Chavez to the rescue?

Throwing his weight about the region by treating his neighbours to everything from Cuban doctors to Carnival floats has been one of the high profile traits of Hugo Chávez’s rule in Venezuela. But for the first time in a long while he seems to have stumbled on a worthy cause.


About a fortnight ago he offered to mediate in Colombia, the scene of Latin America’s longest running guerrilla insurgency. That offer was welcomed by the FARC guerrillas, whose spokesman Raúl Reyes said last week that Chávez’s participation would give negotiations a “fresh boost.” Last Friday, Chávez and President Alvaro Uribe spoke for over seven hours to thresh out the details of a plan to bring about a deal between Bogotá 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 of guerrilla hostages for jailed insurgents.
Chávez said he hoped that the 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 insurgent leader. “Person to person,” as he put it, using his Venezuelan Spanglish vernacular.

The aim of the negotiations is clear. The release of 45 hostages being held by FARC, including former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, three US military contractors and Colombian soldiers and police, will be in return for the release of hundreds of its troops.

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

Chávez proposed that the prisoner exchange take place on Venezuelan soil, but 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. FARC has had their eye on the municipalities Predera and Florida in the southwestern district of Valle for a long time. Reyes repeated the group’s demand to turn the localities into a so-called clearance area for 45 days, saying it was not much to ask.

The Uribe administration disagrees. 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 FARC using the terrain to strengthen itself and carry out attacks on neighbouring areas. The interior minister, Carlos Holguín, flatly declined any possibility of a clearance (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 organization was “dead.”

Soon after that, he showed up at the front door of Mercosur. He 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 see Chávez join the Southern Cone’s union fearing he will politicize what is essentially a place where Brazil sells shoes.

Recently Venezuelan bilateral relations with Argentina soured after a Venezuelan national carrying 800,000 dollars in a suitcase tried to bluff his way through customs at Newbery metropolitan airport. Reacting to the embarrassment it caused the Kirchner-administration, who paid for the jet Guido Antonini Wilson flew in on, local officials tried to pass the hot potato off on the Venezuelans, leading to a cooling 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 the ABC Color 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 to verge more on the tedious than on the subversive. In Paraguay though, the document caused a storm.

So now Hugo Chávez is forced into 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 look to joining the Andean Pact is positive. Ecuador and Bolivia are ideological allies in the common cause of reaching out to Latin America’s disenfranchised. Peru, which had its feathers ruffled by Chávez during its presidential elections, has welcomed Venezuela. “Chávez has realized that to be a Bolivarian one needs to be Andean too,” was how Peruvian President Alan García put it. Finally, Colombia is not an obstacle, especially now that the Bolivarian has assumed the role of peace broker. Despite the good omens though, Chávez may still feel cheated in the end.

When Venezuela initially left the CAN it was because Chávez was angered over the fact that Peru and Colombia were trying to negotiate free trade deals with the United States. For Colombia, getting the deal approved hinges on Uribe’s ability to convince 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 FARC and the Uribe government, in doing so he would be greatly increasing the chances of that free trade deal — which he despises — coming about.

Published in the Buenos Aires Herald on 04/09/07