Sounds just like an ill-informed patsy. The idea that Colombia is some victim and is besieged on all sides by other nations is paranoia they use to justify that absolutely insane level of military build-up in Colombia.
Click on the 25 year history here:
https://tradingeconomics.com/colombia/military-expenditureColombia has had a near continuous and never ending escalation of military spending for the last 25 years, with recessions only being temporary hiccups in the military build-up.
Also note that Venezuela has been slashing their own military spending.
https://tradingeconomics.com/venezuela/military-expenditureAfter Colombia bombed sites in Ecuador in 2008, and then claimed
Ecuador was in league with terrorists, Venezuela did direct more spending towards the military, but even then, they only went from spending 10% as much as Colombia to spending 20% as much as Colombia, and that only lasted a few years before they slashed spending again.
Even on a GDP-basis, Venezuela currently spends only 0.5% of GDP on the military, whereas Colombia spends 3% of GDP on the military:
https://tradingeconomics.com/venezuela/military-expenditure-percent-of-gdp-wb-data.htmlhttps://tradingeconomics.com/colombia/military-expenditure-percent-of-gdp-wb-data.htmlSo, even given that Venezuela's GDP has fallen, they don't have a strong emphasis on maintaining military spending. It's not a main priority of their government, so this notion that Venezuela is some military threat to their neighbors is fanciful. As Venezuela's GDP has fallen, they've actually focused spending
away from the military, not towards it. This is the opposite of what militarily aggressive regimes do when under pressure.
The idea that Colombia is beset on all sides by military threats is in fact internal fascist propaganda to justify their own totally out of control military build-up and threatening to attack their neighbors. This idea that Venezuela is backing terrorists in Colombia to try and goad Colombia to invade them as a "distraction" is in fact an attempt to justify Colombia stomping on their neighbors, as in the 2008 Ecuador bombing, as some sort of act of self-defense. If Venezuela was planning a
war as a distraction they wouldn't be seriously slashing their own military spending at the same time. So the only logical conclusion is that the right-wing in Colombia wants the war but they want to justify it by blaming Venezuela for Colombia's own rebels.
Note, that the Venezuelans supported the FARC peace process, i.e. the ending of Colombia's civil war, while Uribe was dead opposed to the peace process. i.e. the political far-right in Colombia are pretty much the only people who wanted the civil war to keep on keeping on. It's because they've used the civil war to justify 25+ years of continuous military build up, and they use it as an excuse to threaten their neighboring nations as a "self defense" act. Saying Uribe was a fascist dictator isn't any stretch. His family had their own personal paramilitary death squads. His brother and cousin are in prison for that.
EDIT: as for paranoia, here's Uribe saying it was a
British plot when his death-squad links were being uncovered:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/25/colombia-alvaro-uribe-mi6-death-squads-chargesSo it's not just Venezuela, Ecuador. The British commies are coming for Colombia too.
Colombia’s powerful former president Álvaro Uribe has announced that he will resign from his senate seat in order to focus on battling a widening supreme court investigation.
(Link: Colombian army killed thousands more civilians than reported, study claims)
Uribe, a hardliner who led a brutal campaign against leftist rebels from 2002 to 2010, has long dodged accusations of involvement in paramilitary massacres that occurred during and before his tenure.
He could, however, come unstuck in the face of new charges of bribing and intimidating witnesses related to those death squad cases.
On Wednesday, Uribe accused the British intelligence agency MI6 of colluding with his former defence minister and eventual successor as president, Juan Manuel Santos, to supply recordings that implicate him in crimes.
“There are repeated allegations that the recordings were made by the British agency MI6, friends of Juan Manuel Santos,” he tweeted. “Foreign authorities in a ruse against me.”
“Foreign authorities in a ruse against me.”
![Wink ;)](http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/Smileys/aaron/wink.gif)
EDIT2: Actually didn't know this:
A separate scandal led to the abolition of the country’s domestic intelligence agency in 2011 after it was revealed that Uribe had used it to spy on opposition members and journalists. Several witnesses in other cases have turned up dead.
The department of security in Colombia had some very prominent scandals relating to murdering journalists / doing death threats against other journalists. Turns out they didn't survive the scandals. This is equivalent to something happening like the FBI having to be abolished because it was being used as the armed wing of the Trump Organization to discredit or assassinate opponents.