Assistance by Proxy
The fact that Secretary of State John Kerry’s visit to Colombia [August 11] has gone by almost without notice generates the (false) sensation that Colombia’s close association with the United States has passed.
Nevertheless, the listlessness of the bilateral relationship in official discourse and in the media leads us to ignore the fact that Colombia has become a key link in the nervous system of new U.S. security policies.
In the post-Iraq and -Afganistan, and post-economic crisis era, the importance of special operations that leave a “light footprint” has grown for large-scale military interventions. Their objective is to teach other countries to fight threats to their security and, given the transnational character of many of these threats (terrorism and organized crime), work in networks with other special forces, including those of Colombia, an emblematic case because of the duration of the U.S. campaign, the amount of funds invested, and the diversity of state consolidation tasks carried out.
