Yankees Go Home: U.S.'s Unspoken Role in the Andean Conflict

Absent in the discussion of the conflict brewing in the Andes over a Colombian military incursion into Ecuador to kill a guerrilla leader is the role of U.S. military in the conflict. It goes well beyond providing satellite intelligence on the location of guerrilla camps: the two countries have opposing responses to Washington's attempt to militarize the hemisphere. Ecuador's constituent assembly proposes prohibiting all foreign military presence, while Colombia seeks ever greater U.S. military hardware, intelligence and troops. The U.S. response has been quite undiplomatic.

While visiting Italy last October, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa made a modest proposal: if the United States allows his country to set up a military base in Miami, his government would renew the lease for a U.S. base in the coast city of Manta. Otherwise, U.S. troops and operations will have to leave the when the base lease ends next year.

Less than a month later, Correa passed through Miami on his way to China, and U.S. Customs police treated the president as an ordinary foreigner. It wasn't the first time Correa and his vice-president had been denied diplomatic treatment. Ecuador's foreign minister called the incident a "humiliation of a head of state, from arrogance by a country that believes itself above all others."

Declining U.S. Influence

Latin Americans are increasingly saying "No" to the U.S. military bases that are spread through the region. The Pentagon uses vassal states in Central America -- Honduras and El Salvador -- as bases for drug-war surveillance, police training, helicopter sorties, and military-run charity programs. And Colombia, a key ally in the region, receives more military equipment and training than the rest of the hemisphere combined.

But U.S. influence in the region is declining, and the U.S. military presence is perceived as protecting a failed economic model. Instead of militarizing relations and building fortresses, the United States should address the reasons why majorities throughout the region are turning against U.S.-led models.

The widespread U.S. military presence in Latin America and the Caribbean has a long history. Bases resulted from and facilitated the hundreds of U.S. interventions to protect corporate property, coups, occupations, threats by gunboats, and other uses of force since the mid-1800s. Panama was carved out of Colombia in order to build the canal, with a series of bases and forts. In addition to protecting the canal, U.S. bases there served for training Latin American armies, preparing U.S. troops for jungle warfare in World War II and the Vietnam War, testing military equipment, including chemical weapons and preventing leftist forces from either winning or consolidating power in Central America.

Panama and Puerto Rico

Advantages thus obtained by Panama, including access to U.S. markets through the Canal Zone, always conflicted with a desire for independence and with resentment of U.S. arrogance, racism, and interference. A similar dynamic occurred in Puerto Rico, where the Navy moved in after the Spanish-American War in 1898 and remained in the colony for more than a century.

The 1978 ratification of the Panama Canal Treaties, which required the United States to close its bases in Panama by the end of 1999, represented a watershed in U.S. policy, but Washington never renounced military hegemony in the hemisphere.

The enclave system of military basing in Panama and Puerto Rico -- with thousands of troops, multiple military capacities, and internal societies alienated from the "host country" -- has largely dissolved, with the possible and ironic exception of Guantánamo, as a result of popular resistance. But the United States has adapted by establishing more and smaller bases and "security locations," by relying on proxy troops trained and supplied by the United States, and by using air and naval forces for intelligence.