Chavez sends tanks, troops to border with Colombia

From the Daily Mail: America 'could be dragged into South America war' as Chavez sends troops to Colombia border

America started the war in South America. All exploited peoples have a natural right to pursue and defend life, liberty and happiness and not be owned.

BM

What have you been smoking?

Preparing for the onslaught of, Nuke 'em Now, or, Kick their ass and take their gas, or, If we don't destroy their capability by knocking them out, they will be landing on Manhattan's shore with terrorist bombs.

truth.

Well, you will probably live to see the 2nd amendment regulated into non-existence and your kids will never see the opportunity you had nor the means to fight for it and Bush and the Saudis will own your kids. The government knows theres enough liberals to do what they need them to do and they know there are enough conservatives to do what they need them to do. The F#@ken government will divide and conquer.

So how did the US send Columbian troops into Ecuador?
How did the US send 10 battalions of Venezuelan troops to the Columbian border?

Excuse me... too much crap in too few posts.

What do we have?

We have a Colombian guerrilla (FARC) financed partly by drug trafficking, partly by Chavez.
FARC has kidnapped several hundred Colombians, among them former Green Party Presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt. They have them tied with chains at trees (this is what the recently liberated hostages say).
We have that FARC has found asylum in Chavez-friendly territory of Ecuador.

And we have that the Colombian army invaded one mile into Ecuador territory, bombed a guerrilla camp and killed the Number Two man in FARC.
It is possible that US intelligence may have helped the Colombians find their man. I wouldn't rule out their hand.

My first question is: Is this raid enough to provoke a war? Or at least the war-drums in both Quito and Caracas (who has nothing to do with a border problem between Ecuador and Colombia)? Does it suffice to brake all diplomatic relations?

My second question is: Do the problems in food distribution in Venezuela have anything to do with this reaction?

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I see no good guys here.
The Colombian government has the right to fight the guerrilla and to denounce colusion between foreign governments and FARC. It should have asked for Ecuador's permission... while doing what they had to do. But Colombian authorities lied: they declared there was a "hot" prosecution and the FARC rebels crossed the border... in truth it was a chirurgical bombing on sleeping guerrillas, the Colombian soldiers raid on foot was to recover the guerrilla leader's body and show it off.

The Ecuadorian government should be ashamed of: 1) sheltering an extremist group who violently fights their neighbor and despises human rights; 2) playing peon to Chavez.

And Chavez is just looking for any pretext to make trouble.

Ah...glad to see you comment.

I had kind of assumed this to be sabre-rattling distraction for Chavez, not a serious threat that might lead to war.....do you think this "pretext to make trouble." could lead to anything really nasty????

"The trumpets of war sound in South America, as a consequence of the genocidal plans of American imperialists": Fidel Castro (ailing, but alive and kicking)

Peru, Argentina & Chile have asked Colombia to apologize for the incursion.
Brazil has said nothing but is expected to mediate.
Mexico has offered to mediate.

Colombia says it has proof that the FARC guerrillas possess 30 Kg. of uranium and were going the way of International Terrorism (dunno, somehow this declaration has an Iraki WMD stench).

The OAS (Organization of American States) will meet urgently tomorrow. Chile is preparing a draft asking everyone for moderation.

That sounds like a yes.


Damn.

Can I ask why Brazil is expected to mediate, but hasn't offered, while Mexico is apparently NOT expected to mediate, but has offered?

Brazil mediated in the Peru-Ecuador war 13 years ago.

Mexico competes with Brazil as regional "power".

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I don't think there will be a war, though.

I think there's less than a 1% chance of a war. I think all the involved governments know that as well. Well, maybe except Chavez when he daydreams.

1. Aha.

2. More aha. (Thought it was something like that, but too ignorant to be sure.)

3. Good.

I agree with Robert about the implausibility of war, but wouldn't be so confident. Let's say a 5 % chance.
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Both Colombia and Ecuador are "discarding" an eventual war between them.
But Venezuela has closed its borders with Colombia, and Venezuelan troops are on the move.

Correa (Ecuador's president) is in Peru, and has gotten Peruvian Alán García (a foe of Chávez) to demand (Colombian president) Uribe to apologize to the Ecuadorian people. Correa's next stop is Caracas.
Chile's Bachelet used softer words: "Colombia owes an explanation to Ecuador". Bush has pledged "total support" for Colombia.

There will be a Latin American summit in Rio on friday.

Mexico is already rallying the Central American countries behinds its initiative to be.

What's Columbia got that America wants? Not being leftist?


Mexico's "initiative to be"???? To be a mediator?

Columbia was long a source of high grade marijuana to the United States (especially in the 1970s), but then switched to cocaine (and was being beaten up by Mexico as a source for marijuana anyway). Organized crime in Columbia set up the cocaine trade on a theretofore unheard of scale, and funneled the cocaine from parts south (Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia) to the United States. As they became more sophisticated, they involved Mexican organized crime in the the trade route, to eliminate a potential competitor as middle men in the trade. So, Columbia has been attracting a good deal of American attention since the 1970s. Cali, near the Pacific coast (actually, Santiago de Cali, but simply referred to as Cali) became the center of the cocaine smuggling operations because of the ease of smuggling cocaine to the Mexican west coast. That meant big bucks for the cocaine lords of Columbia, without the pesky problem of getting it across the U.S. border, which is something at which Mexican organized crime was already expert.

The cocaine trade was actually languishing, though, in the early 1980s, both because it was an expensive drug with a limited market, and because the United States, especially the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) had become heavily involved in suppression of the trade. But then the "crack" form of cocaine made the cheapest, lowest grade of cocaine wildly profitable, both because it put it in the price range of the poor, and because it is highly addictive within a short period of time. Knocking off the kingpins of the Cali trade just opened up the competition. Additionally, the Sendero Luminoso, a truly bizarre guerilla movement in Peru which began circa 1980, soon moved into narco-terrorism, funding itself with cocaine produced in Peru and Bolivia.

Columbia has its own home-grown guerilla movement, FARC (from the Spanish acronym for Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia), and they weren't behind hand in taking the cue from the Sendero Luminoso. They were actually aided by the success of DEA working with Columbian officials and the Columbian army in breaking up the former cartels, which had been centered in Cali. FARC has been kidnapping and killing police, judges, army officers, journalists--almost anyone who attracts the least public attention--for many long years, and basically, they stick at nothing. When they became involved as a drug conduit, the violence and brutality of the drug trade increased, even though no one in 1980 would have believed it could have gotten any worse.

The United States became involved in Columbia in the 1970s because of the drug trade, and Columbia didn't care for the heavy-handed bullying from the Reagan administration after 1980, and told the Yanquis that if they wanted the government to stop the drug trade, they better ante up with equipment and training. So the United States became involved in a significant way at just about the same time that FARC got involved in the drug trade. Now the United States is committed to battle communism, and the drug trade is largely forgotten (although used as an excuse for heavy funding and lots of American agents in Columbia). With our current President, you can just imagine the rhetoric about fighting communism and terrorists in Columbia.

By the way, to put this in perspective for you, the United States has long had a proximate interest in the affairs of Latin America. England had long wanted to reap the benefits of trade in Spanish colonial America, and the fall of the Spanish monarchy with Napoleon's 1808 invasion gave them the opportunity for which they had so long yearned. The Yankee traders in the United States were not slow in attempting to exploit the situation themselves, and the rush was on to exploit Central and South America. After 1815, the French became involved, as well. In 1823, in his State of the Union address, President James Monroe articulated a basic American policy to the effect that no new European colonies in the Americas would be tolerated. So the United States Navy became involved in patrolling the waters of the Caribbean and of the South Atlantic. With the Spanish war in 1898, American business interests, who had already backed the "Forward Policy" advocated by Republicans (including "radicals" such as Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt), now had dollar signs in their eyes, and moved into Central America in a big way. The United States made a colony of Puerto Rico, and remained heavily involved in Cuba, up to and including Fulgencio Batista, the dictator overthrown in Fidel Castro's revolution. Obviously, the 1845 war with Mexico comes to mind, but the United States intervened at other times and for other reasons. One of the young heroes of the war with the French in the 1860s (when Napoleon III proped up an Austrian Archduke on a Mexican imperial throne) was Porfirio Diaz, who became President of Mexico in 1876, and became "President for Life" in 1880 (although a fiction of democratic elections was maintained). Early in the 20th century, Diaz rigged an election in 1908 in a manner embarrassing even by the rather lax standards of Latin America at that time, and a strong revolutionary movement against Diaz arose, and American business interests (who had always done well in their dealings with Diaz, who claimed not to want the Yanquis, but needed their investment for his modernization programs) became alarmed. Diaz fled the country in 1911, but the new government began to ignore or even repudiate debts, which they had run up in large amounts to fund their movement, so the United States occupied Veracruz in 1913, and seized the customs house to take the revenues until debts to American businessmen were satisfied. (This was not without precedent, as the English and the French had done it before, themselves.)

In order to forestall a project to build a canal between the Caribbean and the Pacific by anyone else, the United States, among other chicanery, occupied Nicaragua, and in 1916, their puppet government signed a treaty making Nicaragua a protectorate of the United States. In the 1920s, Augusto Sandino lead a peasant movement to oppose the United States, and to teach the peasants to feed themselves before growing cash crops for the hated Yanqis. As you might well imagine, this did not go down well with the United States. The Marines hunted Sandino and his rebels for years, but he always managed to escape. In 1933, Juan Sacasa was elected President of Nicaragua (he was educated at Columbia University in New York, and approved by the American business and political interests), and in 1934, a Nicaraguan general, Anastasio Somoza García captured and killed Sandino. He then managed to found a dynasty that ruled Nicaragua for more than forty years, until eventually overthrown in 1979 by the left-wing revolutionary movement known as the Sandinistas, in honor of Sandino. (Franklin Roosevelt was famously alleged to have remarked that Somoza may have been a son-of-a-bitch, but that he was our son-of-a-bitch, putting a catch-phrase into the political language for supporting tin pot dictators who protected American interests.) It was a by-word in Nicaragua that the Somozas were "the last Marines."

The other chicanery was to support a revolutionary movement in Panama, then a province of Columbia. The Panamanians had had revolutionary movement for just about every generation since Columbia gained its independence from Spain, but in the early 20th century, they had an ace up their sleeve that they hadn't counted on. The United States wanted to dig a canal. Theodore Roosevelt sent Nashville in 1903 to prevent the Columbian army from sailing to put down the revolution, and, unsurprisingly, the government of the brand, spanking new nation of Panama signed a deal with the United States to dig a canal.

In 1946, the United States took steps to formalize and make permanent their relationship with Latin American military leaders when they established the School of the Americas in Panama. Since that time, the United States Army has taught tactical, operational and strategic concepts and skills to Latin American military leaders, and assured continuing close relationships with right-wing power brokers in Latin American countries.

If there is any dirt to be dug up on any Latin American regime, the odds are good that there are plenty of Yanquis with dirty hands.