Ay, Hugo

AMERICAS NEWS - JANUARY 9, 2010

Venezuela Says Its Jets Intercepted U.S. Plane

CARACAS -- President Hugo Chávez said he ordered two F-16 jets to intercept a U.S. military plane that twice violated Venezuelan airspace on Friday in what he called the latest provocation in the South American nation's skies. Brandishing a photo of the plane, which he described as a P-3, Mr. Chávez said the overflight was the latest incursion in Venezuelan skies by the U.S. military from its bases on the Netherlands' Caribbean islands and from neighboring Colombia.

So, his foto is good, but the Colombian photos showing FARC camps in Ecuador and Venezuela are fraudulent?

* Venezuela Devalues Its Currency

There was no immediate response from the U.S. Defense Department or the White House.

What are they gonna say?

Separately, Mr. Chávez announced a currency devaluation for the first time since 2005. The president said Venezuela's currency, the bolivar, will now have two government-set rates depending on the use, either 2.60 to the dollar for transactions deemed priorities by the government or 4.30 to the dollar for other transactions. The currency's official exchange rate has been held by the government at 2.15 bolivars to the dollar.


On the plane interception, Mr. Chávez said the F-16s escorted the U.S. plane away after two incursions lasting 15 and 19 minutes each. The perceived threat of U.S. intervention has become a central element of Mr. Chávez's political discourse and a rallying cry for his supporters.

An external threat diverts attention from internal matters.

Foes say the president is hyping the idea of a foreign threat to distract Venezuelans from domestic problems such as a recession and inadequate public services. Mr. Chávez surprised the diplomatic world in December when he accused the Netherlands of abetting potential offensive action against his government by granting U.S. troops access to its islands close to Venezuela.


The Dutch government says the U.S. presence is only for counternarcotics and surveillance operations over Caribbean smuggling routes.

Uribe clears hurdle

Not everybody agrees, but Alvaro Uribe has cleared one hurdle toward getting reelected.

Colombia's Congress passed a bill allowing President Alvaro Uribe to seek a third consecutive term, a move that increases the likelihood that he will join a wave of Latin American leaders trying to stay in office.

Mr. Uribe's drive for another four-year term echoes similar moves by a group of leftist Latin leaders. The Colombian's bête noir, Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, has been in power a decade and changed the constitution to allow himself to run for re-election indefinitely. Ecuador's Rafael Correa and Bolivia's Evo Morales have changed their national charters to allow re-election.

A move to change the constitution and allow re-election led the Honduran Supreme Court and military to oust President Manuel Zelaya in June.

Supporters of the Colombian president say he is much more of a democrat than, for instance, Mr. Chávez, who has gutted Venezuela's democratic institutions with moves such as stacking the courts. Critics say a third term would allow Mr. Uribe to dominate Colombia's traditionally independent institutions. For example, another term would allow him to name the majority of the members of the Constitutional Court.

Álvaro Uribe

Presidents Álvaro Uribe of Colombia, left, and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil met for more than two hours this week.



August 8, 2009
Colombia President, on South America Tour, Defends U.S. Military Role
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

BRASÍLIA —President Álvaro Uribe of Colombia wrapped up a seven-country tour of South America this week seeking to calm skeptical neighbors about a proposal to allow an increased American military presence in Colombian territory.

On Thursday, Mr. Uribe met for more than two hours here with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, who requested guarantees from Mr. Uribe that the military cooperation with the United States would not spill over Colombia’s borders, Celso Amorim, Brazil’s foreign minister, told reporters.

Mr. Uribe took to the road on his diplomatic offensive this week after some countries — including Venezuela, Ecuador and Nicaragua — denounced the plans to allow for increased American troop levels. Others, like Brazil, expressed concern about the agreement, which Colombian and American officials insisted would only extend and formalize a continuing counternarcotics program between the countries.

The concerns — and Mr. Uribe’s hastily organized diplomatic road show — underscore contrasting views about threats to the region’s security. For the Colombian president, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, remain the primordial threat, not only to Colombia but to the entire region, said Michael Shifter, vice president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a research group in Washington.

“Other governments don’t quite see it that way,” Mr. Shifter said. “Most are sympathetic to Uribe, but they view the FARC as essentially Colombia’s problem. They are more worried about any decisions regarding U.S. military presence in the region, which remains a highly sensitive issue that continues to arouse suspicions.”

Those sentiments were on display this week as Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s president, said that the move amounted to preparations for an invasion of Venezuela by a “Yankee military force.”Mr. da Silva said last week that the proposal was unsettling and that leaders in the region should have been contacted beforehand. He also reiterated his concerns about the Fourth Fleet, which the United States reactivated last year in the Americas, and its ships’ ability to range over waters where Brazil would be developing large deep-water oil fields.

Mr. Amorim said little about the substance of the talks on Thursday with the Colombian leader, which he said were continuing. “Our concerns were expressed, and Uribe clarified for us what he felt he should about the agreement with the United States,” Mr. Amorim said.

Chile’s president, Michelle Bachelet, said last week that countries in the region were “unnerved” by the plan to increase the number of American troops and that the issue should be addressed at Monday’s meeting in Ecuador of the Union of South American Nations. Mr. Uribe does not plan to attend the meeting, Mr. Amorim confirmed. Ecuador and Colombia broke off diplomatic relations last year after Colombia’s military assassinated a rebel leader of the FARC in Ecuadorean territory.

After meeting with Mr. Uribe, the presidents of Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay said that Colombia’s sovereignty should be respected. Peru’s leader, Alan García, who is allied with the United States in its efforts to curb narco-trafficking, emphatically supported the Colombian proposal.

But other leaders criticized Colombia. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Argentina’s president, said Mr. Uribe needed to “reduce the conflict in the region” and that “the installation of the bases didn’t fit with that objective,” the Argentine state news agency reported.

Evo Morales, Bolivia’s president and a staunch ally of Mr. Chávez’s, called it a threat to the region and said he would press for a resolution at the Ecuador meeting to veto the presence of foreign bases in the region.

But the strongest reaction came from Venezuela and Ecuador, which have maintained tense relations with their neighbor since last year. Mr. Chávez, already fuming over reports claiming that Venezuelan arms had ended up in the hands of FARC rebels, withdrew his diplomats from Bogotá last week.

On Wednesday he said his government planned to buy “several tank battalions” to boost its defenses in light of Colombia’s enhanced military cooperation with the United States. The Venezuelan leader also said he would halt imports of some 10,000 cars from Colombia — purchases he said would shift to Argentina and Brazil.

“Just when it seemed that relations between Colombia and Venezuela couldn’t get any worse, they have reached another low point,” Mr. Shifter said.

Some analysts said Mr. Uribe was forced to defend his negotiations with the United States because of confusion in the region about whether he had agreed to allow the establishment of American bases in Colombian territory, which is not part of the proposal. The proposal instead calls for a potential increase in American troop levels at at least five Colombian-controlled bases.

The United States has been negotiating the increase of military operations in Colombia in recent weeks in light of Ecuador’s decision to end a decade-long agreement allowing American surveillance planes to operate from a base on Ecuador’s Pacific Coast.

While American antidrug surveillance flights would sharply increase in Colombia, the world’s top producer of cocaine, the agreement would not allow American personnel to take part in combat operations in the country.

The United States, which currently has about 250 members of the military in Colombia, would continue to be limited to 800 military personnel and 600 military contractors, said Charles Luoma-Overstreet, a State Department spokesman.

Colombia has already received more than $5 billion in military and antidrug aid from the United States this decade.

“There is no military offensive nature to this,” Mr. Luoma-Overstreet said. “This is about assisting the government of Colombia to combat transnational crime and narco-trafficking within their borders.”

Increased U.S. Military Presence in Colombia Could Pose Problems With Neighbors

A plan to increase the American military presence on at least three military bases in Colombia, Washington’s top ally in Latin America, is accentuating Colombia’s already tense relations with some of its neighbors.

Purpose?

Venezuela, Ecuador and Nicaragua, which are members of a leftist political alliance that is led by President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and backed by his nation’s oil revenues, have all criticized the plan, saying it would broaden the military reach of the United States in the Andes and the Caribbean at a time when they are still wary of American influence in the region.

The usual suspects.

Despite a slight improvement in Venezuela’s relations with the United States in recent months, Mr. Chávez has been especially vocal in lashing out at the plan. Speaking on state television here Monday night, he put Venezuela’s diplomatic ties with Colombia under review, calling the plan a platform for “new aggression against us.”

This from the man who threatens Honduras with punishment.

The United States has been negotiating the increase of military operations in Colombia in recent weeks, faced with Ecuador’s decision to end a decade-long agreement allowing E-3 AWACs and P-3 Orion surveillance planes to operate from the Manta Air Base on Ecuador’s Pacific Coast.

Purpose.

Colombia, which has already received more than $5 billion in military and antidrug aid from the United States this decade, has found itself isolated diplomatically as Mr. Chávez presses ahead with his efforts to expand Venezuela’s oil diplomacy while eroding American influence in the hemisphere.

Other countries chafe at Colombia for different reasons. Colombia’s diplomatic relations with Ecuador have soured since Colombian forces carried out a raid on a Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, rebel camp on Ecuadoran territory last year. A festering boundary dispute with Nicaragua has also made for tensions between Colombia and Nicaragua’s president, Daniel Ortega, an ally of Mr. Chávez.

Isolated? These three are hardly favorites of any country.

But with Venezuela itself, Colombia remains locked in a complex game of interdependence. Its sales of manufactured and agricultural goods to Venezuela remain resilient despite Mr. Chávez’s occasional outbursts directed at his ideological opposite, Colombia’s president, Álvaro Uribe. And faced with disarray in its oil industry, Venezuela relies on imports of Colombian natural gas, narrowing the possibility of a severe deterioration in ties between the two countries despite their sharply different views of cooperation with the United States.

All bluster; anti-imperialist bluster, but simply bluster.

U.S. Slams Caracas on Drugs

Venezuelan guards escort a man suspected of drug trafficking to a plane for deportation to Colombia in May.






Venezuela is fast becoming a major hub for cocaine trafficking in the Western Hemisphere, according to a report written by the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress. The report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office is sure to raise tensions between Venezuela and the U.S. at a delicate moment in the two countries' often testy relations.

Rather than hysterically attack or defend either party, I thought this following sentence interesting, all the more in having been reading Gringo (an 'anti-imperialist' tract by Chesa Boudin that I found tiring in its constant self-righteous lecturing, and put down):

The biggest problem: corruption of Venezuelan officials at all levels, according to the report. Corruption within the Venezuelan National Guard "poses the most significant threat," the report says, because the "Guard reports directly to President Chávez and controls Venezuela's airports, borders and ports." In some cases, the report says, drugs captured by the National Guard and Venezuela's Investigative Police, who are often themselves involved in drug trafficking, aren't destroyed, but are taken by the officials or returned to drug traffickers.

Boudin discussed that very concept, of Chávez constructing (perhaps erecting would be fitting) a parallel government bureaucracy that reports directly to him.

The Cult of the Caudillo

To understand what is happening in Honduras today, it helps to know a bit more about Latin America’s long love affair with caudillos, how these larger-than-life but power-hungry men damaged their countries, and why so many people are terrified that they are making a comeback.

Acceptable statement, though rather general and sweeping. There is, of course, no denying the reality of the caudillo in Latin American history. Yet it is important to carefully analyze history, and resist the temptation of making shallow analysis.

Caudillismo is so deeply rooted it has spawned its own literary genre. Discerning readers see Fidel Castro as the model for the aging, cow-obsessed strongman in Gabriel García Márquez’s “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” who wanders alone dragging his outsize testicles over the floors of his presidential palace. Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, in his novel “The Feast of the Goat,” portrayed the precariousness of life in the Dominican Republic under the rule of the predatory and brutal right-wing caudillo, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo.

My reading of the recent García Márquez biography byGerald Martin informs me differently; the Patriarch may well have been a composite, and in part based on Trujillo. I shall have to clear that up.

In Latin America, the strength of the caudillo weakened the region’s institutions. Political parties centered on caudillos often collapsed after the caudillo’s death and never professionalized. As a result, Latin Americans seem perennially ready to trust their fate to a providential “man on horseback” who comes to their nation’s rescue, rather than on the ability of the nation’s institutions to provide security and prosperity.

My reading of John Lynch's biography of Bolívar left me with the impression that caudillismo prevented the emergence of robust institutions. Rather than a result, people's trust in strongmen was concurrent with weak institutions, corruption, and social divisions.

Caudillos come in all ideological stripes. Mr. Pinochet, whose famous photograph in sinister dark glasses was taken soon after his coup, became the iconic image of the right-wing Latin American military dictator. These days, most caudillos are leftist. Mr. Castro, el Comandante or el Caballo (the Horse), has the dubious distinction of being the longest-lived caudillo in Latin American history, owing his record-breaking stretch in power more to caudillismo than Marxismo. He’s passed on the torch to Hugo Chávez, the populist caudillo from Caracas, Venezuela.

Interestingly, the article is not accompanied by the famed photograph of Pinochet looking thuggish in his dark glasses, but, rather, a more innocuous one of the general as a sort of elder statesman.
In the 20th century, few had bigger egos than Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961. Known as El Jefe, Mr. Trujillo took power at age 38, wearing a sash with the motto Dios y Trujillo, or “God and Trujillo.” Even churches were forced to emblazon the motto. A few years later, the capital, Santo Domingo, was renamed Ciudad Trujillo. Fond of wearing comic-opera military uniforms with 18th-century-style plumed hats, Mr. Trujillo was as brutal as he was outlandish, murdering thousands of Haitian immigrants as well as torturing and killing political opponents; he fed some of them to the sharks.

Trujillo was the US's man in the Caribbean, a bulwark against communism. His cruelty and brutality is undeniable, yet to omit mention of his being favored by Washington leaves an incomplete, and thus an inaccurate, picture.
While arms made the man in the 19th century, in the 20th, most caudillos have been careful to present themselves as champions of the people, wrapped either in the mantle of revolution—like Fidel Castro—or in that of democracy. Argentina’s Juan Domingo Perón used populism to endear himself to the nation’s poor, known as descamisados, or “shirtless ones.”

Perón returned in the 1970s and held power again, and after his deatch, his new wife held power for a while. Perónismo is the dominant ideological construct, but a vapid skeleton that simply has the label, and little substance. Its meaning is manipulated, so that Menem and the Kirchners can both be labeled Peronists.

The legacy of Mr. Perón’s free-spending populist philosophy has led Argentina into periodic economic crises. When prices for Argentine exports like beef are high, for instance, Perónist governments have spent the windfall like a drunken sailor, leading to a cash crunch when prices eventually head south.

Rather poor choice of metaphor: Argentina is in the South.

As far as the U.S. was concerned, the cause of democracy in Latin America often took a back seat to fighting Communism during the Cold War. For years, the U.S. either looked the other way or supported coups with the aim of preventing the spread of Communism in the hemisphere. Military coups became almost ritual. In the 1970s, Honduras endured so many coups that the capital was jokingly called Tegucigolpe, for the Spanish word golpe, or coup.
Well, the point is raised; I would quibble with the word often. But, the point is made, and is accurate.

While democracy has spread throughout Latin America, caudillos never vanish, they just adapt to changing times. Gone is the old-fashioned military coup, replaced with a new strategy for power that could be called “coup by stealth,” or “coup by democratic means.”


The primary architect of this new blueprint is Mr. Chávez, a strongman with one foot grounded in the past and the other firmly placed in the future of caudillismo. In 1992, Mr. Chávez, then a lieutenant colonel with a mish-mash of leftist, nationalist and fascist ideas, led an old-fashioned coup in an attempt to overthrow the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez. It failed, and Mr. Chávez was jailed.

Buses May Aid Climate Battle

Bogotá, Colombia, has implemented a bus rapid transit system, which improves traffic flow and reduces smog at a fraction of the cost of building a subway.



More Photos >



Like most thoroughfares in booming cities of the developing world, Bogotá’s Seventh Avenue resembles a noisy, exhaust-coated parking lot — a gluey tangle of cars and the rickety, smoke-puffing private minibuses that have long provided transportation for the masses.

Carrera Séptima; we lived on it. And I remember those microbuses, VW vans.

But a few blocks away, sleek red vehicles full of commuters speed down the four center lanes of Avenida de las Américas. The long, segmented, low-emission buses are part of a novel public transportation system called bus rapid transit, or B.R.T. It is more like an above-ground subway than a collection of bus routes, with seven intersecting lines, enclosed stations that are entered through turnstiles with the swipe of a fare card and coaches that feel like trams inside.

rapid transit systems like Bogotá’s, called TransMilenio, might hold an answer. Now used for an average of 1.6 million trips each day, TransMilenio has allowed the city to remove 7,000 small private buses from its roads, reducing the use of bus fuel — and associated emissions — by more than 59 percent since it opened its first line in 2001, according to city officials. In recognition of this feat, TransMilenio last year became the only large transportation project approved by the United Nations to generate and sell carbon credits.

Fascinating.

Colombia Is for the Birds

Fundacion ProAves, www.proaves.org - The yellow-eared parrot, at left, is an endangered parrot that nests on Colombia's national tree, the Quindio wax palm


Slideshow






The finch is one of the more unusual birds in Colombia, which has 1,871 bird species, more than any other country.

Smile, and say queso

Felipe looks a lot more comfortable than Alvaro.
















Secuestradas, mil personas en todo el país
1,000 persons held hostage in the country

Los mexicanos consumen 500 toneladas de drogas al año, y en el último año se han registrado al menos 50 mil casos de extorsión en el país

Mexicans consume 500 tons of drugs every year, and in the last year at least 50,000 cases of extortion have been registered in the nation

View from Bogotá

Obama prometió visita a Colombia y Uribe irá a Washington para primera reunión bilateral
El mandatario colombiano anunció que fue invitado a Estados Unidos, en una fecha aún por determinar, pero en cuestión de semanas, para hablar de temas bilaterales como Plan Colombia y TLC.

• Sencillez y cordialidad caracterizan el paso de Obama por Cumbre de las Américas

  Parece determinado a cumplir uno sus mayores retos en la agenda: convencer a los gobernantes de esta mitad del planeta de que el...

• Nuevo diálogo entre Washington y Suramérica abrió la Cumbre de las Américas

  Gestos recíprocos de cordialidad, sonrisas y franqueza, afloraron durante la primera sesión de la Unión de Naciones Suramericanas...

Colombia's Most Wanted Captured

Desperate to escape the Colombian authorities, Don Mario—described by President Alvaro Uribe as "one of the most feared drug traffickers in the world—offered $1,000 for every killed cop on his trail. But the law (or at least what passes for it) eventually caught up to him, and Don Mario, who had a $2 million bounty on his head, was found "cowering like a dog" under a tree in northern Colombia. Don Mario, a.k.a. Daniel Rendon Herrera, was the boss of a paramilitary organization thought to be responsible for 3,000 murders in the last 18 months. The arrest marks a major coup for Uribe, who now has orchestrated the disarmament of most paramilitary organizations and the arrests of the leaders that refused to lay down their weapons.

At least what passes for it? A rather sweeping assertion.

Rendon Herrera allegedly commanded hundreds of armed men in a private militia and directed a criminal organization that sent hundreds of tons of cocaine to the U.S.

Colombian officials had offered a reward of up to $2 million for information leading to the capture of the man whose organization has allegedly served as a key link between right-wing paramilitary groups and Mexico's drug-trafficking cartels.

Book Casts Harsh Light on Ex-Hostage in Colombia

Keith Stansell, center, Tom Howes, left, and Marc Gonsalves at Columbia University to introduce their new book, "Out of Captivity," about their years as hostages.

It is never pointed out that the (in some quarters) now-sainted Ingrid Betancourt walked into the situation that resulted in her captivity.

In this book, she is not portrayed as a nice person. I am not surprised.

Colombia's Leader Digs In

BOGOTÁ, Colombia -- Álvaro Uribe was 7 years old when he announced to his family that he intended to become president of Colombia. Fifty years later, in the eyes of many, he is the man who rescued his beleaguered nation from collapse.

There is little doubt that he saved Colombia. Hard-line, right of center, tough, uncompromising (or so was his image), he ended chaos long enough, despite factors including Ingrid Betancourt's ill-advised grandstanding, to drag the country back to some level of normalcy.

When he was inaugurated in 2002, Latin America's oldest and largest Communist insurgency, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, was strong enough to lob mortars at the presidential palace during the ceremony. Right-wing paramilitary groups were rampaging through the countryside killing suspected rebel supporters. Mr. Uribe soon put the FARC on the run, and consequently persuaded the paramilitaries to disarm. The dividend for his countrymen: an economic boom.

Andres Pastrana had ceded land the size, it is always stated so, of Switzerland; just how large that is never gets stated (it is 1,852 km). The FARC was running free, unafraid, ambitious, optimistic. Uribe changed all that. And he managed to make progress in stopping right-wing paramilitary groups, another important step in normalizing the country.

The rebels instead used [the land Pastrana gave them] as a base to carry out kidnappings and attacks. Mr. Uribe, convinced that neither major political party would end the conflict, returned to Colombia and announced a third-party candidacy based on waging war against the rebels. Early polls gave him just 2% of the vote.

But the FARC lost support from ordinary Colombians as it sabotaged electricity pylons, bombed a Bogotá restaurant, killing a 5-year-old girl, and tried to blow up the main reservoir supplying water to the capital. The group kidnapped female presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt. With each incident, Mr. Uribe's poll numbers climbed. On May 26, 2002, he won 53% of the vote in a crowded field -- a landslide.

"He recognized early on that Colombia's basic need was security and authority," says Malcolm Deas, Mr. Uribe's professor at Oxford and a staunch supporter.

The fact that Betancourt walked into the hands of the FARC, going to negotiate with them with very little personal protection during the presidential campaign, clearly a rash act that she trusted would enhance her image but instead backfired and landed her a prisoner, is never mentioned. Never. Now that she has been rescued her secular sainthood is fully in place.

The new president wasted no time going after the guerrillas. He persuaded Congress to pass an emergency tax hike on businesses to boost military spending. Andres Peñate, then deputy defense minister, recalls that Mr. Uribe called him one day and asked how many people had been kidnapped in Colombia the previous week. Mr. Peñate said he didn't know. Mr. Uribe told him seven. "Do you want to know their names?" the president asked. Mr. Peñate says he made sure he knew the answer from then on.

Colombia was a basket case, a laughing-stock, a tragedy. I cried for the country of my birth; it was a disaster.

Critics say Mr. Uribe's fixation on eliminating the FARC has caused him to neglect longstanding problems of inequality, land distribution and poor infrastructure. Colombia's highways, for instance, remain in terrible shape. Many Colombians blamed the president for not keeping a closer eye on financial pyramid schemes that collapsed last month and have left tens of thousands of Colombians in the lurch.

Giant Ponzi schemes that lost much money for many people.

His intervention in the economy has also drawn criticism. He has given tax breaks to encourage certain industries, and has raised various tariffs to offer trade protection. "He is very sure of himself, which is a great thing for battling the guerrillas, but is not so good if you have some unorthodox ideas about the economy," says Mr. Perry, the former World Bank economist.

That's Guillermo Perry, former Chief Economist of the Latin America and Caribbean region of the World Bank, who served in Colombian government positions, and now with the Center for Global Development, who also said: "If he had quit at the end of his first term, he would have been a national hero with no questions asked; If he quits at the end of his second term, he'll still be a national hero, but with some questions. If he keeps going, he risks not being seen as a national hero."

Seems a fairly good assessment. Uribe has indeed reached the point where he judges himself as being indispensable, that is, that the nation can not survive without him, which is really an unquenchable taste for power. That is a common disease.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, an anti-American crusader, recently announced that he wants to stay in power indefinitely. The prospect that Mr. Uribe is moving in a similar direction could emerge as a foreign-policy headache for President-elect Barack Obama. Mr. Uribe, who can recite the Gettysburg Address by heart, has been the most steadfast U.S. ally in Latin America, and has received considerable U.S. backing. A conservative, he has preached democratic values and offers a regional counterweight to the man in Caracas.

The man in Caracas seems a curious way to refer to Chavez. Nonetheless, it is true that Chavez hardly is a paragon of democracy.

Mr. Uribe hasn't gutted democratic institutions as Mr. Chávez has. But he hasn't groomed any successor, and his administration is largely a one-man show. He micromanages the country to such an extent that he even checks the bathroom stalls of provincial airports when he arrives on state business. Critics say he cannot tolerate dissent. "He represents an old feature of Latin America, but something new to Colombia -- an authoritarian, a caudillo," says César Gaviria, a former president.

I am not an expert on Colombian history, but I do wonder if Rojas Pinilla does not qualify as a Colombian caudillo. And authoritarians Colombia has had: if one looks at the two-party dictatorship, er, arrangement of sharing of power that the Liberal and Conservative parties had in place for decades (and which Rojas merely interrupted), while not enforced by military might in the way of Peron and Castro, say, nonetheless was hardly openly democratic.

And I can not shake the image of the President of the Republic checking bathrooms; that is really micromanaging.

"A third term doesn't set a good precedent, particularly when you have neighbors like Chávez trying to do the same thing," says a U.S. administration official.

The irony is palpable, Uribe a purported democrat, and Chavez, a self-admitted strong ruler who disdains bourgeois democracy, both vying to extend their terms in office and continue their holds on power.

There are two sides to Mr. Uribe. He is a technocrat who studied at Harvard and Oxford and works on his English by watching the BBC every morning as he rides his stationary bike. In 2005, Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive officer of General Electric Co., visited Colombia after hearing about its turnaround under Mr. Uribe. After a two-hour meeting with the president, Mr. Immelt told associates: "Now that is a chief executive."

One wonders if even for just a moment Immelt thought wistfully of being able to exercise such power on the corporate level.

The other side comes from being raised in a rural culture of powerful landowners, horses and guns. Mr. Uribe sometimes views the world in black and white, such as in his treatment of Carlos Lozano, who edits the weekly Communist Party newspaper La Voz. On several occasions, Mr. Uribe has publicly attacked the editor as a FARC supporter -- dangerous words in a nation where right-wing death squads have killed thousands of leftists. After each outburst, says Mr. Lozano, Vice President Santos "calls to say the president lost his temper, is sorry about what he said, and is increasing my bodyguards and the strength of the bulletproofing on my car." Mr. Santos confirmed that account.

To attack an opponent as a FARC supporter is to mark him with a target whose bull's eye a right-wing paramilitary could wish to aim for; it is irresponsible.

His rural roots gave him a fresh perspective on Colombia's troubles. For decades, the country was ruled by an elite clique, mostly from Bogotá, that sometimes seemed indifferent to the violence raging in the countryside and unsure how to solve it. "The guerrillas weren't challenged by society the way they should have been," Mr. Uribe said in the June interview. "And that let them think they could simply take power through violent means."

That is a very perceptive point: the urban elite ignored the countryside, both the campesinos and the guerrileros earning their disdain. They almost lost the country with such hubris.

In October, the New York-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch issued a report criticizing the Uribe administration for hampering the Supreme Court's investigation into the para-politics scandal. Mr. Uribe responded by calling José Miguel Vivanco, the group's director for the Americas, an "accomplice" and "defender" of the FARC.

Irresponsible for a president to speak that way, plain and simple.

After a similar incident last year, Mr. Uribe received a letter from 11 U.S. senators upbraiding him for his record of "inappropriate statements" against human-rights defenders, journalists, judges and others. Among the senators who signed: Mr. Obama. Ultimately, whether Mr. Uribe runs again may not be up to him. Polls in the past month have shown a marked dip in his popularity. Two weeks ago, Colombia's lower house passed a bill barring Mr. Uribe from a third term. His supporters immediately said they would try to amend it in the Senate to keep his re-election hopes alive.

4,800 Books and 10 Legs

In a ritual repeated nearly every weekend for the past decade here in Colombia’s war-weary Caribbean hinterland, Luis Soriano gathered his two donkeys, Alfa and Beto, in front of his home on a recent Saturday afternoon. Sweating already under the unforgiving sun, he strapped pouches with the word “Biblioburro” painted in blue letters to the donkeys’ backs and loaded them with an eclectic cargo of books destined for people living in the small villages beyond.

In a country that has suffered so much violence in the last half century plus, this is a heart-warming story of a man and books, a triumph of the human spirit that is not a cliché.

“I started out with 70 books, and now I have a collection of more than 4,800,” said Mr. Soriano, 36, a primary school teacher who lives in a small house here with his wife and three children, with books piled to the ceilings.

A whimsical riff on the bookmobile, Mr. Soriano’s Biblioburro is a small institution: one man and two donkeys. He created it out of the simple belief that the act of taking books to people who do not have them can somehow improve this impoverished region, and perhaps Colombia.

A breakthrough came several years ago when he heard excerpts over the radio of a novel, “The Ballad of Maria Abdala,” by Juan Gossaín, a Colombian journalist and writer. Mr. Soriano wrote a letter to the author, asking him to lend a copy of the book to the Biblioburro. After Mr. Gossaín broadcast details of Mr. Soriano’s project on his radio program, book donations poured in from throughout Colombia. A local financial institution, Cajamag, provided some financing for the construction of a small library next to his home, but the project remains only half-finished for lack of funds.

He fractured his left leg in a fall from one of his burros in July, leaving him with a limp. And some of his readers like the books they borrow so much that they fail to return them. Two books that vanished not long ago: an illustrated sex education manual, and a copy of “Like Water for Chocolate,” the Mexican writer Laura Esquivel’s novel about food and love in a traditional Mexican family.

And there are dangers inherent to venturing into the backlands around La Gloria. Two years ago, Mr. Soriano said, bandits surprised him at a river crossing, found that he carried almost no money, and tied him to a tree. They stole one item from his book pouch: “Brida,” the story of an Irish girl and her search for knowledge, by the Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho.

“For some reason, Paulo Coelho is at the top of everyone’s list of favorites,” said Mr. Soriano, hiding a grin under the shade of his sombrero vueltiao, the elaborately woven cowboy hat popular in Colombia’s interior.

Luis Soriano, a teacher from La Gloria, Colombia, traveled to the village of El Brasil with his Biblioburro on Oct. 11. The donkeys are named Alfa and Beto.



Slide show

Colombia considers Afghan mission

This is the kind of story that I just don't see in, say, the NY Times, LA Times, or Washington Post; I found it on Al-Jazeera. It is good to diversify one's news sources and gain a wider perspective.

Colombia may offer mine-removal and counter-narcotics assistance [EPA]

Latin Presidents at Summit

Los presidentes (i-d) de México, Felipe Calderón; El Salvador, Antonio Saca; Colombia, Álvaro Uribe; República Dominicana, Leonel Fernández; Guatemala, Álvaro Colom, y Panamá, Martín Torrijos, durante su llegada a la Cumbre Regional Ampliada sobre el Problema Mundial de las Drogas

Presidents at the Expanded Regional Summit of the World Drug Problem, taking place in Cartagena, Colombia.

Colombians protest hostage taking

Thousands of demonstrators march to prot

Thousands of demonstrators march to protest against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) leftist guerrillas and to ask for the release of hostages at Bolivar Square in Bogota on July 20, 2008 - Colombia's independence day. AFP PHOTO/Joana Toro (Photo credit should read JOANA TORO/AFP/Getty Images)

A little green submarine

Another picture from El Universal: this little green submarine ten meters long and filled with drugs, apparently cocaine from Colombia, was intercepted by the Mexican Navy on the high sea near the coast of Oaxaca.

Un pequeño submarino verde de diez metros de largo y cargado con droga, al parecer cocaína procedente de Colombia, fue interceptado por la Marina mexicana en alta mar cerca de la costa de Oaxaca.




A second image from La Jornada.unam.mx shows the mini-submersible. The Jornada story stated such a vessel can carry up to ten tons of stuff, and travels a mere five meters under the water's surface.

Colombia, FARC, Chavez

Chávez, on Defensive After FARC Losses, Agrees to Host Uribe

Presidente Uribe is on a winning streak.

Mr. Uribe, fresh from his government's daring rescue last week of hostages held by the country's Communist guerrillas, is expected to capitalize on the success to pressure Mr. Chávez to stop his support of the rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. The pair will meet at an oil-refinery town in Venezuela.

Not just that they did it, but how the Colombian armed forces liberated the hostages gives Uribe a strong hand; surely Chavez must feel some embarrassment.

Relations between the leaders have at times been very rocky since Mr. Uribe took office in 2002, but since November, when Mr. Uribe cut Mr. Chávez out of negotiations to free hostages held by the FARC, Mr. Chávez has unloaded often on his neighbor. He has called Mr. Uribe everything from a "lackey" of President Bush to a "mafioso" who heads a "narco-paramilitary" government.

But Hugo does not embarrass easily: for he to charge Uribe as a a narco-paramilitary or mafioso takes some cojones, considering his own record and his allies. But, politics is that way.

I think Chávez is completely spooked by these two extremely successful operations," says Michael Shifter, an analyst at the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue. "The operation to free Ingrid was called 'check,' after the chess move. Chávez has effectively been checkmated."

I would not count Chavez out just yet. He's in check, but not checkmate. He's wily, smart, and capable.

Colombia Frees FARC Hostages, Including Betancourt, Americans

Another wow.

Colombia's military said it has rescued 15 hostages, including former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and three U.S. military contractors, from leftist rebels.

After years in captivity, officials said French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt and three Americans had been rescued from leftist guerrillas by Colombian troops. In total, 15 were rescued. Video courtesy of Reuters. (July 2)

This is going to give quite a boost to Uribe, and probably piss off Chavez. Bush will probably also enjoy it.