BY ALLEN JENNINGS
The May 26 election of Alvaro Uribe Velez as Colombia's next president represents a watershed in both Colombia's and the United States' approach to the country's spiralling discontent and four decades of armed insurgency.
The election was fought largely around whether the government should pursue all-out war or a negotiated peace with the leftist insurgency groups, particularly the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). With 53% of the vote, Uribe won unprecedented support for taking the war to the FARC by escalating the government's military campaign. Backed by Washington and advocating zero tolerance for negotiations, Uribe's support rose from just 23% in September.
Running as a hard line independent who split from the "official" Liberal Party, Uribe convincingly defeated Liberal Horacio Serpa, who received 31.7% of the vote, trade union leader Luis Eduardo Garzon, who got 6.2%, and middle class independent Noemi Sanin, who scored 5.8%. The Greens' candidate, Ingrid Betancourt, who was kidnapped by the FARC in April, received 0.5% of the vote in abstencia.
Born in 1952, Uribe was elected mayor of Medellin in 1982, and was a senator from 1986 to 1994. From 1995 to 1997, he was governor of Antioquia.
Uribe owes his successful political debut to the patronage of the world's most infamous drug trafficker. When Uribe became mayor of Medellin, the city was a boom town. The Medellin drug cartel, headed by Uribe associate Pablo Escobar, was in its prime, and poured millions of narco-dollars into constructing public housing and funding Uribe's construction of a world-class subway.
It is commonly believed that Uribe's wealthy father was a well-known trafficker in the Antioquia region before he was killed by the FARC in 1983.
Uribe's electoral campaign manager, Pedro Juan Moreno, was also his government secretary during his term as governor of Antioquia. In his spare time, Moreno runs the company GMP Chemical Products, which imports tons of potassium permanganate, a key chemical in the manufacture of cocaine.
Uribe and Moreno were responsible for the rise of the paramilitary forces in Antioquia in the mid 1990s. Among Moreno's "achievements" was establishing, across the region, heavily armed and government-trained vigilantes, known as Rural Vigilance Committees, or the Convivirs. These vigilante brigades served, according to Amnesty International, as thinly masked and government-sanctioned death squads and recruiting agencies for Colombia's cocaine-soaked paramilitary forces.
The Colombian government stripped the Convivirs of most of their power in 1997.
Uribe's vigilantes then simply took their weapons and joined the ranks of the so-called Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC). Today, it is the AUC, not the FARC or the National Liberation Army (ELN), which is responsible for the majority of political assassinations and human rights abuses in the country. Recently added to Washington's list of terrorist organisations, the AUC constitutes Uribe's most loyal support base.
Uribe's links to Colombia's paramilitary groups are undisputed. Even Bernard Aronson, a former US Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, advises that: "Colombia's new president must commit to make a clean break with the paramilitaries".
After nearly 40 years of military conflict and some three and a half years of unsuccessful peace talks, the country remains on the verge of all-out civil war. Despite his Harvard degree in conflict resolution, Uribe has no interest in negotiations, and confidently espouses his aim to crush the left.
His election promises included: increasing military spending by US$1 billion; almost doubling the size of the army from 55,000 to 100,000; recruiting 100,000 more police; and, in the spirit of Convivir, creating "civilian intelligence" networks to aid the military. For the latter, he would deploy one million citizens as unarmed, voluntary vigilantes across the whole of Colombia, whose supposed mission would be to provide early warning of any movements of insurgents.
Colombia also faces the worst socio-economic crisis in its history. Poverty and unemployment are at historic highs, and internally displaced persons have surpassed two million. Uribe will be governing a country that has seen World-Bank-measured poverty increase in one year from 56.3% in 1999 to 60% in 2000, homicides increase from 24,358 to 27,841 in the same period, and more than three million people, or 18% of the workforce, officially unemployed. Yet, beyond his law and order policies, Uribe has no social policies.
In foreign policy, Uribe has expressed his support for a US military intervention in Colombia.
All of these policies clearly fit Washington's plans for Colombia. US Ambassador Anne Patterson, who is reported to have congratulated Uribe before he was even declared winner, argues that Uribe's election would be a positive development for US-Colombian relations.
On February 10, Patterson told the Bogota El Tiempo that: "After Mexico and Venezuela, Colombia is the most important oil country in the region. After what happened on September 11, the traditional oil sources for the United States are less secure... Latin America could not cover a shortage, it could not supply [us] in a crisis, but it allows a small margin to work with and avoid price speculation... Colombia has great potential for exporting more oil to the United States, and now more than ever it is important for us to diversify our oil sources."
This helps to explain why opinion pieces in US papers are calling for more US money to be given to Colombia for military and economic aid including funding a rapid-reaction battalion to protect the country's oil pipelines.
It also explains why US President George Bush has asked Congress to allow Colombia, for the first time, to use US military hardware, intelligence and training directly against the leftist insurgency.
Uribe is the US's man, and Plan Colombia, the massive US intervention scheme dressed up as a military "aid" package to Colombia, can now go ahead full steam. Uribe's campaign slogan: "Strong hand, big heart".
From Green Left Weekly, June 5, 2002.
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