U.S. troops to use Colombian bases

If nothing else, it was good TV, said José Vales in Mexico’s El Universal. The presidents of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) spoke passion­ately—sometimes sharply—with one another last week at a summit in Argentina that was televised live across most of the continent. The “tense” meeting was called to debate Colombia’s recent agreement to allow U.S. troops to use seven Colombian military bases for the fight against terrorism and drug trafficking. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who led the opposition to the U.S.-Colombian pact, was in top form, waving a document that he said was a Pentagon plan to dominate Latin America through the bases. “These seven Yankee bases are a declaration of war,” Chávez charged. The presidents of Ecuador and Bolivia agreed, saying that President Obama owed it to South America to explain just what the U.S. is doing in the region. Ultimately, though, the summit did not produce the expected condemnation of the base plan. Instead, the South American leaders simply signed a document reiterating that their continent was a “zone of peace.”

That outcome, said Roberto López Moreno in Ecuador’s La Hora, was actually a big victory for Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, who somehow talked his way out of what was expected to be universal disapproval. And it was Ecuador’s own President Rafael Correa who “unwittingly gave Uribe an opening” in his speech. Correa said it was Colombia’s responsibility, not the U.S.’s, to crack down on the FARC,

the Colombian rebel group that controls the drug trade. He then went on to complain that Colombia had failed to do so. Uribe pounced. “You yourself have complained about the damage these groups will do,” he told Correa, adding that U.S. help was imperative to restore peace to the region. The anti-U.S. camp was left looking “illogical, incomprehensible, and incoherent.”

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It was a tough slog, though, said Colombia’s El Tiempo. Uribe did not entirely convince his fellow presidents that “the infamous American bases” were not American at all, but rather Colombian bases with a few visiting U.S. troops. UNASUR has such an “undisguised anti-American tone” these days, yet Colombia’s strategic alliance with the U.S. is vital to our security. “In the long term, the country must consider to what extent the strategic relationship with the North is incompatible with peaceful relations with the South.”

It’s not the U.S. that’s dividing South American nations, said Hernán Felipe Errázuriz in Chile’s El Mercurio. It’s Venezuela. The UNASUR summit, convened “for the express purpose of denouncing the U.S.,” was Chávez’s idea. It was a foregone conclusion that his “allies in Bolivarian revolution,” Ecuador and Bolivia, would applaud his anti-American rants. But South America has plenty of other, more moderate leaders—in Peru and Brazil, for example, and here in Chile. Surely they don’t want to see UNASUR turned into a forum for Chávez’s chest-beating. Next time, they will have to speak up—and show Venezuela that it can’t speak for the entire continent.