Heritage Foundation Leadership for America

On March 1, 2008, the Colombian military attacked a jungle encampment of the Revolution­ary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), located less than two miles inside Ecuadorian territory. It was an important operating hub for the FARC, which the United States has designated as a foreign terror­ist organization. Luis Edgar Devia (aka Raul Reyes), the FARC’s second in command and top interna­tional strategist, was killed in the raid along with 24 other guerrillas and supporters. Perhaps more important, the Colombian military captured three laptop computers and additional memory devices belonging to Reyes.

The files on these computers and devices chron­icle the thoughts and actions of the FARC and raise serious questions about the effectiveness of U.S. regional policies against the interconnected chal­lenges of terrorism, insurgency, and drug violence in the Western Hemisphere. The FARC files are essen­tially a smoking gun that proves that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is supporting the FARC.

The revelations from the FARC files have prompted several Members of Congress to call for the U.S. to place Venezuela on its list of state spon­sors of terrorism. However, doing so could jeopar­dize economic and commercial ties with the fifth-largest supplier of crude oil to the U.S. and an important U.S. trading partner. It would also likely spark a nationalist backlash in Venezuela and more anti-Americanism throughout Latin America. A more prudent policy would be a course of targeted sanctions against individuals who are illegally sup­porting the FARC.

In addition, Chávez's growing ties with Iran appear to open a door for Islamist terrorism and raise the question of whether the U.S. has done enough since 9/11 to protect against backdoor terror­ist threats originating in the Western Hemisphere. The U.S. needs to explore ways to strengthen vigi­lance and to prevent Iran from exploiting this potential conduit to the homeland.

FARC and drug-related terrorism still threatens progress made in Colombia, the essential U.S. part­ner in the Andes. The U.S. should work to bolster Colombia’s capacity and will to defeat FARC terror­ism by continuing to fund Plan Colombia and by ratifying the Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

Exports of Colombian cocaine, long a staple of FARC funding, are financing the mounting assault of Mexican drug cartels on Mexican law enforce­ment and the very fabric of democratic governance. The U.S. Congress should act promptly, without imposing excessive conditions, to provide much-needed aid to the Mexican government to fight the drug trade and curb drug violence. For the moment, drugs, crime, terrorism, and Chávez have heightened U.S. awareness of security threats along America's southern flank.

What the U.S. Should Do.While the Bush Administration has a solid record of working to secure the U.S. from a range of threats originating in Latin America and the Caribbean, more can and should be done to protect the U.S. homeland from foreign terrorist attack. Specifically, the U.S. should:

• Keep a spotlight on Hugo Chávez's misdeeds.
• Apply targeted sanctions against individuals who are identified and prosecuted by the Colom­bian government for supporting FARC terrorism.
• Use diplomacy to contain Chávez.
• Cement the U.S. partnership with a demo­cratic Colombia by continuing to support Plan Colombia and the Democratic Security Program and by swiftly ratifying the Colombian Free Trade Agreement.
• Implement the Mérida Initiative to combat Mexican drug cartels.
• Press the OAS to fulfill its commitments on terrorism.
• Give priority to funding for Latin America security.
• Guard the homeland with intelligence and naval assets.

Conclusion. Latin America cannot afford to be seen as half terrorist-friendly and half terrorist-hos­tile. In the long run, radical populist regimes will likely run out of steam as they are consumed by non-competitiveness, corruption, and inefficiency, spawning the sorts of popular backlash that ended previous efforts to construct populist paradises. U.S. success in Iraq and Afghanistan against Islamist terrorism will curb or contain its expansionary ways. Even in Iran, shifts in leadership among the mullahs could easily undo Iran’s inroads into the Western Hemisphere.

Ultimately, the U.S. and the strengthening democracies of the region can prevail. An era of good feeling of the sort experienced in the 1990s may be restored as nations turn to improving Latin America's global competitiveness and develop­ment. In the near term, however, the U.S. faces real challenges in a polarized Western Hemisphere that will require committing more resources and coor­dinating responses against the convergent and often overlapping realities of drugs, criminality, and terrorism.

As the FARC files indicate, the enemies of democracy and freedom have deep and tenacious roots in the Western Hemisphere. In remote jungle sanctuaries, FARC leaders are constructing grand strategies for sweeping revolutionary change and are courting friends and allies in the turbulent fer­ment of radical populism. Their leaders and allies dream grandly of humanity in the abstract but are not afraid of resorting to violence, terrorism, hos­tage taking, drug dealing, and forced recruitment of child soldiers. They are ready to fight hard and dirty. They read the press, watch the media, and are quick to seize on signs of fatigue and flagging U.S. will throughout the Americas.

Ray Walser, Ph.D., is Senior Policy Analyst for Latin America in the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, at The Heritage Foundation.