Colombia Wonders What to Do With Its Uninvited Guest

A request for political asylum by Ecuador’s former leader has put Colombian President Alvaro Uribe in an awkward position as he tries to mend deteriorating relations with his southern neighbor.

Colombia has not decided whether to grant asylum to former President Lucio Gutierrez, who arrived unexpectedly in Bogota, the Colombian capital, last week. The ex-army officer was forced from office in April after his widely unpopular actions, including twice dismissing Ecuador’s Supreme Court and allowing disgraced former President Abdala Bucaram back in the country, sparked demonstrations that paralyzed the nation.

Colombia granted Gutierrez a 90-day tourist visa after he arrived Wednesday. Foreign Minister Carolina Barco told reporters Friday that the request for asylum would be resolved soon but that in the meantime, Gutierrez had to promise “not to intervene in politics, nor in the relations between the country of asylum and the country of origin.”

Relations have been strained between the two countries as Gutierrez’s successor, caretaker President Alfredo Palacio, has stepped up his criticism of Plan Colombia, Uribe’s massive U.S.-financed campaign against cocaine and heroin production and leftist rebels. Uribe’s government in turn has complained about what it labels Palacio’s “neutrality” in the face of problems that the Colombian leader believes are regional in scope.

Palacio said the campaign in Colombia was forcing guerrilla units and drug traffickers across the border into his nation, an influx that Ecuador is ill-equipped to contain. He also has told the United Nations that spraying of coca crops has caused health and environmental damage. Ecuador is also struggling to accommodate an estimated 300,000 refugees from Colombia, displaced by their country’s decades-long conflict.

Gutierrez is angling to return to Ecuadorean politics, and is looking to establish a base in Colombia in advance of next year’s presidential election, said analyst Andres Mejia Acosta of Vancouver’s Liu Institute for Global Issues.

Current law would bar Gutierrez from running for president in the next election, said Adrian Bonilla, director of a graduate studies center in Quito, the capital of Ecuador, known by its initials, FLACSO.

Gutierrez told reporters upon arrival that he was optimistic about getting asylum, citing the 8,000 similar requests by Colombian political refugees granted by Ecuador. But Bonilla said Sunday that giving Gutierrez asylum would be a serious slap at Ecuador.

“Uribe has the opportunity to make relations more friendly by denying” the request, Bonilla said.

In what was interpreted as a friendly gesture, Uribe telephoned Palacio to let him know of the asylum request. An arrest warrant has been issued for Gutierrez in Ecuador, Bonilla said, but it is not in force because there is still no sitting Supreme Court to confirm it.

Gutierrez took power in 2002 on a populist platform, but lost most of his support -- including the backing of a rising indigenous party, Pacha Kutic -- after praising Plan Colombia and trying to steer Ecuador closer to U.S. policy, said Bruce Bagley, head of Latin American studies at the University of Miami.

That policy shift went against increasing anti-American public opinion in Ecuador, Bagley said.

Since taking office, Palacio has steered policy away from the so-called “Washington consensus” that Gutierrez tried to embrace, accepting offers of financial aid from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has clashed frequently with the Bush administration.

“This is a return to Ecuadorean foreign policy of old, which was to not intervene in the Colombian conflict and maintain a certain distance from Washington,” analyst Bonilla said.

Gutierrez was initially granted political asylum in Brazil, which he later left for Peru. He has spent several weeks in Tumbes, a Peruvian city on the border with Ecuador. There he tried to rally political support in Ecuador’s Amazonian region, Gutierrez’s base.

Bagley said oil workers there who struck last month and nearly shut down production, costing Ecuador $400 million in oil revenue, were “pushed by Gutierrez, to show his strength.”

Asked in an interview, conducted earlier in Peru and published Sunday in the Bogota newspaper El Tiempo, why he had not requested asylum in Colombia in the first place, Gutierrez said he was under the effects of sedation administered to him by conspirators in the Ecuadorean military to “diminish my reaction” to the coup.