THE POLITICAL and military dispute affecting Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador yesterday assumed a regional character as Brazil and Argentina became involved in attempts to cool it down and the Organisation of American States had an emergency meeting in Washington.
After Colombia's weekend attack on a left-wing Farc guerrilla base in Ecuador President Hugo Chavez mobilised Venezuela's armed forces in solidarity.
The crisis deepened amid accusations that the Farc group funded Mr Chavez in the 1990s, met Ecuadorian leaders and has been preparing a dirty bomb with radioactive materials. Critics of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe say he acted at the behest of the United States and used its intelligence to mount the attack - "Yankee bombs guided by Yankee satellites", according to Fidel Castro. Mr Uribe says there is growing evidence that Farc has "transnational terrorist ambitions" and that he will take the issue to the International Criminal Court.
The 40-year-old left-wing movement has a 10,000-strong armed wing and is financed by drug dealing and kidnapping. While there is considerable sympathy for it among other left-wing parties in Latin America that is by no means universal and is in practice thinly expressed. One possible motive for the cross-border raid (in which one of Farc's top rebel commanders, Raúl Reyes, died) was to prevent any further link-up between Mr Chavez after the release of prominent prisoners held by the group following his recent intervention.
For Mr Chavez the military mobilisation will be a useful diversionary exercise as he encounters growing domestic criticism over crime, inflation and food shortages, despite strong oil revenues. But there is little or no expectation of a real military confrontation, since neither the Venezuelan nor the Ecuadorian armies are any match for Colombia's larger and more experienced force. Mr Uribe appears to have calculated that he could not lose such a battle and has earned valuable approval from the Bush administration. The US has subsidised his battle against Farc by some $5 billion since 2000, ostensibly to fight drug trafficking. But Democratic Party leaders in the US say he is using the money to fund attacks on trade unions and social movements.
The crisis underlines how deep is the ideological divide between Colombia, the US and left-wing governments in Latin America. But it is also significant that the more moderate regional heavyweights, Brazil and Argentina, have acted so quickly to dampen it down.