Mar 05, 2003
Summary
The presidents of Colombia and Brazil will meet March 7 to discuss bilateral relations. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Velez wants Brazil to condemn the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia as international terrorists, but Brazilian President Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva is determined to maintain his government's neutrality -- despite deteriorating security conditions along the countries' shared border.
Analysis
Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Velez will meet with President Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva in Brazil on March 7 in an effort to smooth over several recent bumps in bilateral relations. The summit comes when Colombia's ties with some of its neighbors are strained by what the Uribe government perceives as a combination of indifference, lack of cooperation and even hostility on their parts.
Uribe wants an official statement from Brazil's government condemning the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) as an international terrorist group. Uribe also will seek a commitment from da Silva to significantly reinforce military and police defenses on Brazil's border with Colombia to prevent the rebels from crossing into Brazilian territory, from whence they can smuggle weapons back to their own country.
However, da Silva likely will deflect Uribe's requests. Brazil is determined to remain neutral in the Colombian conflict, in hopes of minimizing the risks of regional spillover and armed confrontations between Brazilian security forces and Colombian irregular groups. Moreover, a senior Brazilian presidential adviser on foreign policy, Marco Aurelio Garcia, said recently that if Brazil condemns the FARC as a terrorist group, it would nullify Brazil's future ability to act as a mediator in peace talks between the rebels and Bogota.
Garcia's statement was an unpleasant surprise for the Uribe administration, which currently does not view peace talks with the FARC as a viable option and which likely would never invite Brazilian mediation -- due to concerns that some senior officials in da Silva's government are sympathetic toward the rebels. Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim later downplayed the significance of Garcia's remarks, but the incident highlighted the fact that Brasilia prefers peaceful negotiations with the FARC instead of an armed confrontation that could grow regionally, with possibly destabilizing repercussions for Brazil itself.
This position places Brasilia directly at odds with the Bush administration on Colombia. The Brazilian government has opposed Plan Colombia -- the U.S.-financed military strategy to eradicate the Colombian drug trade -- since the scheme was first announced in 1999; policymakers feared that Washington's obsession with eradicating cocaine and heroin in Colombia would result in an expanding U.S. military presence there.
From Brazil's perspective, those fears were justified. In the past three years, the U.S. government has pumped more than $2 billion in mostly military aid into Colombia, initially to fight drug traffickers but more recently to battle rebel groups as well. Also, in January, the U.S. Army sent nearly 70 Special Forces advisers into oil-rich and rebel-infested Arauca Department to train a Colombian army brigade in counterinsurgency tactics.
In February, Washington dispatched 49 soldiers to Colombia to participate directly in search operations for three Americans captured Feb. 13 by the FARC, following the crash of their single-engine plane during a counter-drug surveillance flight. Some of those U.S. troops are now in the field with Colombian army units, and their orders of engagement reportedly allow immediate self-defense measures if they take incoming fire from the FARC or anyone else, according to Stratfor sources in Colombia.
Brazilian leaders view these developments as evidence of slow but sure U.S. military expansionism in Colombia, and they are concerned that this trend could aggravate the Colombian civil war, pushing it into neighboring countries. They also fear that the growing U.S. military presence eventually could threaten Brazilian sovereignty over the northwest Amazon region.
However, Brazil's efforts to remain neutral are being undermined by deteriorating conditions along its porous and lightly guarded border with Colombia. The FARC and international drug traffickers -- including Rio de Janeiro's Red Command crime gang, led by jailed Brazilian drug kingpin Fernandinho Beira-Mar -- regularly move large loads of drugs across the border into Brazil and bring back weapons from arms suppliers based in Paraguay, according to news reports.
A Brazilian police officer in Leticia, the river city that divides Colombia from Brazil, recently told Bogota's RCN network that the FARC controls "a vast territory" of coca plantations and cocaine laboratories in southern Colombia, directly across the river from Brazil.
If the Colombian rebels are moving fighters and coca fields into the southernmost reaches of their country to escape aerial crop-spraying and attacks by army units, Colombian paramilitary groups will soon follow -- creating a low-intensity conflict that will spill across the border into Brazil, just as it has spilled into Ecuador's northern provinces during the past several years.