Plan Colombia and Beyond

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May 01, 2005

A defense minister's bad week

Colombia’s defense minister, Jorge Alberto Uribe, had an unusually bad week. A businessman with little prior experience in military affairs or politics, Uribe managed, in a few days, to raise the ire of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Colombia’s own foreign minister, much of his own high command, and several members of the Colombian Congress, who by the end of the week were calling for him to resign. Some of his difficulties were self-inflicted, but the minister was also caught up in a quiet but longstanding turf battle between Colombia’s civilian and military leaders. Meanwhile Uribe’s boss, President Álvaro Uribe (no relation), somehow managed to stay unscathed and above the fray.

On Tuesday, Senator Hernán Andrade leaked a secret memorandum the minister had sent to the congress in answer to several legislators’ questions. One of the questions had to do with Venezuela’s recent wave of arms purchases, including 100,000 AK-47s from Russia, an issue that Colombia’s government has officially sought to downplay. The minister’s memo took a different position, one which it’s easy to imagine reflects the true opinion of Colombian officialdom: “It is an undeniable fact that the Venezuelan re-armament deepens the military imbalance in the Andean region.”

The document, leaked the day before Condoleezza Rice was to arrive in Bogotá, ensured that U.S. relations with Venezuela would be on everyone’s minds during the secretary of state’s visit, even though Rice was taking pains not to criticize Caracas directly during her four-day swing through Latin America. On Wednesday, as Rice was on her way to Bogotá, Hugo Chávez responded to minister Uribe on Venezuelan television. “The imperial lady is traveling throughout South America, and a pawn has told the queen what she wanted to hear, to please the imperial lady, so that she might laugh and feel happy.” He added that “Nobody should act as a pawn of the empire, because that's a pretty sad role.”

That same day, the “pawn” was publicly slapped down by Colombian Foreign Minister Carolina Barco, who made clear that the defense minister’s opinion was not the government’s position, and that she, not the Defense Ministry, is in charge of making foreign-policy pronouncements.

This was the least of minister Uribe’s problems on Wednesday, however. That morning, he had to fire (or force into retirement) four of the army’s top generals: Roberto Pizarro, the army’s second-in-command, Duván Pineda, the inspector-general, Luis Fabio García, the chief of operations, and Hernán Cadavid, the chief of human resources.

The reason given for the generals’ exit was their strong opposition to a U.S.-encouraged change in the way the armed forces work. All were against efforts to get Colombia’s army to work seamlessly with its much smaller navy and air force, particularly within so-called “joint task forces.” Two such task forces exist today: the Caribbean Joint Command in northern Colombia, and Joint Task Force Omega, which is carrying out the “Plan Patriota” offensive in the south.

The “retired” generals, speaking freely to the press, harshly criticized the joint-task-force strategy, but saved some of their strongest words for the defense minister. In this respect, minister Uribe may have been a proxy for President Uribe: according to today’s Semana magazine, “the generals chose him as their target in order to avoid tangling with the President.”

Minister Uribe’s bad week comes on top of a series of recent problems. The weeks-long confrontation in and around Toribío, Cauca, which still has not completely died down, has brought unprecedented questioning of the government’s security policy. In January, the minister was embarrassingly forced to admit that he had been publicly lying about ordering the abduction of a high-ranking FARC member who had been living in Venezuela.

Last year, Miami’s El Nuevo Herald reported that, months before becoming defense minister, the unmarried Uribe had paid conjugal visits to a woman serving a prison sentence for narcotrafficking. The Colombian media largely ignored the story; Uribe insisted that the visits were not in fact conjugal. Gen. Pineda, one of the four fired officers, recalled the allegations last week in a Colombian radio interview. He questioned the minister’s “moral authority,” adding that “if any of us had gone to visit a narcotrafficker in jail, we surely would have been expelled and an object of public scorn.”

The defense minister is being called to testify this week before Colombia’s Congress, where several legislators are calling for his head. This is an unusual area of agreement between two of the very few members of the congress with any military experience: Gustavo Petro, a former M-19 guerrilla, and Jaime Ernesto Canal, a former general and head of the Cali-based Third Brigade.

“The government tries to punish the military. First it insults them and later it fires them,” said Petro, who said last week that minister Uribe’s tenure is “unsustainable.” Sen. Canal – who, Human Rights Watch has reported, presided over the Third Brigade while the unit helped the AUC to set up its Calima Bloc in southwestern Colombia – added that “the minister should not continue in his position, because he had not efficiently served the fatherland. We all know that the minister has much business knowledge, but he has no aptitude for managing men in arms.”

“With regard to management,” added Sen. Luis Élmer Arenas, “the minister is very good and he knows what he is doing. But he doesn’t know military operations and he ends up being the generals’ ventriloquists’ dummy, transmitting their information to the President. This keeps good decisions from being made.” 

More criticism came from former military leaders. Retired Gen. Rafael Samudio went so far as to say that Uribe doesn’t reserve “the respect even of the lowest-ranking soldier.”

Samudio served as a minister of defense before 1991, back when the post was occupied by uniformed officers, not civilians. Though Colombia has now had nearly fifteen years of civilian defense ministers – during which ten individuals have filled the post – the job remains a difficult one. The civilian part of the ministry is small and must deal with a military high command that, as Cali’s El País notes, “still shows resistance to the orders of someone without a military background.”

The job is still tougher for defense ministers who seek to reform the way the military operates; that is when Colombia’s difficult civil-military relationship gives off the most sparks. This has been the case for both of President Uribe’s defense ministers. The first, Marta Lucía Ramírez, was forced out in November 2003 under intense pressure from top commanders, who bristled at her attempts to gain more control over military contracting and discretionary budgets – and at the idea of taking orders from a woman. Minister Uribe too, with his businessman’s approach, has stepped on a lot of officers’ toes, a colonel who asked not to be identified told Cambio magazine.

Little by little, each one of them [defense ministers] has taken a step forward, but minister Jorge Alberto Uribe, with his management experience, has sought to consolidate changes that were already occurring, and to introduce new ones, which without a doubt has won him enemies among some officers who don’t like the idea of civilians overseeing, controlling and improving the efficiency of processes that had been very confused and led to poor management.

One such process, of course, is the one that led the four generals to quit last week: something that U.S. defense planners like to call “jointness” and basically means making the army, navy, and air force work better together, and sometimes even take orders from each other. The U.S. military underwent this reform, somewhat painfully, in the late 1980s, after the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 mandated it. The change was resisted by those who did not want to find themselves taking orders from another service; this resistance is even stronger within Colombia’s Army, which dwarfs the navy and air force in size. Generals who have opposed this change, including Martín Orlando Carreño, who headed the army from late 2003 until being forced out in late 2004, have characterized it as something imposed upon Colombia by the United States.

For now, with the exit of the four generals, it appears that the “jointness” argument has been settled in favor of more reformist generals. But there will be other arguments, and Minister Uribe will no doubt be in the thick of them.

So far, it seems that minister Uribe is not going anywhere; President Uribe seems intent on keeping him. It may be, in fact, that the minister is playing a useful political role by diverting criticism away from the president. According to El País, “he could be playing a role that was filled in the past by the controversial ex [Interior and Justice] Minister Fernando Londoño Hoyos: to say in public what the President thinks in private.”

The bigger question, however, is not how much longer Jorge Alberto Uribe will stay, but how much longer Colombia’s defense ministers will continue to be civilians. “It is undeniable that we are at war,” argued Sen. José Renán Trujillo last week. “It is fundamental to return to a military minister, either active or retired, who knows the fundamentals about what it is to be in the military. The morale of the troops must be kept high.”

This is a terrible recommendation. The presence of a civilian defense minister in Colombia – however weak or frequently questioned – is an important sign of health for Colombia’s civil-military relations and for its democratic institutions. Just look at those meetings of the region’s defense ministers that have taken place periodically since 1995. Every few years there have been fewer men in uniform posing in the meetings’ group picture. That is a clear indicator of progress, and for Colombia to put an officer back into the defense minister’s position would be a major step backward. Minister Uribe’s troubles must not lead to this outcome.

Posted by isacson at May 1, 2005 11:09 PM

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