SOUTHERN QUAGMIRE

Oil Makes U.S. Raise Military Stakes in Colombia

President George W. Bush's quick stop in Colombia on his return from
the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Chile on Monday
brought this forgotten front in Washington's war on terrorism briefly
into the headlines. Bush promised Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe -
his closest South American ally - to boost aid for his military
campaign against leftist guerillas.

Just two weeks earlier, 100 unarmed peasants were killed in a massacre
reportedly by rightist paramilitary troops in Colombia's southern
jungle province of Putumayo. Unlike the Bush visit, this failed to
make headlines here.

Colombia has received $3.3 billion in U.S. aid since 2000 - making it
the top recipient after the Middle East. In October, Congress approved
doubling the Pentagon's troop presence in Colombia to 800 - although
they are officially barred from combat.

The Iraq war may have knocked Colombia off the front page, but Mideast
chaos has made South America's energy resources more strategic to the
United States. Colombia itself is among the top 15 global suppliers to
the United States, and Uribe hopes to privatize the country's oil
industry as part of his push to join President Bush's Free Trade Area
of the Americas. Venezuela, bordering Colombia, is the fourth-largest
U.S. supplier after Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Canada. Venezuela's
populist leader Hugo Chavez is himself a White House target for
Western hemisphere "regime change" - as seen by the current push for
sanctions.

Meanwhile, the oil industry has charted a new thrust into the Amazon
regions of Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia - countries all now receiving
U.S. military aid under the Andean Regional Initiative, the Bush
administration's expansion of President Bill Clinton's "Plan Colombia."

The White House has now dropped the fiction that Plan Colombia is an
anti-drug operation. A post-9/11 $28.9 billion supplemental
anti-terrorism package allowed U.S. military aid to be targeted
against groups on the State Department's terrorist list - including
both Colombia's two leftist rebel groups, as well as the rightist
paramilitary network known as the United Colombian Self-Defense Forces
(AUC), which is responsible for the vast majority of massacres and
atrocities, according to groups like Amnesty International.

The problem, say human rights organizations, is that Uribe is not
fighting the AUC - his government is negotiating with them, while
refusing to talk with the guerillas. Rights advocates cite reports of
collaboration between the AUC and Colombia's military, although they
have been officially denied. Targets of AUC's terror have included not
only guerillas, but union oil workers opposing Uribe's privatization
plan, Indians demanding their constitutional right to local autonomy
and non-involvement in the war, and - as in the recent Putumayo
massacre - peasants simply trying to survive.

One beneficiary of the increasing troop presence in Colombia is
Occidental Petroleum, known colloquially as "Oxy." The United States
is training and equipping a Colombian army brigade to protect Oxy's
480-mile pipeline linking the oil fields of Arauca province with the
Caribbean. Arauca, the heart of Oxy's operations, hosts the greatest
concentration of U.S. military advisers and has Colombia's worst human
rights situation.

Oxy is also building a new pipeline over the Andes to get oil from
Ecuador's Amazon to Pacific ports, while in Peru, Hunt Oil and
Halliburton have launched a massive natural gas project in the Amazon,
with a new pipeline to the Pacific. And in Bolivia, a consortium
including Shell hopes to build a pipeline linking natural gas fields
to a terminal on the Chilean coast. In each case, the protests by
peasants and Indians charging illegal land grabs and pollution have
been violently broken by security forces. Last November, Bolivia's
government was brought down following weeks of protests over the gas
pipeline plan.

With leftist governments in power in Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina and
Uruguay, securing the oil and gas resources of the region is more
critical than ever for Washington. But the United States may be on a
proverbial slippery slope to a second counter-insurgency quagmire -
this one in our own hemisphere.