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Colombia Foreign Policy Decision Making
Under Colombia's Constitution, the president and the
rest of
the executive branch of government have almost exclusive
jurisdictional responsibility for the conduct of foreign
relations.
The president--charged with formulating and executing
foreign
policy--clearly was the single most important player in
the late
1980s. Despite the existence of committees on foreign
relations in
both houses, Congress had little role in making foreign
policy.
Colombia's foreign policy has shifted frequently as a
result of
the president's key role and the fact that the nation's
presidents
have changed every four years. The president appoints and
removes
cabinet members, chooses diplomats to represent Colombia,
and
receives foreign diplomats and other representatives. In
his
responsibility "to direct diplomatic and commercial
relations," the
president also concludes treaties and conventions with
other
states, subject to the approval of Congress. The Senate
must
approve declarations of war made by the president, who
controls and
directs the armed forces, but he could wage a war without
the
consent of the Senate if it were urgent to repel a foreign
invasion.
The primary agency charged with conducting foreign
relations
under the president's direction was the Ministry of
Foreign
Affairs. Within the foreign service, two positions were
almost as
important as that of the minister because of their
prestige and
value in furthering a political career. One was that of
ambassador
to the United States, a post considered to be one of the
stepping
stones to the presidency. Presidents López Michelsen,
Turbay, and
Barco all served as ambassadors to the United States. The
other was
that of ambassador to the Holy See. The role of the Roman
Catholic
Church in the life of the nation meant that this
ambassador
occupied a position of particular prestige and some
importance.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not have exclusive
responsibility for carrying out Colombia's foreign
policies,
however. Beginning in the 1960s, foreign policy also was
influenced
and developed by the Ministry of Economic Development, the
Ministry
of Finance, a variety of semiautonomous government
agencies, and
economic interest groups. Of the latter, the most
important
probably was Fedecafe, which maintained its own
representatives in
various foreign countries to manage Colombia's coffee
exports for
the government.
The Colombian military also played a key role in
determining
the nation's foreign policies in incidents involving
border
disputes or foreign support of domestic subversive groups.
For
example, the military pressed the Turbay government into
suspending
diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1981 after Cuba admitted
its
involvement in an M-19 guerrilla operation in southern
Colombia. In
1983, days before President Betancur was to issue an
official
invitation to Castro to visit Colombia, General Gustavo
Matamoros,
the Colombian minister of national defense, declared that
restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba was a "moral
impossibility." Having already defied the military with
his peace
overtures to, and general amnesty for, the guerrilla
groups,
Betancur subsequently dropped his plans for rapprochement
with
Cuba.
* * *
Robert H. Dix's The Politics of Colombia offers
a
comprehensive and useful general overview of the Colombian
political system. Although more dated, Politics of
Compromise, edited by R. Albert Berry, Ronald G.
Hellman, and
Mauricio Solaún, contains a collection of scholarly essays
on
historical, institutional, and public policy aspects.
Additional
treatment on the state of Colombian democracy can be found
in John
A. Peeler's Latin American Democracies. Among the
most
insightful and scholarly articles on Colombian politics in
the
1980s have been those of Bruce Michael Bagley, Jonathan
Hartlyn,
and Gary Hoskin in the annual South America issue of
Current
History. Useful articles or monographs on Colombian
foreign
policy include Daniel L. Premo's "Colombia: Cool
Friendship"; Bruce
Michael Bagley and Juan Gabriel Tokatlian's "Colombian
Foreign
Policy in the 1980s: The Search for Leverage"; and Mark V.
Chernick's "Colombia in Contadora: Foreign Policy in
Search of
Domestic Peace." (For further information and complete
citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of December 1988
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