We hear little of the war on terror in Latin America, but this may change if agreement is reached to instal a series of American military bases in north-west Colombia. The sites are ostensibly to be used for counter-narcotics operations and to deepen bilateral ties between the United States and its strongest regional ally.
As many as 1,400 US military personnel could be stationed in the country, greatly increasing America’s ability to target local cocaine production, much of which is supported by the Marxist Farc guerrillas.
Leaders on the left, however, argue that the bases will allow the US to project authority throughout Latin America, just as Guantanamo allows it to do in the Caribbean. President Evo Morales of Bolivia has declared that for the leader of any Latin American nation to allow US bases on the continent is a treasonable act, and Colombia’s relations with Ecuador – which is ejecting US forces from its territory – have already soured after Colombian forces pursued Farc guerrillas over the border into Ecuador last year. Doubtless aware that the US has pursued the Taliban over the Afghan-Pakistan border, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez has also ordered a review of relations with neighbouring Colombia.
However, like the war-torn Cuban government, which acquiesced to the American lease on Guantanamo in 1903, the Colombian government is too dependent upon US support to say no to a deal, whatever ire it provokes. Washington, too, is taking risks with this agreement. The US may well find itself accused of complicity in the often brutal tactics of Colombia’s military, especially its paramilitary forces. One of the proposed bases that US troops will share with their Colombian counterparts was the launching pad for a notorious operation in 1998 that killed 17 civilians. Perhaps more importantly, Barack Obama himself could be seen as continuing, instead of breaking with, the history of US interventionism in Latin America.
The American president is doubtless aware of this, but he is a staunch pragmatist. While improving relations between North and South America may be one of his foreign policy ambitions, sustaining America’s capacity to fight multiple fronts of a diffuse war on terror is a more important one. It is this that explains the real importance to America of the Colombian bases, because the bases will also provide a crucial node for transporting military equipment and personnel in future and current military operations in Africa and the Pacific.
The consequences of a deal being struck in Bogotá stand to be felt by terrorists in Africa and Indonesia as much as by the Farc in their jungle hideouts. At the same time, the deal reveals the ways in which Obama is sometimes having to refine, rather than depart entirely, from Bush-era geopolitics.
Simon Reid-Henry is the director of the Centre for Global Security and Development at Queen Mary, University of London
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