The Geopolitics of Plan Colombia

Monthly Review, May, 2001 by James Petras

The fear of this chain reaction is at the root of Washington's hostility to any challenge anywhere that could set in motion large scale and extended political opposition. Colombia is a case in point. In itself the economic and political stake of the U.S. within Colombia is not overly substantial. Yet the possibility of a successful emancipatory struggle led by the FARC, ELN, and their popular allies could undermine the mystique, and set in motion movements in other countries and perhaps put some backbone in some Latin leaders. Plan Colombia is about preventing Colombia from becoming an example that demonstrates that alternatives are possible and that Washington is vincible.

More significantly, a Cuba-Venezuela-Colombia alliance would provide a powerful political and economic bloc: Cuban social and security know-how, Venezuela's energy clout, and Colombian oil, labor power, agriculture and industry. The complementary political-economies could become an alternative pole to the U.S. centered empire. Plan Colombia is organized to destroy the potential centerpiece of that political alliance: the Colombian insurgency.

Vacuous Phrases and Concrete Realities

Plan Colombia has the virtue of being a straightforwardly military operation directed by the U.S. to destroy its class adversary in order to consolidate its empire in Latin America. The anti-drug rhetoric is more for domestic consumption than any operational guide to action. The guerrilla leaders and their movements understand this and act accordingly, mobilizing their social basis of support, securing their military supplies, and fashioning an appropriate anti imperial strategy. Faced with this stark political-military polarity, clearly defined by each adversary, many academic and putatively progressive intellectuals retreat to apolitical abstractions divorced from the real power configurations and class struggle into obscurantist and reified concepts. They speak of the "world capitalist sys tem," "accumulation on a world scale," "historic defeats," "the age of extremes"--vacuous phrases written large and repeated as a mantra which explains nothing and obscures the specific class and political basis of the growing anti-imperialist movements and class struggle. Given the strategic importance of the Colombian outcome in the eyes of Washington and the potential this struggle has as the cutting edge for the breakup of U.S. hegemony in Latin America, it is obvious that accumulation of U.S. capital depends critically on the results of political struggles within nation-states. Moreover, recognizing the centrality of oil as the primary source of energy for the United States, a politico-military victory for the United States in Colombia would isolate Chaves and facilitate efforts to undermine his regime. While the FARC/ELN exists as the radical "greater evil" (in the eyes of Washington), U.S. policy planners have to move cautiously against Chaves' foreign policy for fear he will radicalize domestic policy in line with the Colombian left. For all his nationalist foreign policy pronouncements, Chaves has followed a fairly orthodox fiscal policy, respected and even invited new foreign investors, and has scrupulously met Venezuela's external (and internal) debt payments. Thus Washington has followed complex policies toward its adversaries in the triangle, maintaining cool but correct relations with the Chaves regime, while sharply escalating its support of the war against the FARC/ELN.