Whatever the internal problems, Colombia's military vastly dwarf Venezuela's.
http://nacla.org/blog/2011/10/3/colombias-military-expenditure-and-its-impact25% of their entire budget in Colombia is on the military.
Between 2002 and 2010 Colombia spent $100 billion on defense. That is an average of $12.5 billion per year. For 2011 the amount is about $11 billion. These investments in the war machine made Colombia’s army among the largest in Latin America, on par with Brazil, and among the 15th largest in the world. Colombia's armed forces including the country's 160,000 police amounted to 463,149 personnel.
Seriously Brazil's military is frikkin huge, and Colombia, a much smaller nation has ramped up spending to match them. But no articles talks about Colombia or Brazil causing an arms race, even though those are the two big players in the region.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/venezuela/budget.htmVenezuela slashed its defense budget by 34 percent in 2014, marking the largest decline in military spending in all of Latin America. But the dramatic cut in a country with a history of military coups did not generate audible grumbles because the top brass are bought into the socialist country’s system. Venezuela’s military spending is “erratic”, reflecting major hardware purchases. It fell under the $2.6 billion mark in 2010 and 2011, but bounced back to $4 billion in 2012 and 2013, before making a big drop in 2014.
Venezuela’s military spending was among the lowest in South America. Despite claims to the contrary, Venezuela’s military spending is not unusually high.
Lest I be accused of cherry picking, this was the top google hit for "venezuela defense spending" and the first one was the top google hit for "colombia military spending". The wording changed by accident, but I don't think switching the terms would give a different search result. Basically there aren't
any reputable sources saying Venezuela is the one leading an arms race, it all comes from partisan editorials without any documentary evidence. Or on a percentage basis:
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/venezuela/military-expenditure-percent-of-gdp-wb-data.htmlVenezuela: military = 1.1% GDP
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/colombia/military-expenditure-percent-of-gdp-wb-data.htmlColombia: military = 3.4% GDP
click "max" years to see the longterm trends. Venezuela has clearly trended downwards in mil% over the last few decades, Colombia has clearly trended upwards.
An in raw dollar terms, Colombia is around $11.5 billion per year, Venezeula is $3.6 billion.
http://militarybudget.org/venezuela/http://militarybudget.org/colombia/It's sort of the fact that it's Colombia that they're citing here as the "concerned neighbor" that Venezuela is becoming "too militarized" when in fact Colombia is by far and large the arms race leader, have goaded Venezuela fairly constantly over the years, and Venezuela has fairly steadily reduced its military spending over the last two decades. Also given the whole reputation of the Colombian army & their paramilitary allies in Colombia just since year 2000, it's a bit rich to cite them as a reputable uninvolved party.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-kovalik/number-of-colombian-victi_b_6213352.htmlA tragic milestone went virtually unreported in the English-speaking press last week, as Colombia’s Victims Unit released its report indicating that the number of victims of Colombia’s civil war has now surpassed 7 million. This number includes those who have been killed, disappeared or displaced since 1956. For a country of under 50 million citizens, these numbers are staggering, and certainly newsworthy, but apparently not for our mainstream media.
Of course, the violence and human rights abuses in Colombia have constituted inconvenient truths for the Western media as the U.S. has been a major sponsor of the violence and abuses in that country.
Indeed, a notable fact in the Victims Unit report is that “that the majority of victimization occurred after 2000, peaking in 2002 at 744,799 victims.” It is not coincidental that “Plan Colombia,” or “Plan Washington” as many Colombians have called it, was inaugurated by President Bill Clinton in 2000, thus escalating the conflict to new heights and new levels of barbarity. Plan Colombia is the plan pursuant to which the U.S. has given Colombia over $8 billion of mostly military and police assistance.
Let's break this down, 3.5
million+ Colombians killed, disappeared or displaced since 2000. Santos took over in 2002 as defense minister. He oversaw basically half the deaths of the entire 60+ years of civil strife. And some sources cite that about 85% of killings in the war are attributable to government-side militias.
Meanwhile, the Bolivarian National Militia in Venezuela, how many people are
they accused of killing? If they were accused of
any deaths or human rights abuses, you can be sure they would have been mentioned in the article you linked, Teneb.
In other words, they don't seem to have even a
single death they can pin on the Bolivarian National Militia, to hype the current story up, instead they're talking to the head mass-murder-enabler from Colombia who oversaw the deaths at pro-government hands of something on the order of several million, who also oversaw the biggest arms buildup in latin america, about how he's so-fucking-concerned about the citizens of Venezuela because they're going to recruit more militia there.
It's like being concerned about an increase in British Home Guard militia, and asking Heinrich Himmler for his opinion.