E-Notes

Chaos in the Andes

by Michael Radu

March 20, 2001

Michael Radu, Senior Fellow at FPRI, has written extensively on insurgencies worldwide— Sendero in Peru, FARC and ELN in Colombia, the PKK in Turkey, and the KLA in Kosovo, among others.

President George W. Bush’s first international trip was to Mexico— a historic novelty, but not an unexpected event, considering Mexico’s size, importance as our second-ranking foreign trade partner, and geographic position. U.S.-Mexico relations are on an even keel, with many matters of bilateral interest on the agenda but none that are threatening or of immediate concern.

The same cannot be said about the Andean region (Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Peru), where recent explosive developments make it likely to pose the new administration’s first crisis.

The region, with some 100 million people, is an essential supplier of both U.S. oil and most of the drugs infesting America. While the states as a group are an important trading partner, the region is now a threat to the economic, political, and military stability of South America, and as such threatens large U.S. interests at home and in the Caribbean.

Ecuador

The most immediate, if not the most important, problem is in Ecuador, now overtaking Colombia as Latin America’s “sick man.” Simply put, the country is ungovernable. It has had five presidents in as many years, and has a divided military of dubious loyalty to democracy and the elected government. Moreover, there are huge segments of the population that are simply unwilling to understand or to accept simple economic facts: that the government is bankrupt, that it cannot afford subsidies, and that the country can no longer live beyond its means. Added to these problems are ethnic cleavages: Marxist-led Indians have already used force to overthrow an elected president in February 2000, and are prepared to do so again now. There also is a growing regionalist movement centered in the country’s largest city, the port of Guayaquil, based upon resentment of paying taxes on production to the profit of a largely parasitic Quito and the highlands in general. It is thus easy to see why Ecuador’s political class is in immediate danger of losing control and being replaced by chaos — and a Marxist-type chaos at that, just as the equally suicidal Venezuelan elites did two years ago.

How does this affect the United States? The air base at Manta, Ecuador, is slated to replace the lost facilities in Panama in the United States’ fight against Colombian drug trafficking. The implications of Ecuadoran unrest for the entire strategy of coping with the cocaine/heroin problem are ominous.

Colombia

Given its size, Ecuador’s problems pale in comparison with Colombia’s. There, the government of Andres Pastrana has tried for more than two years to “make peace” with the two communist insurgent groups destroying his country — the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN). The Pastrana government is again proving its inability to learn or to adapt. This time, however, it is having to deal with an increasingly restive, but still professional, military and better organized anti-communist populace.

Indeed, if there is a case study of how not to deal with a Marxist revolutionary challenge, Pastrana’s policies could be the perfect model. After the 1998 surrendering of national sovereignty — no police, no army, no administrative government presence— over an area the size of Switzerland to the 17,000-strong FARC in exchange for vague promises of “talks about peace talks,” the government has nothing to show for it. Nonetheless, Pastrana decided, against overwhelming local opposition, to give the ELN its own chunk of national territory as well, in the San Lucar Mountains in the South Bolivar department.

What makes the ELN deal so incredibly inane is that, unlike the still growing FARC, the ELN (whose original stronghold was the San Lucar) is on the ropes, militarily and politically. Long specialized in destroying Colombia’s largest source of income, oil, by blowing up pipelines on a weekly basis, the ELN has largely been dislodged from most of its areas by the activities of the paramilitary Autonomous Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). Thus, at the very time that ELN could be finally defeated, Pastrana decided— against the loudly voiced interests of the tens of thousands of men, women, and children soon to be ELN subjects— to give that group a lifeline. No wonder the military was at last ready to manifest its unhappiness.

As for FARC, their lack of interest in serious negotiations is matched only by their arrogance. Indeed, FARC’s main precondition for resuming “talks about talks amidst war” is that the government destroy their most effective enemy— the AUC! Simply put, and obvious to all but Pastrana and his closest advisers, FARC’s precondition for continued talks, other than retaining its control over what amounts to a state within a state, is government disarmament.

One of the reasons Pastrana has brought Colombia to the brink of collapse in the name of “peace” is the extraordinary influence wielded by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), mostly those specialized in human rights. These groups— some well intentioned but obsessive; some dominated, controlled, or penetrated by Marxist sympathizers of the insurgents— have made not the FARC and ELN but the AUC their main enemy. They are convinced that the paramilitaries are somehow the cause of violence in Colombia, rather than the natural result of Bogota’s inability to protect its citizens against guerrilla kidnappings, racketeering, and murder. The report on the conflict just published by the Colombian Defense Ministry (February 3, 2001— see http://eltiempo.terra.com.co/04-02-2001/judi_0.html), suggests that the AUC was responsible for fewer civilian deaths than the insurgents during the past three years. It also suggests that they were far more likely to surrender to the police or military than to fight them— which is borne out by the fact that the number of soldiers or policemen killed by the AUC is quite small. The number of those murdered or captured by FARC and ELN, however, reaches into the thousands.

The AUC enjoyed success against the insurgents because they hit them where it hurts — in their recruiting, intelligence, and financing activities. It is made up of about equal numbers of deserters from the insurgents, disillusioned army and police personnel, and civilians who suffered from the Marxists' abuses. While there is nothing glorious about the AUC — they are also involved in drug trafficking and other forms of criminality — they do not seek to overthrow the Colombian democracy, imperfect as it is, and replace it with a Stalinist system, as the FARC and ELN do.

President Pastrana seems bent on making everything more complicated than it need be. There is no other explanation for his insistence on bringing the European Union— whose sympathy for the insurgents and a “peace at any cost" strategy does not match their scarce promises of funds— into the negotiating process. Worse still, as far as symbolism is concerned, Pastrana has chosen Havana (!) as the location of his talks with the ELN.

Peru

After the collapse of the Fujimori regime last year, it appears that Peru is going back to its bad reputation as a country of wild political gyrations. The fall of Fujimori and his corrupt security adviser, Vladimiro Montesinos, has so far led to political revenge, economic chaos, and further institutional decay. A weak, unelected, transitional regime is busy dismantling everything Fujimori did in ten years. That has meant a witch hunt of all associates of Fujimori, legal or otherwise— including some surprises, such as opposition parliamentarians bought by Montesinos. Also targeted was Fujimori’s sound economic policy of the past decade. Worse still, the anti-Fujimori hysteria in Lima includes a de facto pardon for former President Alan Garcia, who is now back after fleeing from corruption charges for almost a decade. Indeed Garcia is running for president, in a field of 17! Antiterrorist legislation, which played an essential role in eliminating Latin America’s worst terrorist threat in the 1990s, is being dismantled in the name of “human rights.” One can only hope that such “democratization” will not lead to a revival of the terrorist groups — the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement — that almost destroyed Peru a decade ago and were so adept at taking advantage of misguided definitions of “democracy.”

The silver lining in Lima is Lourdes Flores, a centrist politician who is in a good position to win the April presidential election. She is a free marketeer realist and seems to be the first woman ever with a chance to win the presidency of a Latin American country on her own merits (in contrast to those who won elections for their name— as in Nicaragua, Panama, and Argentina).

Venezuela

It is hard to see the administration of President Hugo Chavez— with its anti-Americanism, economic illiteracy, admiration for Fidel Castro (including oil subsidies to a bankrupt Havana regime), and its militarization of politics — as anything but reminiscent of Salvador Allende’s Chile of the early 1970s. Not surprisingly, exactly two years after the beginning of his “Bolivarian revolution,” Chavez’s popularity declined by 20 percent, to some 40 percent— and his main institutional prop, the military, nearly overthrew him in January. He destroyed the country’s political institutions— with the “help” of decaying and corrupt parties, judiciary, and economic elites— but built nothing but rhetoric in their place. He did succeed in scaring national capital and the educated out of the country. Chavez also managed to antagonize Washington and his own neighbors by, for instance, openly helping FARC and ELN, as well as leftist groups in Bolivia and Ecuador, while allowing his own borders to become lawless areas.

Prospects

The failed Ecuadorian state cannot cope with any spillover of Colombia’s conflict over its unprotected borders. A weak Peruvian regime will more likely need to deal with its own revived insurgencies rather than with an expanding Colombian one. The radical regime in Caracas is more likely to run into border conflicts with Colombia and Guyana than to help stabilize the region. And a collapsing Colombia will immediately threaten defenseless Panama as well as its other neighbors. Rather than concentrating on Mexico, the Bush Administration must turn its attention to our serious interests south of the Panama isthmus.

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