PIT the Columnist

As of last week I've been asked to write the weekly Lat-Am Watch column for the Buenos Aires Herald. The column is intended to present the readers with an analysis of important developments in the region. The Herald website doesn't allow full access to its columns, but luckily this blog does. I'll be publishing them here every Tuesday.

Chávez to the rescue?

Throwing his weight around in the region by treating his neighbours to everything from Cuban doctors to Carnival floats has been one of the more high profile traits of Hugo Chávez rule in Venezuela. But for the first time in long while he seems to have stumbled on a worthy cause.
About a fortnight ago he offered to mediate in Latin America’s longest running guerrilla insurgency in Colombia. That offer was welcomed by the FARC-guerrilla, whose spokesman Raul Reyes said last week that Chávez participation would give negotiations a “new impulse.” On Friday Chávez and President Alvaro Uribe spoke for over seven hours working on details of a plan to bring about a deal between the government and the 17,000 strong guerrilla organization.


After the talks Chávez announced that he had invited a FARC- envoy to Venezuela to negotiate a potential exchange between the guerrilla hostages and jailed insurgents.
Chávez said he hoped that envoy would be Manuel Marulanda Vélez, the guerrilla commander, alias “Sureshot.” During his weekly television show on Sunday he repeated his invitation to the 77-year old insurgency leader to meet. “Person to person,” as he put it in English, using his typically Venezuelan spanglish vernacular.

The aim of the negotiations is clear enough. The release of 45 hostages being held by the FARC, including former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, three U.S. military contractors and Colombian soldiers and police. In return the guerrilla group demands the release of hundreds of its troops.

Should Chávez manage to broker a deal, it would make something of a Latin Kofi Anan. He would be succeeding where the French, the Spanish, the Swiss and the Catholic Church had failed. That’s because dealing with the FARC is a tricky business.

Chávez had proposed the prisoner exchange take place on Venezuelan soil, but the FARC spokesman Reyes ruled out that suggestion. He insists they are willing to negotiate, but only if a demilitarized zone is provided by the Colombian government. The FARC have had their eye on the municipalities Predera and Florida in the southwestern department of Valle for a long time. Reyes repeated the group’s demand to turn the localities into a so-called despeje for the duration of 45 days, saying it was not much to ask.

The Uribe administration disagree. His government has been loath to relinquish any territory. On principle, but also on the basis of past experience. A similar experiment by former president Pastrana in 1998 ended in the FARC using the terrain to strengthen itself and carry out attacks on the neighbouring area. The interior minister, Carlos Holguín, flatly declined any possibility of a despeje but said the government was open to alternatives. Now it’s up to Hugo Chávez to work out a compromise.

Hostage brokering is not the only difficult piece of negotiating that Chávez is applying his newfound diplomatic skills to. Fearing Venezuela may eventually be blackballed from Latin America’s most prosperous trade group, Mercosur, the former colonel has said he wants to re-join the Andean pact or CAN, made up of Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and Ecuador. That same Chávez left the CAN in a huff in May last year, claiming the organisation was “dead”.

Soon after he showed up at the front door of Mercosur. His was initially welcomed, especially by Uruguay and Argentina, but since then his popularity has taken a turn for the worse. Brazilian legislators aren’t eager to the see Chavez join the southern cone’s union fearing he will politicise what is essentially a place where Brazil sells shoes. Recently Venezuelan bilateral relations with Argentina soured after a Venezuelan carrying 800,000 dollars in a suitcase tried to bluff his way through customs at Newbery airport. Reacting to the embarrassment it caused the Kirchner-administration, who paid for the jet the Venezuelan flew in on, local officials tried to pass the hot potato off on the Venezuelans, leading to a cool down between Chávez and Kirchner.

To make things worse, Chávez then stepped on the toes of the fourth Mercosur country, Paraguay. Anti-Chavism there was ignited last week when a newspaper reported finding a document, which it claimed proved Venezuela was trying to “infiltrate” the impoverished country. The steps set out in the paper deal mainly with instilling the ‘Bolivarian spirit’ in youth leaders and journalists and airing long television programmes about the positive side of Venezuela. The implications of this “infiltration” seem tedious rather than subversive or illegal, but in Paraguay the document caused a storm.

So now Hugo Chávez is forced to do an about face and re-join the old CAN (although he insists that with Venezuela’s participation it will become “a new CAN, the CAN of the 21st Century,” which sounds like it will get the same confusing treatment he gave to socialism.)
Venezuela’s outlook to joining the Andean pact is positive. Ecuador and Bolivia are ideological allies in the cause of reaching out to Latin America’s disenfranchised. Peru, which had its feathers ruffed by Chávez during its presidential elections has welcomed Venezuela. “Chavez has realised that to be a Bolivarian one needs to be Andean too,” was how Peruvian President Alán Garcia put it. Finally Colombia is not an obstacle, especially now that the Bolivarian has assumed the role of peace broker.

When Chávez initially left the CAN it was because he was angered over the fact that Peru and Colombia where trying to negotiate free trade deals with his professed arch enemy, the United States. For Colombia getting the deal approved hinges largely on Uribe’s prowess at convincing the Democrat majority in the US Congress that he can be trusted on Human Rights issues. The irony of the situation is that should Chávez manage to broker a deal between the FARC and the Uribe government, in doing so he’s greatly increasing the chances of that free trade deal - which he despises - coming about.