U.S. Bases or Not?
President Obama was forced to address the growing clamor in South America opposing plans for U.S. military use of bases in Colombia to carry out regional operations with a wide and ambiguous mandate. “We have no intent in establishing a U.S. military base in Colombia,” Obama said on Friday.
But whether the bases are "U.S." in name is of no import. The proposal has always been for U.S. military use of national bases in Colombia, which is how the U.S. works at military bases in Honduras, Ecuador, El Salvador, and many other countries in the world. The Pentagon does not acknowledge “U.S. bases” in Iraq, for example. Obama’s announcement doesn’t change anything of what has bothered so many Latin Americans and U.S. citizens who hoped for better from Obama’s government.
The issue is the missions of U.S. forces at those bases, and the message they send to Colombians and others in the region that the United States will respond militarily to every problem, from poverty to bilateral tensions. The bases will lock in a secretive U.S. military presence to address issues that should be addressed with diplomacy, negotiation, economic development, and drug treatment.
That’s why Brazil’s foreign minister Celso Amorin says this escalation of U.S. military presence “creates a new situation.” It’s prompted Uruguayan president Tabaré Vásquez to oppose foreign military bases in Latin America and Evo Morales to propose prohibiting such bases.
No one believes that U.S. military activities will be restricted to Colombian territory. First of all, U.S. and Colombian drug warriors have been saying for years that narco-trafficking is an international threat that must be met through international operations. So it’s no surprise the Pentagon has its eye on the Palanquero air base, with its capacity for C-17s that can reach half of South America.
Second, President Obama has maintained the doctrine of transnational attacks against groups it denominates as terrorist, including in Ecuador — Obama supported the March 2008 Colombian attack over the border — and Pakistan, where U.S. forces themselves have attacked repeatedly, leading to many civilian deaths.
Third, President Uribe launched his defense of the base agreement by announcing what he said is new evidence that officials from Venezuela and Ecuador were aiding the FARC. Leaders of those countries dispute the evidence, but even if it is true, escalating the U.S. military presence on bases in Colombia will hardly resolve the conflict. It will instead further polarize it.
But the operations of U.S. military forces inside Colombian territory present equally poisonous prospects. The rationale is based on two claims: that the biggest problems of Colombia are drug trafficking and guerrillas, and that U.S. and Colombian military cooperation is the best way to address these problems.
The largest number of killings of civilians each year in Colombia is not committed by the guerrillas, but by the army and paramilitary groups, according to the Jesuit-run Center for Research and Grassroots Education (CINEP). A large majority of Colombia’s 4.7 million internally displaced people were forced from their homes by paramilitary violence, with more than 11 million acres of land violently stolen. The U.S. military presence won’t contribute anything to returning those lands to their rightful owners, nor to holding the Colombian army accountable for more than 1,700 civilian killings committed since 2002. U.S. soldiers at seven bases in Colombia won’t put a brake on Colombian intelligence agencies' harassment, attacks and surveillance of human rights defenders, Supreme Court justices, journalists, and opposition party leaders. That’s not the U.S. soldiers’ mission.
Similarly, more than $6 billion spent on Plan Colombia since 2000 has done nothing to stop the production and flow of cocaine from Colombia to the United States.
Supporters of the base agreement ask what the big deal is, saying that nothing really changes in U.S.-Colombian military cooperation.
First, this is not true. The U.S. presence will be oriented toward the Caribbean and Venezuelan side of Colombia, instead of the south, where U.S. aid to date been concentrated. Second, Pentagon activities in Colombia, such as those carried out on Colombian bases, are secretive and impervious to policy-making. The Defense Department doesn’t set counternarcotics budgets by country, so Congress never knows how much the U.S. military will spend in Colombia until after the fact.
Supporters assert that the number of U.S. troops and contractors in Colombia will not rise above the current limit of 1,400. Yet that limit is not fixed by mutual agreement but by the United States. The Senate Armed Services Committee recently called on the Pentagon to review these limits and consider whether to remove them.
What’s more, the U.S. military presence in Colombia should change, because the facts on the ground either have changed, or cry out for a policy change. There are whole Colombian brigades of 2,000 men chasing tiny bands of guerrillas in some areas. This is a time when Washington should invest in peace talks, not institutionalizing its relationship with the military. And leaders from all over Latin America and Europe are calling for a paradigm shift in how to deal with the narcotics trade. Yet Colombian negotiators say the bases aim to replace Plan Colombia’s U.S. military aid, which has been reduced because of human rights concerns and ineffectiveness.
These realities call for serious consideration of the proposals by the presidents of Uruguay and Bolivia to prohibit all foreign military forces in South America. Ecuador has led the way, through a constitutional provision banning the “establishment of foreign military bases or foreign installations with military purposes” as well as “ceding national military bases to foreign armed forces.” Such a prohibition would be a step toward preventing the United States and other countries from imposing their will through violence, and making space for a true community of American nations.
Contact: John Lindsay-Poland, FOR Task Force on Latin America & the Caribbean (510-763-1403)
