Monday, February 18, 2008 Online Edition 7

Ortega Blasts Colombia’s Navy

James W. Bodden
Honduras This Week

The Sandinista administration of Daniel Ortega has upped their rhetorical and diplomatic stakes in their long running maritime dispute with Colombia. Chancellor Samuel Santos openly denounced the Colombian government and their naval forces in an in official letter of protest delivered to the UN Secretariat and the Organization of American States.

The rising tensions escalated further when a Nicaraguan flagged fishing-vessel, manned by ethnic miskito aborigines, was reportedly approached, intimidated and chased away from the disputed waters by Colombian naval ships. According to the chancellery’s letter of protest, “fishermen and divers of the Nicaraguan flagged lobster-fishing-boat ‘Lady Dee III’…labouring within Nicaraguan waters…were intimidated by a frigate of the Colombian Armada. Such an act…can only be considered as a violation of Nicaraguan sovereignty. In this sense, the government of reconciliation and national unity presented a formal protest, soliciting that necessary measures are taken to prevent incidents of this nature from reoccurring… All our efforts are bound to conserve peace and security in the region.”

OAS Secretary General, Jose Manuel Insulza, has so far refused to mediate or intervene before both countries to settle the rising crisis, and has resolved to let Nicaragua and Colombia resolve their difference through international legal mechanisms, “We won’t pronounce ourselves on bilateral problems. Nicaragua and Colombia are the ones that have to solve their own problem and we hope that they abide to the rule of law and {do so} through peaceful means.”

President Daniel Ortega has elevated his rhetorical attacks on Colombia, accusing the Andean country of increasing their mili­tary presence and the numbers of operations carried out throughout the perimeter of the disputed waters. The former Sandinista commander charged that Bogotá has refused to acknowledge international agreements that prohibit fishing in select portions of the Caribbean waters. Ortega blasted Colombia’s political class, its geopolitical alliances and denounced an unconfirmed territorial expansion scheme, “In this battle we Central Americans need to unite against the expansionist attitude not of the Colombian people, but of the Colombian oligarchy, which is subject to the interests of the big trans-nationals and the interests of the empire. Colombia is a country that is occupied militarily by the United States.”

Honduras has become embroiled in the bilateral crisis when a fishing boat of its own was boarded and the crew seized by Nicaraguan naval agents.

The fishing boat ‘Sea Star’ was given permission to enter the waters by Colombian authorities, but the Nicaraguan Navy had a different agenda, to assert their armed forces control over the Caribbean waters. According to Port officials in Nicaragua, four­teen Honduran crew members were captured and placed under arrest; the boat’s cargo was seized and inventoried. Daniel Ortega’s government referred to the Honduran fishermen’s activities as ‘piracy.’

Mr. Ortega spoke out on the matter of ‘Honduran piracy’ personally, “I’ve been in touch with General Halleslevens {Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Nicaraguan Armed Forces}…, {he informs}that they captured that ship fishing illegally, disrespecting our laws.” Since Colombia gave the boat permission to fish in the area, Ortega linked the event to a larger Colombian policy of undermining Nicaraguan sovereignty and mari­time territorial control. Managua disputes claims of sovereignty over 50, 000 squared kilometres in the Caribbean Sea, including the islands of San Andres, Santa Catalina andProvidence.

The Neo Cold Wars: Venezuela aims for a Latin-American Iron Curtain

James W. Bodden
Honduras This Week

Two decades after the end of Latin America’s dirty-proxy wars and the dismantling of the Eastern-European Soviet satellite-states, Venezuelan socialist-guru Hugo Chavez attempts to play the necro­mancer and revive the last century’s Cold Wars; a fresh, tropical version of the iron curtain rises from the grave.

“I alert the world of the following, the U.S. Empire is creating conditions to generate an armed conflict between Colombia and Venezuela.” Mr. Chavez’s pronouncement that secret plans exist to manoeuvre Venezuela into a regional conflict with Colombia was followed by an announce­ment of a military deterrent to possible confrontation, the creation of a multinational armed wing of the leftist Latin American bloc ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas), “The countries of Nicaragua, Bolivia, Cuba, Venezuela, and now Dominica should work to form a joint defence strategy and start joining our armed forces, air forces, armies, navies, National Guards, and intelligence forces…because the enemy is the same, the empire.”

The Bolivarian Republic has been progressively bolstering and upgrading their National Armed Forces in an attempt to dissuade military intervention through armed strength, as they continue in their effort to expand their endeavour for regional political domination. Its military enlargement policy suggests that the regime’s own self assessment of their vulnerabilities to a hypothetical military engagement with the United States and regional coalition partners does not bode well for them; it is an acceptance of military inferiority. Analyst John Sweeney has studied the Venezuelan national security doctrine and exposed the three major bellicose scenarios Chavez’s armed forces are preparing to engage, “Venezuela’s new national security doctrine envisions three basic conflict scenarios: a U.S. military invasion, a conflict with Colombia, and an internal military revolt or armed insurgency against the Chavez government.”

The Colombian war scenario envisions, “a military incident with Colombia in which the U.S. would play a behind-the-scenes role encouraging and supporting Colombia. This scenario replicates strategically the Cold War-by-proxy that raged in Central America during the 1980’s between the U.S. and the Soviet Union/Cuba alliance. A conflict between Venezuela and Colombia could involve both conventional military forces and unconventional forces like special operations troops or irregular armed groups.” The conflict has become a cornerstone of the regime’s military planning; opposition forces have claimed that such preparations are part of Chavez’s ‘Gran Colombia’ scheme, a political-territorial expansion plan dubbed after the short lived upper-South-American federation favoured by his hero Simon Bolivar.

One note-worthy example of the Chavez opposition’s concerns about his greater regional expansion program were the accusations by former General Nestor Gonzales Gonzales, a backer of the failed civic-military coup de’ tat against the Chavez administration in 2002, who stated that the Venezuelan leadership allow thirty-two permanent military bases of the narco-terrorist outfit FARC to operate with impunity within their borders, in attempt to maintain Colombia and its democratically elected government destabilized. These same charges have been levelled by the Colombian Ministry of Defence and intelligence apparatus.

As the charges of warmon­gering were being disseminated to the international press by the Venezuelan government machinery, the country’s armed forces were deploying over three thousand soldiers in a massive series of military exercises christened ‘Operacion Caribe 01’ and repositioned 1,200 National Guard troops to the Colombian border, labelled ‘Operacion Patria Soberana’. The latter is a supposed anti-contraband operation; the former has been branded by regional military analysts as broad based war games, with the twin intentions of force readiness and deterrent. Venezuelan fighter planes, armed cavalry and newly purchased Russian attack-helicopters were deployed to simulate a conflict that reflects Mr. Chavez’s primary national security concerns.

Venezuela’s Brigadier General Cliver Antion Alcalá Cordones, Commander of the 41st Armoured Brigade, has stated that the first stage of the exercises joined 500 elements of the armoured unit under his command, 1,000 troops and cadets, 120 aerial-specialized personnel and 300 paratroopers. The exercise simulated a coordinated attack with two fronts; a principal theatre of war attack and a secondary strategic support front, which may mimic a major confrontation from a regional enemy and against enemy overlord forces offering logistic, artillery or aerial military support. Interpretations about the meaning of the exercises are abundant, but their intentions are unveiled and clear: Venezuela is ready to repel invasions and defeat local aggressors.

The second phase of their operations includes the simulation of an insurgency type resistance, jointly between the general population, regular army and socialist militia groups, against an occupying force. According to Mr. Sweeney’s analysis of the Venezuelan strategic conflict planning, “Chavez’s national security doctrine to oppose the anticipated U.S. military invasion is an ‘asymmetrical war’ in which a new Territorial Guard consisting of hundreds of thousands of active duty military personnel and civilian military reservists that would operate as irregular guerrilla forces {face} against conventional U.S. forces in a conflict without any rules of engagement. Senior Chavista generals have stated publicly that Chavez’s ‘no rules war’ would involve Bolivarian militants operating like radical Islamic militants in Iraq where car bombs and ambushes in urban areas decimate civilians on a daily basis.”

The ALBA bloc nation’s formation of a multinational mili­tary force could clash against or accelerate the existing security platforms of the Latin American region. The hemispheric reciprocal defence agreement, the Treaty of Rio, could stand to be diminished if signatory states refuse to acknowledge their legal responsi­bilities, within the treaty, in favour of an opposing political posture by the ALBA joint-military-forces. Current plans to form a combined South American defence force, promulgated by the Brazilian government, and Central American propositions for the creation of a regional rapid-response military coalition could be hastened into a policy of rearmament to counter the ALBA country’s influence and bellicose power. The prospect of parallel political poles and military alignments in the region recall the Cold War scenario of a fractured and vulnerable Europe, sliced by the ideological divide between the NATO nations and the Warsaw Pact countries. A resurgent Neo Cold War develops as authoritarian and centralist states in the hemisphere are using last-century tactics to increase their regional geopolitical muscle.