Colombia's Mounting Problems
By Douglas Farah
Things are going from bad to worse in Colombia at a time when we can ill afford further exposure on the southern flank. As the Washington Post reports today, the reform of the police and military is far from completed.
President Alvaro Uribe, locked in a costly and protracted war with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) has failed to adequately gage the dangers posed by the paramilitary groups on the other side. They are just as brutal and perhaps even more involved in cocaine trafficking than the FARC. (To its credit, the Bush administration has declared both the FARC and Self Defense groups terrorist organizations).
Uribe's inability to confront the paramilitary groups, initially formed to fight the FARC and other Marxist-led rebel groups, has been a disaster for his government, and could well turn into a disaster for his neighbors and the United States as well.
The consequences will be severe, particularly for "Plan Colombia." The Congress will cut or condition aid, and the tolerance of Colombia's political class for the paramilitary groups and their money will mean that little true reform will come, at least not quickly. That could kill the Congressional tolerance for spending close to a billion dollars a year on a plan that is running out of steam.
The conditionality of aid is often useful, and there is no doubt that the Uribe government set itself up for much of the current difficulties it faces. Uribe appears to have learned little from the bloody experiences of fighting the drug cartels, where jailed leaders routinely directed their organizations from prison, bought politicians and engaged in endless negotiating tactics and false truces with the government.
The paramilitary groups are using all the same tactics, with the same result-a grotesque undermining of the Colombian state's authority and the consequent delegitimization of the state itself in the eyes of many Colombians.
This is a clear danger to the Colombian state. But the broader strategic danger to the United States, it seems to me, remains the FARC, and their protector in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. My full blog is here.