Gran Colombia Redux

From 1819 to 1831, Colombia and Venezuela were part of the same country (Gran Colombia also included Ecuador, Panama and parts of Brazil and Peru). In ‘Me voy Pa’Cali’, Oscar D’León sang: ‘Listen, my countries/I want Colombia and Venezuela to unite/and without politics to shake hands/I’m Colombian, Venezuelan and of the world!’

The two nations share a poorly policed border more than two thousand kilometres long, stretching from the Caribbean through the Andes and the Llanos, or great plains, into the Amazon and Orinoco basins. Much of the territory along the border is in the hands of competing non-state actors: the AGC, the right-wing paramilitary organisation; remnants of the FARC guerrillas who refused to demobilise in the 2016; and the ELN, which has never signed a peace agreement. The latter two co-operate with Venezuelan state governors and the Guardia Nacional in the cocaine, weapons and gasoline business.

The Wayúu people in the Guajira Peninsula live bi-nationally – or did until the US imposed economic sanctions against Venezuela, making it impossible for them to earn a living in Maracaibo. The lands of smaller Indigenous groups in the Amazon and the Orinoquía, such as the Baniwa and Macuxi, also span the border.

The Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, in his zeal to combat the FARC and the ELN is responsible for the deaths of at least fifteen children in the Amazonian department of Guaviare. The far right, which is well represented in Petro’s administration when it comes to security policy and ‘public order’, argues that unless the airstrikes continue, the FARC and the ELN will recruit more and more minors into their ranks.

There is no logic to the argument. More bombing will not stop the recruitment of children, just as it won’t reduce the amounts of coca cultivated and cocaine produced for export, which are at near-record levels. Peace talks with the FARC and the ELN, on which Petro wagered much of his political capital, soon stalled.

Like Lula in Brazil, Petro was losing the support of his left-wing base until Donald Trump began blowing up fishing boats and murdering fisherman whom he claimed were drug smugglers, while insinuating that Petro was in charge of Colombian cartels. Now, however, Petro’s robust nationalist rhetoric, which emphasises Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein, resonates broadly. Colombians don’t appreciate being branded as a nation of drug traffickers, least of all by someone like Trump. For the moment, Petro’s popularity has rebounded.

At the weekend, Trump declared Venezuela’s airspace closed. President Nicolás Maduro rejected the claim as a ‘colonial threat’. Colombia and Venezuela are now united in defence of their territory, their physical integrity and their sovereignty, and will undoubtedly be swapping intelligence in the coming weeks and months.

A few years ago such an alliance would have been hard to imagine. In 2002, Pedro Carmona slipped off to Bogotá after his failed coup against Hugo Chávez in Caracas, seeking protection from President Álvaro Uribe. During the presidency of Uribe’s protégé Iván Duque (2018-22), Juan Guaidó used Bogotá as a base of failed operations.

Petro, whose background is in social democratic nationalism, since coming to power in 2022 had been at pains to keep Maduro at arm’s length, in the face of accusations from the far right that he was turning Colombia into Venezuela. He never expressed enthusiasm for the Bolivarian Revolution. This was also a way to mark his distance from the FARC and the ELN.

Is the US preparing for war on Venezuela? It will be more difficult without Colombia on the side of intervention, or covert operations organised and launched from the Colombian side of the border. Guyana is a poor substitute, especially given how many Venezuelan migrants have settled there, even if Venezuela’s boundary dispute with Guyana over Essequibo, which first gave rise to US imperial pretensions in the Caribbean in 1894-95, is still a problem. General Laura Richardson, the former head of the US Southern Command, has said that the oil there is an issue of US national security.

The US can bomb Venezuelan military and civilian targets from the USS Gerald R. Ford but it’s difficult to imagine anyone signing off on a ground invasion. Cooler heads in the US military may be wary of a quagmire. If they did invade, US troops would probably end up fighting not only the Venezuelan military, intelligence services and civilian militias but also the Colombian guerrillas that operate along the border. The PCC, Brazil’s multinational crime and cocaine conglomerate, which does business with the FARC and ELN, also has a presence, as do Ecuadorian and Peruvian organised crime groups. Things could get very messy, very fast.

Thomas Mann, Lyndon Johnson’s man on Latin America and a fellow Texan, once shrewdly observed that since the Cuban military was unlikely to split and the population unlikely to revolt, the US had no chance of overthrowing Castro. It would take a full-scale US invasion, of a kind that duly materialised in the Dominican Republic in 1965. The Mann Doctrine was to gut Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress and steer US aid to its only reliable allies in Latin America – the military, police and intelligence services.

But times have changed since the 1960s. Military force and police repression are unlikely to produce the outcomes the US desires, and may end up strengthening Latin American nationalisms instead, in the northern Andes as elsewhere. In Ecuador and Peru, the military and police have barely managed to beat back protesters after weeks of national popular mobilisation led by young people. In Argentina, the military is confined to barracks, and in spite of considerable repression, the police have barely contained popular protest from unions and social movements.

While the US has tilted the balance towards the far right in elections in Honduras and Argentina, it has no viable military strategy for dealing with Venezuela, in part because it has lost its way with Colombia. Despite Trump and Marco Rubio’s revival of the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904, ‘big stick’ diplomacy will not make the Americas great again; Trump will never charge the Venezuelan equivalent of San Juan Hill.