Colombia crisis is settled, but which side wins?

Colombia crisis is settled, but which side wins?
By Simon Romero Published: March 9, 2008

AFter leaders in the Andes tiptoed from the edge of war to bear hugs and oaths of brotherhood over the weekend, Latin America was trying to sort out the winners and losers in the region's worst diplomatic dispute in years.

The crisis over a Colombian military raid in Ecuador was resolved Friday in the Dominican Republic, at an annual meeting of Latin American leaders. The Colombian president, Álvaro Uribe, apologized to President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, who shook his hand and said, "With the commitment of never attacking a brother country again and by asking forgiveness, we can consider this very serious incident resolved."

But it is clear that nearly all of the players involved lost something. The leaders of Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela traded charges that muddied each of them. Colombia and the United States, an ally, found themselves isolated in the region. Latin America's largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, lost two senior commanders in a week.

But a big winner appears to have been the region itself, which resolved its own crisis without outside help and without large-scale violence.

The clearest loser may have been the FARC, which is being driven from territory it once controlled in Colombia into neighboring countries as a result of a brutally successful counterinsurgency.

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Punching back against despair on the American PlainsIn Congress, aides start to map talks on stimulusObama is back on the trail to sell stimulus planThe crisis began when Colombian security forces hunted down and killed Raúl Reyes, the group's second-in-command, and 23 others in a raid last weekend on the guerrillas' camp in Ecuador. Venezuela and Ecuador assailed Colombia for violating Ecuador's sovereignty and sent troops to the Colombian border in a show of force, effectively defending the FARC's right to operate in their countries.

Colombia insists that it retains the right to attack its enemies, but the military response by its neighbors - President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela vowed war with Colombia if it pursued its fight with the FARC into Venezuela - may potentially allow the FARC to operate with greater freedom outside Colombia.

Still, that may be a Pyrrhic victory for the FARC, whose very presence in neighboring countries is a reflection of its loss of strength within Colombia.

Reports emerged on Friday of yet another senior commander of the FARC who had been killed. No cross-border raid was involved. A deserter simply brought the guerrilla's severed right hand as proof of his death by one of his own men.

The killing of the guerrilla, Manuel Jesus Muñoz, who went by the nom de guerre Ivan Ríos, was extraordinarily macabre even in the annals of Colombia's four-decade war. Muñoz, a member of the FARC's guiding secretariat, was the fifth senior member of the group killed in the past year.

For Colombia, too, the results were mixed. It found itself diplomatically isolated in the region, its tactics rebuked and under siege for being a too-willing ally of the United States.

Colombia took a page from the Bush administration's playbook in carrying out the operation without getting Ecuador's permission beforehand. The raid was one of the most controversial chapters of Plan Colombia, the American program that has disbursed more than $5 billion in aid to Colombia since the late 1990s.

Uribe may have misjudged the reaction that would follow: a firestorm of criticism against Colombia, a nation increasingly viewed as a redoubt of loyalty to the United States in a region chafing at Washington's waning influence.

The raid in Ecuador bore remarkable similarities to one carried out just a few weeks ago by the United States in Pakistan, in which the CIA used a Predator drone aircraft to drop missiles, killing Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior commander of Al Qaeda. Both operations used local informants to track the men down. Both operations were carried out in foreign countries without getting permission beforehand. Both were tactical victories, killing enemies classified as terrorists.

Despite Colombia's insistence that it had acted alone, speculation persists as to whether the technological prowess of the United States had a hand in hunting down Reyes.

Chávez emphatically denied reports last week that he had placed a call to Reyes's satellite phone. Such a call might have allowed intelligence agencies to track the guerrilla down in Sucumbíos, an Amazonian province in Ecuador's northern frontier.