Plan Colombia and Beyond

December 22, 2006

Critiques of Chávez, from the left

In the past week three critiques of the Chávez government in Venezuela have landed in my e-mail inbox. That is not unusual on its own, of course. In this case, though, all three critiques come from what is usually considered the "left." All of them warn of real - not imagined or hypothetical - concerns, and put the focus on specific and workable recommendations.

• From the arms control community: the Federation of American Scientists' Strategic Security Blog asks, "Who’s Watching the Guns?"

"It is time for the international community to speak up. Pressure from foreign governments, and particularly Venezuela’s main trading partners, could help persuade Chavez to moderate his small arms build-up and to beef up controls on military stockpiles. To that end, these governments should take the follow steps: First, they should make it crystal clear to Chavez that he should not arm civilians. The threat posed by the distribution of military firearms to the civilian population is far greater – to Venezuelans and their neighbors – than the phantom US invasion force they ostensibly would be used to thwart. Second, these governments should ask the Venezuelan government to brief them on its plans for preventing the theft, loss or diversion of the rifles and ammunition. The plan should be thorough and detailed, and should include physical security and stockpile accounting practices that meet international standards. Finally, the Organization of American States and Venezuela’s neighbors should monitor the regional trade in illicit small arms and alert the international community if Venezuela’s rifles start appearing on the black market."

• From the human rights community: the Venezuelan Program for Education and Action on Human Rights (PROVEA) is one of Venezuela's oldest and best-known human-rights groups, and it was always unsparingly critical of the governments that came before Chávez. It has just released its latest annual human-rights report, covering October 2005 through September 2006. The tone is very balanced, but still quite critical.

From the group's press release: While there have been advances, mainly in the field of social rights, PROVEA expressed its concern for the enormous institutional weaknesses for preventing human-rights violations, investigating or punishing those responsible, or for creating favorable, long-term conditions for the enjoyment or exercise of rights. It highlighted the lack of political will, inefficiency and improvisation on the part of state agencies and bodies in the design and execution of consistent, coherent and integral policies to achieve an improvement in the country's human-rights situtation.

• From a prominent U.S. liberal think-tank: the Center for American Progress, headed by former Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, has released a new report, "U.S.-Venezuela Policy: A Reality-Based Approach."

  Reality makes it possible to largely ignore Chávez. Mutual Venezuela-U.S. energy-sector dependence, for example, undermines Chávez’s ability to access to oil coercively. Notwithstanding Venezuela’s massive oil industry, Chávez’s sphere of effective influence in the Americas and beyond is as overblown as his rhetoric. Profound changes are afoot in the Americas, but Chávez is neither their animating nor sustaining cause. In short, a Chávez-led Venezuela does not pose a national security threat to the United States at present or in the foreseeable future.

These critiques are very welcome. They are far more interesting than what is coming from the right ("he's a thug, we must contain the spread of this cancer") and from the "Chávez, right or wrong" crowd. They actually offer suggestions for how Venezuela's elected leaders can govern better, and recommendations for a more constructive U.S. approach.

Despite the extreme current polarization - which continues to make work on Venezuela resemble poking a hornet's nest - lets hope that both Caracas and Washington take these suggestions in that spirit.

Posted by isacson at 1:18 PM | Comments (1)

December 18, 2006

Soldiers and civilians

Analysts of politics in Latin America have not paid too much attention to civil-military relations in the last few years. For the most part, the region's militaries are staying out of politics, rarely abusing populations, and in some cases weathering cutbacks to their sizes and budgets. Military coups are considered beyond the pale in several countries where they were once common.

Yet the dance between military and civilian leaders remains a delicate one. There are still areas where civilian involvement is clearly not welcome, and much remains to be resolved about roles, privileges, and reckoning with the past. Though flare-ups are rare, the debate is frequent, and civilian leaders still feel frequent push-back from the generals.

Here are four articles published this weekend in the region's press. They indicate that much remains under discussion throughout the hemisphere.

• Agénce France Presse, Chile: The high command of Chile's army was to meet today following two high-profile expulsions from the institution in the wake of Gen. Augusto Pinochet's death. On Wednesday Pinochet's grandson, Captain Augusto Pinochet Molina, was fired after his eulogy defiantly praised the general's 1973 coup. On Thursday Gen. Richard Hargreaves, head of the division in charge of Santiago and number-seven in the army's line of command, was dismissed after defending the coup in remarks to the media.
  
  "In tomorrow's meeting, Gen. [Óscar] Izurieta [the head of the Chilean Army] will inform the high command about the reasons why he applied these sanctions, based on legislation that prohibits members of the armed forces from deliberating and issuing political opinions. ... Among retired generals, who formed part of Pinochet's regime, the sanctions levied by Izurieta were interpreted as 'impositions from the government [of Socialist President Michelle Bachelet],' in the words of the president of their organization, Jaime Núñez."
  
  
• Perfil, Argentina: The paper reveals that, at the height of the country's severe political crisis in December 2001, the armed forces were putting together a plan to fill the power vacuum.
  
  "While those directly involved insist that it was not a classic coup attempt, during the December 2001 crisis the maximum military authorities elaborated a "contingency plan" to take power after the fall of President Fernando de la Rúa. ... 'The armed forces' hypothesis was that, if the Congress stopped working, it would produce a power vacuum and someone would have to take charge of the situation. Their idea was to act as the guarantors of last resort of national order and unity. But it was never proposed as a classic coup d'etat, with tanks in the streets,' affirmed José Pampuro, the secretary of the presidency during Eduardo Duhalde's government and former defense minister under Néstor Kirchner. ... The proposal involved the mobilization of 9,000 troops, included measures to suppor the police and the Gendarmería, and the protection of strategic objectives like the Casa Rosada, the Congress, nuclear facilities, hydroelectric dams, and public buildings."
  
  
• El Comercio, Ecuador: Ecuador's congress is making amendments to the organic law governing the military. The debate has yet to touch one of the most contentious points: a proposed reform to the Ecuadorian armed forces' extensive investments in the private sector. Through their pension and other funds, the military is one of the largest economic entities in the country.
  
  "This reform was included even though the armed forces have had investments for several years in several economic sectors, with more than thirty businesses, of which ten were liquidated last September. ... Gen. (r) René Vargas Pazos participated in the consolidation of the concept of strategic investments. In his opinion, this is part of the military's fundamental tasks of working for the country's social development and defense. ... On the other hand, Juan Aguilar, member of the Civil-Military Relations Foundation, sees no justification for the armed forces to have investments in economic areas unrelated to defense. 'It is understandable for the military to have their own factories for weapons, uniforms and esplosives, but there is no reason for them to move into activities like shrimp-fishing, flower-growing and cattle raising.'"
  
  
• La Nación, Costa Rica: At a meeting of Central America's presidents, Tony Saca of El Salvador and Óscar Arias of Costa Rica disagreed openly about the need to have a military in the first place. (Costa Rica has been armyless since 1949.)
  
  "The job they do in the social area, against crime and against natural disasters 'is very large,' argued Saca after being asked about possible support for a reduction of Central American armies. Just as a journalist tried to ask a question about another issue, Óscar Arias turned on his microphone to speak. 'A few words about this topic... it is immoral for the world to be spending more than $500 billion per year on weapons and soldiers.' ... 'To me it seems unfair to want to eliminate armies from the panorama, because they do an extroardinary job,' Saca affirmed."

Posted by isacson at 5:25 PM | Comments (1)

December 14, 2006

Bury Pinochet, don't praise him

On September 11, 1973, Gen. Augusto Pinochet's reign of terror began in Santiago, as warplanes strafed the presidential palace and troops rounded up suspected leftists. 3,200 people would die, an incredible 29,000 (something like 1 out of every 500 Chileans) would be tortured, and as many as 200,000 would be forced into exile.

Since September 11, 1973 was only my third birthday, there is nothing I can say about Pinochet's death that isn't being said much better elsewhere. Though some very dumb things are being said, too, along the lines of “he wasn't such a bad thug because he believed in the free market.”

Some of the best writing that I've seen:

• Marc Cooper worked as a press aide for Salvador Allende, the elected president whom Pinochet deposed. He has posted thoughts to his blog, the Los Angeles Times, and The Nation. Of all the pieces he has published this week, though, my favorite appears on Salon.com.
• A great first-hand account from Santiago is on the blog of journalist Tomás Dinges.
• “Free-marketeers presumably do not believe that you need torture and murder and dictatorship to implement their policies,” writes Christopher Hitchens in Slate.
• The Independent (UK) publishes an excerpt from an earlier reflection by Isabel Allende.
• Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson recalls covering the plebiscite that brought the dictator's reign to an end.

On the other side, the Washington Post editorial page, in a remarkably lame and lazy piece, contends that Chile wouldn't be eating an omelet today had Pinochet not broken the eggs.

[T]he evil dictator leaves behind the most successful country in Latin America. ... Like it or not, Mr. Pinochet had something to do with this success. To the dismay of every economic minister in Latin America, he introduced the free-market policies that produced the Chilean economic miracle -- and that not even Allende's socialist successors have dared reverse.

An eloquent rejoinder to that argument comes from none other than The Economist:

With Chileans cowed, the Chicago Boys [the foreign free-market economists who advised Pinochet] could work as if in a laboratory, with no regard for social costs. They made mistakes: a fixed exchange rate and unregulated bank privatisations triggered a massive recession and financial collapse in 1982-83. More pragmatic policies and a renewal of growth followed. But it took the return of democracy in 1990, with its ability to bestow legitimacy, to create an investment-led boom and a large fall in poverty.

For his part, conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg uses National Review's blog to take a swipe at “leftists” for how he imagines they will react when Fidel Castro dies:

Fidel Castro is going to die sooner rather than later. And when that happens, you're going to hear crickets chirping in certain quarters of the left ... I think in the grand debate we can characterize as Pinochet V. Castro, Pinochet wins in a cake walk, as the late Jeane Kirkpatrick would surely agree.

Hold on. Who in the world would want to participate in a “grand debate” about whether Pinochet or Castro was the worse dictator? What a waste of time that would be. Both are dictators who've killed lots of their own citizens. Isn't that enough? Why is it necessary to pick and choose between them?

Arguments about which dictator is “better” should be buried along with Jeane Kirkpatrick and her discredited ideas about “good” authoritarians and “bad” totalitarians. The above-mentioned Washington Post editorial, though, sees it differently:

In “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” a work that caught the eye of President Ronald Reagan, Ms. Kirkpatrick argued that right-wing dictators such as Mr. Pinochet were ultimately less malign than communist rulers, in part because their regimes were more likely to pave the way for liberal democracies. She, too, was vilified by the left. Yet by now it should be obvious: She was right.

Huh? Didn't totalitarian-communist regimes in eastern Europe make smooth transitions to liberal democracy after the Berlin Wall fell? And what of the dozen other Latin American countries that had right-wing dictators at the same time that Pinochet ruled Chile? (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico (PRI), Nicaragua (Somoza), Panama, Paraguay Uruguay - that's 14.) Most of these have a long way to go to consolidate democracy - and control over their militaries - while some are actually moving backward. And why didn't right-wing repression translate into economic magic everywhere else in the region?

Posted by isacson at 3:30 AM | Comments (5)

December 8, 2006

Keeping the soldiers happy in Bolivia

Wealthy Bolivians are up in arms about a new land-reform law that might allow the government to expropriate "unproductive" land from large landholders and distribute it to landless campesinos. The law is one of many grievances driving protests against President Evo Morales in Santa Cruz, Bolivia's largest city and a center of cattle-ranching and conservative politics.

In that context, consider this article, published yesterday by the Bolivian presidency's news service. In a ceremony attended by Bolivia's high military command, Morales handed out 1,024 parcels of land to sergeants and other non-commissioned officers. Excerpts:

The president of the republic, Evo Morales, delivered this Thursday afternoon, in the zone of La Tamborada, south of the city of Cochabamba, 1,024 plots of land to sergeants and warrant officers of the armed forces.

Before members of the military high command and a multitude who gathered in the zone of La Tamborada, the president of the Bolivians said that in the coming year, housing policies will be much more aggressive.

... The commander-in-chief also commented that he had been in Trinidad the previous month to hand out land and housing for teachers; the same was done in Riberalta for the blue-collar manufacturing sector. "And now we are here, together with warrant officers and sergeants of the Armed Forces."

... To the members of the Landless Movement he explained that he handed over housing to members of the armed forces this Thursday because they are also sons of the pueblo (popular sectors), who are prepared to defend the fatherland, since in this government this institution no longer has a repressive face.

"It is also the government's obligation to attend to the armed forces' demands," he remarked.

Making the military one of the first beneficiaries of government land giveaways is a novel idea, though it is definitely not a step forward for civil-military relations:

• It politicizes the military by encouraging it to buy into a domestic policy agenda.
  
  
• It provides a material incentive for loyalty to the state and the constitution, when such incentives should not be necessary.

However, it is brilliant politics:

• It seeks to convince Bolivia's military - a mostly conservative institution which until about 25 years ago had a long history of coups - to keep out of politics and support a commander-in-chief from the left, even amid a serious political crisis.
  
  
• It seeks to drive a wedge between the military and the Santa Cruz landowning elite.

In 1954, shortly after he began expropriating unused land from U.S. fruit companies and other large landowners, Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz was deposed by a CIA-sponsored military coup. Decades of horrific violence followed. Would the story have been different had Arbenz distributed some of the land to soldiers?

Posted by isacson at 4:32 PM | Comments (3)

November 21, 2006

Is Brazil absent?

Andre Guzzi is an intern from Brazil who joined us late in this fall semester. I recently asked him why his country, which is by far the largest and strongest in the region, has played such a small role in Colombia, both militarily and diplomatically, even though the two countries share a long border. In particular, I wondered why Brazil, with its pretensions of regional power, chose to distance itself from Plan Colombia and to play only a small role in support of past peace processes.

Here is the response that André came up with - much of it based on research that he has done earlier, in Portuguese and in more detail. It's a very useful overview of Brazil's role and its foreign policy. It answers many of my own questions and includes a lot of information I had either never heard before, or never heard stated so clearly.

Is Brazil absent?
(by Andre Cavaller Guzzi*)

Analysis of drug trafficking in South America usually places the spotlight on Colombia, and to a lesser extent Bolivia and Peru. Brazil seems to be less directly connected, even though it is known that the country has a narco problem: drugs affect public security and public health and, according to the U.S. government, Brazil is a major transit country for drugs produced in the Andean region en route to Europe and the United States.

The Brazilian government seeks to play a continental leadership role, and desires a permanent seat at the UN Security Council. However, Brazil has appeared to be absent from the global debate on drug policy. What, in fact, is the Brazilian government's position on the issue of narcotrafficking? What measures does the government favor?

The Brazilian government views itself as well-positioned to play a role of great responsibility in South America: a continental reach, a population of more than 180 million, a peaceful relationship with all countries in the region, and a strong and multi-sectoral economy. In order to play a leading role in hemispheric security and defense, the current and recently re-elected president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has sought to mediate and stimulate dialogue between countries whose governments have discordant policies. One example is Lula's stated willingness to mediate dialogues between the president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe - notably isolated in the continent due to his political positions and his close connections to Washington - and the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, currently considered the U.S. government's strongest opponent in the region.

According to the minister of security, Geraldo Quintão, Brazilian diplomacy has been constantly working to reinforce security by identifying opportunities to increase Brazil's international standing, in order to gain the mentioned seat on the Security Council. The most relevant current measure is Brazil's leadership of Minustah – the United Nations' stabilization mission in Haiti.

However, when we focus on one of the most prevalent threats in South America - drug trafficking - we note that the Brazilian government is not serving as an effective international actor. The border between Brazil and Colombia is approximately 1,023 miles long, almost totally covered by Amazon-basin jungle, and according to Brazilian authorities, many incidents take place in this region between guerrillas and drug traffickers. In addition, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that 4,000 Colombian refugees have illegally crossed this remote border over the last few years.

Brazil and Colombia have promoted some joint actions in these territories. In June 2003, both countries' Ministries of Defense signed a memorandum about defense cooperation. They decided that both countries will promote research, scientific and technological development of the defense industry, logistical support, training and confidence-building measures.

Cooperation, non-intervention and respect for sovereignty, and diplomatic support for peace processes are considered the three bases of Brazil's foreign policy. While cooperation between Bogotá and Brasilia has increased, the notion of sovereignty has distanced both countries at the same time. Plan Colombia is a key example.

When Plan Colombia was launched, it assumed a different character than its initial purpose. Its original priority was to combat drug trafficking which, as it required a high amount of financial resources, caused the Colombian government to turn to the international community for assistance. The United States became the Plan's biggest financier. The Brazilian government rejected Plan Colombia, mainly because of its militaristic emphasis.

Among the alleged reasons why the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration (1994-2000) took this position, two are of the greatest significance. First, the fear that a military offensive against guerrillas could spill over into Brazilian territory, displacing both drug-crop cultivation and refining. Second, there was huge discomfort with the likelihood that Colombia could be a precedent for greater military engagement of the United States in South America.

At the same time, the Brazilian government decided to promote some counter-narcotics operations on its border with Colombia. The main intention of Operation Colombia-Brazil (COBRA), for example, was to create a stable region near the Colombian border. [Note: Operation Cobra received several million dollars in assistance from the United States.] Brazil developed similar operations with Peru (PEBRA), Venezuela (VEBRA) and Bolivia (BRABO). The aim of the Brazilian government was to mobilize the countries that border Colombia in order to maintain a “peaceful region” around the country. This position follows the logic of Brazilian diplomacy, which considers that national problems should be solved by internal measures. COBRA is a preventive program, which aims to control the Amazon by containing drug trafficking and stopping illegal logging.

With the implementation of the Amazon Surveillance System (SIVAM), in 2001, the Brazilian government offered Colombia all relevant information it obtained, in order to enhance military, police and environmental control in the region. The Brazilian government launched two other operations to protect the border with Colombia: “Operation Timbo,” created in 2003 with the objective of coordinating and combining the Brazilian Armed Forces' actions, and the so-called “Shoot Down Law” (Lei do Abate), which permits the Air Force to shoot down clandestine planes suspected of carrying narcotics. Colombia has already adopted a similar law. [Note: because it has stricter safety procedures in place, the United States helps fund Colombia's “shoot-down” or aerial interdiction program. Very little U.S. funding has gone to Brazil's program.]

Through these operations, it was possible to observe how the Cardoso government distinguished cooperation policies from intervention policies, and to note praise for the first and opposition to the second. Lula's government has a similar position, and its government also considers Plan Colombia to be a “military strategy,” not an initiative for peace.

Another position that separates the Brazilian government from Colombia and the United States is the definition of guerrilla groups as “terrorists.” The U.S. and Colombian governments have sought to define these groups not as a national problem, but as a threat to the whole continent and, consequently, a phenomenon that should be fought by joint efforts. Brazil, on the other hand, does not consider the guerrilla groups to be terrorist organizations because if it did so, it would no longer be possible to negotiate with them.

Finally Brazil, aiming to maintain leadership status in the continent, tries to be more cautious than Colombia and the United States. Its efforts tend to be more preventive than offensive and more cooperative than coercive.

*Student at the International Relations Master’s Program San Tiago Dantas (UNESP-UNICAMP-PUCSP), supervised by Suzeley Kalil Mathias, intern at the Center for International Policy and has received a scholarship from The State of Sao Paulo Research Foundation - FAPESP.

Posted by isacson at 10:40 PM | Comments (4)

October 30, 2006

Not quite an arms race, but still troubling

Arms transfers are a frequent topic in Latin America's news lately, much more than we've seen during the past ten years or so. The United States - which often gets accused, correctly, of being the world's arms supermarket - is only partially involved. A few examples that appeared in the press last week:

• Argentina may buy planes from Russia and ships from France.
• Venezuela may donate helicopters to Bolivia.
• Peru is concerned about Chile's purchases from the United States and elsewhere.
• Venezuela, barred from buying from Spain aircraft that have U.S. components in them, is about to buy twelve transport planes from Russia. Caracas' recent purchases from Russia include 53 helicopters, 100,000 AK-103 rifles, and 24 Sukhoi SU-30 fighter planes.
• A conservative Brazilian military strategist warns that the region's military balance has been upset, and urges the government to "revitalize our domestic armaments industry."

Meanwhile, the United States has been busy too. Whenever an arms sale exceeds $14 million, the Defense Department must notify Congress. The notifications page of the Defense Security Assistance Agency notes big sales to Chile (PDF), Colombia (PDF), and Brazil (PDF) since late September.

Posted by isacson at 12:16 PM | Comments (2)

October 24, 2006

Why Paraguay?

It has been interesting to see much recent speculation about Paraguay, a country that usually gets absolutely no attention in Washington. A series of unusual facts and unsubstantiated rumors have many Latin America-watchers wondering what is going on:

• According to yesterday's Guardian (UK), Paraguay is swirling with rumors that President Bush has bought a 98,840-acre ranch in the arid, empty Chaco region of the country's northwest, not far from Bolivia. "Erasmo Rodríguez Acosta, the governor of the Alto Paraguay region where Mr Bush's new acquisition supposedly lies, told one Paraguayan news agency there were indications that Mr Bush had bought land in Paso de Patria, near the border with Brazil and Bolivia. He was, however, unable to prove this, he added."
  
  
• Earlier this month, Jenna Bush, one of the president's twin daughters, paid a ten-day visit to Paraguay to learn about UNICEF projects there. From the Associated Press report: "'The visit is strictly private in nature,' UNICEF announced in a one-page statement released by spokeswoman Natalie Echague. 'She will get to know the UNICEF activities in Paraguay and some of the programs it cooperates in.'"
  
  
• Since mid-2005, the U.S. Southern Command has been carrying out an unusual series of bilateral exercises in Paraguay. Some of these exercises have been humanitarian - building schools, providing health services - and others have been Special Forces Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) deployments for lethal combat and counter-terrorism training. (See a list of these exercises - and a transcript of the Paraguayan Congress's debate about whether to approve them - here as a Microsoft Word document in Spanish.)
  
  
• U.S. personnel are widely reported to have been using the Mariscal Estigarribia airstrip in the Chaco region, not far from Bolivia. In January, the State Department published a denial that the United States - as was widely rumored - planned to establish a military base there.
  
  
• Earlier this month, Paraguay's government surprisingly withdrew the immunity from prosecution that it had granted the U.S. soldiers present to carry out the exercises. As a result, the series of exercises begun in mid-2005 will end by December 1.

What does all of this mean? And why Paraguay?

I have no idea, and it may mean nothing at all. However, as part of another research trip to South America in early November, I will be spending 2 days in Asunción conducting interviews. (This will be my first-ever trip to Paraguay.) If I learn anything that helps to clarify things, I will post it.

Posted by isacson at 9:50 AM | Comments (3)

October 12, 2006

More notes from Nicaragua

Travel, and a schedule full of meetings, certainly slows down one's output. I left Nicaragua on Thursday, went to Costa Rica Friday and Argentina Saturday, and am only now posting the rest of my notes from the Nicaragua leg of my trip.

Note that these are impressions only, based on observations and many conversations, and I may have gotten a few things wrong. Though I have been to Nicaragua several times, this was my first visit since 2000, and our focus on Colombia has kept me from doing much more than monitoring the small amount of military aid that goes to Nicaragua, while reading the Nicaraguan papers a few times each month. Plus, I was only there for 2 ½ days.

With all those disclaimers in mind, here's what I wrote in my notebook (I filled in some factual blanks later).

The city of Managua still bears deep scars from an earthquake that happened almost 34 years ago. Baseball fans might remember Managua's December 1972 earthquake as the one after which Pittsburgh Pirates star Roberto Clemente, on a humanitarian relief mission, died in a plane crash. Nicaraguans remember it as a watershed moment in the political life of their country.

The international relief and rebuilding funds that flooded Nicaragua after that earthquake were mostly stolen by Anastasio Somoza, the U.S.-backed dictator whose family had ruled since the 1930s, and who by then owned as much as a quarter of the country. This galvanized opposition to the regime, even among much of the church and the business community. The opposition coalesced behind what had been a small leftist guerrilla group, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), which took power in July of 1979.

Peace was short-lived, though. The Sandinistas' victory alarmed Ronald Reagan, then the leading Republican candidate for the 1980 presidential elections, and the new government's leftward lurches alienated many of those in the country's establishment who had initially joined forces with the FSLN. The Reagan administration funded and equipped a large rightist guerrilla force, the contras, with the goal of toppling the Sandinistas. The ensuing civil war lasted until 1990 and cost about 20,000 lives.

The war was brought to an end by a presidential election in 1990 that the Sandinistas narrowly lost. Running each time with former President Daniel Ortega as its candidate, the FSLN proceeded to lose presidential elections to right-of-center candidates in 1996 and 2001. By then, Nicaragua had sunk to the status of the hemisphere's second-poorest country, after Haiti.

The country continued to suffer during the postwar period - this time not as a result of earthquakes, dictatorships, or war, but due to large-scale corruption. Arnoldo Alemán, Nicaragua's president between 1997 and 2002, reportedly stole as much as $100 million from Nicaragua's treasury. He continues to be a very powerful figure; even though he was condemned to twenty years in prison for corruption, he has been conditionally released for health reasons, and controls one of the largest political parties.

Daniel Ortega, whose Sandinistas carried out a spree of property confiscation before leaving power, entered into a power-sharing "pact" with his former archenemy Alemán in 1999, essentially guaranteeing that neither would seek to prosecute the other for corruption. What most Nicaraguans derisively refer to as "El Pacto" continues to dominate the country's politics. Ortega's and Aleman's combined political machines control the Congress, divide up key political posts, and install their supporters into dominance of the judiciary, the prosecutor's office, the elections tribunal, and other oversight bodies. They have made it extremely difficult for President Enrique Bolaños, a critic of the pacto, to govern. And of course, with their mutual impunity assured, they brazenly divide up the spoils of corruption. With the FSLN and the right in such a cozy, sleazy relationship today, many Nicaraguans wonder why 20,000 people had to give their lives in the 1980s.

This is a long story, and the city of Managua bears scars from every chapter. When I first visited Nicaragua as a college student in 1991, I recall seeing many shells of buidlings and uncleared rubble left over from the earthquake that had happened nineteen years earlier. Years of official theft, war and economic ruin had left what had been downtown looking like the 1972 disaster was much more recent.

Now, the rubble has been cleared. Other than the old national cathedral, a windowless shell on what had been Managua's main square, it is rare to see a half-ruined building. But in its place, especially in what was once downtown, are many empty spaces - weedy, overgrown lots. Some of the larger empty spaces have long since been occupied by squatters who built their own shacks on the empty properties; many of these are now established, dense, and very poor urban neighborhoods.

But the empty spaces, with their tall grass and mounds of garbage, are still visible everywhere. Driving near downtown at night, one can find oneself in total darkness - no streetlights, no buildings near the street - for hundreds of yards, passing through "dead zones" between urbanized areas.

I don't mean to give the impression that Managua is a post-apocalyptic horror. Much has been built there, especially during the relative economic boom of the past few years. Managua now has shopping malls and gated communities, with houses and lawns that resemble any U.S. suburb. The wealthy have turned their backs on the old city center and are making Managua into a dispersed, Los-Angeles style sprawl where one really needs a car to get around. ("A suburb without an urb," one Nicarguan colleague described it.)

But as one drives around, it is hard not to notice that the vast stretches of the city that have been "left behind" are far from abandoned. In fact, they're packed with people - the semi-employed majority who live in poverty, as do their many children. The informal economy rules: every intersection is thick with people selling whatever they can in the scorching mid-day heat. On the roads connecting Managua with other cities one finds, every kilometer or so, somebody by the side of the road with a shovel asking for change in return for having filled in a pothole. The prosperity one sees in a few corners of Managua - and evidenced by the past few years' high economic growth rates - has not translated significantly into improvement for the poor, such as gains in formal employment.

Amid the vendors and the empty lots, Managua's landscape is currently dominated by billboards, flags, painted signs and placards. It is election season - Nicaraguans will choose a new president on November 5 - and in a country with one of Latin America's highest voter-turnout rates, the campaign is very much on people's minds. It seems as though about half of the paid advertising space on Managua's streets is currently occupied by ads for political candidates, while radio and television are saturated with campaign commercials.

Many of these ubiquitous ads and commercials look quite sophisticated and expensive; the amount being spent on publicity would seem to befit a much wealthier country. There are four major candidates - one from each side of the Ortega-Alemán pacto, and two independent candidates, each a dissident from one of the parties to the pacto. The two pacto candidates, Ortega and Alemán's stand-in, José Rizo, clearly have more money and a much bigger advertising presence.

Ortega leads most polls, though the surveys vary widely and it is hard to predict what will happen. His hot pink and aqua blue FSLN billboards are everywhere promoting "reconciliation" and "peace" (Ortega's vice-presidential running mate is a wealthy man whose house Ortega confiscated for own use shortly after the Sandinistas took power, and Ortega has welcomed several old Somocistas and former contras into his campaign. The candidate has also repaired an old rift with Nicaragua's influential Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo.) He has been promising cheaper fuel prices and employment-creation projects with help from Hugo Chávez's government in Venezuela. Though he leads in polling, however, Ortega almost never appears with more than 30 to 35 percent support. Many analysts believe that, as a controversial and polarizing figure, he is unlikely to go beyond this hard core of backers. An electoral majority is not necessary to avoid a second round of voting; to do so, though, Ortega would have to defeat his nearest opponent by five or more percentage points. Few see that as likely.

Also everywhere are signs showing the face of Rizo, Alemán's ally, the pacto candidate of the right. Bright red posters show him with his arm raised and his finger pointed in the air like a statue of a 20th-century dictator. Slightly less visible, but still easy to find, are signs touting Eduardo Montealegre, a pro-business, anti-pacto dissident who has broken with Alemán, whom he served as finance minister.

The U.S. government has made clear its distaste not just for Daniel Ortega but for the entire pacto arrangement, and has implied rather clearly that Montealegre would be the president with whom it would most prefer to work. U.S. Ambassador Paul Trivelli has made headlines here with his openly critical statements about Ortega. The Bush administration has apparently made the calculation that implying a U.S. aid reduction under Ortega would convince voters to turn away from the candidate it opposes, instead of increasing support for him as has happened elsewhere in Latin America (Bolivia in 2002, for instance). This may have backfired, as it has allowed Ortega to play the nationalist card and to capitalize on President Bush's evident unpopularity.

Finally, and less visibly in the battle of billboards and posters, is Edmundo "Mundo" Jarquín, a former Inter-American Development Bank official and candidate of the center-left Sandinista dissidents. Jarquín started the campaign as the vice-presidential running mate of Herty Lewites, a popular former mayor of Managua and strong critic of the pacto whom Ortega did his utmost to push out of the picture. Lewites, however, died of a heart attack in July. Jarquín has sought to fill Lewites' shoes, bringing along one of the country's best known musicians, folksinger Carlos Mejía Godoy, as his running mate. The Sandinista dissidents have most of the country's intellectuals on their side, including many heroes of the FSLN's struggles of the 1970s and 1980s (among them poet Ernesto Cardenal and author Gioconda Belli). But they clearly have less campaign cash on hand and lack the connection to the masses, and the get-out-the-vote machinery, of the Ortega-dominated FSLN. The polls only occasionally put Jarquín above 20 percent.

Obviously, almost everyone with whom I spoke had something to say about the elections. I asked often why the pacto candidates were performing as strongly as they were, since so many associate the pacto with corruption and the hollowing out of the country's already-weak institutions. Part of the answer is simply money, both money to get people to the polls, and to carry out the same sort of election-season favor-buying that you see everywhere from Chicago to Chichicastenango. Some also said that many Nicaraguans simply crave a unity government instead of more of the political infighting that has paralyzed the country's politics. They may steal, the reasoning goes, but at least they will be able to get things done because they control everything.

Despite these apparent advantages, disgust with the pacto has kept the dissident candidates in the race. A second round is quite likely, and it will probably be between Ortega and somebody. If the matchup is Ortega and Rizo, the pacto will have uncontested control over the government, including the presidency that it lacked during Bolaños' term. U.S. relations will sour, and especially if Ortega wins, relations with Venezuela will become very warm. If Montealegre or Jarquín should win, U.S. relations will be better and aid levels - including about $35 million per year in Milliennium Challenge funds - would be sustained. However, the non-pacto president would face many of the same obstacles to governing that Bolaños has faced.

No matter the outcome, then, it is unwise to expect downtown Managua to rise again anytime soon.

Posted by isacson at 4:28 PM | Comments (0)

October 7, 2006

Travel notes: the Defense Ministerial meeting

(Written in my notebook on Thursday the 5th:)

Greetings from the Managua airport. I'm headed to Costa Rica today, where I'll only be for about 24 hours before going to Argentina.

I'm doing research for a quick project about how countries in the region have been hit (or not hit) by the U.S. military aid sanctions in the American Servicemembers' Protection Act (ASPA). That's the piece of Republican-inspired legislation that cuts most non-drug military aid to countries that don't give U.S. personnel on their soil special immunity from the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

Colombia granted this immunity, but twelve other countries in the region did not. Their non-drug military aid - largely Foreign Military Financing (FMF) and International Military Education and Training (IMET) - has been cut, as has aid from one economic-aid program, Economic Support Funds (ESF).

So I'm visiting some countries that got hit by the sanctions and others that did not, mainly to see what military-to-military relations with the United States look like today. The resulting report should go to press in late November.

Of course, this very week the White House just waived sanctions for one of these non-drug military-aid programs - the training program IMET - for nine countries in the region. And the new Defense Authorization law for 2007 would lift the IMET sanctions altogether. Still cut (according to the waivers, and probably the law too) is FMF - the largest non-drug military-aid program, which in Colombia is used to support pipeline protection and Plan Patriota, among other things - and ESF, unless this aid is going to non-governmental recipients.

But enough of that for now. In Managua I had a chance to sit in (as a silent observer) on some of the summit of Western Hemisphere defense ministers (the "Defense Ministerial") that was occurring there.

This was not as interesting as it sounds. There was a day of protocolary speeches by the ministers, but I was arriving in Managua that day and did not attend. I understand that Uruguay's defense minister gave a good speech urging limited internal military rooles, and that Argentina's Nilda Garré was good as well, while Venezuela was unexpectedly restrained. Donald Rumsfeld was also quite low-key, refusing to take the bait from reporters and say something bad about Daniel Ortega, the longtime Sandinista leader who holds a small lead in polls for Nicaragua's November presidential elections.

I did attend much of the summit's second day, when sub-groups of defense people from all countries got together to make presentations and to try to hammer out consensus statements on specific issues. The haggling over proper phrasing of every sentence was remarkably dull. At times, though, it brought into very sharp relief the lack of consensus that exists in the region over some of the most basic questions of military threats and civil-military relations.

(Now writing on my computer on a plane en route from San José to Lima, and thence to Buenos Aires:)

The United States clearly wanted all countries in the region to acknowledge that terrorism and narcotrafficking are threats that all countries in the region share in common. The United States did not get that. Many countries were emphatic that they were more worried about much different issues. Those from the northern tier of Central America spoke of gangs and organized crime. Venezuela spoke of the possibility of external aggression. Others simply spoke of the need to defend sovereignty and natural resources.

There was also little agreement about what the military's role should be today. The United States and northern Central America - and Venezuela in its own Bolivarian way - urged greater military involvement against non-defense threats within the country's own borders: gangs, common crime that exceeds police capacities, natural disasters, even development and education projects in the Venezuelan vision. Others - particularly the Southern Cone countries, which lived through years of extreme military involvement in internal affairs - urge a much clearer distinction between what is civilian and what is not, limiting the military mainly to external defense and peacekeeping missions.

I missed the third day, when the final declaration was handed out, as I spoke at events organized by Nicaraguan NGOs and at universities. In fact, I haven't even had a chance yet to see what this final declaration looked like.

The organizers of the Defense Ministerial are to be commended for allowing some non-governmental observers to attend the sessions as observers. It was a good opportunity to have some interesting and at times revealing discussions with defense officials in the corridors and at meals. Some Latin American NGOs were represented as well, such as Peru's IDL, the Costa Rica-based FLACSO directorate, and Argentina's RESDAL.

Some, however, were denied entry. The most egregious example is that of Guatemala's Myrna Mack Foundation - a group that is far from radical, and whose representatives traveled to Nicaragua with the understanding that their attendance had been approved. Here is a translation of their statement, which indicates pretty strongly that things are not at all improving in Guatemala.

Myrna Mack Foundation excluded from participating in the VII Conference of Defense Ministers of the Americas

Before national and international opinion, organizations that specialize in continental security and before the VII Conference of Defense Ministers of the Americas, we denounce that the Myrna Mack Foundation has been deliberately and maliciously excluded from participating in this important event, which is taking place during the first week of October, in Managua, Nicaragua.

The Myrna Mack Foundation requested since last June its accreditation to participate as an observer at the VII Conference of Defense Ministers. At all times it met the deadlines established by the event's organizers and with the regulations defined by the high military functionaries. The request was made to Dr. Avil Ramírez, minister of Defense of Nicaragua.

We know that the Preparatory Committee of the VII conference, which met in June of this year, agreed to accept all civil-society organizations that registered before the deadline. Even though we acted within the procedures and regulations that govern the VII conference, the Pro Tempore Secretariat, which is in charge of organizing the event, did not furnish us with the corresponding invitation or accreditation.

Before this body's silence, we repeated our request twice more, in August and September; there was no official response to these repeated solicitations. In addtion to written communications, we have consulted by telephone with functionaries of the Nicaraguan Defense Ministry and the Pro Tempore Secretariat, from whom we have only received evasive and dilatory responses.

We have information that the minister of defense of Guatemala, General Francisco Bermúdez, has opposed the participation of the Myrna Mack Foundation in the VII Conference of Defense Ministers of the Americas, considering us to be an "enemy of the Army." We believe that Minister Bermúdez has vetoed the Myrna Mack Foundation's participation in this event, and that is the reason why our requests have not borne results.

A veto from Minister Francisco Bermúdez would explain the administrative silance, the evasion and delays with which the Myrna Mack Foundation's requests were processed, even though our organization for more than ten years has specialized in the study, analysis and elaboration of proposals about democratic security and national defense, especially military justice and other aspects of the army's reconversion, as agreed in the peace accords.

For this reason, the Myrna Mack Foundation:

1. Condemns the Guatemalan Defense Ministry's attitide, for the intolerance and observance of retrograde concepts - which have done so much damage to Guatemalan society in the past - shown by rejecting social organizations' legitimate right to carry out citizen participation, to oversee public affairs and to formulate proposals with responsibility and seriousness.

2. Asks the president of the republic, Lic. Óscar Berger Perdomo, in his position as commander-in-chief of the Army of Guatemala, to investigate the existence of these types of practices, which are contrary to democracy, and to carry out the indispensable corrective measures.

3. Asks the National Defense Committee and the Human Rights Committee of the Congress of the Republic to consider this situation and to intercede to preventn the military from putting at risk - again - the few democratic advances that we have been able to celebrate.

Posted by isacson at 9:57 AM | Comments (0)

September 25, 2006

The company you keep

These pictures are undeniably shameful:
President Franklin Roosevelt with allied dictator Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, May 1939.	Vice-President Richard Nixon with allied dictator Carlos Castillo Armas of Guatemala, 1955.
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger with allied dictator Augusto Pinochet of Chile, June 1976.	President Ronald Reagan with allied de facto dictator Gen. Gustavo Álvarez Martínez of Honduras, 1982.
Special envoy Donald Rumsfeld with allied dictator Saddam Hussein of Iraq, December 1983.	Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey with allied de facto dictator Vladimiro Montesinos of Peru, April 1998.

 

But these pictures are shameful too:
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez with allied dictator Saddam Hussein of Iraq, August 2000.	Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez with allied dictator Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, October 2005.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez with allied dictator Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, July 2006.	Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez with allied dictator Bashar Assad of Syria, September 2006.
	Take care, President Chávez, lest you become what you criticize. "You will be known by the company you keep" applies just as much to Venezuela as it does to the United States.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez with allied de facto dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, September 2006.

Posted by isacson at 2:37 PM | Comments (4)

September 18, 2006

"Journalistic terrorism?"

Álvaro Uribe committed a grave error three years ago when he told a military audience that some Colombian human-rights groups are "spokespeople for terrorism."

The word "terrorism" should not be used lightly. It refers to individuals or groups who deliberately kill - or conspire to kill - civilians for political reasons. States must use all legal means at their disposal to stop anybody who fits that description.

But states must also respect and protect those who do not. Critics and political adversaries, however relentless or unfair their arguments may seem to be, have a critical role to play in any democracy. Tarring them as "terrorists" threatens to become a pretext for eliminating that role.

Álvaro Uribe has deservedly faced strong criticism for his use of the "T" word to describe non-violent adversaries. Now Bolivia's Evo Morales deserves similar criticism.

A few days ago Morales, in Havana for the meeting of non-aligned nations, told an interviewer that Bolivia's media are a main obstacle to his proposed reforms because they practice "journalistic terrorism." AFP reports:

"The resistance comes from the media," Morales indicated, denouncing "a journalistic dictatorship, a journalistic terrorism" that seeks "to satanize this process of changes" and "to confuse the Bolivian people and the whole world."

This is not the first time that Morales has used this term, though it is the first time since he was inaugurated that he has used it to describe the entire media.

Morales is correct that much of Bolivia's mainstream media is tied to wealthy economic interests and political blocs that oppose his reforms, and that its reporting often favors his political adversaries. The president is free to criticize their biases, their accuracy and their credibility at every opportunity.

But to use the word "terrorism" is to move beyond politics. It carries an implicit threat of violence: a state's response to terrorism is very different from its response to legal political opposition. The Cochabamba daily Los Tiempos put it well in an editorial yesterday: "The President would do well to reflect on his inappropriate accusation, so that this does not imply a threat to the freedoms of expression and information, as in times of dictatorship."

Posted by isacson at 5:11 PM | Comments (2)

September 12, 2006

Interdiction is up in Bolivia

Felipe Cáceres, the "drug czar" of Evo Morales' government in Bolivia, was in town today. He held a meeting with NGOs and spoke at an event hosted by the Washington Office on Latin America. He is also meeting with officials in the Bush administration and members of Congress.

Cáceres is an unlikely drug czar: he is a longtime coca-growers' union leader in Bolivia's Chapare region. For nine years, he was mayor of Villa Tunari, a Chapare town that saw a great deal of strife between coca-growers and U.S.-funded coca-eradication forces. Today, however, Felipe Cáceres commands those forces.

Obviously, many here in Washington believe that with a drug czar like that, Bolivia is about to become a narco wonderland. But Cáceres comes armed with some surprising statistics that should reassure the drug warriors. Take this one, regarding drug interdiction:

• In 2004, the State Department reports, Bolivian forces seized 8.7 metric tons of cocaine and cocaine base.
• In 2005, according to the State Department, this seizure total went up to 11.5 metric tons.
• Cáceres says that in just the first seven months of Evo Morales' government (January-August 2006), Bolivian forces interdicted just under 9 metric tons of cocaine and cocaine base - already surpassing the 2004 figure and closing in on the 2005 full-year total. He says that this figure has been evaluated and seconded by the U.S. embassy's Narcotics Affairs Section and the DEA. He estimates that over half of this cocaine was made in Peru, in transit to Brazil.

Morales came into office promising that his government would be tolerant of the traditional use of coca leaf, but tough on cocaine trafficking. This is appearing to be more than just empty rhetoric.

Posted by isacson at 5:47 PM | Comments (2)

July 17, 2006

Not quite a "terrorist hub"

On Thursday we sat in on a hearing held by the House International Relations Subcommittee on International Terrorism. We had to leave early due to another meeting, but we wanted to see at least some of an event entitled “Venezuela: Terrorist Hub of the Western Hemisphere?”

The answer, judging from the case made at the hearing, is “not really.” The two State Department witnesses, and most members of Congress who attended, mainly criticized Hugo Chávez’s government for not doing enough against potential terrorist threats, not for promoting or spreading terrorism. Rep. Jerry Weller (R-Illinois), for instance, said that Venezuela’s “clearest link with terrorism is a blatant lack of cooperation” with U.S. anti-terror efforts. Witness Fred Urbancic of the State Department’s counter-terrorism office summarized it thus [PDF]:

The Government of Venezuela has stated that it regards the U.S.-led war on terrorism as a ruse for U.S. imperial ambitions. It has refused to condemn narco-terrorist organizations based in Colombia, and has publicly championed the cause of terrorists in Iraq. Although it is unclear how they were obtained, some weapons seized from Colombian narco-terrorists have come from official Venezuelan stocks and facilities. And the Venezuelan Government has done little to improve the security of travel and identity documents it issues.

These charges are not new; the State Department recently designated Venezuela as a country “not fully cooperating” with the United States against terror, forcing a ban on arms sales to Caracas that begins October 1. Venezuela is the only country given that designation that is not also considered a “state sponsor of terrorism” (those countries are Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba and Sudan.) There is a wide gulf, however, between unwillingness to cooperate and being a “terrorist hub.”

During the hour we spent at the hearing, five members of Congress were present. Four were Republicans: Subcommittee Chairman Ed Royce (R-California), immigration hardliner Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado), Rep. Weller – whose interest in Latin America extends to his family, as his father-in-law is former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt – and Ted Poe (R-Texas), one of several new Texas Republicans who owes his seat to Tom Delay’s unorthodox 2004 redistricting. One Democrat attended: Brad Sherman, who shares a strong critique of Chávez with the chief Democrat on the full House International Relations Committee, his fellow Californian Tom Lantos.

Two witnesses testified: Urbancic and Charles Shapiro, the principal deputy assistant secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Shapiro knows Venezuela well: he was U.S. ambassador in Caracas during the failed April 2002 coup attempt that briefly unseated Chávez. That coup, which the U.S. government handled badly (meeting with the newly installed president and delaying its vote to condemn the action in the OAS), proved to be a turning point in U.S.-Venezuelan relations. Shapiro did not submit written testimony.

The witnesses and members voiced some legitimate concerns; a few are listed below. Others, on the other hand, were less convincing.

• Some, such as Rep. Weller, hinted that Venezuela’s government is actively aiding the FARC guerrillas, citing cases of Venezuelan weapons captured in guerrilla hands. The hearing did not make clear, though, whether these arms transfers – and the freedom with which the FARC operates on the Venezuelan side of the common border – are the product of a conscious policy of guerrilla support, or simply the result of rampant corruption and poor governance. “While it remains unclear to what extent the Government of Venezuela provides support to Colombian terrorists,” said Urbancic, “it is difficult to believe that the Chávez government is unaware of, or helpless to prevent such activity.”
  
  Nobody at the hearing mentioned the continued strength in Venezuela, particularly in Táchira province, of Colombian paramilitaries – a decidedly anti-Chávez force that the Venezuelan government has also been unable to expel from its territory. The hearing participants also failed to demonstrate how the situation along the Colombia-Venezuela border differs from what occurs along the borders with Panama and Ecuador, where small, overwhelmed security forces generally choose not to pick a fight with Colombian armed groups in empty, remote zones. In all of Colombia’s neglected border areas, all neighboring-country military officials face similar incentives to look the other way, or even to make big profits by selling off some of their weapons stockpiles.
  
  
• The hearing also left unresolved an accusation first reported in the Miami Herald last fall: an Ecuadorian intelligence report claiming that South American leftists were receiving guerrilla warfare training on Venezuelan soil. The State Department witnesses were not able to corroborate this report in a public hearing.
  
  
• Hearing participants also accused the Venezuelan government of allowing drugs from Colombia to transit through Venezuelan territory, citing an increase in suspicious flights leaving Venezuela. Like the charges of guerrilla support, however, the hearing did not establish whether the Chávez government is deliberately seeking to facilitate drug transit, or whether increased trafficking is resulting from individual corruption and general inattention.

“General inattention” may sound like an unsatisfying explanation for some of these phenomena, but it cannot be dismissed. The Chávez government deserves praise for spreading oil wealth to poorer populations and increasing access to nutrition, health and education. But it also appears to be neglecting some very basic aspects of governance.

This is reflected, for instance, in skyrocketing violent crime rates, particularly in cities like Caracas. It is reflected in decaying infrastructure, such as the notorious case of the collapsed viaduct connecting Caracas with its airport and coast. It is reflected in the scarcity of corruption investigations and prosecutions, and the inefficiency of the judicial system (Colombia’s judiciary is swift and transparent by comparison).

President Chávez inherited many of these problems from his predecessors, whose misgovernment propelled him to power in the first place. But these governance indicators continue to show little or no improvement – and they may prove to be a greater threat to Chávez’s rule than any ham-fisted U.S. attempt at regime change.

The same neglect of governance that has caused Venezuela’s murder rate to exceed Colombia’s may be making border areas more hospitable to Colombia’s armed groups. The same neglect of governance that allows key roadways to crumble may also allow drug smugglers to pass unhindered through Venezuelan territory. Where some U.S. officials and legislators see a plot to foster terrorism, there may simply be a government that, in its rush to implement a program of dramatic political and economic reforms, has left many other urgent needs unattended.

“General inattention” may underlie some of the other official complaints aired at last Thursday’s hearing.

• It is apparently quite easy, for instance, for third-country nationals to obtain Venezuelan citizenship documents. “Anyone in this room other than me,” Shapiro said, “can get a legitimate Venezuelan passport.” The witnesses had no information, though, about how many foreign nationals – much less citizens of Middle Eastern countries – had been caught trying to enter the United States with falsely obtained Venezuelan documents. They also were unclear about whether it was official Venezuelan policy to be lax with passport enforcement, or whether it was the result of low-level corruption. Shapiro said that part of the problem was that Venezuela’s passport operation has effectively been contracted out to Cuban government officials.
  
  
• The hearing participants also raised the issue of potential fundraising for Hezbollah and similar Islamist groups among the Arab or Muslim communities in places like Margarita Island on Venezuela’s Caribbean coast. All agreed that Venezuela is not doing enough to stop this; Urbancic, without citing proof, said he had “no doubt that Chávez is friendly toward these types of activities.”
  
  
• The witnesses cited a Venezuelan failure to respond to U.S. information requests about potential terrorist activity. According to Shapiro, the U.S. Embassy in Caracas has requested twenty meetings in the past year with Venezuelan officials who have counter-terror responsibilities, but no such meetings have been granted in the past two years. (Shapiro did say, though, that “police to police cooperation” against drugs was still good, though “low level and technical.”)

A few of the concerns raised at the hearing, however, are real and worrisome.

• The hearing participants had much to say about Venezuela’s foreign policy. While many of President Chávez’s overseas statements and actions appear designed merely to irritate Washington, they do place his government on the side of some rather unsavory regimes. Urbancic said that Hugo Chávez “ostentatiously cultivates” ties to U.S. enemies. He noted that earlier this year, Venezuela, Cuba and Syria were the only International Atomic Energy Agency countries to vote against referring Iran’s nuclear program to the UN Security Council. Venezuelan officials were some of the only government representatives in the world to offer a defense of North Korea’s missile tests earlier this month. Urbancic used the words “strategic alliance” to describe an upcoming Venezuelan visit to North Korea, Vietnam and Iran.
  
  Because of this, the Bush administration is going all out to prevent Venezuela from getting a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council in October. Usually, each region of the world forms a consensus about which country to send to the council, and that country enjoys easy approval in the General Assembly. This year, however, there is no regional consensus: while some countries (Brazil, Argentina, several Caribbean countries) are backing Venezuela, others (Mexico, Colombia, several Central American countries) are backing Guatemala, the U.S. favorite. The General Assembly will have to choose the next Latin American Security Council member.
  
  The Bush administration worries that Venezuela would side with Iran and North Korea in upcoming Council debates and votes. While Venezuela would have no veto power on the Council, Shapiro worried that its “role and voice would be amplified” by its presence on the UN body and on subcommittees with terrorism responsibilities. Whatever the outcome, the Security Council vote this fall is likely to polarize Latin America further as all states are forced to take a side.
  
  
• The hearing also devoted time to Venezuela’s recent arms purchases, a concern that CIP has also raised before. The Chávez government recently began taking delivery on an order of 100,000 AK-47 rifles purchased from Russia, and Mikhail Kalashnikov, the weapon’s elderly inventor, was on hand to help inaugurate a new rifle factory on Venezuelan soil. The guns are supposed to go to a million-person citizens’ militia that Chávez hopes to form, ostensibly to protect the country against foreign invaders. The militia is part of a “militarization of society” that Venezuela’s Bishops’ Conference condemned in a statement last week.
  
  
• Though it has little bearing on terrorism, members of Congress present at the hearing expressed concerns about the health of democracy in Venezuela. The national legislature, whose members are 100 percent pro-Chávez due to an ill-advised opposition boycott of congressional elections, is nearing approval of a new law to regulate the activities of non-governmental organizations. The law’s wording is very vague; much will be left up to the executive branch, which will author regulations for its implementation. In the best of cases, these regulations will merely improve transparency over NGOs’ operations and increase government oversight over donations from foreign countries. However, a broad spectrum of Venezuelan NGOs worries that the law could be used to block foreign contributions to groups that criticize the government, or at least require that such funds first go to a government agency. They are also concerned that the law could allow the government to deny the legal status of groups that fail to toe the official line.
  
  Pro-Uribe congressmen caused an international outcry in 2003 when they sought to pass similar legislation in Colombia’s congress that would have placed a government barrier between foreign donors and Colombian NGOs. A similar outcry is warranted now in the case of Venezuela.

In all, the hearing was unsatisfying. Not only did it fail to reach a convincing conclusion about Venezuela’s relationship to terrorism, it featured almost no discussion of what the United States can or should do. The members of Congress in attendance failed to go beyond generalities: Rep. Poe, the Texas Republican, suggested “drawing boundaries between those that fight terror and those that don’t,” while Rep. Sherman, the California Democrat, warned the Bush administration to stop counter-productive talk about “taking down” Chávez.

Right now, U.S. policy seems to be a haphazard combination of:

1. Staying quiet and not unilaterally criticizing Chávez (the State Department has rarely taken the bait under Assistant Secretary Thomas Shannon, while the Defense Department has said little publicly since February, when Donald Rumsfeld compared Chávez to Hitler);
2. Using official reports and designations to deliver condemnations of Venezuelan behavior (drug de-certification, human trafficking, “not cooperating fully” against terrorism);
3. Hoping that neighboring countries act on their own to isolate Chávez; and
4. Buying as much Venezuelan oil as we can.

The Bush administration faces few other options in Venezuela at the moment. Arming Chávez’s neighbors or setting up Venezuelan “contras” should be off the table: this is a terrible idea whose negative effects would reverberate throughout Latin America for a generation. On the other hand, even though engagement or “détente” with Caracas could do much to reduce tensions, President Chávez’s own level of interest in improving relations is unclear.

Also unclear, though, is the threat to U.S. security of Venezuela’s current behavior. Many of the issues raised at last week’s hearing – passports, information-sharing, border controls – were technical and could be easily resolved through improved engagement. Others, such as arms purchases, democracy, and relations with rogue regimes, should be important to many countries – not just the United States – and could be addressed through a more multilateral approach.

Security concerns aside, of course, many in the administration and Congress want to get tougher with Venezuela simply because they cannot countenance the presence of another leader in the region (after Castro) who rhetorically defies the United States and disparages the free-market model.

The United States does not get to decide, however, whether Venezuela should have such a government. That is up to the Venezuelan people, who chose Chávez to begin with. If the Bush administration wishes to influence the Venezuelan people’s views, it can start by seeking to ease polarization within the country, not exacerbating it.

That also means improving the U.S. image in Venezuela. Instead of saber-rattling and holding hearings about “terrorist hubs” in the hemisphere, U.S. policy should seek regular contact with all political sectors – including pro-Chavez sectors. It should be our highest priority to change the conditions that have led Venezuelans’ perceptions of President Chávez to exceed their perceptions of the United States by wide double-digit margins. But those conditions were not discussed at last Thursday’s hearing.

Posted by isacson at 11:32 PM | Comments (2)

May 9, 2006

Notes from Costa Rica

Greetings from the airport in San José, Costa Rica. It’s Tuesday morning, and I’ve been in the country since Saturday afternoon to attend the inaugural of President Oscar Arias.

Arias was president of Costa Rica from 1986 to 1990, and he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 for his efforts to bring Central America’s conflicts to a negotiated end. He used the prize money to start a San José-based foundation for peace, where I worked in 1994-95 before joining CIP.

Using the same dogged persistence that made his peace plan successful, Arias helped convince Costa Rica’s Congress to change the country’s constitution to allow re-election; he ran for, and won, a second term in February elections. Like many U.S. and Canadian employees and interns who passed through over the years, I happily accepted an invitation to Arias’ inaugural.

It is interesting to have a former boss now serving as leader of a foreign country. It’s at least as interesting to have a former co-worker – Kevin Casas, who was a fellow program officer at the foundation when I was there – now serving as second vice-president and minister of planning. Kevin is only 38. (I admit I had trouble treating Kevin with the deference his new position requires. In retrospect, saying “hey man, you’re Costa Rica’s Dick Cheney now” was probably over the line.)

“Don Oscar” not only invited all of us former employees to the inaugural, but hosted a lunch for us at his house on Sunday, the day before the inauguration. Arias told reporters that the lunch “lightened his day.”

(Could the contrast with the United States be any greater? A president about to be inaugurated spends three hours of his pre-inaugural day with a bunch of twentysomething and thirtysomething gringos who used to work for him. Meanwhile Arias – not a press secretary – would emerge from his house, on a busy corner in a wealthy neighborhood, every so often to talk to the reporters gathered outside. For its part, the house was guarded only by one or two armed police, and none of us was so much as patted down as we entered. For someone who spends much time in security-obsessed Washington and Bogotá, the contrast was incredibly profound.)

The inauguration was, well, ceremonial. Laura Bush was among the foreign leaders there; she arrived the night before and left a couple of hours after the ceremony. Hugo Chávez canceled at the last minute. Álvaro Uribe was there, and received a loud round of applause from the specially invited audience of wealthy and well-connected Costa Ricans (“Now he’s the one that I really like,” an elderly woman seated behind me told her husband as the crowd applauded Uribe.)

In his inaugural speech, Arias promised to govern in line with many of the values his foundation sought to promote. He promised to spend 8 percent of GDP on education. He called for improving basic infrastructure and access to technology, to modernize the country. To cheers, he called for strengthening the national healthcare and social welfare system, and to pay for it with an increase in progressive income taxes. He called for a foreign policy based on human rights, peaceful conflict resolution, promoting demilitarization, “human development,” and reliance on the United Nations. He said that Costa Rica should be a “moral power” in the world, and its “brand” should be “peace and love for nature.”

This all makes Arias sound like another center-left leader who will quickly run afoul of the Bush administration (just as Arias, for his efforts to end Central America’s wars peacefully, ran afoul of the Reagan administration twenty years ago). But that’s not likely. Arias is not only an admirer of the United States at heart (he is particularly fond of John F. Kennedy), he is a fierce defender of a free trade agreement with the United States. The Bush administration – no doubt anxious to hold on to its dwindling number of friendly leaders in the region – has promised “full cooperation” with Arias, and that’s why they sent Laura to represent the United States instead of, say, the deputy secretary of transportation.

Arias’ pro-CAFTA stance, however, has made Costa Rica no exception to the deeply divisive neoliberalism-versus-statism debates that have swept through Latin America lately. Of all Central American countries, Costa Rica – with its educated workforce and economy less dependent on agriculture – probably stands to gain most from a free-trade agreement with the United States. But the issue is hugely controversial within Costa Rica, and the rather emotional debate has left the country more polarized than it has been in decades.

At the heart of Costa Rica’s free-trade debate is the requirement that the country open up its telecommunications sector to foreign competition (and perhaps its electricity and insurance sectors too). This would likely mean privatizing the Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE), the mammoth government electricity and communications monopoly that controls everything from power lines to Internet connections.

Like a lot of state-owned enterprises, the ICE is undercapitalized and bureaucratic; when I reported there in 1994 to try to get a phone line connected to my apartment, they told me that the waiting list would take three years. (It was there that I first heard the word “trámite,” a terribly bureaucratic word meaning “process,” but really meaning “abandon all hope.”) The wait has since been apparently cut down to about six months.

Despite these problems, many Costa Ricans consider the ICE to be a national treasure, a living symbol of the state-led development model adopted after a brief civil war and restoration of democracy in 1948. This model brought the nation much prosperity since then, and made Costa Rica a majority middle-class country. The fear is that privatizing ICE would be a huge step toward dismantling this model, deepening class divisions in a society that, despite recent increases in income inequality, is very egalitarian by Latin American standards.

Those who want to preserve the 1948 model are joined in opposition by students and labor leaders, who fear that opening up public utilities to globalization will lead to rising rates and worsening conditions for the poorest Costa Ricans. These groups do not view Oscar Arias as a center-left figure at all: they see a wealthy politician trying to open up the national patrimony to the world’s wealthy capitalists. The graffiti seen around San José, including on the walls of the Congress – “Down with Arias, the country is not for sale,” “Arias fascista” – show how the free-trade debate has divided society and coarsened the political culture. (Though José María Figueres, the president during my time in Costa Rica, was quite unpopular, I rarely saw critical graffiti on San José’s walls.)

The debate was so bitter that Arias – who ten years ago, polls consistently showed, was the most popular figure in Costa Rican public life – nearly lost the February election. Ottón Solís, a third-party politician who vociferously opposed a free-trade agreement, was only beaten by a margin of 40.92 percent to 39.80 percent, after a three-week re-count. Solís carried most urban areas, while Arias dominated the Costa Rican equivalent of the “red states.” The campaign was nasty by Costa Rican standards; Solís charged Arias with selling the country to the highest bidder and harming the poor, and Arias charged Solís with seeking to keep the country backward and underdeveloped.

Even little Costa Rica has not been immune to Latin America’s deepening polarization. Even a dovish social democrat like Oscar Arias has ended up being seen, in the eyes of many, as a plutocrat doing the gringos’ bidding, in the same category as Álvaro Uribe or El Salvador’s Tony Saca. It was plain from his words with us that this perception really bothers Arias, and it worries Kevin Casas too. They now face the difficult task of smoothing the deep divisions that have emerged in their traditionally peaceful country. I hope they can do it.

P.S.: A note on re-election: Oscar Arias, like Álvaro Uribe, supported a constitutional change that allowed him to run for office again. During Colombia’s re-election debate, I was often asked whether I thought re-election would be a good idea for Colombia. (Why the opinion of a U.S. organization would matter is unclear to me, but never mind.) My response was that I did not oppose re-election, but that I thought it was usually not good for democracy if the constitutional change allowed a very popular sitting president (Fujimori, Menem, Chávez) to run for a consecutive term. In the case of Oscar Arias, not only was he not a sitting president, he was out of power for sixteen years between his first and second terms.

P.P.S.: If you’re ever in Costa Rica for work but have a morning free, rent a car and drive to the Carara National Park about an hour and forty-five minutes away from San José. In two or three hours of walking in the jungle you’re virtually guaranteed to see monkeys, scarlet macaws, coatis, agoutis and those colorful little tree frogs. Don’t forget to peer over the highway bridge right before the park entrance to see huge crocodiles in the Tárcoles River.

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May 4, 2006

Will nationalizing gas mean more money for Bolivia?

This is not the website to visit for research and analysis of energy-sector economics. Neither I nor anyone else here at CIP is really qualified to comment on the economic impact of Evo Morales' surprise nationalization of Bolivia's extensive gas reserves.

But why let a little thing like lack of expertise keep us from commenting anyway? (This is Washington, after all.) And this issue, which has been dominating the news from the region this week, is very much on our minds.

The headlines following the nationalization are certainly alarming.

• Watchdog warns of ‘dangerous’ trend on energy
• Some see Bolivia strategy backfiring
• Nationalisation fuels fears over Morales’ power
• Chávez casts long anti-American shadow
• Power grab is risky for Morales
• Bolivia's swoop for gas reserves stuns energy giants
• Bolivia's Energy Takeover: Populism Rules in the Andes
• Energy takeover puts Bolivia in a not-very exclusive club
• Outdated petulance

But let's leave aside for now the questions that the nationalizations raise about Bolivia's internal politics, its economic outlook, and its relations with its neighbors. Let's focus for a moment on the bottom line. Will nationalization increase the amount of money Bolivia gets from its gas reserves?

Clearly, the Bolivian government's answer is a resounding yes. Reduce or eliminate foreign companies' share of gas profits, and Bolivia gets to keep more of the pie. Their reasoning seems rather zero-sum: the less foreign companies get to keep, the more Bolivia gets. Show that as a graph and it would be a downward sloping line, like this.

But it's probably more complicated than that. After all, poor countries don't invite foreign oil and gas firms to their territory because their employees are especially charming or good-looking. These countries need foreign firms' capital, technology and expertise to help get the commodity out of the ground and to the market.

Take that into account, and it's not a zero-sum question at all. Instead of a downward-sloping line, the graph is probably more of a bell curve.

That is, if foreign companies see little of the profits, they won't invest enough to help Bolivia find gas, get it out of the ground, process it, and build pipelines to bring it to market. Bolivia's earnings will be low. However, if foreign companies succeed in getting too large a share of the revenue from gas, then the Bolivian people have been ripped off, and Bolivia's earnings will also be low.

For Bolivia, the trick is to avoid finding itself on either end of this bell curve. An effective hydrocarbons policy would place Bolivia right in the middle, where the nation gets a fair share of profits, but not so large a share as to discourage badly needed energy-sector investment. The goal should be a win-win arrangement in which Bolivia makes more money than it would otherwise, and foreign companies make a bit less but avoid inspiring the kind of resentments that lead to a backlash.

Most Bolivians clearly feel that the natural-gas privatizations of the mid-1990s, which allowed Bolivia to collect 18 percent of gas revenue as taxes, were too favorable to foreign firms, placing the country on the right edge of the bell curve.

Anger over this division of income fed protests that ultimately forced President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada to leave the country in October 2003. Evo Morales, meanwhile, was elected in part on his promise to nationalize the country's gas reserves.

The question now is, will Morales' nationalization just push Bolivia to the other end of the bell curve, to the point where disinvestment keeps the country from getting enough of its gas reserves to market?

That depends, of course, on what sort of deal Bolivia negotiates with foreign firms over the next six months. It is entirely possible that this process, if well-managed, could bring Bolivia toward the "sweet spot" in the middle of the curve, greatly increasing government revenue. However, if a hard-line negotiating stance causes the foreign investors to vacate the country, the only thing that might keep Bolivia off the left edge of the curve would be assistance from Venezuela. And it's not certain whether even that would be enough.

Morales' surprise move on Monday is a very risky one. Without a strong dose of pragmatism as the nationalization process moves forward, it could end up being a costly move as well.

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February 10, 2006

Military aid to Bolivia

Yesterday’s New York Times article on Bolivia ("Bush Budget Would Cut Military Aid to Bolivia by 96 Percent") creates a few impressions about U.S. military aid trends in Bolivia that need further clarification. Since I'm cited in the article, I've received a number of e-mails indicating a need to clear up these impressions.

1. All military and police aid to Bolivia is not going down by 96 percent in 2007. In particular, counter-drug aid is being cut much less drastically. Our best guess (since at this early stage much aid must still be estimated based on past years) is that 2007 military aid would be $9.3 million lower than 2006. That’s an 18 percent drop in military aid from 2006 to 2007, and a 25 percent drop from 2005 to 2007. It’s still steep, but not as radical as 96 percent.

	2004	2005	2006, est.	2007, req.	2007 minus 2006		2007 minus 2005
Andean Counterdrug Initiative (ACI / INC)	44.61	48.61	42.57	35.00	-7.57	-18%	-13.61	-28%
Foreign Military Financing (FMF)	3.98	0.00	0.99	0.03	-0.97	-97%	0.03	∞
International Military Education and Training (IMET)	0.59	0.00	0.79	0.05	-0.75	-94%	0.05	∞
Counter-drug aid through the Defense budget (“Sec. 1004”)	5.45	5.45	5.45	5.45	0.00	0%	0.00	0%
Counter-Terrorism Fellowship Program (CTFP)	0.02	0.02	0.02	0.02	0.00	0%	0.00	0%
Regional Defense Centers (CHDS)	0.40	0.40	0.40	0.40	0.00	0%	0.00	0%
Aviation Leadership Program (ALP)	0.01	0.01	0.01	0.01	0.00	0%	0.00	0%
Enhanced International Peacekeeping Capabilities (EIPC)	0.02	0.02	0.02	0.02	0.00	0%	0.00	0%
Total	55.08	54.51	50.25	40.97	-9.28	-18%	-13.54	-25%
Numbers underlined and italicized are estimates drawn by repeating last available year.

The “American Servicemembers’ Protection Act” (ASPA), the 2002 law that bans non-drug military aid to countries that don’t exempt U.S. troops from the International Criminal Court, forces cuts in two programs, IMET and FMF. But the ASPA stops neither U.S. military aid through other programs nor the presence of U.S. military personnel on Bolivian soil (or that of any other banned country).

2. The ASPA would reduce IMET and FMF to Bolivia by 96 percent between 2006 and 2007, according to the aid request. But these programs were already cut completely in 2005. They may in fact be zero again this year, unless the White House decides to offer Bolivia a temporary waiver of the ASPA sanctions, which it can do under the law. Bolivia got a waiver in 2004 when it signed an immunity agreement, but the waiver was lifted when the Bolivian Congress did not ratify the agreement.

A waiver for 2006 might explain why the State Department estimates IMET and FMF rising from zero in 2005 to $1.78 million in 2006; if the waiver were to expire in 2007, that would explain why the aid request foresees them going back down to $80,000 next year. (Neither the New York Times reporter nor I have been able to get a straight answer from the State Department about whether Bolivia is indeed getting a waiver for 2006.)

3. Bolivia is one of twelve Western Hemisphere countries in the same situation. The twelve Latin American and Caribbean countries whose aid is cut by ASPA are Barbados, Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay and Venezuela. Chile, which has signed onto the ICC but not ratified the Rome Statute, may join the list sometime after Michelle Bachelet assumes office.

Bolivia is not being singled out. And the ASPA aid cutoff would have taken place even if Evo Morales had not been elected.

4. Bolivia will continue to send students to the former School of the Americas. In the ten years between 1996 and 2005, Bolivia sent 612 students to the School of the Americas and its successor at Fort Benning, Georgia, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). The Times article leaves the impression that Bolivian military personnel will no longer be able to attend the controversial facility due to ASPA restrictions.

Yet even with its IMET and FMF funding “zeroed out” in 2005, Bolivia still sent 30 students to WHINSEC, and the school expects 61 Bolivian students in 2006. These students are able to attend thanks to funding programs that are not subject to ASPA sanctions: two “pots of money” for counter-narcotics (The Andean Counterdrug Initiative and the Defense Department’s counter-narcotics account) and one for counter-terrorism, a “Counter-Terrorism Fellowship Program” created within the defense budget in 2002. With those funding sources largely intact, we can expect to see Bolivian officers at Fort Benning for the foreseeable future.

These may appear to be minor quibbles, but I did want to clarify them before people began celebrating (or sounding the alarms about) a sharp break in U.S.-Bolivian military-to-military ties. There is some distancing and the budget is being cut significantly, which will likely cause the Bolivian officer corps to complain. But it is not a 96 percent cutoff.

However, the main argument of the Times piece – that the reduced aid may anger some factions of Bolivia’s military and complicate relations with President Morales – is fundamentally sound and I agree that it is a risk.

On the other hand, it could go the other way: if the U.S. defense establishment is forced to cut back ties to the Bolivian military, than it will lose “influence” and “leverage” with Bolivian officers and be unable to use them as a potential political counterweight to a “leftist” civilian government. Which is just fine.

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February 6, 2006

Two days in February

What’s going on here?

In just over 24 hours last week, we heard four Bush administration officials offer wildly divergent opinions about Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales and so-called “radical populism” in Latin America:

On one hand…

On the other hand…

“The President spoke with President Morales of Bolivia. The President called to congratulate President Morales on his election and inauguration. The President also commended the Bolivian people for their strong commitment to the democratic process. The President expressed our commitment to helping the Bolivian people realize their aspirations for a better life. And President Morales outlined his agenda for social and economic change in Bolivia. Both leaders reiterated their interest in a constructive U.S.-Bolivian relationship and dialogue.” – White House spokesman Scott McLellan, February 1, 2006 “The situation now [regarding Bolivia] is deeds not words. Let's take a chill pill.” “The fact of the matter is that we're finding it harder and harder to send our officers to Venezuela but we do want to keep that relationship going.” “We've had populism for years. I don't know if it is more radical.” – Southern Command Commander Gen. Bantz Craddock, February 2, 2006

“We’ve seen some populist leadership appealing to masses of people in those countries. And elections like Evo Morales in Bolivia take place that clearly are worrisome. I mean, we’ve got Chavez in Venezuela with a lot of oil money. He’s a person who was elected legally – just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally – and then consolidated power and now is, of course, working closely with Fidel Castro and Mr. Morales and others.” – Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, February 2, 2006 “In Venezuela, President Chavez, if he wins reelection later this year, appears ready to use his control of the legislature and other institutions to continue to stifle the opposition, reduce press freedom, and entrench himself through measures that are technically legal, but which nonetheless constrict democracy. We expect Chavez to deepen his relationship with Castro (Venezuela provides roughly two-thirds of that island’s oil needs on preferential credit terms). He also is seeking closer economic, military, and diplomatic ties with Iran and North Korea.” – Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte, February 2, 2006 [PDF format]

So there you have it: the same day that the chief of Southern Command says he wants to “keep that relationship going” with Venezuela, his boss – the defense secretary – compares Venezuela’s president to Hitler. (Talk about “old Europe.”) The day after the President calls Evo Morales to congratulate him on his election, the defense secretary calls that election “worrisome.”

This is a clear example of what happens when the White House (which heads the executive branch) fails to set out a clear policy about something: the policy ends up being up for grabs. We can conclude a few other things:

- Donald Rumsfeld just did a grave disservice to Venezuela’s opposition. Hugo Chávez has said publicly several times that the United States is either planning an invasion or seeks to assassinate him. These claims sound ridiculous to us, but no doubt help Chávez to rally his base, keep the opposition off balance, and justify policies like the formation of citizen militias. Every so often, some U.S. wingnut like Pat Robertson opens his mouth and makes Chávez sound credible before his domestic audience. Rumsfeld just did it again.

We can insist all day long that the United States has neither the will nor the resources to invade Venezuela. But a hard-core Chavista can reply that if the head of the Pentagon thinks Venezuela in the 00s looks like Germany in the 30s, then a U.S. invasion could be in the offing. Why not stop him now before he invades Paris?

- Officials are much more alarmed about Venezuela than about Bolivia, where most are trying not to give Morales a hard time, yet. The Bush administration is almost uniformly alarmed about Chávez, as Negroponte’s testimony indicates, though there doesn’t seem to be much consensus about what to do about him. (Other than to cut back on oil imports by 2025.)

- The State Department isn’t controlling the policy. Notice that none of last week’s public statements came from a State Department official. Since the mid-2005 departure of hard-line Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega, the State Department has sought to avoid inflammatory public statements about Chávez or other Latin American leftists, instead expressing concerns off the record or multilaterally. This policy would do much to defuse tensions and silence Chávez’s invasion and assassination talk – if other parts of the executive branch would follow suit.

The State Department is in charge of implementing foreign policy, but it is the very top level – the White House – that must set that policy. That hasn’t happened; the policy toward Venezuela, Bolivia, and Latin America’s rising left remains unclear. The result is a confusing welter of mixed messages from loose cannons throughout the executive branch.

In the absence of a clear policy, Gen. Craddock’s words probably make the most sense. Let’s hope there are enough “chill pills” to go around.

P.S.: The State Department posted the overview of its foreign aid budget request for 2007 a few hours ago. A first glance at the summary tables indicates that the amount of aid requested for Colombia will remain about the same, but that Colombia’s Andean neighbors may be facing deep cuts in both military and economic aid.

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January 24, 2006

Notes on my weekend in Venezuela

In my final post to Democracy Arsenal, I offer a few random observations on what I saw and heard during my first-ever visit to Venezuela this past weekend. I was in Maracaibo to speak before a terrific gathering of hundreds of faith-based peace and human rights activists from Colombia and Venezuela. The trip was way too short to offer more than a few rapid, superficial comments about life in Chávez's Venezuela, but I posted them anyway.

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January 14, 2006

12 elections in 12 months

Another post to Democracy Arsenal, this one about upcoming elections in Latin America and the Caribbean:

In the few minutes per week that they spend thinking about Latin America (am I giving them too much credit?), top foreign policymakers in the administration and Congress would do well to stop and take a deep breath. They will only do more damage if they find themselves hyperventilating about a “leftist wave” or a new “hemispheric axis of evil.”

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December 21, 2005

U.S. policy and the outcome in Bolivia

This morning, I had the opportunity to participate in a great, well-attended press conference at the National Press Club about Bolivia’s elections, along with speakers from the Andean Information Network, the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, the Institute for Policy Studies and the Washington Office on Latin America. I learned a lot from my fellow speakers and I was grateful for the opportunity to participate.

Since this last week before Christmas is less busy than usual, I had a chance to prepare my four-minute remarks in advance. Here they are:

My name is Adam Isacson, I’m the director of programs at the Center for International Policy in Washington. For the last eight years I’ve run a small program that monitors all U.S. military assistance to Latin America and the Caribbean – arms transfers, training programs, deployments, bases, anti-drug operations, and similar things.

We’ve always had an eye on Bolivia. Since 1997, Bolivia has been the number-three recipient of U.S. military assistance in Latin America, with $393 million over 9 years. This puts it behind Colombia and Peru, but since Bolivia has less than 9 million people, only Colombia gets more military aid per person. Beyond Latin America, Bolivia is still one of the main destinations of U.S. military aid. By my best estimate of military and police aid worldwide this year, Bolivia is tenth in the world, right behind Poland and ahead of Mexico.

Between 2001 and 2004, the United States trained 5,689 Bolivian military and police, including about 300 at the former U.S. Army School of the Americas. Among Latin American countries, only Colombia had more trainees during this period. In 2004, Bolivia was fourth in the world in military trainees, behind Iraq, Afghanistan, and Colombia.

Our aid goes to specialized military and police units that interdict drugs, like the army’s 9^th division and the Rural Mobile Police Patrol Units in the police force. It funds an army-police joint task force that forcibly eradicates coca plants and breaks up protests in coca-growing zones. In 2001 and 2002 it even funded a paramilitary “Expeditionary Task Force” whose sole mission was to break up protests; this unit was accused of several human-ri