[News] Setting the Stage for an Encounter at the Colombia-Venezuela Border

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/03/07/setting-the-stage-for-an-encounter-at-the-colombia-venezuela-border/ 



  Setting the Stage for an Encounter at the Colombia-Venezuela Border

by W. T. Whitney <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/gaguwe/> - March 
7, 2019
------------------------------------------------------------------------

On February 23, The U.S. and Colombian governments together tried to 
push humanitarian supplies from the Colombian border city Cúcuta into 
Venezuela. The humanitarian aid was a Trojan horse that, in theory, 
would confront Venezuelan security forces with a dilemma. These would 
supposedly step aside or desert. A take-down of Venezuela’s socialist 
government would follow. But the soldiers, police, and people’s militia 
remained loyal to the emancipating legacy of President Hugo Chávez. They 
blocked the trucks and the façade shattered.

Fire consumed a truck heading for the border. The rubble contained aid 
material but also whistles, gas masks, steel cables, spikes, and wires. 
_Anti-government rioters 
<http://www.resumenlatinoamericano.org/2019/02/26/venezuela-como-se-fabrica-un-crimen-internacional-como-pretexto-de-guerra/> 
_in Venezuelan streets would go without. __

Colombia is a U.S. proxy warrior. It’s a partnership prepared over the 
course of decades, one that is dangerous for the neighborhood and 
central to U.S. pretensions in the region. An understanding of why the 
alliance is strong and how it persists may shed light on the context of 
the Cúcuta incident and on what’s to come.

The flow of money is one aspect. According to a report, “The United 
States is Colombia’s 
<https://www.export.gov/article?series=a0pt0000000PAtWAAW&type=Country_Commercial__kav> 
largest trading partner” and “U.S. exports to Colombia in 2017 [were] 
valued at USD 13.3 billion.” U.S. direct investment of $2.2 billion 
exceeded that of all other countries in 2017. The U.S. ultra-rich have 
soul mates in Colombia. Millionaires there numbered 21,900 in 2007, 
35,900 in 2012.  One percent of Colombians own 40.65 percent of the 
wealth there. Colombia’s _income inequality 
<https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/how-the-panama-papers-spooked-colombias-elite-to-own-up-about-their-wealth/> 
_is second in the world only to that of the United States.

Two big items cementing the alliance are: ideological solidarity 
manifesting as anti-communism and high marks earned by Colombia in 
Washington for reliability in advancing common goals. Its ruling-class 
is well-known for stopping at nothing to stay in power.

President Alfonso López Pumarejo governmentdid advance liberal reforms 
in the 1930s. Otherwise, big landowners have controlled Colombian 
politics with an assist recently from business moguls. The post World 
War II roll call featured a proto-fascist, President Laureano Gómez; a 
military dictator, Gustavo Rojas; an assortment of reactionary 
Conservative and Liberal Party presidents; and the extremist Alvaro 
Uribe. His protégée Iván Duqueis president now.

Colombia’s army murdered some 2000 striking banana workers in Ciénaga 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ci%C3%A9naga,_Magdalena> on December 5-6, 
1928. JorgeEliécer Gaitán, hero to aroused Colombian masses, was 
murdered April 9, 1948 under strange circumstances. From 1986 on, dark 
forces murdered 5000 members of the Patriotic Union electoral coalition, 
mostly Communists.  Since 2016 assassins have taken _431 lives of 
activists 
<https://www.telesurtv.net/news/colombia-asesinato-lideres-sociales-defensoria-pueblo-20190110-0034.html>, 
_including labor leaders and community organizers.

The targeting of leftists has been standard fare in the United States, 
but without the blood. Resurrecting red-scare, President Trump recently 
in Miami delivered a diatribe 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/02/trump-socialism-venezuela-bernie-sanders-ocasio-cortez/583135/> 
hitting at Venezuela and socialism.

In a show of anti-communist collaboration, the United States brought 20 
Latin American nations to Bogota in 1948 to set up the Organization of 
American States. They took the pledge to fight communism. The first OAS 
secretary-generalColombian was Alberto Lleras Camargo,a future 
president. Colombian troops joined U.S. forces in the Korean War, alone 
among their Latin American peers.

Colombia’s government battled the Marxist-oriented FARC insurgency from 
1964 until 2016.The U.S. government supplied its partner with military 
equipment, personnel, and advice – and, between 2001 and 2016 with _$10 
billion 
<https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/02/08/15-years-and-10-billion-later-u-s-efforts-to-curb-colombias-cocaine-trade-have-failed/>_. 
Civilians and combatants killed in the war _totaled 220,000 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/08/24/the-staggering-toll-of-colombias-war-with-farc-rebels-explained-in-numbers/?utm_term=.f073ec3bac07>_. 
But the United States remained aloof from peace initiatives of the last 
decades of the conflict. Its military settled into seven Colombian bases.

To receive U.S. military aid, the Colombian army had to demonstrate the 
good use it had been put to. For display purposes Colombian soldiers, 
eager to please, dressed the bodies of civilians they had killed in the 
uniforms of FARC rebels, minus the FARC rebels. They were showing the 
goods to their U.S. masters. The dreadful sham – _10,000 bodies 
<http://www.pacocol.org/index.php/noticias/ddhh/7581-ejercito-colombiano-mato-a-10-000-civiles-para-mejorar-sus-estadisticas> 
_have been found in all – lasted from 2002 until 2010.

The Colombian government has implemented only bits and pieces of the 
peace agreement ending the conflict. Prominent FARC peace negotiator 
Jesus Santrich, wrongly imprisoned, faces extradition to the United 
States. Fearing the same, head FARC negotiator Iván Márquezis on the 
lam. Over 500 former insurgents, captured as prisoners of war, remain 
imprisoned. The money faucet is still open:  “_U.S. government agencies 
<http://cubamoneyproject.com/2019/02/16/colombia/> _have poured nearly 
three-quarters of a billion dollars into Colombia since 2017,” reports 
Tracey Eaton.

In both countries abuse and neglect ravage the underclass, and campaigns 
for social justice frighten reactionaries imbued with anti-communism. 
Yet upper echelons in the United States may even take perverse 
reassurance from social ills in Colombia. To the extent that resistance 
there is ineffectual, they probably attribute such favorable results to 
suppression. And the suppressors gain credit as reliable allies because 
they are good at what they do.

Social distress is indeed overflowing. In La Guajira, a Colombian state 
bordering Venezuela, 5000 Wayúu 
<https://www.las2orillas.co/presidente-duque-un-concierto-por-la-guajira-tambien-es-posible/> 
Indian children died of starvation during the past 10 years.  Over 58 
percent of the people live in poverty, _25 percent 
<https://www.aporrea.org/actualidad/a276196.html> _of them in extreme 
poverty. Buenaventura is a seaport on the Pacific coast and a profit 
center. People there are 90 percent African-descended and 80 percent 
poverty-stricken (41 percent live in extreme poverty). Some 71 percent 
have limited access to water; 40 percent, no access to sewage; and 65 
percent, no jobs.

“_In Cúcuta, with 750,000 
<http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=253007> _people,” as historian 
Renán Vega Cantor 
<http://www.rebelion.org/mostrar.php?tipo=5&id=Ren%C3%A1n%20Vega%20Cantor&inicio=0> 
observes, “40 percent of the people can’t pay basic expenses; 70 percent 
work in the informal sector; 25.3 percent have no access to drinkable 
water. The poverty rate is 40 percent … and the income for one percent 
of the population derives from illegal sales of contraband goods from 
Venezuela.”

Ironies abound. On February 23 Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro broke 
diplomatic relations with Colombia. Simon Bolívar, inspiration for 
Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, in 1819-1830 headed the nation called 
“Gran Colombia.” Today’s Colombia and Venezuela were part of it. It had 
a constitution, the “Constitution of Cúcuta.”

Almost 200 years ago, Bolívar proclaimed that the United States 
was “destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of 
liberty.” Soon Karl Marx would identify capitalism as the true 
responsible party.

/*W.T. Whitney Jr.* is a retired pediatrician and political journalist 
living in Maine./

-- 
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