Credible threat or political stunt

Ok the obvious, Colombia recently sent a military operation into Ecuador’s territory to kill FARC’s second in command.  The Colombian struggle against the FARC has taken on a transborder nature.  Beyond Colombia, FARC operates in both Venezuela and Ecuador.  For there to be an effective war against this group, there cannot be ’safe havens’ within other countries.  In part, the extreme response from Ecuador and Venezuela in troop mobilization is unexpected.  While the Colombian strike may set a scary precedent it is clearly not a threat to the political stability within these countries.  I will make the claim that the troop mobilization by Venezuela is only political posturing to gain domestic political support.  In fact, this move is the logical conclusion of Tanaka’s analysis about how Chavez has been able to increase his authoritarian power.

In “The Thrid Wave of Democratization in Latin America: Advances and Setbacks” Martin Tanaka explains that traditional models of democratic outcomes fails to predict the recent increase in authoritarian power in Venezuela.  What Martin does find is that these errors of the model are best approximated by the dominate party power.  Martin argues that Chavez came to power in part because of his good timing and his charisma.  While he has been able to use his popularity to push past a constitutional referendum, his most recent bills that were put to voters showed markedly weaker support for the presidents policy.  This is the similar indicator used by Tanaka to measure the decrease in power of the previous political parties which lead to the Chavez regime.  As he came to power, Chavez was able to blame the political problems of the country on the previous leadership, however now that he is in control voters are looking to blame him for any negative political outcomes.  His move to mobilize troops against Colombia serves two purposes.  First, it plays on anti-US feelings by targeting a US ally who receives billions of dollars in military aid. Second, it unifies to people against an outward enemy, i.e. Colombia military incursions into other sovereign territory.

It appears that Colombia also believes the threat from Chavez isn’t credible.  Colombia has not mobilized their troops to the border and they have instead turned to the international community and the United States for support.  This hurts Chavez’s ability to spin the Colombian response as a justification for escalation.  We can predict that this conflict with transition into strong anti-US rhetoric from Chavez in the near future and blame Colombian action on US support.  This decreases the chance of regional violence but maintains an enemy for Chavez to blame for economic disparities.