President Hugo Chavez on Wednesday warned Colombia not to allow a U.S. military base on its border with Venezuela, saying he would consider such an act an "aggression."
Chavez said he would not permit Colombia's U.S.-backed government to establish an American military base in La Guajira, a region spanning northeastern Colombia and northwestern Venezuela.
The Venezuelan leader said if Colombia allows the base, his government will revive a decades-old territorial conflict and stake a claim to the entire region.
What happens is that Chavez's minion Correa of Ecuador has been saying that Ecuador will not renew a 10-year lease on the base in the Pacific port of Manta when it expires next year. No one is surprised at Correa's position considering how he's under Chavez's orders, and how Venezuela has become the choice port of departure for the South American drug trade. After all,
Manta is the United States' only military base in South America. Surveillance flights the United States runs from there are responsible for about 60 percent of drug interdiction in the eastern Pacific.
A look at the military strength of U.S.-backed Colombia compared to Ecuador and Venezuela (troop strength and reservist figures include army, navy, air force personnel):
Colombia * Regular troops : 254,300
* Reservists : 61,900
* National police : 136,000 (many combat-trained and equipped).
* Hardware : 115 combat-capable aircraft, including 22 ground-attack fighters, among them Mirages and Kfirs. Four surface combat ships
* Defense budget: $5.1 billion
Ecuador * Regular troops : 57,100
* Reservists : 118,000.
* Hardware : 57 combat-capable aircraft including 31 fighters, among them Mirages and Kfirs. Eight surface combat ships.
* Hardware : 94 combat-capable aircraft including 68 fighter jets including Sukhois, F-16s and Mirages. Recent military purchases include 53 helicopters, two dozen SU-30 Sukhoi fighter jets and 100,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles. Six surface combat ships.
* Defense budget in 2007 : $2.56 billion
Source: International Institute for Strategic Studies, AP
On those 280,000 Venezuelan reservists, whose fighting capability is unknown, it's worth revisiting this 2006 NYT article by Simon Romero:
As dawn broke in this gritty city adorned with revolutionary graffiti and murals one day recently, about 300 residents were practicing military-style marching, strutting under the hot sun and clicking their heels in a salute to their commander. This ragtag army of nurses, students and other citizens is one of many being formed throughout Venezuela, part of President Hugo Chavez's attempt to create Latin America's largest civilian reserve force.
The article says, "The reservists in Cua, a city with 120,000 residents 24 miles south of Caracas, ranged in age from 18 to 74." They get paid $7.40, for showing up to march and do calisthenics.
Be nice to Hugo or he'll sic grandma on you.
And let's not forget that last March the Venezuelan army was stopped on its way to the Colombian border by a taxi drivers' strike in a town near the border.
The Washington Post has a slideshow of more of Chavez's bluster.
In other South American news, Lima is under tight security for the Fifth EU-Latin America and Caribbean Summit, The two main topics to be discussed: fighting poverty, and climate change.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's main excuse for trying to kill the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement is that Colombian President Álvaro Uribe winks at atrocities by his country's illegal paramilitary groups. The charge has always been false, and yesterday Mr. Uribe proved it by extraditing 14 "para" leaders to the U.S.
Regardsless of Pelosi's idiocy,
Mr. Uribe has done more to reduce violence, from both right and left, than any president in modern Colombian history.
In the meantime, Human Rights Watch and its congressional partners are running out of excuses for their campaign against the U.S. free-trade agreement with Colombia. The murders of "trade unionists" they decried have drastically decreased; the paramilitary leaders they claimed would go free are in U.S. custody. If their agenda is genuinely human rights -- and not opposition to free trade -- it's time for them to change course.
The Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean: FARC establlishes undercover cells in 17 countries
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The article (in Spanish) states that the FARC, through its Coordinadora Continental Bolivariana (CCB) [Continental Bolivarian Coordination] network created in 2003, the FARC has developed a strategy that involves legal groups, clandestine cells and guerrilla training. These groups are closely associated with leftist organizations in seventeen countries, including Germany and Switzerland.
They opened four organizations in Mexico, managed by two cells that answer directly to the Secretariado, the FARC's leadership.
In the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela the FARC sponsor guerrillas through so-called "Biodiversity Forums", in addition to "official political-diplomatic relations" with Communist parties and the governments of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Ecuador.
Their aim, is
"Crear un gran Ejército revolucionario con el apoyo de masas para derrocar el sistema capitalista e instalar el socialismo". "To create a great revolutionary Army with the support of the masses in order to destry the capitalist system and install socialism."
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia has established undercover cells abroad in 17 countries, a Spanish newspaper says, quoting from documents found on the computer of Raul Reyes, a slain commander of the anti-government group.
All this information comes from the computers seized from Raul Reyes.
Among the details in today's article in addition to their narcotraffic involvement, the FARC is the world's largest planter of land mines, their ties with internations criminal organizations, and their revenues from kidnappings, among them half a million dollars revenue from kidnapping two Swiss executives from pharmaceutical company Novartis.
You can read the articles at El Pais in Spanish. The above is my translation and summary. Please credit me if you use it. Thank you.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Sunday almost told German Chancellor Angela Merkel to go to hell, but stopped short of insulting the woman leader on Mother's Day. Instead he called her a political descendant of Adolf Hitler and German fascism. "Ms. Chancellor, you can go to ...," he said, pausing for effect and eliciting giggles from the audience, a group of military officers, cabinet ministers and government officials. "Because she's a woman I won't say anything else."
Being insulted by Chavez is indeed a mark of honor.
Welcome to this week's Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean. If you would like your posts on Latin America and the Caribbean included in the next Carnival, please email me: faustaw2 "at" gmail "dot" com. Please send only posts directly related to Latin American and Caribbean news and politics, not to commercial endorsements and advertising of resort areas and the like.
This week's big story: Santa Cruz, Bolivia's largest province with 1.5 million inhabitants which Simon Romero describes as
a boomtown in the fertile lowlands. There avenues of glistening office buildings house some of Bolivia's largest private companies and the headquarters of most foreign corporations operating in the country.
Besides finance and resource extraction, Santa Cruz is also home to agribusiness concerns that produce much of the nation's food.
"I hope the government will hear the call of its people now, and not the call of [Venezuela's left-wing President Hugo Chavez] and will start choosing its own course and accept this autonomy and decide it's time to sit down and talk", former president and leader of the opposition Jorge "Tuto" Quiroga told the BBC.
The Last Monday in April Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean
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Today's big story: Bill Richardson's trip to Caracas to ask Hugo Chavez, who has given $300 million dollars to the FARC, to negotiate for the release of three American FARC hostages.
The meeting itself was exceptional, marking a rare personal encounter between and a prominent American official and Mr. Chavez, following a sharp deterioration of political relations between the Bush administration and Venezuela’s government.
It's not clear whether Richardson is ignorant of or indifferent to the anti-American propaganda Chavez spews weekly on TV.
Another big story from last week, the body of Beatriz Porco, a 22-year-old Bolivian who won a scholarship to study medicine in Cuba two years ago, was returned to her family on April 2, minus several internal organs, including the girl's brain, kidneys, lungs, and uterus. Humberto Fontova writing at NewsMax notices that this is not the first time this has happened under the Cuban "free healthcare" system.
Guerrilleros de las FARC atacaron con armas no convencionales desde Ecuador a tropas de Colombia que prestaban seguridad a una petrolera, que cumple actividades de exploración en la frontera binacional, denunció el sábado el comandante del Ejército colombiano, general Mario Montoya.
New documents from computers seized in a March raid on a FARC camp in Ecuador show that the guerrilla group may have ties to a prominent Ecuadorean politician.
Today's Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean
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The big story this week? Barack Obama's Communist ties, which may include the FARC. More thoughts on that at American Thinker.
* Will Obama disclose his full relationship with Ayers and Dohrn? * Will Obama disavow his relationship with Ayers and Dohrn as well as return any money that they have donated to him in the past? * Were Obama's representatives speaking directly or indirectly with the communist terrorists known as FARC? * Will Obama completely denounce Marxist-Leninist ideology, which was espoused by his father as well as friends like Ayers and Dohrn and groups such as FARC?
In a Feb. 28 letter, FARC chieftain Raul Reyes cheerily reported to his inner circle that he met "two gringos" who assured him "the new president of their country will be Obama and that they are interested in your compatriots. Obama will not support 'Plan Colombia' nor will he sign the TLC (Free Trade Agreement)."
Aside from some interesting possibilities about who these "gringos" are — a congressional delegation did visit Ecuador and an international leftist "congress" was held in Quito around this time — the real question is why anyone secretly consorting with FARC would be able to speak for presidential candidate Obama.
Obama hasn't said a whole lot about Colombia other than to criticize President Bush's good relations with President Uribe. With this correspondence suggesting that FARC knows what he thinks, maybe the American voters have a right to know what he thinks, too. Five questions come to mind:
1. Is it true Obama would cut off Plan Colombia military aid to our ally, which would serve the terrorist group FARC's interests?
2. Does Obama still oppose a free trade agreement for Colombia, even though that puts him on the same side as FARC in the debate?
3. Does Obama know or care that one of his staffers or supporters is claiming to disclose his positions in secret meetings with FARC terrorists outside government channels?
4. Can he tell us why his supporters would pass on such information to terrorists, and what he or she could gain from it?
5. Will Obama, as president, treat FARC as the serious terrorists they are, given that they still hold three Americans hostage?
These aren't idle "gotcha" questions, by the way. Based on his campaign so far, Obama favors meeting and negotiating with rogue leaders without preconditions, passing secret messages to foreign countries at odds with his public positions and tolerating Che-flag wielding leftists among his supporters who advance a radical agenda in his name.
American Thinker correctly warns we shouldn't jump to conclusions, but we're still waiting for the media to aks Obama a few tough questions. These would be a good start.
Two things: First, if Obama wants to put American workers first, why is he opposing a trade deal whose sole purpose is to open up Colombia's markets to American-made products? Over 90 percent of Colombian goods can already enter the U.S. duty-free. Second, violence against unionists in Colombia has fallen dramatically, from 275 killed in 1996 to 39 last year. ... Obama opposes the Colombia FTA because trade is a four-letter word among those "bitter" working-class Democrats to whom he sorely needs to build inroads. It's that simple.
Finally, here is how Latin Americans view the situation: Hugo Chavez beat the United States, and Colombia is now all alone. She got in bed with Tio Sam and has nothing but shame to show for it. We just gave every country down there an object lesson in why it is foolish to trust in our friendship. This is how we gain friends in Latin America?
Today's Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean
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The big story: Nancy Pelosi throws Colombia under the bus by postponing a vote on the Colombia Free Trade Agreement. The message Pelosi has sent the world is that in America, the only superpower in the world, political squabbles take precedence over security interests. By doing so, Nancy Pelosi has covered herself in a cloak of shame and infamy. Unfortunately for us, everybody in the hemisphere will have to pay the consequences. Scroll down for all the links and roundup on the story.
Another small big story, Bill Clinton went to Puerto Rico to woo the underwhelming crowds in preparation for the June 1 Democrat primary.
A dark day in history: Nancy hands out 'the Chavez Rule'
UPDATED
Wednesday night I wrote an article for Pajamas Media explaining the consequences if Nancy Pelosi delayed a vote on the Colombia Free Trade Agreement.
Yesterday Pelosi, who I now consider an enemy of America, changed the voting timeline rule on trade pacts from 90 days to whenever.
This is the first time in history that Congress failed to approve a major trade pact.
Monica Showalter of Investor's Business Daily yesterday afternoon describes why this is an evil move (yes, I am choosing my words carefully - it is an evil thing Pelosi has done). I post the editorial in its entirety (emphasis added):
Pelosi's War Congress: The cowardly start more wars than the courageous. Nancy Pelosi's craven altering of House rules to kill off Colombia's trade pact brings that danger to the Andes. If war breaks out, her name will be on it.
April 10 may end up as a date which will live in infamy. The Speaker of the House not only refused to step forward and be counted on approving the vital Colombia free-trade agreement, she ran away from letting anyone else vote on it.
After President Bush submitted the pact to a vote under fast-track rules, she changed them to ensure it wouldn't go anywhere anytime soon. By a 224-195 House vote, the voting timeline rule on trade pacts was changed from 90 days to whenever. Pelosi now can hold up Colombia's treaty however long her caprice dictates.
"The message Democrats sent today," a bitter Bush warned after Thursday's vote, "is that no matter how steadfastly you stand with us, we will turn our backs on you when it is politically convenient."
Pelosi's move leaves Colombia, an ally, in limbo and uncertainty. She may think her clever maneuver was done in a vacuum, but it wasn't. In Venezuela's capital of Caracas, where Hugo Chavez holds forth, and in the jungles of Colombia, where drug terrorists hide out, Pelosi's move was watched closely.
Indeed, within hours of the vote, Latin American media already were calling Pelosi's maneuver the "Chavez Rule."
The Venezuelan dictator is no doubt fascinated at how Pelosi could do this to America's best ally in Latin America, punishing a vibrant democracy by isolating it from all the other nations that have sought and won free trade.
Unlike, say, military aid, this deal costs the U.S. nothing, is too small to have much impact on the U.S. economy and is mainly about ending tariffs on U.S. goods sold in Colombia, matching the no-tariff trade that Colombian firms already get here.
Free trade was what Chavez's enemy, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, considered his best weapon. And Pelosi knocked it right out of his hand, just to placate her party's union supporters.
Only a month ago, Chavez sent 10 tank divisions to the Colombian border after Colombia's army blew away a FARC terrorist kingpin. He warned he would bring war inside Colombia.
Encircled by tanks not only in the East by Venezuela but also in the South by Chavez's cat's paw, Ecuador, Colombia asked the U.S. for just one thing: to pass the free-trade agreement. No tanks. No jets. Just free trade.
Now without it, Chavez might be emboldened to strike. After all, he'll hear from congressional sources that Pelosi probably won't bring up a vote on the trade pact for at least several months. He'll use that time to pick fights with its now-forsaken neighbor. The fact that Colombia can't get even a trade pact tells him all he needs to know about American commitment.
So even though the pact was not rejected outright, its absence will be inherently destabilizing. There's nothing Chavez or his FARC allies dread more than Colombia armed with trade rights that will boost its economy beyond the allure of Chavista populist promises.
At Argentina's 2005 Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata, Chavez made his enmity toward free trade known by hurling insults at the president of Mexico and vowing to "bury" free trade.
Now, thanks to Pelosi's bid to shunt Colombia off to trade limbo, the potential for war in a tinderbox Andean region — over any border incident or FARC terrorist attack — has been heightened.
The world and its dictators don't sleep. The cowardly number that Pelosi did on Colombia likely will prevent the soft power of free trade from working, instead opening the gates to the hard power of war — and pulling in the U.S. whether Pelosi likes it or not. If so, we'll have the her to thank.
Nancy Pelosi has covered herself in a cloak of shame and infamy. Unfortunately for us, everybody in the hemisphere will have to pay the consequences.
The message Pelosi has sent the world is that in America, the only superpower in the world, political squabbles take precedence over security interests.
That political turf-staking, and the Democrats' decreasingly credible claims of a death-squad campaign against Colombia's trade unionists, constitutes all that's left of the case against the agreement. Economically, it should be a no-brainer -- especially at a time of rising U.S. joblessness. At the moment, Colombian exports to the United States already enjoy preferences. The trade agreement would make those permanent, but it would also give U.S. firms free access to Colombia for the first time, thus creating U.S. jobs. Politically, too, the agreement is in the American interest, as a reward to a friendly, democratic government that has made tremendous strides on human rights, despite harassment from Venezuela's Hugo Chavez.
Read the rest, at that arm of the vast right-wing conspiracy, the Washington Post.
At that other arm of the VRWC, the Boston Globe, Edward Schumacher-Matos adresses the "killing union organizers" meme:
While the murder of even one union organizer is deplorable, the numbers being used are so misleading that they should not be cited in opposing the agreement.
All sides agree that the killings are dramatically down, and no one accuses the government of orchestrating them. By the unions' own count, the killings dropped from a high of 275 in 1996 to 39 last year. The government says 26.
The assumption by the Democrats is that all were killed for union organizing. It is an assumption implied in reports they cite from groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Those groups, however, rely on Colombian unions for their numbers, instead of collecting their own. The number of convictions now being won in the union's own cases reveals that perhaps one-fifth, and almost certainly less than half, of the killings had to do with unionism.
Of convictions won in 87 cases since the first one in 2001, almost all for murder, the ruling judges found that union activity was the motive in only 17, according to the attorney general's office. The judges found 15 of the cases had to do with common crime, 10 with passion, and 13 with being guerrilla members. No motive was established in 16 of the cases.
The unions don't dispute the judicial findings, and deep in their reports say that they, in fact, have no idea of suspect or motive in 79 percent of their cases going back to 1986. The killings, in other words, are isolated and not part of a campaign against unionizing. The unions further benefit from the reduced paramilitary and guerrilla violence. The convictions have cut impunity. The government provides protection, from free mobile phones to bodyguards, for nearly 2,000 union leaders.
Not satisfied with cement, Chavez has now set his sights on nationalizing steel, and his armed forces are now occupying 32 sugar plantations. Apparently, Chavez is so afraid of getting whacked with a sugar cane that he's decided to make a preemptive strike. We have a golden opportunity to strengthen a relationship with an improving Democratic nation that unfortunately is next door to a president who is a socialist kook. Too bad our Democratic "leaders" would rather let that opportunity pass.
Mrs. Pelosi herself spoke with the Colombian ambassador to the U.S. to offer assurances that the House action wasn't meant as a show of disrespect and could ultimately lead to passage, according to an aide to the congresswoman. Mrs. Pelosi said the deal could still come before the House this year, if Colombia takes steps to stem violence against labor organizers and if the White House moves to accept Democratic demands for action on competing priorities, such as expanded food assistance to the poor.
"Not having a trade agreement is almost like having trade sanctions imposed in the sense that you've been downgraded, or are at least now one level below the other comparable economies in the continent" that do have trade deals, such as Mexico, Chile, Peru and Central America, Trade Minister Luis Guillermo Plata said in an interview.
Additionally,
The delay "is a calamity for the world trading system," said Fred Bergsten, the director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. "This undermines the whole basis of international confidence in the U.S. as a trading partner."
By eliminating the deadline for ratification, Nancy Pelosi proves she is willing to endanger the security of the continent just to show that Democrats are the ones in charge
I'll be missing most of the Congressional three ring circus surrounding Gen. Petraeus's testimony today, but here's more on Hillary's double-dealing on Colombia:
While she's saying that she's against the agreement, and the Democrat party has caved in to labor unions' objections in spite of the fact that the agreement would strengthen America's most important ally in South America, Mark Penn, her campaign strategist was also working for the Colombian government towards pushing the agreement.
Penn was fired by the Colombians on Saturday and lost his job as Hillary's campaign strategist on Sunday, but will remain as pollster and adviser to the Hillary campaign, whatever that means.
signed a $40,000 per month contract with the government of Colombia in April of 2007 to promote the very agreement that Clinton now rails against on the presidential campaign trail.
That means Glover Park Group was arguing the same position as Penn's firm.
The Colombian government said Saturday it has fired Mark Penn's public relations firm after the chief campaign strategist for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton apologized for meeting with Colombian officials pushing a trade deal with the U.S.
"Sources said that the Clintons were angry to learn about Penn's work, especially because they had been told that Penn had recused himself from controversial clients and would restrict his private work."
Ironically, "Penn also was regarded by many in the campaign as too self-serving."
The Last Monday in March Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean
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This week's big stories: Colombia seizes thirty kilos of depleted uranium from the FARC. The American media doesn't seem to have caught on that this is news.
Democrat Congressman James McGovern was found to have ties with the FARC.
Also in US and Latin American news, governor of Puerto Rico Anibal Acevedo was been indicted, booked, and released without bail on nineteen charges of conspiracy, false statements and violations of various campaign finance laws, following an FBI investigation in Puerto Rico and Philadelphia. Acevedo was one of Obama's superdelegates. The Democrats have scheduled the Puerto Rico primary for June 1.
Mario Ballesteros, head of the state-run geology institute Ingeominas, said a study of the uranium, its possible uses and health risk would be presented on Friday, EFE news agency reported today.
"The FARC may have wanted this material to build a stronger rocket that destroys the president or a minister's armored car, not create a weapon of mass destruction," said Cesar Restrepo, from Bogota's Security and Democracy Foundation.
Padilla said informants he didn't identify, who are close to an alleged arms supplier Reyes called "Belisario," led the military to the uranium. Authorities are investigating the origin of the material, he said.
Embossed on the two metal lodes, in English, was the warning "Caution: Radioactive Material. Depleted Uranium," according to the military's video.
Chavez warns Colombia against U.S. base
Today's WSJ editorial, 
BRAZIL
If you only read one blog post today, read Doug Ross' 
Then