A lone oasis of conservatism in a sea of new socialist leaders, Uribe has been sniped at by Chávez and his followers, who mock Uribe as a puppet of "the Empire," (the US). It is true that Uribe would not be as popular without $800 million a year from the US, making it second only to the Middle East as a recipient of American aid. The money is given under Plan Colombia, a South American Marshall Plan to fight drug trafficking and coca growing by aerial spraying, manual eradication, social development and alternative crop programmes. In an interview, Foreign Secretary Jaime Bermúdez asserted with characteristic understatement: "The United States is a country that has provided efficient support to Colombia in the area of drug trafficking." 

The efficiency of spraying, however, is questionable. Coca growers quickly pluck the poisoned leaves before they wither, process them immediately into coca paste and then wait for the plant to sprout new leaves, in about three weeks. So unless the aerial spraying is followed up by hazardous manual eradication (where soldiers may be blown up by landmines or ambushed and shot), the sprayings paradoxically accelerate production, a claim that is supported by recent export figures. 

The 2003 kidnapping of Marc Gonsalves, Keith Stansell and Tom Howes, the three Americans taken by the Farc when their aerial sprayer crashed and who were rescued together with the French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt last year, gave the US impetus to increase its involvement in Colombia. The Americans accepted Uribe's proposed Plan Patriota, under which the US provided greater intelligence and weaponry to chase and bomb the Farc, expanding US involvement from mere drug eradication and interdiction to the active pursuit of narcoterrorists, a plan that fitted nicely into post-9/11 foreign policy. Under Plan Patriota, the US provides unmanned Predator drones and a plane commonly referred to as "the Cross" that hovers silently and gathers intelligence to guide the bombers and Black Hawk helicopters in to bomb and shoot the Farc with pinpoint accuracy.

There have been allegations, dubbed the Parapolitical scandal, that Uribe's aggressive pursuit of the Farc has made his administration a distasteful bedfellow with the right-wing AUC, which battles the Farc and yet has the same fundraising strategies: kidnap, torture, extortion, murder, terrorism and drug-trafficking. Evidence of AUC donations to congressmen and even Cabinet members has rocked the Uribe administration and threatened its US Free Trade Agreement, which would expand and cement the biannually-renewed preferential tariff status Colombia enjoys. At the behest of Uribe, who argues he needs the FTA to grow and stabilise the economy away from drugs, President Obama has promised to push it through.