The establishment of a military base in mediterranean South America would mark a major departure in US strategy, which since the closure of the six bases in the old Panama Canal Zone (concluded in 1999) has abandoned the old-style full-fledged military base in favour of relatively small facilities in host-country bases.
There are in fact only two old-style bases left. One is Guantánamo, in Cuba, which doubles up as a detention centre for would-be illegal immigrants and suspected terrorists. It houses about 3,000 troops (the often-cited total of 8,000-plus includes non-military personnel), about half of the entire military presence in Latin America. The other, in Honduras, is Soto Cano (better known in the days of the Contra War by the name of its location, Palmerola), home to 600-plus members of Joint Task Force Bravo (JTF-Bravo). The General Accounting Office recently played down this base's strategic value, but Soto Cano has been undergoing a 'makeover', with apartment blocs going up in place of the old wooden 'hooches' - which suggests that it may be there for the long haul.
The new 'facilities'The facilities that have been emerging to replace the Howard airbase that functioned in Panama are the so-called Cooperative Security Locations (CSL), initially named Forward Operating Locations (FOL): areas within host-country airbases or airfields from which the US can run aerial surveillance, originally focused on the Andean drug-producing areas, later also incorporating a counterinsurgency function in Colombia. There are four of these: Comalapa in El Salvador, Reina Beatrix in Aruba, Hato International in Curaçao, and Manta in Ecuador. One rung further down the scale are the ground-based radar (GBR) installations, of which there are nine, all sited in host-country facilities. Six of them are in Colombia, in Leticia (Amazonas), Marandúa (Vichada), San José del Guaviare (Guaviare), Tres Esquinas (Caquetá), Riohacha (Guajira) and San Andrés isla (Caribbean). The latter two are part of the US air force's Caribbean Radar Network (CBRN), which also has facilities in Jamaica, Honduras, Mexico and Panama. Another three GBRs are in Peru, at Andoas, Iquitos and Pucallpa. Each of the GBRs is staffed by 36-45 people. Beyond the GBRs there are eight mobile radar units, whose location is undisclosed. Colombia concentrates the largest number of US military personnel outside Cuba. There are legal ceilings of 500 for regular members of the military and 300 for mercenaries (known in polite company as 'contract personnel'). Apart from the 270 or so assigned to the GBRs, and a core command team based at the US embassy in Bogotá, the rest are not permanently posted to any single Colombian base; they have been moving around as their training programme has demanded. This said, many can usually be found at Tolemaida, home to the Colombian special forces, near Carmen de Apicala, southwest of Bogotá, and in recent times substantial contingents have been based in Larandia (Caquetá) and Saravena (Arauca). Special forces & two-way training
Training exercises of the kind now scheduled in Paraguay are hardly new. Apart from ongoing training programmes, in 1996-2002 the number of exercises has fluctuated between 15 and 21 per year. In 2002 there were six engineering exercises, four field training ones, three operational ones, two command-post ones and a seminar. Very frequent participants in training missions are US special forces, which are run from Special Operations Command South (Socsouth) based at Roosevelt Roads Naval Air Station in Puerto Rico. Mission teams, says CIP, deploy over 100 times each year for joint training in nearly every country in the hemisphere. They go out in teams that usually number 10 to 40 members, but can reach 100. Many of these missions are carried out under the Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) programme, but also under similar ones devised by Socsouth. Counternarcotics missions are a dominant feature of special-forces activity in the region. Their stated aim is to provide 'intelligence, planning and training to countries actively engaged in countering cocaine cartels'. They also serve to train the US special forces to operate with their Latin American counterparts. Special forces have been involved in a number of unacknowledged operational missions. The full gamut of special forces is involved. Participants in training missions in 2004 were drawn from the 7th Special Forces Group, 4th Psychological Operations Group, Naval Special Warfare Group 2, 16th Special Operations Wing (USAF) and 720th Special Tactics Group (USAF). That year Socsouth ran 62 training missions in nine Latin American countries: Colombia (47 missions), Ecuador (4), Bolivia (4), Peru (3), Panama (1), Paraguay (1), Chile (1), Costa Rica (1) and the Dominican Republic (1).
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