NATO Sets its Sights on Colombia
NATO Sets its Sights on Colombia
Written by Dave Feldman
Wednesday, 03 July 2013 19:56
Source: Spectrezine
On June 25, Colombian Defence Minister Juan Carlos Pinzón and the Deputy Secretary-General of NATO, Alexander Vershbow, signed an Agreement on the Security of Information. The news comes a little more than a month after the Colombian Air Force began to participate in training exercises with NATO planes in Canada, and three weeks after President Juan Manuel Santos first announced his administration's intention to seek increased cooperation with the military alliance, with an eye towards eventually becoming a full member. Santos's words elicited strong condemnation from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)—with whom the Colombian government is currently engaged in peace talks—and the heads of state of Latin American countries such as Bolivia and Nicaragua, who have pointed out the incompatibility of NATO's aggressive bombing campaigns with the efforts made by the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) to promote peace in the region.
While Colombia is unable to join NATO due to its geographical location, the agreement portends future collaboration in matters of security, and facilitates the participation of Colombia in a number of NATO activities. Although the idea might strike some as bizarre, this is actually a rather logical development when one considers the contemporary geopolitical situation in the region. Looming large is Washington's intense militarisation of Colombia—a bastion of right-wing forces in an increasingly left-leaning region—as well as Bogotá's recent signing of free trade agreements with both the United States and the European Union. Moreover, the death of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez—and the subsequent challenges that this poses for the Bolivarian Revolution and indeed the stability of the ALBA bloc as a whole—must also be taken into account.
The hidden fist of the market
~snip~
Free trade and economic liberalism have been inextricably linked with militarisation and imperial exploits for well over a century, and lest liberals turn sour on the concept of perpetual war, today's poster boy for neoliberal globalisation, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, reminds us that “the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist”. Indeed, the possibility of increasing cooperation between NATO and Colombia was initially broached in 2006, the same year that negotiations for the U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement began.
Neoliberalism began to make headway in Colombia during the 1990s, and accordingly, defence and security spending in the country shot up from $423 million in 1992 to more than $2.2 billion by only 1998. Under the guise of combating narco-trafficking and subsequently “terrorism”, the United States has since channelled well over ten billion dollars to its Andean ally via Plan Colombia and its successor the Patriot Plan. The former focused resources on the “transformation” and “modernization” of Colombia's armed and police forces to combat guerrilla forces and maintain control over strategic territories, while the goals of the latter included gaining control of Colombian territory and increasing access to neighbouring countries. This involved the deployment of roughly fifteen thousand soldiers to the Ecuadoran and Venezuelan border regions, and led to a flaring of regional tension in the wake of an attack by the Colombian armed forces on a FARC camp in Ecuadoran territory in 2008, with the National Court of Justice of Ecuador eventually even issuing an arrest warrant for Santos, head of the Armed Forces at the time.
More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4361-nato-sets-its-sights-on-colombia
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