Colombia steps back from US

Opinion: November 30, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Colombia’s right-of-center President Juan Manuel Santos may have been kidding when he recently said that radical leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is his “new best friend,” but few in Washington are laughing.

There is a growing feeling in the U.S. capital — especially in Congress — that Santos is moving closer to Chavez, and shifting away from Colombia’s close alliance with the United States over the last eight years.

Since Santos took office in August, he has taken several steps to distance himself from former president Alvaro Uribe’s policies. Consider:

Santos’ first official trip as president was to Brazil. Since then, he has toured several Latin American countries, but has yet to set foot on Washington.

Santos has met several times with Chavez, and both have vowed to dramatically improve Colombian-Venezuelan ties. Relations were openly hostile under Uribe, in part because the former Colombian president repeatedly condemned Venezuela’s clandestine support for Colombia’s FARC guerrillas.

Complying with Chavez’s wishes, the Colombian president recently announced that he will extradite suspected Venezuelan drug kingpin Walid Makled to Venezuela, rather than to the United States. Both Venezuela and the United States had requested Makled, who has testified that top Venezuelan government officials were protecting his drug trafficking operations. Chavez wants Makled at home, to keep him silent, or press him to recant his testimony.

The Santos government has no immediate plans to submit to the Colombian Congress a new bill authorizing the presence of U.S. troops in several Colombian military bases, Colombian officials say. A much publicized 2009 U.S.-Colombian military agreement to that effect was recently invalidated by a Colombian court.

Santos is scheduled to launch free trade agreements with Canada and the European Union in coming months. The 2004 U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement has yet to be ratified by the U.S. Congress.

‘Lot of concerns’

Rep. Connie Mack, a conservative Republican who is scheduled to become chair of the House Western Hemisphere subcommittee next year, conceded to me that “there are a lot of concerns” about Colombia in Congress, but added that “I’m not ready to say that he is drifting away from the United States.”

Curious about what’s in Santos’ mind, I talked with several Colombians who are very close to the new president.

Most told me that, indeed, there is a deliberate foreign policy shift in Colombia. It was prompted by the U.S. failure to deliver on its trade deal with Colombia despite major diplomatic overtures from Colombia.

In recent years, Colombia has accepted U.S. troops in Colombian military bases, has sent Colombian police officers and anti-drug agents to Afghanistan in support of U.S. troops, and has voted with the United States on most issues at the United Nations.

Despite these and other gestures, there has been no positive response on the free-trade deal from Washington. President Barack Obama’s close ties with anti-free trade U.S. labor unions has kept him from pushing more aggressively for ratification of the trade deal, they said.

“Colombians are somewhat disillusioned with the United States,” says Enrique Santos Calderon, until recently managing editor and columnist of El Tiempo, Colombia’s most influential newspaper, and the president’s brother. “There is a feeling that we need to take some distance, and stop making unilateral favors that are not reciprocated.”

My opinion: The new Colombian president is moving closer to Chavez mainly for economic reasons. Venezuela is one of Colombia’s biggest export markets, and previous tensions between the two countries had hurt Colombian exports badly.

In addition, Santos is also using his temporary honeymoon with Chavez as a negotiating strategy to move Washington into action on the free-trade deal. Since the previous policy didn’t work, he’s trying something else.

I’ve known Santos for many years, and I always keep in mind that one of his favorite hobbies is playing poker. As a good poker player, he is keeping everybody guessing, including his friends in the U.S. capital.

Andres Oppenheimer is a Latin America correspondent for the Miami Herald. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.