Posted on Tue, May. 03, 2005 LATIN AMERICA The rule of law in danger BY CARLOS ALBERTO MONTANER www.firmaspress.com Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice does the right thing when she pays attention to Latin America. The problems are grave, they will ultimately affect the United States and they feed on each other. In sum, all of Latin America -- although unevenly -- faces a growing wave of ordinary crime, frequently allied to political subversion. Both trends are driven by two formidable forces: the enormous resources of Colombia's communist narco-guerrillas added to the petrodollars of Hugo Chávez, the maximum chieftain of the banana left, who is intent on redesigning the political map of Latin America. The best synthesis of this dangerous symbiosis was a sad event that occurred in Paraguay. A few months ago, Cecilia, the young daughter of former President Raúl Cubas was kidnapped and murdered by militants of Patria Libre [Free Homeland], a far-left Paraguayan group that demanded a huge ransom for her release. Kidnapping connections Patria Libre is a member of the Sao Paulo Forum, a kind of ''internationale'' that brings together all sorts of groups, from the Chavistas of the Fifth Republic Movement to the Nicaraguan Sandinistas. In the Forum, the representatives of the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) are singularly important. It was precisely a leader of the FARC, Colombian Rodrigo Granda -- to whom the Chávez government had granted Venezuelan citizenship and a passport so that he could travel freely worldwide -- who was the ''technical'' advisor of the Paraguayan criminals. Shortly thereafter, Granda was kidnapped on the streets of Caracas and ''sold'' to the Colombian government by some Venezuelan military men who, on their own, had become bounty hunters. This aroused the ire of Chávez and his vice president, José Vicente Rangel, who insisted on vigorously defending the Colombian criminal. This encapsulates the problem and its extraordinary menace. Here, you find the long hand of Colombia's communist narco-guerrillas, filled with dollars from cocaine traffic, operating in Paraguay, thousands of miles away. You find the ideological and strategic complicity between Patria Libre, the FARC and Chavism. You find the Mafia-style collaboration among groups that have turned the kidnappings, murders and drug trafficking into common practices, justified as valid weapons in ''the struggle against Yankee imperialism and the cruel capitalism.'' You also find the suicidal indifference of the rest of Latin America, which looks upon these events as if they were unrelated police cases. Yet they really are coordinated attacks against the heart of democratic stability and social peace throughout the hemisphere. Cruel gangsters Add to this panorama the existence in Central America of the maras, gangs formed by young, terribly cruel gangsters who already are establishing contacts with the communist narco-guerrillas. It's the perfect marriage: Where else could you find better allies for trafficking in weapons and cocaine? Today, three countries have been invaded by this massive and violent form of delinquency and are almost powerless to stop it: Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. How long will the Central American maras take to coordinate their criminal actions with the Mexican drug cartels and furnish them with enough assassins to carry out their tasks? The blood is likely to spill into Nicaragua and Panama. The ground is fertile for that: The police forces are weak and lacking in resources; the judicial systems are politicized and prone to corruption; the prisons, overcrowded and violent, are schools for the furtherance of crime. In large portions of Latin America, something terrifying is happening: The state is increasingly incapable of maintaining order and guaranteeing the safety of its people and their property. In Argentina, the crisis has reached the point where the government is blackmailed by the ''picketeers,'' street demonstrators who demand subsidies to scale down their disorders. `Decivilization' In Ecuador, street riots are passed off as patriotism. In rural zones of Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, violence triggers large migrations of peasants into the cities, which inevitably become Calcuttas, creating the perfect conditions for the proliferation of crime. This situation has a name: decivilization. Slowly, Latin America decivilizes itself; it regresses toward chaos. Governments lose the capacity to exert authority. Societies feel unprotected. Criminals are in charge, sometimes on their own, others in association with corrupt policemen. Crimes go unpunished. Judges do not judge with equity. Parliamentarians don't legislate using common sense. The rule of law and the delicate institutional fabric of the republics simply dissolve in the face of society's generalized impotence. ©2005 Firmas Press