By Michael Soltys, Senior Editor of Buenos Aires Herald.

Although bilateral visits are never supposed to respond to a single-issue agenda, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe’s whirlwind presence here on Wednesday was perhaps the exception which proves the rule — there is no evidence of any topic having been discussed other than Colombia’s decision to open up seven military bases to United States troops. President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s response to Uribe’s consultation was neither positive nor constructive, arguing that this “inconvenient” cure could be worse than the disease and stressing the legal immunity always sought for US troops. Perhaps the best response from all Uribe’s South American colleagues came from Paraguay’s beleaguered Fernando Lugo, who said (in so many words) that this was Colombia’s sovereign decision, always as long as it was indeed sovereign — which ties in with Uribe’s insistence that these bases will continue to be Colombian under Colombian command.

Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa (who has recently ejected Washington from the Manta base) all see the US military move into Colombia as a hostile advance of Yankee imperialism but they misread the United States at a number of levels. Firstly, this attitude misses the whole thrust of US foreign policy under the new Barack Obama administration, which is the antithesis of any “big stick,” questioning the whole superpower concept in the light of the financial crisis afflicting US economic superiority. But this also underestimates just how simplistic US perspectives on Latin American problems often remain, reducing them to drug-trafficking and terrorism — thus the Heritage Foundation insists on seeing the common denominator of Latin America’s four main hotspots (Mexico, Venezuela, Honduras and Colombia) as drugs even though Chávez is so obviously dangerous as an oil-fuelled ideologue rather than as a drug lord. While Colombia might seem to have less need for US troops with the FARC guerrillas so patently on the decline, it would also have more reason to trust them under a commander-in-chief like Obama.

In these terms, the Uribe visit had its own local subtext — a fresh resurgence of the debate over the decriminalization of drug possession. With the criminalization of drug consumption leading to equally criminal production just as surely as in the case of Prohibition against alcohol almost a century ago but also with the advent of drug-related slayings in Argentina (if not yet on the gruesome daily scale of Mexico), there are no easy answers in this debate.