TEÓDULO LÓPEZ MELÉNDEZ, Writer and Journalist - Caracas, Venezuela
The right is not a rigid body, kind of a stiff cadaver or a lowered chart of the mountain to be applied with a dry blow on the head of the men or of the States. The right is renewed to cover the realities that they are born in the breast of the human communities and in the relationships among States. The principle of sovereignty is very limited for the growing conformation of regional blocks and you subsume in a voluntary renouncement in favor of multilateral organs.
The principle of territorial inviolability has been affected by the appearance of the terrorism like malicious phenomenon in the ends of last century, one that has propitiated numerous resolutions of the United Nations on the prohibition to the States of harboring in its own territory organizations that they use them as sanctuaries to incur in acts of this nature.
The screams of birdcall of sovereignty are estentóreos in a world globalizado where the voluntary instances settled down by the States assume more and more competitions. The regional blocks-I marry Europe - they have advanced more-it is certain - that the same United Nations in the conformation of mechanisms supranacionales, but there are even this way advances like the establishment of the international Penal Court, institution that it had in their moment the North American rejection in the face of the fear that their own soldiers can be judged there after some intervention in the exterior.
To listen to speak of sovereignty in today's Europe is something like that as an absurdity, when the institutions that have been built (European Central Bank, European Commission, European Parliament, European Court, etc.) they are establishments renouncement receivers to that old concept. In Latin America the back payments are always the norm. The integration processes are braked because one alleges that that or that institution “it affects the national sovereignty.”
The fixation of a common external tariff is violated repeated times, in the processes of creation of a hoop external group, because the States is allowed to allege that that disposition-or the one of further on - it affects to some agricultural or industrial product. It is for it that the Andean Community of Nations was weak and that the MERCOSUR is a formless body that refuses to take form. In this continent we continue living off the “sovereignty” as an irrefutable principle, it causes for the one that the integration continues being an entelechy.
The scarce and weak mechanisms that it has been able to build the OAS serve while they don't enter with me “sovereign State”. The pathetic example has it when the then president Fujimori you retiró de the Interamerican Court because a sentence that was he took place unfavorable. It is necessary to admit, nevertheless that that unilateral measure taken then by the Peruvian State contributed to the process of a president's fall that sought eternizarse in the power by means of fraudulent mechanisms.
What we have seen in the debate of the permanent Council of the OAS is a total desfase in the juridical plane. I personalize it in the Argentinean ambassador's very late intervention with their firm one “no”, one that embodied the ignorance of the new world reality with the appearance of the terrorism. A State cannot harbor in its breast-especially if it is consented - to a qualified organization of terrorist and very much less to one that is in activity to overthrow the government de otro. Nevertheless, for the late Argentinean State the juridical principles are unalterable, inmodificables, eternal, is those devaluated populists those that the one devaluated principle of the sovereignty scream.
Let us see the borders of the word-concept called aggression now. A State attacks to other when it attacks citizens or goods of that country, causing dead or wounded or physical destruction. In the case that occupies us the Colombian State it attacked to a group of their own citizens run off with in weapons to overthrow their legitimate government, it didn't cause any damage to Ecuadorian citizen some and in the physical plane it destroyed some trees, that that, if we abandon the seriousness for a moment and we become humorous, well it could be repaired with a massive siembra of some plant that the Ecuador considers appropriate to its environment.
As diplomat I admit that the decision of the Permanent Council of the OAS has been balanced. After all it has recognized the undeniable thing-Colombian armed forces entered in territory of the Ecuador -, it has named an investigating commission and it has summoned the convenient thing: an Extraordinary Meeting of the Secretaries of External Relationships, one that won't go beyond that decided by the Permanent Council, but whose lapses will contribute to lower the diplomatic pressure. As politician I should be in charge of of the imbalances.
I have followed step to step the president's Belt performance and I should say that it is an unbalanced one. This man is very far from putting on shoes the shoes of a statesman. He is an inconstant individual, influenciable, marked by an untimely nationalism. Their declaration of Caracas, in meeting with their Venezuelan couple, in the sense that if the OAS doesn't condemn Colombia he will wash for its own means the insult, it is a declaration of a crazy boy that exercises blackmail against a multilateral instance and he/she leaves outlined the warlike option.
The juridical-political problem that the OAS will face-and that it is not in capacity of confronting for its intrinsic weaknesses - it is, however, many more serious. It is the novel of States members harboring in their breast organizations dedicated to overthrow the government of another State and, for if it was little, linked to the drug traffic and the practice of abhorrent crimes as the kidnapping. Here it is not the old Latin American conspiracies developed in other territories to overthrow to some military, happened dictatorship, apart from this, in an OAS full with dictatorships. This is not at least the Cuban ingerencia exporting their revolution and that he was solved with the expulsion of Cuba of the OAS. We are before unpublished facts.
Two States has been negotiating with the FARC, and at least one of them financing them and providing them logistics of war. Poor OAS: the old principles to those that he/she has clinged are always diluted before their eyes, what has been denominated interamerican system, one that didn't have at least force to confront the traditional conflicts, now will be in charge of of matters that transform the old juridical conceptions and that they put paws you arrive the old political solutions.
For if it was little, to that of the States involved in the abhorrent practices, it will add a group of States members that I will denominate “patinetas”. I make It because the other day I was walking in a park and I discovered that the patinetas no longer has double wheels, only a before and other behind and an axis in the means that makes the children to move the whole body to guide it and to maintain it in balance. States “patinetas” they are Argentina and Brazil, for example.
The true matter is not that the Venezuelan government takes from of walk to his soldiers or that the immature Belt checks us that the dear Ecuador you the pass eligiendo good presidents for town mayor. The true matter is in that once again the Latin American community faces dilemmas on which he doesn't have the smallest idea of how to proceed.
And I eat he doesn't have it, neither he will have it, he will never be able to grasp the protective serious matter of States of terrorist organizations, what will bear to that the matter escapes completely from the regional environment to become topic of international politics with pronouncements of the powers and juridical competitions of the institutions settled down by the world that he knew for some time like they face the new interferences and the new requirements the right. In other words, we will be, once again, a continent in the limbo for which the resolutions of their conflicts always fall in the chance.
