IHS Global Insight Perspective | |
Significance | In an extraordinary display of political pragmatism, Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos and his Venezuelan counterpart Hugo Chávez yesterday agreed to re-establish diplomatic ties after they were broken last month over Colombian allegations that Venezuela was tolerating Colombian insurgents on its territory. |
Implications | The rapprochement is a success for the new Colombian administration, which has made the re-establishment of ties with Venezuela its top foreign policy priority. Although a positive outcome had been widely anticipated, the meeting exceeded expectations by outlining a mechanism for dealing with a series of highly contentious and potentially divisive issues. |
Outlook | With both governments determined to turn the page, the outlook for bilateral relations now looks brighter, but there are considerable downside risks to a sustained improvement of ties, mostly stemming from the domestic political situation in Venezuela. |
Rapid Reconciliation
Even by the standards of the volatile political relationship between Colombia and Venezuela, the two countries' reconciliation has been surprisingly quick. Less than three weeks after Venezuela severed diplomatic ties with its neighbour, the presidents of Colombia and Venezuela, Juan Manuel Santos and Hugo Chávez, respectively, yesterday decided to bury the hatchet. The leaders agreed to relaunch bilateral relations and re-establish diplomatic ties based on transparent, direct, and respectful dialogue, according to a joint declaration issued after the meeting in the Colombian Caribbean coastal city of Santa Marta. The gathering took place in the house where Simón Bolívar, the liberator of both countries and a key political reference figure for president Chávez, died in 1830, giving the Venezuelan leader the opportunity to muse about the "sacred ground" as the appropriate place for reconciliation. Speaking to the press after the meeting, Colombian president Santos announced that José Fernando Bautista will become the new ambassador to Venezuela. Bautista, a former communications minister under president Ernesto Samper (1994–98) who has close links to Santos, knows the border region particularly well. He hails from Norte de Santander, a border department, and he previously served as mayor of Cúcuta, the departmental capital.
Alongside the resumption of diplomatic relations, the leaders also agreed on the establishment of five joint working groups to look into a series of contentious issues that had contributed to the sharp deterioration of bilateral ties over the last year. The first commission will be tasked with working on the payment of some US$800 million in Venezuelan debt to Colombian exporters and re-establishing commercial relations. The other key working group will be the fifth commission, which will be charged with overseeing security in the border region. Supported by the secretary-general of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), a fledgling regional co-operation body, the foreign ministers of both countries will work on elaborating a strategy to prevent the presence or the operations of armed illegal groups along the border, the joint declaration said. The other working groups will look into an economic complementation accord, social investment in the border region, and joint infrastructure projects.
Advantage Pragmatism
The meeting was, above all, a victory for political pragmatism. Political and economic relations had been severely strained ever since Colombia signed a military co-operation agreement last year giving the United States enhanced access to up to seven military bases. However, they hit a nadir after the previous Colombian administration of president Álvaro Uribe presented evidence before the Organisation of American States (OAS) last month alleging that its left-wing neighbour was tolerating the presence of some 1,500 Colombian insurgents from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) on its territory. Yet the inauguration of Juan Manuel Santos earlier this month opened an opportunity that neither government could pass up.
Both sides share an interest in avoiding destabilisation of the fragile border region, where the effects of trade restrictions imposed last year by Venezuela are being keenly felt. Santos, who has refrained from publicly commenting on the FARC allegations, also hopes that by prodding Venezuela into more effective security co-operation, Colombia will be able to make further strides in its counter-insurgency efforts. For his part, the increasingly embattled Venezuelan president appears to have concluded that a prolonged stand-off with Colombia would be likely to further undermine his domestic position shortly ahead of a pivotal legislative election scheduled for late September. As trade restrictions with Colombia have pushed up an already high inflation rate, a gradual normalisation of commercial relations will send the signal that Chávez is doing everything he can to combat the chronic food shortages, a key electoral concern. Even so, the number of concessions made by president Chávez remains surprising. Most notably, he backtracked on the controversial U.S.-Colombian military co-operation agreement: having slammed it as a direct threat to his regime and his country's abundant oil resources, he yesterday accepted that it falls within Colombia's sovereign competences.
Outlook and Implications
Yesterday's meeting with Chávez crowned what have been extraordinarily successful first days in office for the new Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos. Shortly after Saturday's (7 August) inauguration ceremony, he met with Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador, Colombia's other left-wing neighbour with which it had strained relations under president Uribe. Relations with Ecuador have been improving steadily since last year and Santos made another important step towards fully normalising ties when he handed over to Correa a computer hard drive supposedly belonging to Raúl Reyes (alias), a top FARC leader who died during a controversial 2008 Colombian air raid on a rebel camp located just inside Ecuador. Santos has also already made progress in reconstructing the battered ties with the judiciary, meeting with the high courts and withdrawing a contentious judicial reform bill filed during the last days of the Uribe administration (see Colombia: 10 August 2010: New Government to Withdraw Judicial Reform Project in Colombia).
The big question now is whether the positive momentum from yesterday's meeting can be sustained over time. Differences, including over ideology and attitudes to the United States, run deep and the mutual distrust that has built up over recent years will not simply disappear. In this respect, the joint working groups will play a crucial role. They will need to become the forums for re-establishing confidence and inter-government co-operation. Given that contentious and potentially divisive issues—including Venezuelan debts to exporters and the presumed presence of Colombian rebel combatants in Venezuela—will first be discussed within the working groups rather than in the public sphere, there is something to suggest that bilateral relations could improve over the medium term.
However, there are downside risks, mostly relating to the domestic political situations in both countries. In Colombia, there is a lingering possibility that former president Uribe could emerge as a disturbing factor. On his last day in office, he filed a complaint against president Chávez in the International Criminal Court (ICC), a move that Chávez yesterday labelled a "joke". Yet the bigger mid-term risks arguably stem from the situation in Venezuela. Just as the re-establishment of diplomatic relations has been helped by a favourable political climate—domestic gains from further polarisation with Colombia might have been very limited—relations might come under stress again once the domestic political game in Venezuela changes. This could be the case as soon as after the September legislative election. However, with the Colombian government determined to give diplomacy and regional integration new weight in its foreign policy, there is at least the prospect that the traditional volatility in relations between the two countries could decrease gradually over the medium term.