Latin America has been, in the main, a mysterious blind spot in my comprehension of the contemporary world, and remains so, despite advice received from four different friends with some expertise in the region, who tell me the solution to the problems my enemies have created for me in Canada would be emigration to Brazil. (They are kind, and they are practical, but I would not dream of giving anyone the pleasure of seeing the back of me.)
It is with this proviso that I comment on interesting developments in the Spanish Main, where the democratically-elected, mostly constitutional, and reasonably decent government of Colombia has been enjoying some success in exterminating the vile, narcotics-trafficking Marxist bush army of the FARC.
This “Revolutionary Armed Force of Colombia” was, as everyone should know, founded as the terrorist wing of the Colombian Communist Party, under Cuban and Soviet patronage, nearly half a century ago. It has evolved through the years, surviving the loss of that patronage after the fall of the Berlin Wall, by engaging in criminal activities on a larger and larger scale.
Needless to say, for the sort of people who still sport Che Guevara T-shirts—and they are legion, even in Barack Obama campaign offices in Texas—slaughter, kidnapping, extortion, and drug-trafficking hardly impede worship of what can be touted as a chic revolutionary movement. And when such people learn that the Colombian government is eager to conclude a free trade pact with the United States—well, what could be more wicked than trying to raise an impoverished people out of abject dependency by means of honest capitalist enterprise?
I admit, there was some sarcasm in the previous paragraph, but entirely deserved. The outrage expressed in some sections of the media, because the Colombian army briefly trespassed into Ecuadorian territory to get at an important FARC operation, is beyond risible so we should not laugh. In international law, going back nigh unto the treaty of Westphalia (1648), a country is entirely within its rights to invade a neighbour that is harbouring its violent insurgents.
The operation last week, in which Raul Reyes, the FARC “foreign minister” and second-in-command, was returned to his maker for final disposition, was, on the evidence presented, a brilliant success. Not only did an air strike demolish the guerrilla headquarters, but a subsequent commando operation sifted the ruins for evidence that will now be presented to an international court, showing direct financial and logistical support for the FARC by the Venezuelan government of that psychopathic buffoon, Hugo Chavez.
Like the mad mullahs of Iran, though working from a different ideology, Mr. Chavez manifests behaviour that is quite impossible to predict. He has already ordered the Venezuelan army into threatening positions along Colombia’s eastern border—during a meandering television address in which he was quite visibly frothing at the mouth. Colombia’s sane president, Alvaro Uribe, has so far refused to respond to this bait. The leftwing governments of Ecuador and Nicaragua have joined Mr. Chavez in withdrawing their embassies from Bogota. All three are pursuing a regional diplomatic campaign to harm Colombian interests as much as possible.
The immediate danger is that, if he thinks he could survive it, Hugo Chavez might well wish to start a war. This is traditionally the way ideological monsters, in Latin America and elsewhere, secure their domestic power, after making a mess of a country’s social and economic order. Nationalism worked even for Stalin, in resisting Hitler, and even for Hitler, in resisting Stalin. It tends to evaporate only when a country has been thoroughly laid waste, and occupied.
With the declining prestige of Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin, Mr. Chavez and his ilk have reached for another old revolutionary standard to wave—that of a certain Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar Palacios y Blanco—better known more simply as “Simon Bolivar.” History, if I may paraphrase the famous Marxian analysis, is repeated first as tragedy and then as FARC.
My suspicion is that we are in need of a deeper historical understanding, if the persistent fall of Latin American countries into demagogic populism, jingoism, caudillism and monocracy, is ever to be reversed. Why was it that the American struggle for independence turned out so well, yet the Latin American so poorly—despite being founded on largely the same Scottish Enlightenment ideals, and the latter having the U.S. example before it?
I leave this question to people who know more about Latin America.
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