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Colombia: Growing Signs of Conflict's Regional Spillover
April 3, 2002
Summary
The Bush administration is many months away from obtaining congressional approval for a plan to increase substantially U.S. military aid to Colombia. However, the Colombian conflict is already spilling over into neighboring countries with growing intensity, presenting U.S. planners with the likelihood of a significantly larger battlefield in which guerrillas, paramilitaries and drug traffickers will not be restricted by the territorial borders that constrain the Colombian army.
Analysis
As Colombia's conflict spills into countries such as Ecuador and Venezuela in the coming months, the possibility of diplomatic confrontations between Bogota and regional governments will increase, complicating the Bush administration's efforts to manage the regional political repercussions of a deeper U.S. military presence in Colombia. At the same time, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia's (FARC) growing use of extra-territorial bases in Panama, Ecuador and Venezuela also is likely to raise levels of violence dramatically along Colombia's border regions with those countries.
The FARC's use of extra-territorial bases may give it some strategic advantages over the Colombian army in terms of staging attacks and withdrawing to secure locations where the army legally cannot pursue it. But it also is likely to trigger a buildup in border areas of the paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), which unlike the Colombian army, will not stop its pursuit of the FARC at Colombia's national borders.
In fact, the regional spillover of FARC and AUC forces into neighboring countries could turn the border regions of these countries into bloody battlefields if the Colombian army and AUC cooperate in cross-border pincer attacks against FARC forces. It also could suck the military and border security services of other countries into armed engagements with Colombian combatants, and it may endanger the lives and property of civilian non-combatants in states and provinces that border Colombia.
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Colombia: Growing Signs of Conflict's Regional Spillover . . .