President Obama will soon throw American troops deeper into the war-torn jungles of Colombia.

An agreement he recently signed called the US-Colombia Defense Cooperation Agreement (DCA), will allow American troops to operate in seven Colombian military bases for the next ten years. The US Forces, who currently work in only one base, are part of a mission to help Colombian troops in their fight against drug cartels, particularly those with links to the terrorist group known as the Revolution Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

News of the agreement has shaken South America, worsening relations between Colombia and its neighbors and distracting regional efforts at cooperation.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has lead the opposition to the DCA since it was first reported by Colombian magazine Cambio in July. In a television appearance following the report, Chavez called the accord “a new aggression” against his nation. “They are surrounding Venezuela with military bases,” he said.

As Robert Pastor, former US National Security Advisor on Latin America, explained in an e-mail, “Chavez is worried that the US and Colombia might take action against him, and his closest allies in the region—Bolivia and Ecuador—support Chavez unequivocally.”

The DCA dominated the latest summit of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), an integration body in the style of the European Union that seeks to forge cooperation on the continent’s challenges. Mr. Chavez, along with Presidents Rafael Correa of Ecuador and Evo Morales of Bolivia, repeatedly denounced the plan.

“You’re not going to be able to control the Americans. This constitutes a grave danger for peace in Latin America,” Correa said.

“They’re mobilizing for war,” Chavez added.

Uribe responded by arguing that the bases pose no threat to the region, and that it was a matter for Colombia to decide.

“The only focus that Colombia has is to end its internal war,” Uribe said.

While Chavez and his allies may be the most vocal opponents to the DCA, they are not alone. Presidents Luiz Inácio Lula de Silva of Brazil and Michelle Bachelet of Chile have also criticized the agreement, a fact which, according to Pastor, should worry the White House.

“I do not believe they had opposed similar efforts in the past, so it might be related to the magnitude of the commitment and the failure of the US to do a credible job of briefing these countries as to its purposes,” he said.

In other words, a lack of US engagement, perhaps best illustrated when Obama declined an invitation from Lula de Silva to discuss the issue at a summit, is creating a sense of distrust that permeates beyond the Colombia-Venezuela border.

Cynthia Arnson, director of the Latin America department at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, said the White House had been rash in its handling of the issue.

“It has hurt the Obama administration’s credibility in the region at a time when when the administration was attempting to really set a different path in US-Latin American relations that was multilateral, that involved working with allies,” she told The Washington Post.

The climate of wariness stemming from the bases has led uneasy nations to assuage their fears by investing in arms, according to Roque Panas, a research associate for the issue tracking non-profit North American Congress on Latin America. He explained in an October 1 article that South America was already in the midst of an arms race, and that expanding the American military role in the region will exacerbate it.

“The increased US presence gives South American leaders an obvious reason to invest in their militaries. The lack of transparency in the negotiations over the base deal, which were conducted in secret and only addressed publicly after Cambio broke the story, did little to assuage the anxieties of leaders who interpret the US military as a threat.”

Panas’s analysis seems to be holding true; within two months of finding out about the agreement, leaders were championing new weapons purchases. In September, Lula da Silva signed an agreement with France to buy four attack submarines and 50 military transport helicopters, and opened negotiations to purchase a fleet of French fighter planes. That same week, Chavez secured a $2.2 billion line of credit from Russia to buy tanks and rocket launch systems. Chavez explained his decision to buy the new weapons on his weekly television broadcast, saying, “We can guarantee Venezuela’s sovereignty, which is now threatened by the United States.”

An altercation last year highlighted the danger of this increased military spending as it brought three countries to the brink of war. In that incident, Colombian forces, acting on US intelligence information, bombed and then raided a FARC camp in the Ecuadorian jungle, killing seventeen rebels. In the aftermath, Venezuela and Ecuador mobilized troops at their Colombian borders, called home their ambassadors in Bogotá, and threatened war if a similar cross-border attack were to occur again. As all three of these nations strengthen their militaries, they may feel more inclined to act on such threats.

While some analysts hope that regional integration—that is, increased trade and cooperation—will prevent war, the DCA controversy seems to be weakening those hopes. Economic interdependence has already shrunk as Venezuela stopped issuing import permits for Colombian goods in response to the Defense Cooperation Agreement. And political cooperation has been tested as well, according to Paula Serna Salazar, a research associate with The Council on Hemispheric Relations, a DC think tank. Serna argued that Colombia’s decision to ignore the the complaints of UNASUR has weakened faith in multilateralism.

“UNASUR has one position—they don’t want the bases,” she said. “And Uribe is saying, ‘I’m going to accept these bases, I don’t care about UNASUR.'” The result is an overall reduction in the value of such efforts at integration that might have acted as safeguards against war, she said.

The DCA has garnered little attention in the United States, despite the consequential implications of the agreement—it threatens to tear apart a region and deepen an arms race, yet other issues seem to have buried it. The American mainstream press mentioned the DCA only once in the month following the initial report in Colombia. In Britain by contrast, various BBC publications and London’s The Daily Telegraph mentioned the DCA fourteen times in the same time period. In Latin America, the issue has been ubiquitous from the start, and many have formed strong opinions on it.

“I think the US government is a threat to all developing countries. That’s why I don’t feel comfortable with the bases so close to us,” said Tiago Fabris Rendelli, a Brazilian graduate student in Buenos Aires, Argentina.“They think the concept of democracy is only valid when it serves the US. When it’s in the interest of other nations too, they don’t have eyes or ears for it.”

Photo by Sergeant Andrew Smith courtesy of the U.S. Army Soldiers Media Center on Flickr.