President Alvaro Uribe headed off on a whirlwind South American tour Tuesday to defend his plans to expand the U.S. military's presence in Colombia, a prospect that worries even friendly nations in the region.
The trip coincides with a two-day visit to Brazil of U.S. National Security Adviser James Jones, who met Tuesday with defense officials and with President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's foreign affairs adviser.
Silva said last week that "I don't like the idea of an American military base in Colombia."
Chile's President Michelle Bachelet said Colombia's decision to host more U.S. forces "affects all the (region's) countries, and they are uneasy."
Brazil's foreign minister, Celso Amorim, told the Folha de San Paulo newspaper over the weekend that he understands "the bases will allow for aircraft operations with a wide radius of action" and said his country is worried about "a strong military presence whose objective and capacity to go a lot further than Colombia's internal needs."
Colombian officials say they hope talks next week will produce an agreement that will give U.S. forces greater access to three Colombian air bases and two naval bases. The Palanquero base in the central Magdalena valley would host U.S. Air Force counternarcotics missions that had been based in Ecuador.
The 10-year lease agreement would not boost the presence of American troops and civilian military contractors above the 1,400 currently permitted by U.S. law, the Colombians say.
U.S. officials have refused to discuss details of the negotiations, although U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield has insisted that an accord would not produce U.S. bases but rather "cooperative security locations" at Colombian-run installations.
In Brasilia on Tuesday, Jones told reporters that the bases issue "will have a good explanation and a satisfactory outcome that will in no way interfere with the progress of our friendship and our cooperation together on matters of mutual security interest."
Uribe has put Colombia's leftist rebels on the defensive with more than $5 billion in U.S. aid, including special forces training and the sharing of intelligence from satellite and airborne communications intercepts.
While Colombia's ties with the rest of the continent have been on the whole cordial, it has feuded with Ecuador and Venezuela over their leftist leaders' alleged ties with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which has been seeking to overthrow Bogota governments for 45 years.
Neither country is on Uribe's itinerary.
Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez pulled his ambassador from Bogota last week after Colombia complained that three Swedish anti-tank rocket launchers bought by Venezuela's military in 1988 wound up in a FARC weapons cache seized in October.
President Rafael Correa of Ecuador was stung by a FARC video given to The Associated Press last month in which a rebel commander discusses making contributions to Correa's 2006 election campaign.
In a telephone interview with the AP, Silva's foreign affairs adviser Marco Aurelio Garcia said Brazil believes that "the region's problems should be resolved basically in the regional realm."
Ecuador is hosting a summit on Aug. 10 of South America's fledgling UNASUR defense community, which most of the continent's presidents are expected to attend. Uribe and his foreign minister, Jaime Bermudez, plan to be absent.
