Washington and the Breakdown of the Colombia-Venezuela-FARC Peace Process [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

Washington and the Breakdown of the Colombia-Venezuela-FARC Peace Process

by James Petras / June 6th, 2013


Washington has devised a dual strategy toward Latin America. This involves a new set of ambitious imperial initiatives designed to undermine the principal anti-imperialist governments (Venezuela), social movements and armed insurgency (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), while dismantling Latin America-centered integration and regional alliances, such as ALBA, Petro-Caribe, UNASUR and MERCOSUR. At the same time the US seeks to establish an alternative US-centered ‘integration scheme’ through the Latin America and Asia-the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which encourages closer ties among neo-liberal states, like Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Chile with their energy and mining sector-dependent development strategies.

The involvement of Colombia is crucial to both of these ‘high priority’ objectives. In order to grasp the centrality of Colombia to current US strategy, it is essential to analyze the interplay of military, economic and political interests of the White House and Bogota.

US and Colombia

Washington’s interests in Colombia are largely defined by the policies it has pursued: The last three US Presidents have poured over $7 billion in military aid, building seven military bases and stationing several thousand rotating and permanent US military advisers to ‘advanced combat zones’. Colombia’s military has more than doubled in size to over 350,000 soldiers. In this context, Colombia has acted as an armed surrogate for US foreign policy, overtly intervening via cross border operations in Ecuador and Venezuela and serving as a platform for logistical and surveillance operations in the Caribbean, Andean, Amazonian and mid Pacific regions. US military interests are reinforced by economic ties, which have deepened via a bilateral free trade agreement and Bogota’s open embrace of large scale mining and energy exploitation.

Washington’s military strategists and ruling class allies in Colombia, however, face formidable opposition from three sources – two internal and one external. Internally, there is a vast alliance of social movements encompassing dispossessed peasants, farmers, and Indo and Afro-Colombian organizations, which have joined forces with trade unions, student confederations and human rights groups to oppose the civilian-military rulers who represent an elite 5% in control of over 70% of Colombia’s wealth. Over 4.5 million peasants, who have been driven from their lands by the scorched earth ‘counter-insurgency’ policies devised by US and Israeli military strategists, are clamoring for their right to return to their farmsteads. Despite decades of repression and horrific massacres committed by the military and state-sponsored paramilitary death squads (Colombia has the world’s highest ongoing homicide rate of trade unionists), the regime in Bogota faces rising social and political opposition.

More:
http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/06/washington-and-the-breakdown-of-the-colombia-venezuela-farc-peace-process/