Plan Colombia and Beyond

With some exceptions (such as the remarkably outspoken Antioquia congresswoman Rocío Arias), paramilitary-allied candidates claim in public that they oppose paramilitarism, and usually seek office as members of mainstream political parties. But they campaign with the open support of the paramilitary groups that kill opponents, run drugs and dominate politics in their home regions. In many cases, due to threats against would-be rivals, these candidates find themselves running unopposed. In the paramilitary-dominated Caribbean coast department of Magdalena, for instance, mayoral candidates for the October 2003 municipal elections ran unopposed in 14 of the province’s 30 towns, according to El Tiempo.

For months, candidates opposed to President Uribe had been denouncing the presence of known paramilitary allies among pro-Uribe parties’ lists of candidates, but they had failed to get an official response from the government. In December, U.S. Ambassador William Wood added his voice, expressing public concern that “corrupt electoral practices may occur in the elections of 2006, notably by paramilitaries.” Instead of government action to investigate these concerns, Wood’s words only earned him a rare rebuke from President Uribe to stop “meddling” in Colombia’s affairs.

The issue of paramilitarization of the legislative election campaign didn’t begin to blossom into a full-blown scandal until about two weeks ago. Here is what happened.

Week of January 9: President Uribe attended a meeting in the heavily paramilitarized department of Córdoba, where local political leaders were to appoint a new governor to replace one forced out by corruption charges. During the meeting, two Córdoba senators, both running for re-election, got into a heated argument. In Uribe’s presence, both accused each other of having entered into “political pacts” with Córdoba-based AUC leader Salvatore Mancuso. Within a few days, Uribe ordered the attorney-general to investigate both politicians’ links to the AUC.

That week Gina Parody, a popular Bogotá congresswoman who supports Uribe but disagrees with the paramilitary negotiation process, declined invitations to run as the candidate of one of the two largest pro-Uribe political blocs (“Partido U,” coordinated by former Treasury Minister Juan Manuel Santos, and the oddly named “Cambio Radical,” headed by prominent Senator Germán Vargas Lleras, the grandson of a former president). Parody’s reason for turning them down: Both parties’ candidate lists included people “with paramilitary links.”

She named two senators running for re-election as candidates of “La U”: Dieb Maloof and Habib Merheg. Maloof, from Magdalena department, is believed to be an associate of “Jorge 40” (Rodrigo Tovar Pupo), the chief of the AUC’s powerful Northern Bloc. Merheg, from the tiny coffee-growing department of Risaralda, has been accused of paramilitary ties since 2003, according to El Tiempo. Both senators were elected in 2002 as candidates of “Colombia Viva,” a right-wing party widely seen as paramilitary-linked.

January 11: Perennial Liberal Party presidential candidate Horacio Serpa, in a speech announcing his candidacy, said that Álvaro Uribe “is caught in a web of rich people, bad policies and paramilitarism. … Today, the power of the paramilitaries is greater than that of the government” in many regions. Uribe’s interior minister, Sabas Pretelt, replied that “it is a barbarity to say that the country is paramilitarized.”

January 13: In public remarks, opposition Liberal Party chief, former President and former OAS Secretary-General César Gaviria said, “I don’t understand the reason why the President doesn’t reject the support of paramilitarism, doesn’t reject more clearly and firmly the mafias that have been encroaching on many regional governments. This worries me.”

January 16: The official tone appeared to change, as Uribe ordered the attorney-general’s office to investigate the “dubious and sizable financing of some congressional campaigns.” Interior Minister Pretelt explained, “There are outlawed groups that think they can do what they want, and they want to be the owners of the provinces, using money and coercion, but they won't succeed.” He added that paramilitary leaders found to be involved in campaigns will lose the lenient treatment that the “Justice and Peace” law would give them, and will be sent to jail.

January 18: “La U” and “Cambio Radical” expelled a total of five candidates from their lists for suspected paramilitary ties. The Liberal Party expelled one more.

That same day, though, the Uribistas began to play very dirty. In a move reminiscent of the sleazy “Swift Boat Veterans” ads that so damaged John Kerry in the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign, they spread a false rumor making a ridiculous charge. The target was Sen. Rafael Pardo, a former defense minister who is now vying for the Liberal Party presidential nomination. Pardo left the Liberals in 2002 to support Uribe’s initial candidacy. He split from the Uribistas and rejoined the Liberals in 2004. The reason for the split: Pardo, like Parody, was a leading critic of the paramilitary talks, the “Justice and Peace” law, and creeping paramilitarization in general. (Unlike Parody, Pardo abandoned the ranks of Uribe’s supporters).

Juan Manuel Santos, the head of “La U,” started the attack by asserting publicly that, according to intelligence reports, Pardo has secretly made a pact with the FARC guerrillas to oppose Uribe, for instance by encouraging voters to abstain. The charge is silly on its face: Pardo is likely on the guerrillas’ most-hated-persons list. He is an establishment politician who became defense minister in 1991, shortly after Colombia’s military ended a round of peace talks by bombing the FARC’s “Casa Verde” headquarters. It shocked many last week to see allies of the government seeking to link Pardo to the guerrillas, a tactic usually reserved for union organizers and human-rights defenders.

Now, a proper “swift boat” strategy would require the candidate himself to distance himself from the “unrelated” supporters making the false charges. But President Uribe did not do that. Instead, the Palacio de Nariño (Colombia’s “White House”) put out a statement promising that “the government will make known to the attorney-general’s office the information it has received indicating that Dr. Rafael Pardo has proposed to the FARC a political action against the President of the Republic.” 

January 19: As the political furor worsened, Sen. Pardo put out a statement of its own, asking, among other things:

Señor Candidato Uribe:
- Is Dr. Santos acting on your orders?
- Are slander and the diffusion of false rumors tactics that you are promoting within your campaign?
- Why does a political leader who supports reelection have access to supposed government intelligence information?
- As head of state, have you instructed the intelligence agencies to pursue the opposition’s leadership?

The communiqué adds,

The country doesn’t really gain anything when some people are expelled from one of the Uribista movements for supposed paramilitary ties, only to be accepted minutes later as the congressional candidates of another Uribista movement. The fundamental issue is the one that I have mentioned: there is a paramilitary political project that seeks access to power through intimidation, and that is what we have to confront.

In Pardo’s case, the “swift boat” strategy appears to have backfired. The Uribe government failed to come up with the proof promised in its January 18 statement, and instead issued an apology to Sen. Pardo. If anything, Uribe’s ploy may have helped boost Pardo’s flagging campaign for the Liberal Party nomination: the senator had only been polling at about 2 or 3 percent.

But the problem of paramilitary infiltration persists. “I think that the list [of expelled candidates] is going to grow like a snowball [rolling downhill],” pro-Uribe political analyst Fernando Cepeda told the Associated Press. “This is a bomb that exploded at the right time, and it should help to clean up Colombian democracy.”

But expulsion of candidates from larger parties doesn’t mean that those candidates are abandoning their campaigns, and in fact they may still win as candidates of smaller parties, with help from the paramilitaries.

Meanwhile, it remains to be seen whether the Colombian government actually plans to take the bold step of revoking “Justice and Peace” law benefits from paramilitary leaders who get openly involved in politics. One such leader would likely be “Jorge 40” of the AUC’s Northern Bloc, who held a December 5 meeting with political leaders in Curumaní, Cesar department (where, a few days later, the Northern Bloc would go on to massacre at least seven people). The meeting was reportedly an exercise in choosing congressional candidates and developing an electoral strategy. Will the Colombian government seriously pursue “Jorge 40,” who has been one of the least cooperative participants in the paramilitary talks, and who is under indictment in the United States for drug trafficking?

Don’t count on it, as long as those who dare to denounce paramilitarism’s advance find themselves either the target of nationalist bluster (like Ambassador Wood) or the target of ridiculous swift-boat-style rumor-mongering (like Sen. Pardo). When charges this serious are met with attacks, the international community must sit up and take note of the kind of government it is dealing with in Bogotá.