US involvement in Columbian raid into Ecuador
I am fairly ignorant on South American politics. I know generally that the US is involved with some of the governments down there either suppoorting the government or trying to undermine it. I guess our interest has to do with stopping drug trade in some cases and with oil trade in other cases(Venezuela for instance).
I also do not know much on who the bad guys and good guys are. I saw where the right wing Columbian government staged a raid into Ecuador to chase the FARC, one of those left wing groups that kidnaps people for ransom. That has cause a lot of tension between Columbia, Ecuador and Venezuela. Columia claims Venezuela bankrolls the FARC and that I guess explains why Venezuela is in this deal. I know we dont like Chavez and he doesnt like us.
Early reports suggested the Columbian troops used high tech equipment to track the rebels and both Ecuador and Venezuela have implied the US provided logisitical support for this mission. I was kind of curious reading the first reports if we did and, if we did, how advisable it was for us to be doing a covert operation that involves military from one country crossing the border of another, even if we considered the incursion justified. South American countries often accuse us of meddling in their affairs and I assume we do to some extent.
In this case, even assuming the FARC are the bad guys and the existing Columbian govt are the good guys(you never really seem to know for sure down there as a lot of the govts we have supported have turned out to be very oppressive and corrupt), my thought was that I hoped we were not involved. Whether Ecuador harbors FARC rebels seems to me to be an issue between Ecuador and Columbia.
Today I read this in an article about the tensions this incident has created:
Earlier this week, a spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command, Jose Ruiz, would neither confirm nor deny that the U.S. military took part in the attack that killed Reyes and 23 other guerrillas.
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20080307/D8V8LLH80.html
That response seems to imply we were involved, I mean why not deny involvement otherwise? If we were not involved, why would we not just say so?
It bothers me a bit that we get involved in these clandestine operations without US citizens ever knowing if we did or why we did. I am not naive, though, and presume there are situations that justify covert operations and our involvement in the politics of other countries.
In this particular case, if we were involved, I sure hope we had a very good reason. I think providing logistical support for one country to invade the borders of another is a very dangerous business. While there might be some reason to justify it, I have a hard time understanding without someone explaining it to me how our national interests are so threatened by a leftist Columbian group to justify a serious attack such as this that might destabilize the whole region. Or was that the point?