Chavez support for terrorists goes too far
Here’s an interesting theory: the ongoing escalation of Colombian-Venezuelan tensions will help the two countries’ charismatic leaders become even more powerful and win third terms in office.
Granted, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez may have overplayed his card and may have lost support internationally, but when if comes to internal politics, both he and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe could stand to gain. The latest Colombia-Venezuela war of words rose to new heights following Venezuela’s official support for granting diplomatic legitimacy to Colombia’s narco-guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
Last week, Chavez made headlines around the world by asking Colombia and the international community to stop labeling the FARC rebels “terrorists,” and granting them diplomatic legitimacy by defining them as “insurgent forces” that control territories within Colombia.
Colombia reacted with predictable anger, accusing Chavez of meddling in its internal affairs. It reminded the world that the FARC rebels not only hold more than 700 hostages — many of them in chains — and are big-time drug traffickers, but are responsible for thousands of civilian deaths.
Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro charged that Uribe is “obsessed with defeating the insurgent forces militarily, obsessed with war.”
Internationally, there is little question that Chavez’s open support for recognizing the FARC as a legitimate insurgent force will hurt him.
“Of all the guerrillas in Latin America, this has been the worse one,” former Salvadoran guerrilla leader Joaquin Villalobos told me in a telephone interview from London. “While most other guerrillas at one time or another made mistakes, this one has turned narco-trafficking, kidnapping and terrorism into its main activity.”
Little support
Even Chavez-friendly countries such as Argentina and Ecuador, as well as Colombia’s own leftist Polo Democratico opposition party, have kept distance from Chavez’s pro-FARC statements. And pollsters say Chavez’s standing in Latin America, which was already low, is likely to drop even further.
According to the latest Latinobarometro poll, a survey of more than 20,000 people in 17 Latin American countries, Chavez is — along with President Bush — the second least-liked leader in Latin America. The leader with the lowest Latin America-wide approval rates is Cuba’s Fidel Castro.
Domestically, however, both Chavez and Uribe may get a popularity boost, several analysts agree.
Chavez is eager to divert attention from his Dec. 2 electoral defeat over a constitutional reform that would have allowed him to stay in power indefinitely, Chavez critics say.
In addition, to regain ground in Venezuela, Chavez may also be trying to revive age-old Venezuelan animosities against Colombia, and rally the Venezuelan people around him by creating an international conflict. Chavez badly needs a popularity boost at home to revive his bid to change the laws and remain in power until at least 2020, they say.
Something similar is happening in Colombia, where Uribe will take advantage of the situation to change the constitution and seek a third term, critics of the Colombian president say.
“Uribe badly needs to polarize Colombia against the FARC as a foundation for his possible bid to remain in power,” Horacio Verbitsky, an influential Argentine leftist columnist, told me from Buenos Aires. “He needs to change the laws, and his only argument is that he is the big macho who’s fighting the bad guys.”
But the bottom line is that either by design (in Chavez’s case) or by chance (in Uribe’s case), the new Colombian-Venezuelan tensions may help the two presidents present themselves as “indispensable leaders” to their peoples, and remain in power beyond their current legal mandates. That would be bad news for their countries, and a bad precedent for the region.
X Andres Oppenheimer is a Latin America correspondent for the Miami Herald. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.