BOGOTÁ, Colombia — The arrest of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe’s cousin and political ally, Mario Uribe, on charges of conspiring with the country’s paramilitary groups, brings the country’s so-called “para-politics” scandal closer to the president’s inner circle. Mario Uribe’s arrest on April 22 and the ever-growing domestic scandal that links politicians with outlawed right-wing paramilitary groups is being seen as the most serious crisis facing President Uribe since he first came to power in 2002. A former senator who co-founded the Democratic Colombia Party with the president, Mario Uribe is one of the most prominent politicians engulfed in the scandal [...]
This month’s NATO summit in Bucharest failed to produce a consensus in favor of proposals to offer Membership Action Plans (MAPs) to Georgia and Ukraine. The pro-MAP faction within NATO, led by the United States and also including Canada and most Eastern European countries, failed to overcome concerted resistance from most of the Western European member-states, led most vociferously by Germany and France. At the conclusion of the conference on April 3, NATO issued a cryptic joint communiqué stating that it “welcomed Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership and agreed that these countries will become members of NATO,” but [...]
When Colombia bombed a guerrilla camp in Ecuador last month, igniting one of Latin America’s worst diplomatic spats in recent history and nearly sparking a regional war, the leaders at the center of the dispute each emerged with a most unexpected political reward: a boost in their domestic support. Recent opinion polls in Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela illustrate that the nationalist stands taken by leaders of the three countries paid off for each of them politically. “All three leaders occupied different roles and all of them are satisfied,” said Juan Gabriel Valdés, former minister of foreign relations in Chile. Colombian [...]
