Uribe stands ground on US military deal

Friday, August 28, 2009 at 9:25 PM Posted by Beijing News


BARILOCHE, Argentina – South American presidents wrangled for hours Friday over a pending deal to expand the U.S. troop presence in Colombia, closing their meeting with a statement that foreign troops should not be allowed to threaten any of the region's nations.

The leaders also instructed their foreign and defense ministers to meet next month and come up with a cooperation agreement that would enable the UNASUR group to inspect military bases in each member country to confirm that promises are being kept.

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe appeared to go along with the base supervision idea, although the presidents began to leave while the summit declaration was still being drafted and there was no signing ceremony.

"There are no guarantees" in life, said Ecuador's Rafael Correa, the group's rotating president. "We hope it works, that this UNASUR defense council will be able to supervise the bases ... what more can we do?"

Throughout the day, Uribe defended his U.S. military alliance against tough criticism, saying the United States was alone in answering his nation's call for help against drug traffickers and terrorists.

"We are not playing some political game," Uribe declared after others accused him of destabilizing the continent by giving U.S. troops more maneuvering room on Colombian bases.

Uribe provided few details about the 10-year base deal, and his rivals spent much of the summit, broadcast live across the continent, painting the U.S. as a menace to peace and security, despite the goodwill generated by President Barack Obama's election.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called the summit "a great step that opened the gates to understanding, unity and peace — because we don't want war." Speaking on Venezuelan state TV, he lauded the meeting's resolution as "a very important gesture."

Earlier in the day, Chavez read from a document in which he said Pentagon planners saw Colombia's bases as a jumping off point for "expeditionary" forces to secure whatever might be in the U.S. strategic interest in South America.

"They're mobilizing for war," Chavez charged.

"This greatly worries me, and I can't accept that a U.S. document treats us like a back porch," said Correa, who proposed an urgent meeting with Obama.

Uribe said the document was merely a proposal from a group of U.S. academics that is publicly available on the Internet. Strategic defense planning is what they do, he said, but "Colombia's focus is completely the opposite. The only focus that Colombia has is to end its internal war."

The presidents also instructed the UNASUR defense committee to analyze the document before deciding whether to press Obama to provide more explanations.

Uribe urged his neighbors to take more responsibility in the fight against "narcoterrorists" — prompting angry retorts from Bolivia's Evo Morales, among others.

Morales, who rose to power through a coca growers union, said U.S. soldiers accompanying Bolivian troops fired at his union members. "I witnessed this," Morales said.

"So now we're narcoterrorists. When they couldn't call us communists anymore, they called us subversives, and then traffickers, and since the September 11 attacks, terrorists," Morales added. "The history of Latin America repeats itself."

The ultimate responsibility for Latin America's violence lies with U.S. consumers of illegal drugs, Morales said, before answering his own rhetorical question: "If UNASUR sent troops to the United States to control consumption, would they accept it? Impossible!"

Associated Press Writers Christopher Toothaker and Jorge Rueda in Caracas; Alan Clendenning in Sao Paulo; Carlos Valdez in La Paz, Bolivia; Gonzalo Solano in Quito, Ecuador; Eva Vergara in Santiago, Chile; and Frank Bajak and Vivian Sequera in Bogota contributed to this report.





Romania, at the end of a hot day. AP/Vadim Ghirda

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