Saber Rattling South America Style

Say what you want about recent politics in South America – a region of new governments for the people, or the land of populist despots, take your pick – but at least until now conflicts between countries seemed to be a relic of the ancient past. Well, until last weekend.

On Saturday, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe committed what is generally considered to be a diplomatic 'no-no' in most parts of the world. He sent his army across the border into another country, Ecuador, in a raid against a guerilla (FARC) encampment. The government of Ecuador reacted the way one might expect Washington to respond to Canadian Mounties staging a raid into upstate New York – he was not happy.

Ecuador's President Rafael Correa sent Colombia's ambassador back to Bogotá, temporarily broke diplomatic relations with his country's neighbor to the north, and sent thousands of Ecuadorian troops to the Colombian border to prevent a repeat episode. Not to be outdone, Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez also sent Colombia's ambassador packing and sent thousands of his troops to the Colombian border, though no incursion has happened there or seems likely. Perhaps it was a legitimate precaution, or perhaps just a case of international-crisis-envy. Again take your pick.

All this also plays out against the backdrop of larger U.S./Latin America political dynamics. Uribe, a conservative and heated opponent of the FARC, is also President Bush's chief ally in a region where he has very few. Correa and Chavez, along with Bolivia's Evo Morales, are generally regarded by the Bush administration as the South American leftist presidential 'bad boys.'

Not surprisingly then, the Bush administration was quick to defend Colombia's cross-border moves, no doubt seeing the incursion as more akin to invading Afghanistan to chase Al Qaeda then Canadians advancing on Buffalo (with fried chicken wings and Genesee beer being the target, no doubt).

For more than two decades, since the U.K. and Argentina duked it out oddly over some rocky islands off the latter's southern coast, South America's instabilities have always been internal, not cross-border. These international tensions aren't likely to fade with just assurances that similar border crossings have been taken out of Colombia's counterinsurgency game plan.

Colombia's government says that in Saturday's raid it took possession of one FARC leader's laptop that, it claims, included evidence of long-standing amiable relations between the FARC and Chavez, including $300 million in support payments to the insurgents from the Venezuelan treasury. It was a convenient and timely link for Uribe (with the evidence still unreleased) and one that Chavez heatedly denied.

To be clear, most nations do not take kindly, and understandably so, to having armies from other nations wander across the border to shoot and kill. Similarly, neither do most nations have good feelings when their neighbors serve as host (willing or not) to guerillas dedicated to kidnapping and torturing their citizens.

The FARC and its operations in Colombia have been a violent and painful fact of life in that country for more than forty years – officially the longest running civil insurgency in the world. "Cats" didn’t even run that long on Broadway.

The instability of that ongoing conflict now threatens to spread regionally, which is not welcome news. In comparison, the Bolivian battle between Morales and the governors, over autonomy and gas revenue, looks like a minor sideshow of instability.

The good news is that others in South America are stepping up to take on the role of peacemaker and mediator, including Brazil's government, also led by an ostensibly left President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Perhaps the silver lining in this incident is that it will draw others in South America to take leadership in a regional crisis, rather than letting the driver seat be occupied by the great neighbor to the north.

The question is whether South Americans can achieve that restoration of stability before someone in government, or on the ground, does something stupid and converts the current tensions into something else entirely.