It’s something that was probably impossible just 100 days ago.
Using the speech that marked his first 100 days in office as his platform, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos put speculation to rest Tuesday, announcing that he will extradite businessman and alleged drug kingpin Walid Makled to his native Venezuela rather than to the United States. The latter, the AP reports, has called Makled Venezuela’s most important drug trafficker. Earlier this week Florida Republican and incoming chair of the House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, congressman Connie Mack, made Makled’s extradition from Colombia to the US one his first priorities saying,
“It appears that the [Obama] administration's posture with Chávez is to give into Chávez, and make some attempt to reach our hand out to Chávez like that will get us somewhere. If we could get Makled here, I think he could provide a lot of evidence about the Venezuelan government's involvement in narco-trafficking.”
Speaking to reporters by phone after Tuesday’s announcement, Mack contended the United States had “completely dropped the ball” and lost the chance to “shine the light on a lot of bad behavior by Hugo Chavez and his government.”
In many ways, Mack’s words demonstrate that the Makled case is not of significance to many US lawmakers because of who Makled is. Rather, it’s about where Makled is from and who he claims to know. A one-time Chavez ally, Makled fell out with the Venezuelan government sometime around 2008. He has, however, maintained that members of the Venezuelan military continued to protect him and the international trafficking networks he controlled until his detainment in Colombia in August of this year.
According to Juan Manuel Santos, the decision to send Makled back to Venezuela to be tried was a relatively clear and straightforward one. “I gave my word to Chavez that, once judicial procedures are carried out, we will hand over (Walid Makled) to the Venezuelan authorities," the Colombian president told reporters Tuesday. [The fact that, unlike in the US, Makled is also wanted on murder charges in Venezuela seems significant as well.]
But in the big picture what seems most important about Santos’s announcement is not any one particular pledge made about the extradition of any one particular drug trafficker – although this is not to imply Makled was any normal drug kingpin. Nor does the significance of what Santos stated Tuesday lie in the fact that Colombia seems to have snubbed its principal ally and military benefactor, the United States, although again that may be implied. Rather the take away seems to be two-fold. First, it’s another indication of Latin America’s new independence vis a vis the United States. In a trend which began with the centre-left governments elected over the last decade, Colombia’s Juan Manuel Santos’s actions prove that the centre-right desires independence as well. Second, Santos’s decision seems to demonstrate that even two often ideologically opposed countries are capable of rebuilding strong relationships with one another on their own terms. Just weeks ago, Santos and Chavez took new steps toward cooperating on counter-narcotics operations as well as reestablishing economic ties with one another. As a just released report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research maintains, deepening regional and bilateral commercial ties between Venezuela and Colombia are behind the recent diplomatic thaw – something Juan Manuel Santos also suggested on Tuesday, when he said Venezuela was in the process of repaying some $800 million owed to Colombian exporters.
Colombia, a country which has been touted by many for what it may have to teach others struggling against organized crime, may just have taught us something even more important about international diplomacy. We’ll see if anyone here took note.
To other stories:
· On anti-UN protests in Haiti, the AP reports that President Rene Preval is “appealing for calm” as worries spread that protests could spread to the capital. Preval’s appeal came during a national address Tuesday which followed an announcement from health officials that cholera-related deaths in the country had gone over 1000. According to the president, barricades erected by protestors were beginning to hinder the ability of doctors to respond to the public health crisis. Part of Preval’s written statement, directed at demonstrators is quoted in the Miami Herald this morning:
“Those who are creating the violence, who are looting warehouses, who are destroying other citizen's wealth, you should be reminded that no serious government will tolerate the state of disorder you are creating.”
For its part, the UN was forced to cancel flights carrying 3 metric tons of soap, other medical supplies, and personnel to Haiti’s second largest city, Cap-Haitien, because of ongoing protests there. A UN World Food Program storehouse was destroyed as protests also targeted police stations and UN outposts, particularly those run by the Nepalese, in the Northern Haitian city. At least two demonstrators have been killed thus far – one shot and killed by a member of the UN’s peacekeeping forces. The Wall Street Journal adds that the streets of Cap-Haitien were reopened Tuesday. It also reports that cholera has officially jumped the Haitian border and is now present in the Dominican Republic. The AP’s Jonathan Katz and Time’s Jessica Desvarieux and Tim Padgett, meanwhile, look at the implications of protests on presidential elections, currently still scheduled for one week from Sunday, as well as the well-organized targeting of UN Minustah forces by protestors. And the New York Times’ Randal Archibold highlights how medical authorities once again said they have no intention of conducting a full study into the origins of cholera in Haiti. As for the protestors, here’s UN Minustah spokesman Vincenzo Pugliese:
“’These are not genuine demonstrations. They are using spoilers paid to create chaos.”
· In Honduras, at least five landless campesinos (Tiempo says six, the FNRP says 12) have been confirmed dead in Bajo Aguán after being allegedly attacked by private security forces at an African palm farm which the peasants intended to occupy. The region has been the site of some of Honduras’s most intense land struggles for months. And according to Tiempo, President Pepe Lobo has now decided to send in state security forces to “to protect property” and “restore order” in the area.
· Nicaragua’s La Prensa reports on a new report by the Observatorio para la Protección de los Defensores de Derechos Humanos which indicates an upswing in violence against human rights defenders in the country.
· At Foreign Policy, Christina Larson, a fellow at the New America Foundation, on the “reverberations” of the drug wars being felt throughout Mexico – not just along the US-Mexico border, what Larson cleverly (and ironically?) calls “newspaper Mexico.” An excerpt from Larson’s piece:
“Sitting inside the heavily guarded presidential residence, Los Pinos, in Mexico City, waiting to speak with one of Calderón's advisors, I examined the portraits of mustachioed national heroes staring down from their gold frames…The palace had the feel of a bunker, but not because the drug wars resemble "an insurgency," as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in September -- it's clear that most of the violence is directed at rival gangs, not the state. But it's also clear that Mexico's "war on drugs" cannot be regarded as a law enforcement issue alone; it concerns the whole of society. And society at large must be engaged if the war is ever going to end.”
· The Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones on what appears to be restarted economic growth in Venezuela during the third quarter. The growth would be the first uptick in economic activity in seven quarters.
· Emily Achtenberg at NACLA on Bolivia’s state-run lithium industry. The New York Times yesterday on Russian oil giant Gazprom which has joined “a growing list of companies” planning to drill for oil in Cuba’s coastal waters. And the Guardian yesterday on how Brazil’s Petrobras is trying to become the world’s largest oil producing company – something which could happen as soon as 2015.
· A phone call I would have liked to have listened in on this week: NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg calling Uruguayan President José Mujica to pledge his “financial assistance” to the country’s fight against tobacco giant Philip Morris. According to the New York Times, “the cigarette giant objects to two new Uruguayan laws. One covers 80 percent of the front and back of cigarette packages with a graphic health warning. The other bans more than one type of any brand of cigarette, such as Marlboro red, gold and silver.” Uruguay became a leader in the global anti-smoking campaign under its former oncologist president, Tabaré Vazquez. The country hosts the Fourth Conference on the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control this week, says IPS, which adds that Latin America, more generally, is now on the cutting edge of the global anti-smoking, pro-public health movement.
· And finally, returning to where we began this morning, Michael Shifter in El Colombiano on an upside down world, and why he believes Colombia and Latin America, more broadly, should not forget about the United States amidst its new streak of assertive independence.
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