South America: Pulling back from the brink of conflict

last updated 8 January 2015

Ecuador has been vindicated, said Ecuador’s El Comercio in an editorial. Last week, Colombia violated our sovereignty in the most brazen way, bombing a camp of Colombian rebels that was located on the Ecuadoran side of the border. Colombia did not ask Ecuador to move against the camp, let alone seek permission to launch its military attack, “as required under bilateral agreements.” Instead, it invoked “the doctrine of pre-emptive self-defense that, until now, had only been advocated by President Bush.” It’s not surprising that the rest of Latin America rallied to Ecuador’s cause. Nicaragua recalled its ambassador, and Venezuela actually mobilized troops on its border with Colombia.

The outrage at Colombia was bewildering, said Edulfo Peña in Colombia’s El Tiempo. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe had plenty of evidence to back up his actions. At a regional summit in the Dominican Republic last weekend, he showed his neighbors “video evidence” of rebels from the FARC—which has been trying to overthrow the Colombian government for 44 years—operating openly on both Ecuadoran and Venezuelan territory. It’s not as if Colombia is the first country to target rebels across a border: “Nicaragua did the very same” back in the 1980s, when it attacked the Contras in their Honduran bases. Yet Uribe was the one who had to apologize. His promise never to violate Ecuador’s territory again has defused the crisis, but at the cost of a loss of prestige.