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December 21, 2004

Holiday cheer from Fernando Londoño

Fernando Londoño was in rare form in his latest column, which appeared in Monday’s edition of El Tiempo. He informs us that the Uribe government’s peace talks with paramilitaries would be going just swimmingly if it weren’t for the sabotage of those all-powerful human-rights activists, UN representatives, former guerrillas and other assorted communists.

While our pueblo in arms gives its lives in jungles and valleys for Colombia’s Liberty, and the vast majority of our judges and prosecutors do their duty with an abnegation and selflessness that we will never forget, the juridical dogs work indefatigably to render sterile the efforts of their blood and sweat. Leading this entourage marches Mr. [Michael] Frühling [the head of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ Bogotá Field Office], demanding the memory, reparations and justice that the UN never mentioned when he and [UN Special Representative James] LeMoyne were embracing the FARC’s murderers in the Caguán [during the failed 1998-2002 peace process]. They are followed by all the Associations and Collectives of jurists, with their purses filled with foreign gold, proposing whatever perverse obstacles that might slow the progress of our tragedy’s final process, while also inventing arguments that they never mentioned when talks were occurring with the band of Marxist bandits. At their side, some pardoned members of the old M-19 [dissolved guerrilla group], who want to occupy the professor’s chair of moral values, using the part of their conscience not compromised by their massacres, kidnappings, vile murders and acts of terror. In the group are Communist legislators, who venerate the Chávez dictatorship and detest the democracy in which we permit them such freedoms.

Londoño seems to have left off his list the paramilitaries’ many victims and their relatives, who no doubt are doing the fatherland a disservice with their constant bellyaching about accountability, reparations, the return of their stolen property, and their desire to see the AUC truly disappear.

I wouldn’t bother to translate and post this if it were just the ravings of another paleo-right, anti-modern, feudal-landowning, red-baiting dinosaur still fighting the cold war. (You’re on your own, for example, if you want to wade through Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza’s screed in Sunday’s El Nuevo Herald.)

But Fernando Londoño is no ordinary extremist crackpot. Until about a year ago, he was perhaps the most influential figure in Álvaro Uribe’s government. In 2002, when the newly elected president was picking his cabinet, he created a hugely powerful post by fusing the ministries of interior and justice – and then surprised most by picking Londoño to fill it. The outspoken minister lasted only fifteen months, consumed by scandals about shady investment deals and embarrassing misstatements (such as suggesting that Uribe, if denied a chance to run for re-election, would resign, call new elections, and run again).

No space will be wasted here responding to the “arguments” in Londoño’s column; CIP has written much elsewhere about the paramilitary dialogues, the M-19 process, and the important role of NGOs. If Fernando Londoño ever reads this, though (say, if he Googles himself), I’d like to say to him: Mr. Londoño, you’re doing your former boss a grave disservice with this overheated, irresponsible prose.

And to President Uribe, who hired Londoño in the first place: You will be known by the company you keep.

Posted by isacson at December 21, 2004 02:04 AM

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Posted by: jcg at December 22, 2004 02:31 PM

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