Judging by the Stonhenge-to-Sgt. Pepper spectacle of the London Olympics’ opening ceremonies, Brits take jolly good pride in knowing their history. But here’s an early twentieth-century episode that Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service apparently forgot: the Venezuela Crisis of 1902, when British and other European warships blockaded and bombarded the South American country’s ports to force it to pay foreign debts. It was a classic instance of “gunboat diplomacy”, and it’s the sort of thing that Latin Americans, given the centuries of often ugly foreign intervention they’ve experienced, certainly tend to remember.
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa remembers it so well, in fact, that he sucked Britain into a diplomatic blunder this week. For much of the summer, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who’s wanted in Sweden to answer charges of sexual assault, has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid extradition, not just to Sweden, but possibly also to the US, where he could face trial for espionage. The leftist Correa professes to admire Assange for releasing thousands of classified US diplomatic cables (one of which gave Correa a pretext for booting a US ambassador out of Ecuador last year). As Correa moved closer to granting Assange political asylum, frustrated UK authorities reminded Ecuador, in writing, of a British law that revokes an embassy’s diplomatic immunity if it’s judged to be harboring a fugitive.
But that simply opened the door to accusations from Ecuador that the Brits were threatening to storm the embassy (shades of 1902) if it didn’t hand Assange over. It also gave Correa, who’s been accused of offering Assange sanctuary as a way to deflect attention from his petulant crackdowns on freedom of expression back in Ecuador, enough of a diplomatic upper hand to go ahead and give the WikiLeaks leader political asylum. “No one is going to terrify us!” Correa tweeted. He succeeded in evoking the ghosts of gunboat diplomacy and in turning the subject from an extradition case, if not Ecuador’s possible flouting of international law, into a heroic standoff between a defiant underdog and an imperialista power.
It was just the latest example of how absent-minded governments in the developed world can still be when dealing with developing regions like Latin America. That’s especially true in countries like Ecuador and Venezuela, where leaders are apt to exploit a national sense of vicitimization. When a coup briefly ousted socialist Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in 2002, the Bush administration, wittingly or not, gave the world the impression that it supported the putsch against a democratically elected head of state, even though Washington had to know what a raw nerve the history of yanqui-backed coups in Latin America was (and is). A popular uprising against the coup leaders restored Chávez to power and, ever since, the anti-US firebrand, who looks set to win yet another term this year despite battling cancer, has been able to use Washington’s missteps in that episode to leverage his political power and increasingly authoritarian governance.
The Obama administration hasn’t always performed adeptly south of the border, either. In 2009, it decided to move US counter-drug operations in South America from Ecuador to bases in Colombia. But it didn’t consult the other South American governments about the possibility that the Colombia-based mission might also include counterinsurgency, even beyond Colombia’s borders. This despite the fact that those countries share historically founded anxieties about US military involvement on their continent. Washington’s naive failure to allay those fears drew an angry earful from even moderate governments like Brazil’s, and dropped yet another gift into the lap of Chávez, who in typically hyperbolic but politically effective fashion declared that the US-Colombia pact had “loosed the winds of war”.
Little wonder, then, that Chávez keeps going to that well, especially now that he’s finally facing strong opposition in the October election. Last weekend he announced that authorities had detained a former US Marine who tried to enter Venezuela illegally from Colombia, an American “mercenary,” Chávez insisted, bent on fomenting anti-government unrest before the presidential contest. US diplomats were finally allowed to visit the man, but so far there’s little evidence to back up Chávez’ “mercenary” charges.
Still, this week’s British slip-up was a reminder of how easy it remains for First World countries to set off the Third World’s gunboat diplomacy sirens. It also recalls how easy it is for leaders like Correa, who, given the condemnation he’s received from international human rights groups for criminalizing journalists and other critics inside Ecuador, is the unlikeliest of patrons for a free-speech champion like Assange, to use that noise as convenient cover. These are the sorts of things we expect our diplomats, especially in a foreign service as elite as Britain’s, to take into account before they move the chess pieces. Correa isn’t likely to checkmate London in the end; Assange still faces arrest if he leaves the embassy. But for a moment, at least, Ecuador’s president has schooled the Brits in history.
Rico says that quotation is "let slip the dogs of war"... (But surely Assange can get out in some large diplomatic 'pouch' as cargo?)
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