Opinion: Will Colombia remain ‘the old strategic’ ally of Washington and NATO

By Hernando Calvo Ospina

(Opinion) Weapons were still smoking in Europe destroyed by the Second World War; the Soviet Red Army was beginning its return home after confronting, pursuing, and crushing the Hitlerite troops even in Berlin itself; already another terrible danger for humanity was starting to emanate from Washington.

His army had only entered the war when the red flag, with the hammer and sickle, was beginning to float in the liberated concentration camps.

Washington had seen Soviet courage and momentum in the war and now saw that ideological enemy rising from the rubble. So he could waste no time in seizing the wounded world.

One of his priorities was to establish dominion over what he called his “backyard”: all of Latin America and the Caribbean, a region that had not suffered directly from the horror of the war.

To this end, President Harry Truman enacted the “Inter-American Military Cooperation” Act in 1946. It came to fruition with the signing in Rio de Janeiro of the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, TIAR, in September 1947, which brought all the continent’s armies under U.S. rule.

The TIAR was to respond to any external aggression, which, in its logic, would come from the bloc headed by the Soviet Union.

The pretext was to prevent the arrival of “perverse and atheistic communism”, but the reality was to keep the Soviet Union away from the region’s incalculable strategic resources, which Washington could only decide.

The statutory framework of the TIAR was drafted by the former president and ambassador in Washington, the Colombian Alberto Lleras Camargo, under the criteria established by Washington.

It was natural, then, that the government of Bogota was the first to sign a military agreement with the United States under the TIAR principles.

The following year, in April 1948, the Organization of American States, OAS, was created in Bogota, whose statutes were presented by the Colombian delegation, even though the text had been submitted by the U.S. delegation, headed by General George Marshal.

Lleras Camargo was appointed as the first Secretary General of the OAS.

Adapted, the OAS statutes, together with those of the TIAR, were imposed by the United States to become the ideological and operational framework of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, created on April 4, 1949.

Only six years later, on May 14, 1955, the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance, better known as the Warsaw Pact, was created. It was a military cooperation agreement between the countries of the European socialist camp, led by the USSR, to respond to the aggressive pretensions of NATO.

From 1951 to 1954, Colombia participated in the Korean War, together with NATO countries, under U.S. command. It was the only Latin American country to send troops, more than 5,000 soldiers. Since then, the different Colombian regimes have not missed any opportunity to support the United States in aggressions and military invasions. Almost always without asking them to do so.

Its alliance with Washington and NATO members supported Great Britain when Argentina tried to recover the Malvinas Islands militarily in April 1982. Colombia and the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet were the only two Latin American countries that took that side.

With official troops or by facilitating the participation of thousands of mercenaries, Colombia has been alongside the United States and its NATO in the wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen.

It would seem that the political world does not change in its essence, that it only changes its mask, decorum, and characters, but the intentions and procedures of the empire and its henchmen remain almost identical.

At the beginning of the nineties of the last century, the USSR and the so-called European socialist camp disintegrated, and logically, so did the Warsaw Pact. It was expected that NATO would be diluted since the communist enemy no longer existed.

But it stayed and began to expand, invoking the need to combat world drug trafficking and terrorism. In other words, NATO went from being the most powerful multinational military organization in the world to taking on police matters.

True, it was the pretext, but it was accepted. The big media corporations, almost all managed by the United States and NATO countries, unashamedly said that “international public opinion”, that is, they agreed. And they even created invasions and wars to make these pretexts a reality.

It has already been seen that the intention was to advance towards Eastern Europe, swallowing up nations that had belonged to the Warsaw Pact, seeking to encircle Russia, a country emerging from the precipice into which it had fallen with the disappearance of the USSR. This resurgence was unthinkable in the 1990s.

The United States-NATO had not managed to appropriate its enormous strategic resources, particularly oil and gas.

Moreover, Russia expanded economically throughout the world without invading soldiers, political or economic blackmail, and achieving strategic commercial exchanges in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Ah, but also China: without armies, monetary extortion, or threats against the sovereignty of other nations.

Two decades ago, the United States realized the world’s economic power was getting out of its control. That is why it imposed an urgent presence in these regions on NATO, even though they had nothing to do with its founding or regional objectives.

Although discreetly, the Atlantic Alliance has had a certain presence in Latin America and the Caribbean through the U.S. Southern Command, but basically through its colonies in the Caribbean: the Netherlands has Bonaire, Aruba, and Curacao, among others; France holds Martinique and Guadeloupe, mainly; Great Britain colonizes the Virgin Islands, Monserrat, Anguilla, besides not letting go of Jamaica; the United States subjugates Puerto Rico.

In the South Atlantic, Great Britain invades the Falkland Islands, and France has the department of Guiana.

Encouraged by Washington, in the face of the commercial expansion of Russia and China, NATO set out to set foot directly in, shall we say, sovereign countries. Thus, in 1998, President Carlos Menen congratulated himself for including Argentina as a “main extra-NATO ally”.

It did not matter that the same NATO had made war so that the Malvinas remained in London’s hands. In 2019, Jair Bolsonaro was proud that Brazil was granted the same category.

Thus NATO had two of the three Latin American powers on its side (Mexico is the other) without being obliged to support them in the event of an armed conflict.

With the arrival of President Hugo Chavez to the government in Venezuela and of a series of progressive presidents in several Latin American countries, who demanded respect for the sovereignty of their nations, the need for an effective NATO presence increased for Washington.

In June 2021, the “NATO Agenda 2030” was defined, which had been planned since the administration of George W. Bush (2001-2009). It specified the urgency of strengthening relations with Latin America, Africa, and Asia for a particular purpose: to counter Russia and China’s influence. And not precisely the military one: the economic one.

The presence of the Alliance in Latin America should serve the same purpose as the TIAR did in its day: to impose political and economic conditions on Washington-NATO’s main rivals by employing military threats.

And if Cuba was a great challenge to the United States in the sixties, Venezuela, with Chávez and President Maduro, tripled the threat because it is a nation with immense strategic resources, starting with oil. The fact is that these rulers dared to have Russia and Iran as strategic allies, economically and militarily.

With the background of a nation prostrate to Washington, it was natural that, from Colombia, they began to organize the Washington-NATO plans to destabilize the Bolivarian government, which included a military invasion.

At least since 2000, troops from several NATO countries have had a regular presence in Colombia, using the nine bases installed by the Pentagon for exclusive use or in any battalion in the country.

The Colombian military has trained for several years in NATO schools in European countries. The few times it has been made public, it was argued that it was a collaboration for the war on drug trafficking.

“Collaboration” has proved useless because since then, the production of cocaine has not stopped increasing, just as opium trafficking soared in Afghanistan while NATO invaded it.

These NATO troops served to train in guerrilla warfare and to advise on espionage techniques.

A little before 2016, and more precisely since the FARC guerrillas surrendered their weapons, the military strategy of the Colombian army began to change by order of Washington.

It had been an army highly specialized in counter-guerrilla warfare and in pursuing and killing the “internal enemy,” the political opposition. Now it had to become an army for regular warfare and even adapt its weaponry. It has been a priority in the U.S. plans to attack Venezuela.

And NATO was there to advise and provide weapons.

Moreover, it was impossible not to think about the possibility of using Colombian troops, whose numbers are only surpassed by those of Brazil in Latin America: 350,000 and 200,000, respectively.

On March 11, 2022, Washington recognized the Colombian regime as a “Non-NATO Strategic Preferential Ally”.

Bogota and Washington rushed to explain that this was not only conditioned to the military area but was convenient for Colombia’s future because it also integrated economic development, education, rural development, security and defense, democracy, migration, climate change, and COVID.

Thus, one might think that the U.S.-NATO and Colombia had just met.

The agreement is also to “combat organized crime” and “human security”. Further, there is talk about “strengthening” the Colombian armed forces.

In other words, an old reality was made official.

The status of “major extra-NATO ally” is a designation under U.S. law but does not make the country part of NATO or support it if it is attacked by another nation “friendly” to Washington.

Among the “advantages” Colombia has by possessing this status are obtaining loans of military material, supplies, or equipment for cooperative purposes of research, development, testing, or evaluation, as well as for the priority delivery of defense articles.

Of course, and it is evident in the agreement: unless the Pentagon or NATO agrees, Colombia must reimburse all costs.

Colombia has become NATO’s main ally in the region. As we have already seen, this has always been so for Washington.

The questions that must be asked now are: will the new Gustavo Petro-France Marquez government leave Colombia with this status despite its consequences?

Will it continue to allow the Pentagon to do whatever it wants in its territory now that NATO has officially joined it?

Will it allow the United States to continue seeking to destabilize the Bolivarian government of Venezuela from its territory?

Let’s hope dignity and sovereignty finally arrive in Colombia, so it becomes a territory of peace, inside and outside its borders. Because since Colombia has been called Colombia, it has had neither dignity nor sovereignty and even less peace.

With information from Rebelión