installations, as it does in bases, and is insisting on immunity under Colombian law for its personnel. Argentine President Cristina Kirchner said it well when she joked to Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe last week, "Come on, nowhere in the world is a Gen. Fernandez going to give orders to a Gen. Johnson!"

The Colombian government has also been toying with words. The wordsmithing is apparent in a recent in a memo to the Colombian Senate explaining that the base plan is "a simplified agreement of technical cooperation and development of related bilateral agreements already in force."

Previous bilateral agreements, however, make no mention of U.S. military personnel being based in Colombia. So it’s a bit of a stretch to claim this agreement is simply a matter of extending previous accords.

In Colombia, this renaming is part of the Uribe administration’s strategy to slide the agreement through without submitting it to the Colombian Congress for approval. You see, the Colombian constitution requires congressional approval for international treaties and the submission of such agreements to review by the Constitutional Court, but not for extensions of previous treaties. 

Despite Uribe’s effort to avoid congressional input, some in Colombia’s Senate aren’t too sure that they like the idea of inviting the neighbor to stay. 

Senators from the left-wing political party Polo Democrático have insisted on a public debate and are now fighting to have the administration submit the agreement to Congress, as the law requires.

The first session of the debate, held Tuesday, raised some very worrisome issues. Sen. Jorge Enrique Robledo of the Polo Democrático expressed concern that he and other members of opposition parties, investigative journalists and human-rights activists might themselves be in danger if the U.S. military sets up house in Colombia, given that a stated aim of the bases is counterterrorism.

"If Uribe claims that we are the ‘intellectual bloc of the FARC’ because we disagree with him, and the U.S. classifies the FARC as a terrorist organization, will we then be targets, too?" he asked.   

Even supporters of the bases have inadvertently provided reasons to worry. During the debate, a senator supporting the bases spent over 40 minutes comparing, via a PowerPoint presentation complete with photos and detailed descriptions, the military arsenals of Colombia and Venezuela. He concluded that since Colombia’s arsenal is substantially smaller and less powerful than Venezuela’s and since Colombia would therefore lose in a war against its neighbor, Colombia should accept the U.S. military bases with open arms. 

The senator, whose information was clearly informed, if not supplied, by the Colombian military, thus affirmed the fear of those opposing the bases that the installations may well be used in aggressions against Colombia’s neighbors.

Perhaps Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez isn’t over the top when he cautions that the bases could mean war. Arlene Tickner, a political science professor at the University of the Andes in Bogotá, affirms Chavez’s concerns. She says U.S. government documents suggest that Palanquero, one of the sites for the proposed bases, could eventually launch missions far beyond Colombia.

"One of the interests of the U.S. Air Force in particular is to use the base in Palanquero to do surveillance activities from the air outside of Colombia and throughout the continent, eventually using the base to reach even Africa."  

Also raised in the Senate debate was the serious concern about the behavior of U.S. soldiers and contractors given the U.S.’s insistence on complete immunity under Colombian law for its personnel. This would likely also apply to subcontractors, like Dyncorp, which has been accused of ignoring, even firing, whistleblowers; tolerating widespread sex trafficking among its employees, and failing to act even in documented cases of rape against girls on a U.S. base in Bosnia.

These concerns are important because most crimes committed outside the United States are beyond the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, and Status of Forces Agreements, part of the negotiations of foreign military installations, protect U.S. personnel from legal action even in the case of the most serious crimes. 

This issue clearly scares the bases’ proponents: in the Senate debate, senators supporting the plan refused to allow the mother of a 12-year-old girl raped by U.S. soldiers in Melgar, Colombia, to speak, calling such testimony "pornographic" and irrelevant to a discussion of war planes and tanks.   

All these local and regional concerns seem to be making the Uribe and Obama administrations sweat. In a memo to the Colombian Senate, the defense minister said final negotiations wouldn’t happen until the last weekend of August. Now, however, the Colombian daily El Tiempo has reported that a Colombian negotiations team will be in Washington this weekend to finalize the bases deal.

This new urgency demonstrates that leaders want to move the deal before local and regional debates heat up further. 

Opposition in the U.S. is also mounting. On August 20, more than 100 U.S. organizations sent a joint letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urging her to halt negotiations with Colombia.

Referring to Obama’s statement to hemispheric leaders in April, in which he cautioned against military-only interactions with the region, the organizations called on the administration to "broaden relationships with South America and value respect for human rights," arguing that "the United States should not create a fortress in Colombia in concert with the region’s worst rights violators, the Colombian military."

The groups oppose the bases because of the potential to escalate regional conflicts; the precedent for mission creep in current bases like Manta, Ecuador; the fact that such an agreement demonstrates tacit support for the horrendous human-rights record of the Colombian army; and the stated counternarcotics aim for the bases despite the failure of the U.S. war on drugs.

You, too, can take action. Send a message to Clinton that you don’t want U.S. military bases in Colombia.  

This article originally appeared at Alternet.org.

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• Reader Comments

  Columbia is a no go.

  Single payer, no bullshit or addendums.

  Bring all of the troops home NOW.

  I said in 1980, it makes no difference if the Iranians have oil.  They have to sell it;

  Venezuela is a nice country trying to get ahead.  My president is rapidly becoming a piece of right winger no think..

  Impeachment now, there are enough votes and I personally could draw up a bill for impeachment based strictly on war crimes committed in the last seven months of war crimes;

  Posted by evil is evil on Aug 26, 2009 at 9:10 AM

  With the nation bankrupt the military industrial complex still expands.

  These days our country’s principle worldwide export is war and the implements and technologies of war (large scale violence and tools of the trade).

  Since WWII well over half of collected revenues have been allocated toward the ‘defense’ killing machine - a major player in the current bankruptcy.

  When do taxpayers wake up and cut the military industrial budget by 75%?

  Want to support our troops? The ONLY way is to bring ‘em home.

  Stay out of Columbia

  Posted by John Danilow on Aug 26, 2009 at 1:46 PM

  Indeed, Ms. Birss, you were not been the first one to use my neighborhood analogy. And although I sort of appreciate that you put a link to my column in Colombia Reports (the least you could do), I do not think it kind or professional that you almost copied and pasted the first paragraph of my column to begin your own. Just change rats for roaches. That will do.

  Also, I am outraged that you used my own ideas to advance your arguments, considering that they are both so opposed to mine and deeply flawed.

  There seem to be quite a few Americans in Colombia, like yourself, working against the interests of my country and supporting deleterious and vague ideas of independence and sovereignty. In reality, although perhaps inadvertently, you are protecting the interests of thugs, drug lords, and expansionist autocrats.

  It is time to bring into Colombia the other Americans that will help my country in the fight against terror and drugs.

  I’m also filing a complaint with your editor. Have a nice day.

  Posted by Gustavo Silva Cano on Aug 26, 2009 at 3:57 PM

  Mr. Silva,

  Yes I played on your good neighbor analogy, though I clearly did not cut-and-paste. Such back-and-forth between journalists is an inherent part of having one’s work on the public record.  If you are not okay with people responding to your work and riffing on it, you should write only to people who agree with you.  And as you noted, I did cite your article.  If anyone can claim authorship of the idea, however, it would be Franklin Roosevelt.  Others have also used such an analogy, like in reference to the U.S.’s involvement in Iraq. 

  Living in Colombia I can plainly see that your point of view is not the only one in the country; plenty of Colombians oppose the bases deal.  In addition those that I mention in my article, I have talked with dozens of individuals, representing a wide range of organizations and communities, who emphatically do not support the bases deal.  Besides, as a U.S. citizen I also have just as much right to oppose the deal as you do to support it.

  Regards,
  Moira Birss

  Posted by Moira Birss on Aug 28, 2009 at 6:08 PM

  Hi Gustavo. I read your article on the military bases (quick note to your article. It’s an op-ed intended to induce discussion. I don’t quite understand your snap reaction to a response, wasn’t that the intention? If so I applaud your effectiveness). Speaking of your response, you did not address one, not a single, issue Ms. Briss presented in the above article. Instead you dealt claims of plagiarism, arrogance, and western (US) naiveté’s to Colombia. You’ve used empty rhetoric to deflect the fact that you failed to have a valid rebuttal to any of the above realities.

  I’m curious to your response as to the free reign your country is conceding to the US?
  Or the precedence that exists for the US’s tumultuous relationships to the countries they occupy?
  Or the questionable locations of these bases?
  Or the resistance from within Colombia to these bases and the expediency in which they are being appoved?
  Or …well you know the questions you read the above.
  We’ve seen how most of the above questions play out in like of Iraq, Philippines, Honduras, Panama, Guam, Hawaii, it goes on. Are you so diluted in the tired Uribe talking points that you think the US military, which invested more military funds in Colombia (outside Isreal) than any other country, is going to waltz in, roll over, and not have an alternative agenda?

  No, I know you aren’t. You seem pretty sharp, and I actually enjoy your writing, it’s accessible and engaging. But I’m much more interested in reading your response here about an issue that holds huge repercussions to both our countries (this is very far from a Colombia exclusive issue). Instead you throw allegations and revert to the tired tactic of trying to deflect fact with nonsense. I’d enjoy reading your reaction to the piece not your retaliation.

  I’m going to end on two gems from your post:

  “There seem to be quite a few Americans in Colombia, like yourself…supporting deleterious and vague ideas of independence and sovereignty”
  Gasp, Supporting independence and sovereignty! Who would ever do such a thing? Is this really one of your concerns, the promotion of independence and sovereignty?

  and

  “It is time to bring into Colombia the other Americans that will help my country in the fight against terror and drugs”
  How’s that working out for the other countries we’ve “helped” in the war on terror?

  I’m filing a complaint with your common sense. Have a nice day.

  Posted by Nick Magel on Aug 29, 2009 at 2:45 AM

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