Hemisphere May Have Its ‘Kosovo’ Crisis

Washington’s problems are everyone else’s too, and nowhere is this more true than in Latin America. So it should come as no surprise that as debate and concern intensify in the United States over the proper American role in Colombia’s unfolding drama, foreign ministries throughout the region are beginning to fret over their own involvement--or lack of it--in the imminent hemispheric crisis.

The coordinates of the dilemma are clear. Economic recession, political weakness, some governmental mistakes made in good faith and the ruthless nature of the Colombian guerrilla movement and paramilitary groups, associated in different degrees and ways with the drug trade, have created a terrible situation for the government of President Andres Pastrana and Colombia’s allies. Three scenarios describe the possible outcomes:

* The peace negotiations prosper and bring an end to the country’s violence and virtual civil war, allowing the authorities eventually to bring the drug trade back under control. Though substantive talks have finally gotten underway, the outlook is not optimistic, particularly--and paradoxically--since the huge demonstrations of recent weeks against the guerrilla groups only confirm the guerrillas’ suspicions that entering the political mainstream would not be successful.

* The peace talks fail but the Colombian armed forces, with moderate doses of U.S. military aid, defeat the guerrillas or at least weaken them sufficiently over the next year or so to force them to negotiate in good faith. While the army has been doing somewhat better lately and the guerrillas are finally beginning to suffer significant casualties, this alternative remains uncertain.

* The government continues to lose ground and can be rescued only by much more significant foreign support, including U.S. advisors, trainers and perhaps even troops. The first two possibilities require little by Colombia’s neighbors. But the third option, still remote but no longer unthinkable, generates countless complications for the rest of Latin America. The reason lies largely with Washington politics, particularly in an election year or in the first year of a new administration.

On drug enforcement grounds, American intervention in Colombia, with the prospect of even modest human losses, is a hard sell in Congress and in public opinion. On security grounds--the United States cannot countenance a “revolutionary” regime in Colombia--it is almost an impossible sell in the post-Cold War world. So if the White House were to decide that Pastrana and the Colombian armed forces cannot survive without outside assistance, Washington would in all likelihood heighten the pressure on other nations in the region to share the burden: the Gulf War and Kosovo strategy with a Latin American twist.

Given the sympathy of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez for the guerrillas, and the vulnerability to armed strife spill-over in Peru and Ecuador, the main responsibility would fall on Brazil, which would be hard-pressed to act without consulting its main Mercosur trade partner, Argentina.

Here the plot thickens. While it is not inconceivable that the Brazilian armed forces could be persuaded to seal off their Amazonian border with Colombia, closing off their territory to any guerrilla activity, the government of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso will not easily abandon its traditional anti-interventionist stance. Argentina after Carlos Menem will no longer automatically side with Washington; it is doubtful that the era of what outgoing Foreign Minister Guido di Tella called “carnal relations” with the United States will be pursued under incoming President Fernando de la Rua.

And finally, of course, there is Mexico. The Mexican Foreign Ministry traditionally has opposed any form of U.S. intervention in Latin America. It is to be expected that Mexico would stand by its anti-interventionism not only for reasons of principle but also in direct self-interest. Embracing U.S. involvement or even passively acquiescing to it could set a precedent for Mexico itself, increasingly hard-put to control--let alone defeat--its mammoth drug cartels. If Mexico were to countenance American intervention in Colombia, it could well regret it. So in all likelihood the Mexican Foreign Ministry will resist any attempt to follow the U.S. on this issue, despite Mexico’s obvious alignment with Washington on many other matters and its diminishing capability to sustain a foreign policy of its own.

Thus the dilemma confounding the region. Each country not only has to define its position and policy in view of existing events, but also in the light of what it thinks may happen, particularly if it wishes to influence subsequent events. The absence of Cold War certainties makes these definitions much more difficult. The looming Colombian crisis overwhelms past problems such as the contras in Nicaragua, the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, in El Salvador, and the international ramifications of the region’s political and military convulsions in the 1980s pale in comparison.