The Corriente Bolivariano de Colombia, or Colombian Bolivarian Current, that organises on the Caribbean coast — and the Movimiento Bolivariano de Colombia S A (sin armas), or Colombian Bolivarian Movement (without arms), that organises on the Venezuelan frontier — stood almost 50 candidates in 6 states in the October elections.

Stirring up an excitable and often irrational response from Colombia’s rightist press and Uribista politicians, these Chávista parties won almost 12,000 votes on the Caribbean coast and in states on the frontier with Venezuela.

As it takes as little as 6,000 votes to elect a governor in some Colombian states, and often less than one thousand votes to elect a representative to a state asamblea, these parties total vote is ‘a respectable figure for Chávista politics in conservative Colombia,’ according to political journalist Cristina Acevedo, ‘and an indication that a Bolivarian candidate could be elected to Congress in the next elections.’

The best results were on the Caribbean coast. One candidate in Atlántico, Óscar Manduca, took 4,000 votes. Other candidates, Ramiro Chamorro in Sucre, Orlando Carrascal in Norte de Santander and Luis Acuña in Cartagena took a thousand votes each. Still more Bolivarian candidates stood for local juntas in La Guajira and other states on the frontier, and support was given to the victorious leftist opposition Polo Democrático in Colombia’s capital, Bogotá.

‘Despite the press attacks and pressure, we have achieved a representative vote,’ Jorge Urueta, Corriente Bolivariano de Colombia leader, said, ‘I think with what we have achieved we will go far.’ ‘Despite the persecution against us,’ adds Carlos Felipe Flórez, Movimiento Bolivariano de Colombia leader, ‘Colombians are taking the first steps towards a Bolivarian revolution.’

The ‘press attacks and pressure’ and the ‘persecution’ that these leaders refer to include newspaper articles that claimed prominent candidates had criminal records, unsigned leaflets that claimed the parties were promising Venezuelan cédulas (identification cards), so Colombians could claim free medical care across the border, and even deportation threats from Colombia’s DAS intelligence service.

‘There was no attempt at combating our arguments,’ said Flórez, ‘instead, the press just lied, but despite the dirty war against us, our candidates on the frontier, Carlos Delgado and Esperanza Contreras, won almost 3,000 votes.’

The more serious threats to deport ‘Venezuelans who interfere in Colombia’s politics,’ as Santiago Vásquez, DAS’s local director on the frontier put it, had an effect because many Colombians have dual nationality with their Bolivarian neighbour.

As several Venezuelan Congressional representatives have recently visited elected mayors and local asamblea deputies in Colombia, the intelligence service’s deliberate attempt to blur the distinctions between these politicians, and Colombian citizens who might support the Bolivarian parties, raised tensions during the election campaign.

Vásquez claimed that Venezuelans were ‘infiltrating Colombia, keeping a low profile’ and were ‘illegally interfering in politics.’ Jorge Urueta, on the Caribbean coast, dismissed the allegations, and related how Venezuelan politicians often made commercial agreements at a local level in Colombia, and also brought opportunities for the children of poor workers to study in Caracas.

Constitutional and legal experts stated that even if Venezuelans were attending political meetings or talking about politics while in Colombia, this did not amount to ‘conspiracy or sedition, which are obviously against the law,’ as lawyer Francisco José Sintura explained. ‘There is a law against foreigners financing election campaigns, but that is not what is happening here.’

In response to Vásquez, Corriente Bolivariano organiser, Ángela Contreras, pointed out that ‘Americans come to Colombia all the time; US politicians come here and impose their opinions on us, American businessmen write articles in our press praising the president’s pro business policies, and this is fine. But when Venezuelan workers talk to Colombian workers, this is ‘political interference’.’

Even helping poor Colombians receive medical treatment in Venezuela comes under suspicion. While Vásquez claims that the Colombian Bolivarian movements ‘exploit the poor, and use visits to hospitals across the frontier to disguise their politics,’ Flórez counters that thousands of poor Colombians have benefited from the free medical attention of Cuban and Venezuelan doctors because Colombia’s privatized health care is too expensive. ‘It’s solidarity, not partisan politics,’ he says.

However, far right Uribista parties, attempting to capitalise on the intelligence service’s over reaction to the Bolivarian movements and the hostility in the press towards Venezuela, are now discussing drawing up a proposal to strip the almost 5 million Colombians with dual nationality of their right to vote.

‘Illegal and unconstitutional,’ is how Constitutional judge Eduardo Cifuentes described the proposal, ‘It is not possible to legislate against Colombians’ political rights like this, and it is senseless, just as Latin America is coming closer together, to attempt to divide us. This is parochial politics.’

In contrast to the Uribistas’ prejudice, thousands of Colombians organised in the Bolivarian parties recently signed cards to President Chávez, requesting Venezuela allow Colombians with dual nationality to cross the frontier without a visa or passport.

An estimated 2 million Colombians are in Venezuela, most having fled the rightist paramilitaries who have dominated the frontier, controlling lucrative contraband trades, and who still control politics in the border states. Exile has split families and has further impoverished Colombians struggling against an almost 50 per cent poverty rate.

One worker wrote to Chávez that he wanted to visit his daughter in Venezuela, but had ‘no money to open a bank account, and so I can’t even apply for a visa at Venezuela’s Consulate, nor can I get a passport from the Colombian government.’

Óscar Manduca, a Corriente Bolivariano leader, says that ‘one of the Bolivarian principles is cooperation, solidarity between peoples.’ Colombia and Venezuela may have presidents far from each other politically, but the people should be as one.’

‘Venezuelan workers have their revolution,’ says Jorge Urueta, ‘but the Uribistas shouldn’t be concerned about Chávez – he doesn’t have anything to do with us and he’s not going to take over Colombia. If in Colombia we elect a leftist president, a Polo Democrático or a Bolivarian president, it will be because Colombians do it, not because of Chávez.’

Estas elecciones son una bofetada para todos aquellos que quieren que la impunidad se mantenga en Colombia, para todos aquellos que quieren que sigamos en la pobreza y desigualidad, para todos aquellos que continuen siendo manejados por la sombra de la muerte.
– Ángela, Ciudad Bolívar, Bogotá

A victory so sweeping, that without doubt is the first down payment for the presidential elections… organise the masses to give the coup de grâce with Lucho Garzón’s presidency!

Un triunfo tan arrollador, que sin duda es la cuota inicial para las presidenciales… ¡de sembrar las bases para dar el golpe final con la presidencia de Lucho Garzón!
– Eder Gutierrez, Barrio La Candelaría, Bogotá

We will continue like this, now for the presidency, and I don’t care if Lucho Garzón or Carlos Gaviria is the candidate — the aim is to take the presidential palace.

Continuemos así, ahora por la presidencia, no interesa que sea Lucho Garzón o Carlos Gaviria, la idea es llegar al palacio presidencial.
– Álvaro Cañon, Bogotá

It was hard fought, heartbreaking… we feel that they attacked each of us personally when they lied and slandered the Polo, but we won!

Fue luchada, dolorosa, desgarradora, sentimos que nos atacaban a nosotros mismo cuando se calumniaba e injuriaba al Polo Democrático, pero ¡ganamos!
– César Patiño, Barrio San Victorino, Bogotá

These elections dramatically demonstrate the terminal crisis of the traditional two party system that for a century and a half has dominated our politics. In Bogotá, the Conservative candidate couldn’t even achieve one per cent of the vote, and the Liberals supported the Uribista, Peñalosa.

This shows that the old traditional parties don’t have a place in Colombia and the experience has given a hard knock to the prophecies of the analysts in the press, who continued predicting disaster for the Polo.

Estas elecciones muestran dramáticamente la crisis terminal del bipartidismo tradicional, el cual durante siglo y medio copó el escenario de nuestra política. En Bogotá, el candidato conservador no llega al uno por ciento de voto, y los liberals apoyan a los uribista Peñalosa.

Esto demuestra que las viejas formaciones tradicionales no tienen espacio en la vida colombiana y la experiencia ha dado un duro golpe a las profecías de los analistas de la prensa, que se mantienen previendo la dispersión y el desastre del Polo.
– Álvaro Vásquez, Partido Comunista Colombiano, Bogotá

A victory of serenity over arrogance and a president that dismissed all logical principle in reason and politics.

Una triunfado de la serenidad sobre la soberbia y un presidente que descoce todo principio lógico en la razón y la política.
– José Hernández, Cartagena

This is the continuation of the democratic path that Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador have taken… the country is polarized between the Uribistas and the real opposition that is the Polo… this means that we have to begin bringing the factions in the party together in order to arrive at the presidency.

Es el de continuar el camino democrático de Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador… Se polariza el país entre los uribistas y la oposición real que somos el Polo… esto significa que tenemos que iniciar la consolidación del partido a través de sus tendencias para llegar al gobierno.
– Gilberto Ospina, Medellín

With our votes the people of Bogotá defeated the dirty scheming of the president… soon, the presidency will be ours!

Los bogotanos con nuestros votos derrotamos la suciedad y mezquindad del presidente… de pronto, ¡la presidencia es nuestra!
– Nelsi Pérez, Bogotá

It has to be recognised that the President of the Republic contributed to this victory with his scheming and his mistakes. The president led a campaign against the Polo Democrático that was not only contrary to the Constitution, but against all norms and decency.

They created a war of improprieties, of lies, of attacks against the Polo in an attempt to deny us victory, but it wasn’t possible.

He wanted to bring his prestige to this campaign, but it had the opposite effect. In this moment the Polo Democrático has obtained a sweeping victory and the President of the Republic has been comprehensively defeated. Take note, Mr President, there’s nothing that can be done to stop the forces of the Polo.

The Polo is confirmed today as an unstoppable force for the presidency in 2010.

Hay que reconocer que el Presidente de la República contribuyó a este triunfo con sus mezquindades y sus torpezas. El señor presidente fue a encabezar una campaña contra el Polo Democrático, no solo por fuera de la Constitución, sino por fuera de las normas y la decencia.

Que sepa que el Polo se ha afirmado hoy en el país como una fuerza incontenible, y que en el 2010 la presidencia va a ser del Polo.
– Carlos Gaviria Díaz, Presidente del Polo Democrático

The results of the election campaign show that many Colombian citizens resist continuing to accept the right, and that we consider it necessary to increase the resistance.

Los resultados de la campaña electoral es el reflejo de que muchos ciudadanos de Colombia nos resistimos a seguir aceptando al derecho y consideramos necesario incrementar la resistencía.
– Mario Velásquez Caicedo, Macao

A strong opposition and being an observer on consejos and asambleas is an important front in the struggle, but I think the Polo should look outside Bogotá because a real alternative to take the presidency will come from working from now all across Colombia.

Una oposición firme y una veeduría de los consejos y asambleas es un frente de lucha importante, pero pienso que el Polo debe mirar más al fuera de Bogotá porque una alternativa de poder real para la presidencia pasa por el trabajo que desde ahora se haga al fuera la capital en todo Colombia.
– Dámaso Alegría, Quibdó, Chocó

We are ready for whatever will be necessary, starting now for the elections for President of the Republic. For a Bolivarian revolution in Colombia!

Estamos listos para lo que sea necesario y puesta desde ya en las elecciones a la Presidencia de la República. ¡Por una revolución Bolivariano en Colombia!
– Ati Montañez, Pereira

We are a party that is different, and we can’t allow ourselves to fall into the clientilist and corrupt practices of the other parties, and like them sell out our principles for favours.

Nosotros somos un partido diferente y no podemos caer en las prácticas polítiqueras, clientelistas y corruptos de los demás, así como tampoco vender nuestro ideario a cambios de prebendas.
– Moisés Quintero, Barrio San Cristóbal Sur, Bogotá

The Polo should consolidate unity from below, and unite the strategy of electoral participation with mobilising and organising the people.

El Polo se propone la consolidación de la unidad desde abajo y conjugar la participación electoral con el esfuerzo por la movilización y organización más cumplia del pueblo.
– Quena Ribadeneira, Communist/Polo delegate elected in Barrio Teusaquillo, Bogotá

The elections show that the Polo Democrático is a national reality… but that parapolítica is a national reality too. As an international observer commented: if they pursued this dirty war to derail the election in Bogotá, what wouldn’t they do — kidnapping, disappearances or assassinations – to stop the victory of the left in a presidential campaign…

The traditional two party system is mortally wounded, although it still staggers on, but the Polo Democrático has a future ahead of it. The most important thing now is to act without sectarianism and without ambiguity.

Las elecciones demostraron que el Polo Democrático es una realidad nacional… pero también la parapolítica es una realidad nacional. Como dijo un veedor internacional: si adelantaron esta guerra sucia para impedir la elección en Bogotá, qué no pueden hacer – secuestrar, desaparecer o asesinar – para impedir la victoria de la izquierda en una campaña presidencial…

El tradicionalismo bipartidista está herido de muerte, aunque todavía patalea, pero el Polo Democrático tiene un porvenir por delante. Ahora, la clave está en que actúe sin sectarismo y sin ambigüedad.
– Voz editorial

To all those who wanted to stigmatize the Polo Democrático — the people of Bogotá know how to think and understand. And vote with independence. This is the lesson for the president.

A todas los que quisieron estigmatizar el Polo Democrático — los bogotanos saben pensar y entender. Y votan con independencia. Esa es la lección para el presidente.
– Joselín Bolaños, Bogotá

The crushing triumph of Moreno in Bogotá, as well as the consolidation of the Polo Democrático as the first political force in the capital, shows that Bogotanos don’t appreciate the president interfering in elections and telling them who to vote for. His intervention produced the opposite effect to what he intended — in the end, he lost Peñalosa votes.

Just to point out, if its not already crystal clear, that neither the editorials in El Tiempo, nor countless political columnists, convinced the voters. If they had, Peñalosa would have won by a large margin. A slap in the face to the columnists and a warning to the media who ganged up to defeat the Polo… The voters are not idiots and they know when someone tries to manipulate them.

El aplastante triunfo de Moreno en Bogotá, además de consolidar al Polo Democrático como primera fuerza política en la capital, demuestra que a los bogotanos no nos gusta que el presidente se nos meta al rancho y nos diga por quién debemos votar. Su intervención resultó produciendo el efecto contrario — al final, quitándole votos a Peñalosa.

Quedó probado, por sí ya no estaba claro, que ni los editorials de El Tiempo ni los votos cantados de los columnistas tienen incidencia en los votantes. Si contaran, Peñalosa habría ganado y por amplio margen. Un golpe al ego de los columnistas, y una voz de alarma para los medios, que en gavilla trataron de socavar al Polo… los electors no son bobos y saben cuándo se los manipula.
– María Jimena Duzán in El Tiempo, Bogotá

The Polo candidate, Samuel Moreno, took 915,000 or 43.6% of the votes on a record turnout, while the president’s candidate, Enrique Peñalosa, could only manage 589,000 or 28.2%, despite support from the main Uribista parties, the supposedly opposition Liberals, and Colombia’s sole national daily newspaper, El Tiempo.

Continued Polo Democrático domination in the capital not only strengthens the left challenge in Colombia’s next presidential elections, but has also derailed the right’s intention to change the constitution to allow Uribe to run for a third term.

Had Peñalosa defeated the Polo, Uribe would have considered this an endorsement of his re-election. As it is, the president is now hoping for a ‘catastrophe’, as he himself put it, that will give him an excuse to remain in office after his second term ends in 2010.

‘These elections are a slap for all those who wanted impunity to continue in Colombia, for all those who wanted poverty and inequality to continue in Bogotá,’ said Ángela, a Polo activist celebrating Moreno’s victory in the Ciudad Bolívar barrio that rises on a steep mountain at the edge of the capital.

‘It has to be recognised that the President of the Republic contributed to this victory with his scheming,’ declared Carlos Gaviria Díaz, the Polo Democrático’s national leader, ‘The president led a campaign against us that was contrary to the Constitution — he lied and attacked the Polo but his attacks had the opposite effect. Take note, Mr President, there’s nothing that can be done to stop the left taking the Presidential Palace!’

Uribe had constantly interfered in the election, claiming that the Polo had bought votes and demanding that Colombians not vote for leftist candidates ‘associated with terrorists or communists’. Although this is illegal under Colombia’s Constitution, which prohibits public officials from intervening in election campaigns, as the president has appointed his far right supporters to the Prosecutor’s office and the Supreme Court, there is little chance he will be investigated.

Lucho Garzón’s Bogotá

The rising left challenge to Colombia’s closed politics built on the Polo Democrático’s ability to organise in poor workers’ barrios and the achievements of Bogotá’s current mayor, Luis ‘Lucho’ Garzón, who first won the capital for the left in 2003. Garzón’s emphasis on the poor, workers and the displaced has reduced poverty from 38.9% to 23% in Bogotá, even while Colombia’s national poverty rate continues at almost 50 per cent.

Garzón’s Bogotá sin hambre (Bogotá without hunger) and Bogotá sin indiferencia (Bogotá without indifference) programs have helped to ensure that poor workers and the displaced have a chance to escape the desperate poverty that forces literally millions in Colombia to try to survive on less than 8,000 pesos, or 4 US dollars, a day.

These programs have established 281 community kitchens in the poorest barrios in the capital, and have built schools and colleges in the most marginalised zones, while subsidising medical care to prevent almost 2 million workers in Bogotá being excluded from health care by Colombia’s privatised hospitals.

As a result, the Polo Democrático increased its vote in the capital from 797,000 to 915,000, and became the largest single party on Bogotá’s asamblea, while defeating all the rightist parties in 17 of the city’s 20 zones to more than double its representation on the city’s local juntas. This success has positioned Garzón as the obvious choice to be the Polo’s candidate in the next presidential elections, although the party’s current national leader, Carlos Gaviria, has strong support amongst the activists.

Gaviria, a former Constitutional Court justice and Senator, was the Polo’s presidential candidate in the 2006 elections, when the left took more than 2.5 million votes and eclipsed the traditional Liberals to become Colombia’s second political force after the rightist Uribista coalition.

Gaviria is considered more radical than Garzón, and has the support of Colombia’s influential Communists, but workers organised in the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores union confederation lean towards former union president Garzón. Some Polo Congressional representatives also suggest that Garzón’s record in the capital makes him the best choice to overcome Colombians’ traditional cynicism and distrust and prove that it is possible to end poverty and inequity.

As the Polo Democrático has a strong democratic tradition, more than 500,000 activists voted in the internal elections to choose delegates to the party’s first Congress last year. The presidential candidate will be discussed in caucuses and chosen in primaries in 2009, or just before the actual presidential election the following year.

50 dollars a vote

Whoever the candidate is, Colombia’s local elections have shown that the Polo still has work to do. Despite the left’s success in Bogotá, the picture is more complicated in other parts of Colombia. Although the Polo doubled its national vote to elect local representatives across the country, it had to support independent candidates in Medellín, Cali and Cartagena to ensure rightist parties and corrupt caudillos were defeated in the big cities.

The elections proved that the far right paramilitaries, clientilism and the caudillos still have a strong hold on Colombia’s politics, although the violence that saw 30 candidates assassinated had more to do with rightist factions settling scores amongst each other than an organised campaign against the left.

Some local caudillo bosses were defeated by independent candidates on the Caribbean coast, most notably in César state where Cristian Moreno won supported by the Polo Democrático. Moreno had stood down as a candidate in the 2003 elections after receiving death threats, but the Uribista candidate who then ‘won’ that election unopposed is now in jail for his ties to the paramilitaries.

However, other corrupt political bosses maintained their control through traditional patronage and bought votes. In Chocó on the Pacific coast, where the poverty rate is an incredible 80 per cent, a vote cost 100,000 pesos, or about 50 dollars, according to election observer Victor Raúl Mosquera. Some voters ‘received wood, zinc sheets or paint,’ he reported, ‘and all the parties except the Polo did this.’

Uribistas disunited

Rightist paramilitary front parties and other parties in the president’s Uribista coalition continue to control several states, but even after the election results there were scores of instances of these parties’ supporters fighting each other, and even setting fire to candidates’ campaign buildings where it was perceived that one candidate had bought more votes than another.

This indiscipline has raised concerns amongst Colombia’s elite about the right’s ability to unite their disparate parties to challenge the Polo Democrático. Although the scattered rightist parties seem to have more support on paper if their votes and political positions are added together, Colombia’s tradition of personalist caudillos and proud, arrogant bosses might be too strong for the right to overcome in order to present a united candidate in the next presidential elections.

For this reason, there is much speculation in the rightist press to encourage Uribe to run for a third term. To do this, the Constitution would have to be changed again; it was already rewritten in 2005 to allow Uribe to run for reelection the first time, and although the Supreme Court has a rightist majority, the conservative Colombian elite are cautious about more changes to what they consider to be the country’s ‘institutional stability’. As such, a ‘second reelection’ may be a step too far for these traditionalists to make more changes to their Constitution, even for Uribe.

To counter this, one of the main Uribista parties intends to present to the right dominated Congress a proposal to put the Constitutional change to a referendum, calculating that a national vote, with limited turnout and opportunities for buying support and intimidating opposition, will allow them to circumvent the Supreme Court.

But some traditionalists are drawing unfavourable comparisons with Venezuelan President Chávez, and among others there is the concern that further revelations in the parapolítica scandal will at some point debilitate Uribe, contribute to the left’s advance, and culminate in a defeat for the right in the Congressional elections due to be held just 8 weeks before the next presidential elections.

Colombia’s business and financial elite, already nervous about losing the American free trade agreement, are concerned about the impression Uribe’s intemperance and arrogance is having in the US. Regardless of their political affinity with Uribe, their commercial interests come first, and comments in the financial press indicate this elite would prefer to support a fresh rightist candidate against the left in the next elections.

There is no guarantee that the right will agree on one, however. Uribistas are scattered amongst at least 6 political parties, with no particular reason for their separation other than the egos of the party leaders. None of these parties have clear, principled policies other than to support the president, and it is obvious that without this ‘Pole Star’ these parties would have nothing more than a support either based on personalist patronage or on votes that are bought, or gained through intimidation.

Without the president standing as a candidate, there are certain to be many opportunistic short term coalitions amongst the right, alliances based on personalities, and much disagreement and little coherence. In addition, none of these parties have the organisation and activists to sustain a committed and disciplined campaign or organised party for more than a short time.

In the recent local elections, it was common to see people paid by these parties to distribute leaflets and even attend meetings, while the Polo Democrático could count on a massive activists’ base — some 500,000 members — whose work on the campaign did not need to be paid for, but was instead voluntary, committed and engaged.

Tumultuous scenes and thousands of supporters greeted Polo candidates in the barrios, and some 25,000 attended the party’s closing rally in Bogotá, while the Uribista parties were reduced to paying people to give out leaflets at stoplights, and instead of taking to the streets or talking to Colombians, relied on press conferences and endorsements from columnists in newspapers and magazines that most people are too poor to even buy.

For this reason, bought votes became one of the main themes in the elections, and the successes the right had often came in states where politics continue to be controlled through a caudillo or political boss.

Traditional parties’ relevance questioned

The polarisation in the elections between left and right has also disorientated Colombia’s historic traditional parties, continuing the crisis about their relevance that Uribe precipitated when, although a Liberal, he became president in 2002 as an independent supported by the Conservatives.

In these elections, the Conservatives, now tired of being co-opted and marginalised by the far right, split from the Uribistas and ran a separate candidate in Bogotá, and have declared their intention to run their own candidate in the presidential elections, whether Uribe stands again or not.

The Liberals are split. The party that has given Colombia six of its last eight presidents lost half its representation throughout the country in the elections, and didn’t even stand a candidate in the capital, Bogotá, where their official position was to support the Uribistas, even though most party members actively campaigned for the Polo Democrático.

‘These elections dramatically demonstrated the terminal crisis of the traditional two party system that for a century and a half has dominated our politics,’ wrote Álvaro Vásquez in the Partido Comunista Colombiano newspaper, Voz. ‘In Bogotá, the Conservative candidate couldn’t even achieve one per cent of the vote, and the Liberals supported the Uribista, Peñalosa, showing that these old parties no longer have a place in Colombia.’

The Liberal’s opportunism and schizophrenia, (a celebrated victory was a Liberal win over a notorious caudillo boss in Atlantico state on the Caribbean coast, while in states where the resurgent paramilitaries dominate, the caudillo bosses often are the Liberals), suggest the party, desperate to regain power after three successive presidential election defeats, is likely to support whoever it perceives as having the strongest chance to take the presidency next time, whether the Polo or the right.

The Liberals could still be important in this respect, because although the Polo’s strength as a united, coherent and independent party is feared. Even the rightist press were impressed how the Polo took Bogotá with almost a million votes without making alliances, while Peñalosa lost despite the support of the two strongest Uribista parties and the Liberals. In much of Colombia it may prove difficult to break the traditional caudillo bosses hold over some states in the time before the next elections.

Towards the presidential elections

This has led some in the Polo to suggest that an alliance with the more progressive and principled Liberal activists in these states might be necessary, and cite the fact that there is still a residue of traditional support, especially from workers, for the Liberals. Colombia’s most progressive president, Alfonso López Pumarejo, who governed in the Thirties and Forties and is often compared to US President Franklin Roosevelt, and also Colombia’s most radical leftist, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, who had to be assassinated in 1948 to stop him becoming president and taking Colombia to the left for the first time, were in the Liberal Party and are still remembered and celebrated.

Across Colombia, the Liberals still took more votes than the Polo in these elections, (although in the 2006 presidential elections the Polo had eclipsed the Liberals), demonstrating that the traditional party still has an organisation in states where the Polo has little presence, further encouraging some on the left to believe an alliance is necessary.

Others in the Polo believe its strength is precisely in the fact that the left is not associated with the traditional clientilist patronage that the Liberals still represent. Although the only alliance with another party in these elections was with the Liberals in Santander state, where the Polo supported perennial presidential candidate and proven Uribe critic, Horacio Serpa, to victory over a rightist paramilitary front party candidate, some Polo members question why the Liberals should receive any support at all, especially when their leaders campaigned against the Polo in Bogotá.

Instead, cited as an inspiration is President Chávez’s success in Venezuela, where he has mobilised unorganised workers and the poor in the barrios who had never voted or even supported a political party before, instead of trying to win over those who are already involved in politics.

In Colombia this constituency is huge — more than 50 per cent never vote in elections, millions are displaced and most workers are unorganised. Instead of attempting to win over those supporting the traditional parties or caudillo bosses, the Polo should organise in the barrios and among these workers, and organise vote registration campaigns to involve the displaced and the poorest.

That the left has already had some success pursuing this strategy was evidenced by opinion polls that disastrously underestimated the Polo’s support, due to the indifference the press had in the poor or the desterrados displaced in the barrios where Polo activists had been campaigning and organising. Right to the end of the election campaign in Bogotá, some polls undercut the Polo’s vote by more than ten points, underestimating the party’s actual vote by about 250,000.

The elections have given further indications that Colombians are perhaps not as conservative as thought. Chávista revolutionary parties, such as the Corriente Bolivariana and Movimiento Bolivariano de Colombia, took almost 12,000 votes in 6 states — enough, according to political analysts, to elect a Chávista representative to Congress should that figure be repeated in the congressional elections.

The Partido Comunista Colombiano, standing candidates as part of the Polo Democrático, won more than 20 positions throughout the country, including local mayors, state assembly representatives and consejo positions on Bogotá’s assembly. The Polo has even organised chapters among Colombian immigrants in the United States, Spain and Venezuela, registering migrant workers to vote and making sure the Polo’s message is brought back into these workers’ home communities.

The Polo has proved that Colombians have a strong identification with the party. In the elections, its supporters didn’t split their vote, voting the party list all down the ballot, and even the elite press constantly counter poses the left coalition’s organisation to the Uribista coalition’s ‘indiscipline.’

Columnists and political commentators take it as obvious that in the next elections it will be the Polo’s presidential candidate that the right will have to beat, and although there is much work still to be done, the Polo’s continuing election successes, and its ability to organise the other Colombia — the poor, workers and the displaced — show that Colombia has a strong chance to leave its isolation and soon join the rest of Latin America on the left.

There is no doubt that the leftist Polo Democrático coalition has become a decisive movement in Colombia’s politics. Political commentators and newspaper editorials have devoted much space to this rising challenge to Colombia’s closed, elitist politics, the first organised democratic and leftist opposition since the Unión Patriótica had its activists and candidates massacred by paramilitaries in the late Eighties.

Literacy is not total in Colombia, and even the government concedes that almost 50 per cent of all its citizens live in poverty, struggling to survive on less than 4 US dollars a day. Newspapers that cost a dollar, or political magazines that cost almost five dollars are clearly not a priority for most Colombians, and so the debate in the press over the Polo Democrático is more a discussion amongst the elite about how to deal with this threat to their privileges.

Far right Colombian President Álvaro Uribe has set the tone, intemperately calling the opposition ‘disguised communists’, while Uribista politicians resort to the standard McCarthyite tactic of our times – ‘you are either with the President or with the terrorists’ – and demand the Polo expel all activists and candidates who suggest that Colombia’s war might be connected to the country’s inequality, inequity and poverty.

Although rightist politicians attempt to either dismiss the Polo as ‘communists’, or continue to have faith that a conservative Colombia will be sceptical towards a leftist party, more intelligent observers amongst the elite have realised that the left has a real chance to win the next presidential elections.

At a recent ‘closed seminar’, political strategists, advisors and newspaper editors concluded that the Polo Democrático appeared to be the strongest and most coherent political force, and could in all probability force the 2010 elections into a second round. This prospect concerned those present, who believed the right were not as united or as organised, and who were still uncertain about the possibility that Uribe could change Colombia’s Constitution again to allow a third presidential term.

Armando Montenegro, the reporter who revealed the seminar’s discussions, wrote that the political strategists advised the right to organise a ‘scare the rich’ campaign, in order to create a fear amongst the elite that could force the Supreme Court to allow Uribe to run again.

At the same time, editorialists and political columnists have voiced despair that the traditional parties are no longer considered a credible option in Colombia’s political scene. In part, this is due to Uribe’s own political opportunism; originally a Liberal, he stood as an independent supported by the Conservatives, and has, as an unintended consequence, decimated traditional politics.

The right are now scattered, dispersed amongst personalist, caudillo parties that have no clear principles but instead dispense favours and patronage to obtain votes. Almost 50 Senators and Congress representatives in these parties are either in jail or under investigation for their ties to the far right paramilitaries.

That the Liberals have lost respect and are considered irrelevant, has been demonstrated by ex President and current party boss César Gaviria, who said that the party could not oppose the government’s policies because it might ‘lose points’, while the old Conservatives are struggling to recover their independence after being co-opted and marginalised by the far right Uribe.

This has led some commentators to believe it is inevitable that the left will win the next presidential elections, and as a result, their columns and opinion articles have sought to influence the Polo Democrático’s politics, attempting to favour perceived ‘moderates’ over more leftist or even Chavista leaders in the party.

Semana, Colombia’s most prestigious political magazine, and the rightist newspaper El Tiempo, have made the greatest efforts to intervene in the Polo’s political debates, printing speculative articles suggesting that prominent leftist leaders are considering resignation, or patronising editorials that advise the party to be ‘responsible’.

‘The elite demands a decaffeinated opposition party,’ comments Polo activist Carlos Castillo, ‘one that is extremely similar to the right.’ A party in the right’s image seems to be all that the Polo Democrático’s critics understand. Accustomed to the patronage practised by the old traditional parties and the new, Uribista caudillo parties, some columnists interpret the Polo’s advance in terms familiar to them.

‘A clientilist threat,’ writes Alejandro Gaviria in El Espectador, claiming that the left’s emphasis on ending poverty, ‘is old politics, handing out favours to gain votes,’ while El Tiempo believes that the party’s open, combative and democratic debates on policies — unheard of in Colombia’s traditional politics where policies are quietly agreed upon in elite clubs — demonstrates ‘immaturity and irresponsibility.’

‘The proof that the Polo is a new and honourable movement is that it doesn’t have tired old politicians,’ points out Colombian poet and writer William Ospina, rebutting the media’s attacks, ‘Colombia needs a true democracy, and the Polo lacks the malice and shrewdness that characterize the old parties and politicians, and with ease it has provoked some in the elite and confused others.’

The Polo Democrático has not just ‘provoked and confused’ the elite through its emphasis on workers, the poor and the displaced. Contrary to the localised caudillo party bosses, the Polo is a national party that organises all over Colombia: in barrios that no traditional politician visits, and amongst workers whose unions offer it their unequivocal support.

The fact that several different leftist political parties overcame their historical sectarianism to unite in the Polo Democrático, including the influential Partido Comunista Colombiano, has raised more McCarthyite fears in the press. ‘Communists in the Polo raises suspicions,’ states Semana, ‘and the question that has to be asked is whether the party can avoid their influence increasing, which it must do if the Polo wants to maintain the moral authority to criticise paramilitaries in politics.’

This astonishing attempt to equate communist participation in a democratic leftist opposition party, with far right terrorist paramilitaries that have killed Colombians — including communists and leftist political activists — in their thousands, has rightly been greeted with complete contempt.

‘This tactic, ever more frequently used by the press and the Presidential Palace, intends to polarize Colombia,’ retorts Felipe Zuleta in El Espectador, ‘To dirty the name of the left is far easier than attempting to show the president is not connected to narco bosses or paramilitaries disguised as politicians.’

‘The régime sees the Polo as an enemy to contain and has unleashed the narco paramilitary dogs,’ adds Jaime Caicedo, a communist activist in the Polo, ‘each day, the president and his ministers make up all kinds of lies to discredit it as they try to make us adopt a conciliatory attitude acceptable to the régime… the blackmail consists in saying: be a tame opposition or your destiny will be that of the Unión Patriótica, while others demand the Polo becomes a moderate party, and the press gives lessons in how to be ‘sensible’.

The latest attempts to ‘moderate’ the Polo Democrático have reflected the old opportunistic tradition in Colombia’s politics that permits individual politicians to change parties as it suits them. ‘To be more attractive to Colombian voters,’ Semana condescendingly advises, ‘independent politicians’, ‘respected Liberals’ and even ‘dissident Uribistas’ should not just be potential Polo members, but become Polo leaders.

Completely failing to understand that the Polo is a democratic party with its own elections, primaries and activists — more than 500,000 party members voted for delegates to the first Polo Congress in 2006 that then elected the party’s leadership — Semana’s spectacular ignorance reveals just how used the elite are to assuming that everyone is as opportunist as them.

Arrogantly taking for granted that individuals without principles, convictions or even affinity with the Polo’s aims, could usurp its democratic processes and simply assume or be handed a leadership position, indicates the contempt Colombia’s rulers have for those ordinary citizens who are now organising and participating in politics on their own terms.

Polo Democrático President, Carlos Gaviria Díaz, spelt out the irreconcilable difference between the left and Colombia’s elite: ‘I think that in Colombia there are two proposals: one of the right, that supports, strengthens and consolidates the current inequity, and another of the left, where we want to change this state of affairs.’

Criticising the attempts to pressure the party to move to the right, he reiterated: ‘Our party is a leftist party. Many people ask why we don’t call it a ‘centre left’ party and I tell them; because I don’t know what the centre is… in a polarized Colombia, the centre shamelessly flirts with the right.’

‘I want the term ‘leftist’ to be used without fear in Colombia, without demonizing this position,’ Gaviria continued, ‘I don’t speak of an armed left, but a democratic left, where we propose to make substantial changes and reforms in Colombian society through electoral politics.’

It is this determination that has caused such fear amongst Colombia’s more far sighted political strategists and commentators, and has them attempting to curtail the party’s independence, radicalism and the challenge it represents to the elite — but it is almost certainly too late.

‘The Polo has become the sole democratic opposition in Colombia in the eyes of the people,’ as Jaime Caicedo says, and the poet William Ospina agrees, emphasising that the Polo must ‘maintain its presence, its vigorous and pluralist character… it must not get worn down in opposition, but must usurp the traditional clientilism, scepticism and violence of this country and continue advancing policies of change to offer an alternative.’

Colom won almost a million votes (28%) to defeat the principal rightwing candidate, military general Otto Pérez Molina, who took 750,000 votes (23%). The obvious concern amongst Colom’s supporters is that those who voted for other rightwing parties in this first round will now transfer their votes to Pérez Molina in the run-off election due to take place on 4 November.

This is exactly what happened in Guatemala’s previous presidential election in 2003. Álvaro Colom also stood in that election as the left candidate, and advanced to the run-off election where he challenged the rightist, Óscar Berger. The united forces of the right then defeated Colom 54 to 46 per cent to hand the presidency to Berger.

On Sunday, twelve rightwing parties competed for the presidency against just four parties considered to be on the left. Apart from Colom’s UNE, the other left parties were eclipsed by the multitude of small parties led by rightwing caudillos who, according to Guatemalan political commentator Alexander Sequén Mónchez, coerced or bought votes.

Contrasting his country to México to the north, where the appeal of Manuel López Obrador’s combative and uncompromising leftist program forced the right to steal the 2006 elections there with fraud, and to El Salvador to the south, where the Marxist FMLN (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional) is the second political force and dominates politics in the cities, Sequén Mónchez says the left in Guatemala lacks tradition and organisation.

Even the capital, La Ciudad de Guatemala, is controlled by the right, contrary to the trend of capital cities in Latin America being won by the radical left recently. In fact, former rightist president Álvaro Arzú, who has been the capital’s mayor for the last four years, was easily reelected on 9 September, and in the presidential election, Pérez Molina gained more votes in the city than Colom and all the other left parties put together.

‘The left has been excluded from participation in politics through repression and violence,’ says writer Carolina Escobar Sarti, ‘but also, the left has not been as clear with radical, progressive policies as the left in México, nor has it organised in the street or in the barrios with an everyday, on the ground presence as the FMLN has done in El Salvador.’

The experience of the presidential campaign seems to bear out this assessment. More than 50 candidates and campaign workers have been assassinated, including 15 members of Colom’s UNE, and also seven supporters of the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Rigoberta Menchú, who was the first indigenous Mayan in Guatemala’s history to stand as a presidential candidate.

The indigenous have long been excluded, despite comprising more than 58 per cent of the population, through military repression and the racist denial of their culture and languages that has left politics in Guatemala in the hands of a tiny elite. Although this is now changing slightly, there are still few opportunities for the indigenous — or the left — to participate in the country’s formal ‘liberal’ democracy.

There are no elections for governors, senators, or state representatives as Guatemala has neither an upper house nor state legislatures, and governors are appointed by the president. Representatives in the national Congress rely heavily on traditional patronage or violence to secure their positions, and the assassinations of leftist and indigenous activists serve to deter opposition.

In this election campaign, Álvaro Colom has had to travel in a helicopter to avoid being attacked, and he was accompanied at all times by a doctor with extensive experience in bullet wounds, while his campaign manager, José Carlos Marroquín, was fortunate to survive a grenade attack on his car.

Aside from this intimidation and violence, the left in this election ‘has not succeeded in positioning their proposals and vision at the centre of the political debate,’ reiterates Sarti, ‘the themes have been a free trade agreement with the US, and security ‘hard fist’ policies that reprise the repression of the military dictatorships. There has been no debate about Guatemala’s great social concerns.’

‘The election has shown the conservative side of Guatemalan society,’ concurs an editorial in the newspaper El Periódico de Guatemala, ‘the parties on the right have dominated while the principal parties on the left have not even presented programs with socialist policies, much less Chávista policies,’ it stated, referring to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution. ‘The political left is almost nonexistent in Guatemala, eclipsed by decades of continuous governments of the right.’

Colom has campaigned on a moderate, social democratic platform that emphasises a continuation of the economic liberalism policies of the current conservative president, while claiming to be able to distribute the ‘benefits’ of these policies more equitably. While this is sufficient to be considered ‘leftist’ in Guatemala’s political context, it has clearly failed to attract mass support from the majority of Guatemalans who continue to live in desperate poverty under these policies.

Rigoberta Menchú’s presidential campaign has had similar failings. Her candidacy has been important in cutting through the racism and elitist, exclusionary attitudes of the traditional political class, but she has not used the small space she has opened to confront the country’s central problems of poverty, exclusion and indigenous rights.

‘Despite the support of Bolivian President Evo Morales, that country’s first indigenous leader, Rigoberta doesn’t want to be seen as a leftist. She has chosen to be independent, repudiating the support of the left parties,’ writes Guatemalan sociologist Gonzálo Sichar Moreno. ‘The space she has is the fruit of much struggle, but political debate continues to be restricted and elitist.’

Menchú also did not propose to alter the country’s economic policies, and as a result, a clear rift could be seen between Guatemala’s peasant worker organizations, which reject free trade, and the ‘Mayan intellectuals’ in Menchú’s party. ‘It was decided not to support Menchú’s political movement,’ said Rafael González, an indigenous leader, ‘as indigenous people, we do not identify with its politics.’

This has left Colom, despite his moderation, as the repository of the hopes of the left in this election. That he still has a mountain to climb is shown by the fact that the far right former military dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, despite an international arrest warrant issued against him for massacres committed during his repressive rule, was elected to Congress at the same time as Colom won the first presidential round.

Guatemala’s ‘strong rightist tradition and history of military repression, violence and impunity continues to be an obstacle to change,’ writes Sichar Moreno, ‘the situation of the left is probably worse than when it was illegal under the dictators. There is a need for a mass, progressive political coalition to end the right’s domination.’

There is still a chance, and some signs of hope, that the right can be defeated in the final presidential round. Although Pérez Molina took the capital, Colom’s party defeated the right in 17 states — Pérez Molina won in 5 states — and the Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza is now the largest party in the Congress after almost doubling its share of seats to 48.

Despite his moderate social democratic policies, should Álvaro Colom become president, the victory will be as momentous for Guatemala as the elections of Rafael Correa in Ecuador or Evo Morales in Bolivia, and will be further confirmation that Latin America’s left turn continues.

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9 September 2007 results:

Álvaro Colom (UNE – left) 917,000 (28.2%)

Otto Pérez Molina (Partido Patriota – right) 767,000 (23.5%)

Alejandro Giammettei (Gana – government party) 562,000 (17.2%)

Rigobertu Menchú (Encuentro – left) 100,000 (3.2%)

In total, left parties obtained 1,107,000 votes.

Rightwing parties obtained 1,909,000 votes.

Congress:

La Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE) 48 diputados

Gran Alianza Nacional (Gana) 35

Partido Patriota (PP) 32

Encuentro (Rigoberta Menchú’s party) 4

In total, of the 158 seats in Congress, left parties obtained 53, but rightwing parties obtained 105.

In the capital, La Ciudad de Guatemala, Pérez Molina took 227,000 votes to the left’s 205,000.

In testimonies and interviews, residents in the El Salado barrio in Medellín’s central western Comuna 13, and in the Santo Domingo Savio and La Esperanza barrios in Comuna 1 in the northeast, relate how ‘armed men in black’ have returned to militarize their communities.

The paramilitaries don’t patrol on the streets with guns in hand… it is an invisible control, with threats, with guns hidden in belts, with forced displacement. Their control is more subtle.

–Antonio, Barrio de La Esperanza

There are no men with automatic rifles, but the pressure is felt and it increases… the paramilitaries demand 5,000 pesos each week or there are death threats. The illegal trades in drugs, gasoline and guns are under their control, the girls on the streets at night are theirs… it is true that there are less killings than before, but it is not necessary to have deaths to feel fear.

–Cristina, Barrio de El Salado

Paramilitaries take Medellín

The far right paramilitaries became a strong military force in 1998 after taking over the drug trade after the Medellín cartel had splintered under state onslaught. But fighting for control in the Comunas against leftist influenced militias such as the Comandos Armados Populares, which had been organised to provide ‘justice’ and ‘security’ in workers’ barrios in response to the state’s absence, the paramilitaries were soon forced to rely on the military to intervene.

A nine hour assault on Comuna 13 began at dawn one day in May 2002. Black Hawk helicopter gunships hovered over the densely packed barrios as soldiers fought Comandos in the steep, narrow alleys and passages between the houses. This first inconclusive battle left 15 dead, including nine civilians, and led to further overt collaboration between the paramilitaries and the Colombian military after the hard right president Álvaro Uribe Vélez was sworn in for his first term that August.

One thousand soldiers, Black Hawk helicopters and armoured personnel carriers stormed the same Medellín barrios in October 2002 to begin a military occupation that lasted until December and resulted in almost 20 deaths. As the soldiers cleared the streets, the paramilitaries entered the barrios – within a year there were reports that at least 46 people had been ‘disappeared.’

The paramilitaries were primarily organised in the Bloque Cacique Nutibara, whose commander was Diego Fernando Murillo Bejarano – ‘Don Berna’ – who had been a narco boss in the Medellín criminal cartel ‘La Terraza.’ In addition to fighting leftist Comandos, Berna’s paramilitaries fought other far right militias and threatened to kill criminal gang members if they didn’t join his force.

Through assassinations, threats and forced displacements, the Bloque Cacique Nutibara consolidated its control over Medellín’s barrios, profiting from the illegal drug and gun trades. State paramilitarisation – collusion between the far right death squads and Colombian politicians and military commanders – culminated in the attacks on Comuna 13 that defeated the Comandos and allowed the paramilitaries free reign across the entire city.

Paramilitaries legalised and legitimized

After Álvaro Uribe’s election as president, and the subsequent negotiations that accorded paramilitaries virtual impunity for their crimes, the Bloque Cacique Nutibara laid down their arms in front of the television cameras in November 2003. As barrio residents testify however, the paramilitaries remained in control in the Comunas and even sought to legitimise this control by attacking barrio and political organisers and taking over democratic organisations such as the Juntas de Acción Comunal.

Peasant workers who had been forcibly displaced as a paramilitary war tactic on the Caribbean coast, and who had settled in Medellín’s Comuna 1, were attacked again as they tried to organise the Movimiento Social de Desplazados de Antioquia, (Social Movement of Displaced People of Antioquia), and earlier this year an activist in the community organisation Madres de la Candelaría, Judith Vergara Correa, was assassinated in Comuna 13.

Two months later on 23 June, another local leader organising barrio workers in the leftist Polo Democrático coalition, Julio César Gómez Cano, was also shot dead, this time at his own home in Barrio Tricentenario in front of his two children. Later, threats to leave Medellín or be killed were attached to rocks smashed through windows at the coalition’s offices in the city centre.

Residents in the Santo Domingo Savio barrio in Comuna 1 in Medellín’s northeast also relate that killings continue despite the paramilitaries having supposedly ‘demobilised’. Threatening leaflets against community leaders and barrio organisers continue to be pasted to light posts as before, but political assassinations are now more often carried out with knives rather than assault weapons to make the attacks appear like common crimes.

Fear

The narrow passages and steep streets in the barrios are deserted after dark. Despite residents attempting to organise in the Polo Democrático Alternativo political coalition, the Madres de la Candelaría community association, or the Movimiento Social de Desplazados de Antioquia and other barrio organisations, the resurgent paramilitaries, legitimised and legalised under President Uribe’s protection, continue to control Medellín’s comunas through fear, forced conscription and threats.

Rodrigo was 15 when the paramilitaries took him. He was ‘conscripted’ but he came back in December 2005 after the paramilitaries demobilised. He came back changed… he wasn’t a happy child as before. Soon after, he began to receive calls – they shouted at him and insulted him. I asked him what was going on but at first he didn’t want to tell me. Then he said that he was being ordered to go back as just the paramilitary commanders were demobilising but the others had to return. Once, I received a call and the man said that Rodrigo knew he should return because he didn’t have much time left. Rodrigo told me he didn’t want to go back to that life, so I gave him some money and told him to stay with a friend in Pereira. After he left, a man came to my home and threatened to kill my other son if Rodrigo didn’t return to Medellín, so he came back. He came back after midnight and went with the man who had threatened to kill his brother. After a few days Rodrigo came home and started to collect his things together… he wanted to leave and told me that I should leave the barrio too. He tried to leave, but they killed him on 17 October, 2006.

In the barrio Altos de la Torre, so high that Medellín’s lights appear below as though from an aircraft, the paramilitaries control the night. Peasant workers displaced from Chocó on the Pacific coast, or Urabá on the Caribbean, attempt to begin again in the wood and tin shacks crammed against each other in what one resident called ‘the city’s lost barrio.’

This fear has created ghost barrios in Medellín that the paramilitaries have returned to control. But although these far right terrorists now have virtual legal impunity, shared political affinities with the president, and the assurance that, in the last resort, they can rely on the military’s Black Hawk helicopters to terrorize the comunas, some residents are determined to resist.

To the criminals who want to take our lives… you have no right to be in our barrio. On one side you want to be politicians, but you have a stone to throw that is hidden in your hand. But the paramilitaries can’t kill us all… with all our heart we will make justice in our own land.

–Astrid, Comuna 13

Professor Gustavo Moncayo, whose son, Pablo Emilio, has been held as a ‘prisoner’ by the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc) since December 1997, pleaded with the president to agree to a humanitarian exchange of guerrilla prisoners in jail with those held by the Farc.

President Uribe, flanked by military officers and his foreign minister, Fernando Araújo — a former Farc hostage who escaped from the guerrillas earlier this year — rejected any exchange during a frank and often intemperate debate on the steps of Colombia’s Congress.

Over the jeers and whistles of thousands of Colombians who had come to greet Professor Moncayo at the end of his 46 day trek across the country’s mountains and steep valleys to this capital high in the Andes, President Uribe refused to ‘give even one millimeter’ in the form of negotiations or concessions to what he called ‘criminals.’

The President demanded that the Farc free, without preconditions, all of the estimated 2,000 hostages it is thought to be holding, and then, and only then, he said, would the government listen to the Farc’s demands for social justice. Political analysts in Colombia consider this to be an ‘unrealistic’ proposal, particularly as the guerrillas believe that negotiations over the hostages are their only chance to have their demands considered.

President Uribe has been noted for his hardline policies towards Colombia’s rebel forces since he was first elected in 2002. After his re-election last year, he vowed to continue with a strategy of military confrontation, as well as relying on a policy of ‘military rescue’ of hostages in guerrilla hands — a policy criticized by the families of those hostages, many of whom accompanied Moncayo at different moments on his journey to Bogotá.

‘The families of the kidnapped victims are in the middle of a political game between the Farc and the government,’ Moncayo said in response to the president’s rejection of a humanitarian exchange, and he implored Uribe not to make unrealistic proposals ‘just to have something to say. Don’t let our loved ones die in the jungles — they deserve to live!’

‘Don’t compare the government of a democracy to these terrorists,’ President Uribe retorted, and referring to a Farc member recently freed from jail, contemptuously suggested that Professor Moncayo, ‘go to Cuba and talk with the guerrilla Rodrigo Granda to find a solution.’

The debate between the president and the schoolteacher, broadcast live to the entire nation for two hours, ended with Professor Moncayo, disconsolate at the president’s intransigence, and still wearing metal chains to symbolize his son’s continuing captivity — walking down the Capitol’s steps in tears.

Meanwhile, President Uribe, in an extraordinary display of intemperance — ‘beneath the dignity of the presidency,’ according to one commentator — angrily responded to shouts from the crowd to deny that he was connected to far right paramilitaries and narco-traffickers, saying, ‘I am not a front man for anyone… I don’t have one dollar in a foreign bank.’

The paramilitaries, who had claimed to be patriots fighting the guerrillas, are now known to have killed as many as 14,000 Colombians over the last 20 years, including trade union organizers, indigenous activists and campesinos — often in order to steal valuable land to grow cash crops for export and coca for the drug trade.

Uribe’s government has been accused by human rights organizations of awarding the paramilitaries, in return for giving up their arms, virtual impunity for the massacres, assassinations and forced displacements they have committed. Almost 50 members of Congress, all but one supporters of the president, have either been jailed or are under investigation for their connections to the paramilitaries, and evidence about Uribe’s personal involvement is circling closer with each new revelation.

Between the stubborn intransigence of President Uribe, and the undoubted criminal and inhumane actions of the Farc in continuing to take and hold people hostage, Professor Moncayo has now become the centre of a storm of debate in Colombia about how to achieve peace in this war torn country.

The schoolteacher’s tireless efforts over the last ten years to try to free his son have included meeting with guerrilla leaders in the mountains and with three Colombian presidents — all to no avail. Following his public debate with Uribe, the professor is now appealing directly to the Colombian people, and with the consent of Bogotá’s leftist mayor, Luis Garzón, Moncayo has vowed to camp in the capital’s central plaza until his son is free.

The first is a video that shows Álvaro Uribe at a private meeting on 31st October 2001 to organise support for his 2002 presidential campaign. According to the Colombian political magazine Semana, five of the 13 people present were associated with the paramilitaries in the far right AUC militia, and one of them, Frenio Sánchez Carreño, was a notorious narco boss whose militia name was Comandante Esteban.

Comandante Esteban had been complicit in at least 80 assassinations and also the forced displacement of more than 3000 peasant workers, according to Colombia’s DAS intelligence service, whose agents were actively searching for him at this time. He had threatened local journalists as far back as December 2000, and just twelve days before meeting with Álvaro Uribe, he had signed an AUC communiqué that declared union and worker organisers to be ‘military targets.’

The meeting pledged to support Uribe’s presidential campaign, and also other rightist candidates in the 2002 Senate and Congress elections, in the hope that legislation promoted by these politicians would ‘legitimise’ the paramilitaries. These militias succeeded in electing their candidates in 2002 — AUC national boss Salvatore Mancuso has since admitted that intimidation and bought votes, or threats and assassinations, allowed many rightist candidates to be ‘elected’ unopposed — and soon received a payback from the politicians in the form of virtual impunity for their crimes.

The DAS arrested Álvaro Uribe’s supporter, Comandante Esteban, just six weeks after the 31st October meeting, and charged him with aggravated homicide and attempted homicide, among other crimes. For ‘reasons that are still not clear’, according to Semana, and after Uribe became president, he was freed from jail in 2005. Now, as Frenio Sánchez Carreño, the authorities have offered a $5,000 reward for his arrest, accusing him of leading supposedly ‘demobilised’ paramilitaries reprised as criminal gangs.

An interview in México revealed more details about the president’s ties to the paramilitaries. Fabio Ochoa Vasco is a narcotics cartel boss who is one of the United States’ most wanted criminals — he has a $5 million price on his head — and he claimed to Colombian journalists that the paramilitaries’ boss of bosses, Salvatore Mancuso, had financed Álvaro Uribe’s presidential campaign in 2002.

It is suspected that Mancuso, in jail and expecting a lenient sentence while avoiding extradition to the US, has not revealed all about the paramilitaries’ ties to Colombia’s political elite for this reason. Ochoa, lacking Mancuso’s political protection to avoid his fate, has decided to detail his part in the parapolítica scandal in an attempt to be worth more to Colombian investigators and avoid an American jail.

Ochoa claimed that he took thousands of dollars in cash — paramilitaries’ narcotics profits — in suitcases to the capital, Bogotá, to finance rightist candidates in the 2002 elections. He claimed that the paramilitaries and Mancuso contributed $2 million to the president’s campaign, and that he also organised campaigns to intimidate voters in Medellín to ensure Álvaro Uribe was elected.

Mancuso said ‘that the paramilitaries should finance the (presidential) campaign because one of the promises is that there will be a law that should anyone be accused or suspected of being in the paramilitaries, they will be saved,’ Ochoa related, ‘so we made sure that all the votes had to be for Uribe.’ In Medellín’s barrios, people confirmed that the paramilitaries patrolled the streets that election day, demanding to see residents’ identification cards, and warning opposition supporters ‘not to show at the polls if you’re not going to vote for Uribe,’ as one barrio activist recalled.

The third revelation came in another video, this time posted on the opposition Polo Democrático Alternativo internet site that showed another paramilitary boss, Ernesto Báez, acclaiming Uribista politicians in the 2002 elections as ‘his candidates.’ The Colombia Democrática and Convergencia Popular Cívica parties that the paramilitaries supported succeeded in electing Senators and representatives to Congress in 2002, who subsequently went on to approve laws that gave the paramilitaries their virtual impunity.

The Colombia Democrática party was established by Álvaro Uribe’s first cousin, Mario Uribe, and one of the Congress reps that paramilitary boss ‘Ernesto Báez’ supported was the CD’s Rocío Arias. After the connections between the far right militias and the president’s Congressional supporters became known, Arias revealingly said, ‘No-one can blame us if the paras, for ideological reasons, supported us.’

The president responded to all the revelations with characteristic disdain, at first refusing to ‘make comments or give explanations about each photograph or video recorded’ during his political career. As the accusations mounted, he even resorted to criticising the Méxican police for not arresting Fabio Ochoa Vasco, rather than counter the narco boss’s allegations.

In the end the president was forced to make a US President Richard Nixon ‘I am not a crook’ style live television broadcast to all Colombia, claiming ‘I have never abused my position… I never sought to be president using illicit money, and I have never used illicit money to remain as the Republic’s president.’

Editorials and newspaper columnists, rather than investigate further, predictably echoed the president’s line, claiming the most recent revelations were ‘a disgrace’, not because of the details, but because they were published at all. ‘Against Colombia,’ declared the country’s single national newspaper, El Tiempo, commenting on the allegations, and taking up the elite’s favourite tactic of deliberately equating the president with the country in order to curtail debate, continued, ‘the campaign against Colombia is implacable, devastating and unjust.’

‘Implacable, devastating and unjust’ are adjectives that could more appropriately be applied to the terror the narco paramilitaries have inflicted on Colombia in recent times, but ‘a disgrace’ is too complaisant a term to describe a president supported, financed and bought by such terrorists.

Here, where Colombian soldiers patrol the dirt streets at dusk, they have tried to make a new life, starting again with almost nothing but with little hope of ever returning home because the paramilitaries who took their land handed it over to businessmen to clear for an African palm plantation.

In Quibdó, their wood and mudbrick home barely keeps out the rains, which are incessant in this tropical coastal state. Alicia rises at 4am in the morning to walk to the local market where she prepares fresh caught pargo fish and lobster for 15,000 pesos (US$7) for a 50 hour week.

Her husband, José César, hasn’t worked since he was hurt on a construction site last year. He cannot afford privatised medical care and hasn’t even been able to buy painkillers. Despite this, José César still searches for casual day labour, or el rebusque, but in Quibdó he says, ‘there is little work at all, and much hunger.’

Usually, he spends the rest of his day waiting for Alicia. Of their six children, four have died, one is in prison, and they think the other is in Medellín, but they are not sure. They try to look after their four grandchildren as best they can, and most days they manage to get by making and sharing caldo — a thin watery soup with a little potato.

There is no running water in their home, except what is collected from the rains, but sometimes José César manages to bring home a guanabana — a large juicy spiky fruit — or maybe a mango that he has knocked out of a tree by throwing stones at it.

There is electricity, via a precarious wire that pirates the power from overhead lines, but it is unreliable — usually, without light and once night falls, the Pereas have little else to do but go to bed and wait for the dawn.

Cazucá and Ciudad Bolívar, Bogotá, Colombia

‘I know I am malnourished because they told me so at school,’ says Ángela, an 8 year old displaced girl in Bogotá, leaning against a Coca Cola advertising hoarding that is also the wall to someone’s home, ‘This is because since I was very little I have eaten dirt. Now it’s better in the city; I can eat the scraps that are thrown out behind the stores.’

Ángela runs to take shelter as a fierce torrential rainstorm, an aguacero, begins to convert the steep dirt streets in Cazucá and Ciudad Bolívar into thick mud streams. The brick walls of the homes in these Bogotá barrios have no mortar, and the roofs, a collection of scrap metal zinc sheets and wooden planks, drip water onto hard earth floors.

The displaced and dispossessed that manage to make it to Colombia’s capital attempt to settle here, scattered amongst makeshift homes in the close, narrow streets that cover what the barrio residents call ‘the mountain.’ There is water and electricity in the homes further down, but the newest arrivals have to begin in the highest streets in the barrio, where there is little.

Water is collected from a communal tap that trickles out a flow for barely two hours a day. Ángela sometimes has to miss school to wait in line in the hope that her wait will coincide with those two hours, but it is better than missing school to ask for coins at stoplights.

Hernández, Ángela’s father, works as a baker in a panadería, and sometimes she can sell little hot bread pan de yuca rolls her father gives her to the workers on the colectivo buses. Although he is paid much less than the legal minimum wage — 436,000 pesos, or about US$220 a month — and has to work every day in the week, Hernández believes he is fortunate to have work at all.

‘No-one wants to hire a desterrado,’ he says, ‘I had to lie to get work; bosses don’t want those who live in Cazucá or Ciudad Bolívar; for the displaced there are no opportunities, you are nothing, no-one wants you.’

Forced to leave their home in Córdoba, a Caribbean coastal state, Hernández and Ángela had to wait two months after arriving in Bogotá before receiving a little state assistance. A 500,000 pesos grant (US$250) over six months then allowed Ángela to start school, but there is still no help to return home, even though fear and violence seem to have followed them to this barrio.

The rightist paramilitaries that Colombian President Álvaro Uribe claimed had ‘demobilised’ and turned in their guns, have been reprised as criminal gangs in Cazucá and Ciudad Bolívar. One illegal armed force, the Águilas Negras, or Black Eagles, undeterred by the police cars that here are armoured personnel carriers, terrorise the barrios with threats, assassinations and forced conscription.

At night, from the steep, dark streets on ‘the mountain’, the distant lights of the glittering steel and glass towers in downtown Bogotá look like more of the starlit sky, and to Hernández, are just as inaccessible. He doesn’t understand why, if he and his daughter work so hard, the future still seems to be as dark as the skies that bring the torrential aguaceros.

Poverty

28 million Colombians live in poverty, according to research in the independent Revista Actualidad Colombiana. Even the government concedes that almost 50 per cent of all its citizens are condemned to live on less than 7,500 pesos (US$3.30) a day, with almost 15 per cent, or more than 6 million people, enduring misería — extreme poverty — and attempting to survive on less than 3,000 pesos (US$1.50) a day.

In the capital, together with Hernández and Ángela, 2.5 million live in poverty, while in Chocó on the Pacific coast, Alicia and José César Perea and their grandchildren are among the 85 per cent who are considered to be in this state.

Unable to afford basic foods containing iron, vitamin A or zinc, at least 80 people, 50 of them children, have died of malnutrition so far in 2007 in Chocó alone, and in all Colombia it is expected that 1000 children under 5 years of age will die this year from nutritional deficiencies and associated illnesses.

Colombia’s riches — its gold, oil, emeralds, sugar, coffee and exotic fruits — have the potential to end the disgrace that allows a million people in this unbelievably beautiful country to go hungry each day. But averting their eyes from the pain of someone’s loss helping their gain, Colombia’s uninterested political elite continues to permit the forced displacement, and the unmitigating terror and impunity that enforces this dispossession, to further enrich those who already have more than Ángela or the Pereas ever will.

It is an indication as to how far to the right political debate is in Colombia that journalists and politicians considered this as a serious proposal — the Interior and Justice Minister thought it ‘interesting’ — but the proposal also reflects a concern among this elite that for the first time since 1948, a leftist opposition is rising.

The Polo Democrático Alternativo, a coalition that unites all the significant leftist political parties and factions in Colombia, has dramatically realigned politics and displaced the traditional, clientilist Liberal Party as the principal opposition to President Álvaro Uribe Vélez and the right.

Carlos Gaviria, the Polo’s presidential candidate, achieved an unprecedented 2.5 million votes in the 2006 elections, despite President Uribe demanding that Colombians choose between his militarization and authoritarian policies or ‘los comunistas disfrazados’ — ‘the disguised Communists’ in the opposition.

And this despite the fact that these elections are now known to have been fraudulent on the Caribbean coast, where paramilitaries bought votes, and in Colombia’s heartland where the President’s 98% vote totals in some districts recalled presidential ‘elections’ in Batista’s Cuba or Stroessner’s Paraguay.

Against increasing state paramilitarization, Uribista congress representatives, senators and military generals collaborating with the narcoparamilitaries in assassinating union workers and leftist opposition, the Polo has courageously continued to fight for a different Colombia that prioritises the poor, workers and desterrados.

Liberal Senator Jorge Eliecer Gaitan attempted to do this in the Forties, proposing policies that could have made him Colombia’s Franklin Roosevelt. His almost certain election as president was denied when he was assassinated in 1948, and the Bogotazo riots that followed, with Gaitan’s supporters burning downtown Bogotá and threatening an insurrection, demonstrated the fervent desire for such change.

The leftist Unión Patriótica tried to organise union workers and communist activists against the traditional Conservative and Liberal parties’ patronage and corruption in the late Eighties, but rightist paramilitaries and narco terrorists assassinated UP presidential candidates, Congress representatives and almost 4,000 UP members to avoid this progressive challenge to the state.

In 2007, the political realignment that has taken place all over Latin America has isolated Colombia on the right — just Perú, México and some Central American republics still adhere to the imported United States ‘consensus’ that favours corporate interests over social policies.

The leftist politics that are now dominant on the continent have closed down space for the right in Colombia to suppress opposition, and it is in part due to this favourable international scene that the Polo Democrático has risen to challenge President Uribe and the paramilitaries.

The Polo’s success has been evident in uniting the splintered left opposition into a coherent political force that even Colombia’s most influential newspaper, El Tiempo, considers a ‘credible option with the possibility to take power.’ The coalition has overcome the left’s historical sectarianism to include the Communists, Movimiento 19 and organised workers in the Confederación Unitaria de Trabajadores union confederation. The communist Voz newspaper commented that the dissident Liberals attracted to the coalition meant the Polo represented ‘the first time in Colombia that the revolutionary left and the social democratic left have united together.’

Originally organised as a loose coalition in 2005, the Polo achieved 708,000 votes in the March 2006 Congressional elections to elect 9 senators and 8 representatives. 380,000 coalition members voted in the Polo’s election to choose Carlos Gaviria as the presidential candidate, and despite a virtual media blackout and the paramilitaries’ bought votes, 2.5 million Colombians voted for ‘un país para todos.’

Proposing similar social policies to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s Bolívarian revolution, the Polo is organising amongst Colombians who have never participated in politics. ‘The Polo should not be just an electoral party,’ Senator Antonio Navarro insists, ‘it must have a presence in all Colombia,’ and reach workers in Ciudad Bolívar in Bogotá, the desterrados in Medellín’s comunas, the desperate poor in Chocó’s Pacific coast shanty towns and the indigenous.

Organising at a local level, on the streets in the barrios, proposing redistributive policies that favour the poor, the Polo has encouraged democratic participation to avoid association with the patronage and clientilism that has discredited the traditional parties. Candidates are chosen in open consultations, and 555,000 members chose the delegates to the party’s first united congress in December 2006 to reiterate the Polo’s commitment to progressive social change.

‘No-one in the Polo is to accept an Ambassador or Minister position,’ Carlos Gaviria declared, citing a favourite tactic Colombia’s political elite has often used to co-opt opposition, ‘our party is not opportunist and cannot be bought.’ And in Congress, Polo representatives such as Wilson Borja, a union organiser who has survived an assassination attempt, and Senators Alexander López and Gustavo Petro have proved to be the most effective opposition to the Uribistas.

President Uribe has also contributed to the left’s resurgence; originally a Liberal, he continued the Liberal’s opportunistic tradition, standing as a Conservative supported independent in the 2002 presidential elections. The president’s ‘undisciplined coalition,’ according to El Tiempo, has since had an unintended effect: scattering and splintering the right, leaving no clear successor once Uribe’s second term ends in three years.

Further to this, the traditional Conservative and Liberal parties have been co-opted, more than 20 Uribista representatives in paramilitary front parties have so far been jailed in the parapolítica scandal, and Colombian politics have been polarised leaving little choice for the president’s opponents but to support the left. ‘The elites’ traditional parties, their similar policies and patrician leaders have been replaced,’ commented one writer, ‘Colombian politics are now like Bolivia or Venezuela — left and right oppose each other and could never compromise.’

‘In Colombia exists the most arrogant opulence together with the most shameful poverty,’ Carlos Gaviria said in the election campaign. ‘Disguised communists,’ responded the intemperate president, and referring to the Polo’s campaign colour, said the opposition were ‘like papaya: yellow on the outside but red on the inside.’

Ever more increasing political polarisation in Colombia since the election has made the Polo’s challenge clearer. It has started to organise and mobilise the millions who did not vote at all in 2006 — 55% abstained in the presidential elections — and policies prioritising the poor, indigenous and workers reflect Latin America’s political realignment, echoing Méxican presidential candidate Manuel López Obrador’s 2006 ‘First the poor’ campaign and Venezuela’s Bolívarian revolution.

These threats to Colombia’s complacent elite have led the president’s Uribista representatives in Congress to propose the ‘coup’ in an attempt to avoid further opposition advances. But should that happen, the Polo’s organising amongst Colombia’s poor and in the barrios has ensured that it will not need Congress to be heard; the opposition will be in the streets, and Colombia will be a step nearer to joining Latin America’s left turn.

As the parapolítica death squad scandal circles ever closer to President Álvaro Uribe — the latest is a video showing him with a narco boss at an election campaign meeting in 2001, just before the boss, implicated in assassinating worker and union activists, was arrested — the president can be assured that investigative reports in the Colombian press will be few and far between.

Colombia has just one daily national newspaper, El Tiempo, but the latest revelations were not due to its investigative reports — on the contrary, after the evidence was printed first in US newspapers, El Tiempo merely summarised in a few lines what these reports said, and then published in its entirety a communiqué from the president that intemperately denied any connection to narco bosses or the paramilitaries.

It was left to the Washington Post to investigate further, while El Tiempo concentrated on criticising those who criticised the president as criticising Colombia. One of its columnists later tried to defend the paper’s political coverage claiming El Tiempo’s editorial line was ‘independent’, although ‘independent’ compared to what was not explained, probably because there is little editorial pluralism in Colombia to compare it to.

But then even this columnist had to admit that his personal connections to the newspaper’s owners meant he probably couldn’t be believed. The Santos clan that owns El Tiempo is part of Colombia’s closed political elite; its former editor, Francisco Santos, is now the vice president, and his cousin and former El Tiempo journalist, Manuel Santos, was first a Finance Minister and is now the Defence Minister in Uribe’s government.

Not surprisingly, El Tiempo’s editorials have strongly supported President Álvaro Uribe’s authoritarian militarisation policies. In 2005, the newspaper demanded that the Constitution be rewritten to allow the president a consecutive term, and in the 2006 election it even claimed that should the opposition leftist Polo Democrático coalition force the president into a second round, it would be ‘inconvenient for the country.’

Although the paper’s editor, Enrique Santos, had claimed his Uribista editorial line would have no effect on campaign reporting — ‘it’s not going to influence the balance at all,’ he said — El Tiempo declared on election day that the president must win in the first round, as anything else would be ‘awfully wearying’ for Colombia.

Fortunately for Colombia’s elite, their favoured candidate survived the indignity of submitting to democratic elections, although allegations that the paramilitaries bought votes, intimidated opposition supporters and assassinated anti-Uribista candidates, have since cast doubt on the election’s legitimacy.

But again, the president can be assured that the paucity of independent and investigative reporting in Colombia should mean that there are no more threatening consequences to his clientilist caudillismo politics than having some rightist Congress representatives and Senators thrown in jail.

The editors and broadcasters ‘who sign the paychecks think one way,’ commented independent political columnist Daniel Coronell after he received death threats and went into exile in the US, and this ‘definitely reduces a journalist’s spirit to report any story to the contrary.’ The peculiarly responsive nature of inquiry that characterises El Tiempo and Colombia’s pre-eminent political magazines Semana and Cambio seem to bear this out.

Investigative reports into the other Colombia — peasant workers and the indigenous forcibly displaced and counted in their millions, or the Colombians enduring an incredible 85 per cent poverty rate on the Pacific coast — are limited and inconsistent, while to divert attention, criticism is often directed at Venezuela’s President Chávez or at Colombia’s opposition Polo Democrático.

Parapolítica scandal revelations such as the Senators and Congressmen implicated in assassinating political opponents through their association with the paramilitaries, resignations of an Ambassador or Foreign Minister, or even narco bosses campaigning for the president’s election — stories that would be headline news day after day in the United States — receive relatively scant press coverage in Colombia.

Sometimes there is a real reason for this incurious detachment; the Committee to Protect Journalists has reported on the threats and intimidation that Colombian journalists are subject to when attempting to report on the paramilitaries’ connections to politicians, and even El Tiempo’s editor admits that this causes a ‘dictatorship of fear’ which ‘leads to self censorship’ and an ‘imposed silence.’

70 journalists have been killed in Colombia since the paramilitaries organised into a coherent national force in 1997, according to the International Press Institute. Although the picture is not all black and white — the guerrilla Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia have killed reporters too — the far right paramilitaries have been implicated in more threats and assassinations, and more insidiously, have been able to draw on their political connections to receive impunity for these crimes.

The ‘imposed silence’ has also received President Álvaro Uribe’s contribution. The Committee to Protect Journalists comments that the president’s favoured response to criticism is to accuse reporters of being terrorists or communists, encouraging either the paramilitaries to threaten or force writers into exile, or Colombia’s DAS intelligence service to arrest or deport foreign journalists.

The limited opposition press — the liberal El Espectador and communist Voz and the small leftist papers Desde Abajo and Revolución Obrera — have suffered terrorist attacks or had journalists assassinated and editors threatened, while local newspapers and radio stations are restricted in their independence through their owners’ corruption and political allegiances.

‘The owner calls the governor or mayor and says “Give me a million pesos and we’ll continue to work together”,’ a local radio reporter relates. ‘It’s impossible to fight with the boss,’ another local journalist reports, when the local newspaper is owned by a congressman or even the conservative Catholic Church.

Colombian TV presents a similar picture. The country’s two private broadcasters have an 80 per cent audience share and are controlled by the two richest men in Colombia’s elite club, Carlos Ardila Lulle and Julio Santo Domingo. Domingo recently said that Uribe was the greatest president Colombia had ever had, and encouraged the Uribista controlled Congress to change the Constitution again to allow the president a third term.

‘Thing’s have got worse,’ affirms investigative TV reporter Hellman Morris, ‘in Colombia there is just private TV — all reality programs and telenovelas and little news and debate with different perspectives.’ The president has closed the public financed Inravisión broadcaster that had featured cultural and independent programming as well as critical documentaries, and there are reports that even congressional and judicial debates are censored before being broadcast on cable TV stations.

A Senate debate that the Polo Democrático had initiated to discuss Uribista politicians’ connections to the paramilitaries in October 2006 was inexplicably taken off the air without any explanation, and as more parapolítica scandal details become known, forcing more rightist politicians before the courts, journalists are being denied access to the judicial hearings that investigate these revelations.

The restrictions, assassinations and threats — presidential and paramilitary — assist in protecting Colombia’s elite from critical and investigative reporting, and are then complimented by the peculiar editorial pluralism that restricts opinions to this elite — previous presidents and their relatives are prominent columnists in El Tiempo and Semana. All this serves to distort reality in Colombia to the point that a paramilitarized state is almost uncritically accepted.

As Polo Democrático Senator Gustavo Petro has pointed out, the Colombian press has misrepresented or failed to report on the paramilitaries’ atrocities, massacres and assassinations to such a degree that barely 6 per cent in Colombia believe these terrorists are a problem.

As more rightist politicians are arrested and the narco and parapolítica scandal edges closer to the president, the more Colombia’s elite may attempt to rely on this perception to avoid deeper scrutiny, investigation and jail. And as has been proven, while the newspaper editors’ class is the politicians’ class, there should be little need to pressure, censor or restrict the press to protect this elite. For the rich in Colombia, for Senators, presidents and editors, Colombia continues to be their exclusive club.

Ambassadors, congress representatives, senators, state governors — more than 50 national and local elected representatives who participated in state paramilitarism are under investigation, have been arrested or jailed, or are wanted fugitives in México and the United States.

Colombia’s elite Santos clan — owners of the country’s most influential newspaper, El Tiempo, whose former editor is now the Vice President, and whose cousin is the Defense Minister — are implicated in assisting to organize the first paramilitaries in the Nineties.

The Foreign Minister resigned as her brother Senator was jailed, and an arrest warrant was issued for her former Senator father — who is now a fugitive on the run — wanted for collaborating with paramilitaries.

Accusations that the information director in the president’s intelligence service — Colombia’s CIA — compiled hit lists targeting union organizers and opposition activists to pass onto the paramilitaries to assassinate.

Illegal surveillance operations against opposition politicians and journalists investigating the parapolítica scandal, resulting in several senior police officers being fired, including the chief of police intelligence — Colombia’s FBI — and the national police chief.

The president’s supporters in Congress, whose election the paramilitaries claim to have bought or ensured through intimidation, threats and terror, proposing a ‘presidential coup’ — closing Congress to avoid the opposition taking control as more Uribista delegates are jailed — a proposal the Interior and Justice Minister thought ‘interesting.’

One might think that Colombia is in crisis; the president must be isolated in his palace writing his resignation and waiting to be arrested for acquiescing in the state’s paramilitarization.

But according to the latest opinion polls, Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez has an unprecedented 85% approval rating.

Articles in Colombian newspapers are often unsigned, so as to avoid a fate common to Iraqi journalists under American occupation; contentious opinions are often met with threats, assassination attempts and forced exile, but several newspaper columnists in Bogotá have courageously raised questions about the president’s apparent stratospheric popularity.

Referring to Colombians forcibly displaced as a paramilitary war tactic, and to a poor barrio in Bogotá, one writer asks, ‘how many desterrados or workers in Ciudad Bolívar are interviewed in these opinion polls?’

The opinion pollsters state that their interviews take place by phone, and just in the largest cities. One pollster admitted that Colombia’s highest, or wealthiest strata, constituted almost 20% of respondents, even though nowhere near 20% of Colombians are in this elite — even in Spain the highest class is considered to constitute just 15% of the population.

The fact that one hour interviews with respondents were conducted by phone raised further concerns; just 54% of Colombians have access to a private phone, and one can only speculate as to how many workers have an hour’s free time to answer questions. As another writer pointed out, domestic workers cleaning expensive apartments in strata 6 zones — the wealthiest areas — wouldn’t have the time, but the rich whose time is freed thanks to the labour of these workers, would.

In Colombia, where those in absolute poverty are 50% of the entire country, some incredulous journalists refused to accept that the opinion polls accurately reflected Colombian opinion. Those that investigated a little deeper discovered that one influential opinion poll director was an unapologetic Uribista, who expressed his contempt for the poor by claiming the unemployment figures merely measured ‘those who are not interested in work.’

But other unsigned articles seem to be designed to attempt to close down debate; the business magazine Cambio claims that the president has a ‘blank cheque’ from 85% of Colombians to do whatever he wants, while the political elite’s magazine, Semana, without the slightest reflection or doubt, confidently states that ‘Colombians believe Uribe is one of the greatest presidents.’

It is not clear who the writers at Semana have been talking to, but it is clear on whose behalf the magazine makes this claim — Colombia’s richest man, Julio Santo Domingo, recently made the same claim and also hoped that the Constitution could be changed again to allow Uribe to be re-elected to a third term.

It is also certain that there are some Colombians whose opinions this elite believes are not worth consideration.

On the Pacific coast live the most desperate and poorest citizens in Colombia, descendants of Caribbean slaves brought to this tropical rainforest in 1728 to mine gold for the Spanish empire. After the Colombian Republic ended the slave trade in 1851, American precious metal companies moved in to expropriate the land and still, American fruit companies continue to exploit Pacific coast workers on banana, sugarcane and palm oil plantations.

In the largest Pacific coastal state, Chocó, this relentless exploitation has resulted in an incredible 85% poverty rate. At least 50 children have died due to malnutrition so far in 2007, and state disinterest, according to the leftist opposition Polo Democrático, has left health, education and nutrition in a critical and precarious position.

‘Chocó’s cacaos’ — the corrupt bosses in the state — have participated in the paramilitaries cocaine wars, the Polo states, deliberately displacing peasant workers that resist their communities’ militarization. The displaced have created desperate shanty towns on the Pacific coast where, in scenes reminiscent of the poverty and inequality in Haití, many Colombians are now forced to scrape a living on less than 2 dollars a week.

Colombia’s most prestigious sociologist, Alfredo Molano, writes, ‘Chocó is a colonial state,’ paramilitaries, politicians and corporations, ‘have left children displaced, malnourished and dead…’ Black Colombians ‘have been exploited by the white elite and their racist, thieving economic liberalism,’ and this elite has been protected by Uribe’s Democratic Security policies that militarise the shanty towns and criminalise dissent.

But in Colombia’s magical realism state, editorial writers in Bogotá are convinced that ‘Colombia’s greatest president,’ and his ‘undisputed’ 85% approval rating, reflect reality. There is no desperate hunger in Colombia, there are no desterrados — the paramilitaries are not resurgent and union workers are not assassinated.
‘¿Parapolítica? ¿Qué es eso?’ declares Semana. ‘The president continues rising in the polls,’ headlines El Tiempo. It is as though the deeper the crisis becomes, the more Colombia’s elite retreats into their own reality, a magical Colombia that will forever believe in the president’s 2006 election campaign slogan, Con Uribe, más que nunca — ‘with Uribe, more than ever.’

Sources

¿Parapolítica? ¿Qué es eso? Report in Semana, Bogotá, 12 March 2007.

…Ni qué niño muerto, Alfredo Molano, El Espectador, Bogotá, 31 March 2007.

Death squad scandal circles closer to Colombia’s president, Simon Romero and Jenny Carolina González, New York Times, 15 May 2007.

Chocó: la crisis, las intervenciones, las mentiras de gubernamentales, Polo Democrático Alternativo de Chocó statement, Quibdo, 18 April 2007.

Cuestionario para el encuestador, Daniel Coronell, Semana, 12 March 2007.

Desterrados: crónicas del desarraigo, Alfredo Molano, El Áncora, Colombia, 2001.

El largo brazo del narcoparamilitarismo colombiano, Hernando Calvo Ospina, Telesur report, Caracas, 9 May 2007.

Días de tempestad, headline report in El Espectador, Bogotá, 20 May 2007.

Presidente Uribe sigue arriba en encuesta, article in El Tiempo, Bogotá, 8 March 2007.

Cocaine wars, photographer: Scott Dalton, New York Times, 2007.

The best laid plans of presidents and war criminals: The unintended outcome of Colombia’s demobilizacion process, Garry Leech, Colombia Journal, 17 May 2007.

¡Ave María! Cover report in Cambio, Bogotá, 20 May 2007.

Chocó – ¿el pasado o el futuro? Aurelio Suárez Montoya, Centro de Medios Independientes, Quibdo, 9 April 2007.

Entremeses, Alfredo Molano, El Espectador, Bogotá, 20 May 2007.

La favorabilidad del presidente, O L González, El Tiempo, Bogotá, 12 March 2007.

Los niños del Chocó, Libardo Muñoz, Centro de Medios Independientes, Bogotá, 30 March 2007.

Más que complicado, Alfredo Molano, El Espectador, Bogotá, 7 April 2007.

¿Uribe III? Report in Semana, Bogotá, 29 de enero de 2007.

Los errors de Gallup, Daniel Coronell, Semana, Bogotá, 26 March 2007.

Barbacoa children and streets, photographer: Kris Lane, William and Mary College, United States, 1995.

Paramilitary ties to elite in Colombia are detailed, Juan Forero, Washington Post, 22 May 2007.

¿Una encuesta embuchada? María Isabel Rueda, Semana, Bogotá, 19 March 2007.

Al Chocó lo esta matando la rosca, Néstor López, Quibdo report in El Tiempo, Bogotá, 1 April 2007.

La confianza en las encuestas, O L González, El Tiempo, Bogotá, 2 April 2007.

Momentos amargos, article in El Espectador, Bogotá, 20 May 2007.

The media in America immediately, and falsely, claimed the President intended to outlaw all political parties, and US newspaper editorials continued their strikingly unoriginal echoing of the Bush administration’s opposition to the Bolívarian revolution, to claim that Venezuela would soon become a single party state.

What Chávez had actually declared was the formation of a new revolutionary party to attempt to unite the Venezuelan left. No rightist or opposition parties would be closed or banned, and even the leftist parties currently forming part of the Bolívarian coalition would be free to choose to unite in the new party or not.

One of Chavez’s intentions was to try to avoid sectarianism and political infighting within the governing coalition, and to avoid implications for clientilism associated with the discredited COPEI and Acción Democrática regimes of the past, when political party bosses dispensed favors to their supporters.

Although Chávez’s own Movimiento Quinta República (MVR) party won 42% in the elections, and organizes the great majority of Bolívarian revolution activists, other militants, union workers and communists were organized in small, splintered political parties that together contributed another 20% to the vote to re-elect Chávez.

At a 15 December 2006 political meeting in Caracas, Chávez recalled that a splintered left coalition allowed the contradictions between diverse political parties in Chile to divide President Salvador Allende’s progressive government, letting the right take advantage and depose him in a military coup.

Chávez, having defeated one US inspired coup through the collective force of Venezuelans taking over the capital, Caracas, believes ‘there is no time to lose’ to unite the various political parties supporting the Bolívarian revolution into a single force.

The president immediately dissolved his own MVR organization into the PSUV after the election, and called on all the other organizations that supported his re-election to call congresses and meetings to put his proposal to a vote among their party members.

Completely contrary to the American media’s unoriginal cartoon image of the Venezuelan revolution, President Chávez made clear that ‘no-one should feel obliged to join the PSUV,’ and in his own characteristic style, Chávez compared the act of joining the new party to the ‘act of love’, telling activists in the other parties comprising the Bolívarian coalition that, ‘if you don’t feel it, it’s better not to do it… it is not obligatory, and we are not going to reject you if you don’t.’

Nine leftist parties have now decided to participate in the PSUV, but the largest organisations in the coalition — the Communist PCV, Patria Para Todos (PPT), and Por La Democracia Social (Movimiento Podemos) — took the decision to remain independent while continuing to support the revolution.

In the case of the Venezuelan Communist Party, which originated in 1931 and endured persecution under the dictators Juan Vicente Gómez in the Thirties and Marcos Pérez Jiménez in the Fifties, the reluctance to unite in the PSUV reflects a long history of independent activism.

The PSV’s popularity has surged under Chavez’s presidency due to its active participation in the Bolívarian revolution, and last year a member of the Central Committee, David Velásquez, became the first Communist to be appointed to a cabinet position.

After a Communist Party congress in March to discuss the president’s invitation to unite in the PSUV voted to remain independent, PCV leader, Oscar Figuera, declared that the party would still continue to be part of the Venezuelan revolution, and will contribute to the PSUV’s ‘construction’, but ‘without dissolving the Communist Party’.

PCV president, Jerónimo Carrera, 84, who was imprisoned three times under Pérez Jiménez’s dictatorship, declared that the party ‘will wait for the moment… it is not possible to dissolve the Communist Party into a new organization that still doesn’t have democratic structures or a program. The Communist Party continues to exist.’

Despite this, the congress resolved to delegate activists to assist in building the PSUV, and the PCV intends to present its opinions to the new party to be considered for incorporation into the PSUV’s policies, in the hope that the new party will have strong Marxist credentials.

However, some communists believe their party is missing an opportunity to strengthen the Bolívarian revolution, and in the face of individual members, including 13 on the Central Committee, joining the PSUV, the PCV has been obliged to declare that ‘double militancy is not permitted’ — effectively expelling these activists.

Similar difficulties have arisen in the Patria Para Todos (PPT) party — heirs to the leftist opposition La Causa R (Radical Cause) party that had opposed the corrupt COPEI and Acción Democrática governments since 1971. The PPT won a 5% vote in December 2006 to contribute to Chavez’s re-election, and its decision not to unite in the PSUV has caused prominent leaders such as union organizer and former Caracas mayor Aristóbulo Istúriz, and former foreign minister Alí Rodríguez Araque, to leave the party.

The third significant party to decide not to unite, Podemos, justified its decision claiming that Chávez intended to use the PSUV to close political space in Venezuela. ‘We don’t participate, and we will never participate in pensamientos únicos (a single line of thinking),’ said the party’s president, Ismael García, ‘because Venezuela is a diverse society.’

President Chávez criticized Podemos for this claim, suggesting that some PSUV critics were ‘raising the flags of the right,’ and forcefully stated that he wanted the revolution to encourage a ‘debate of ideas’ to counter ‘capitalism’s pensamientos únicos.’

Following the president’s criticism, several Podemos congressional deputies and state governors left their party to unite in the PSUV, declaring that Podemos’ 7% share of the December vote was not a sectarian, or separate vote, but a vote for Chávez and the revolution.

The Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela, which these dissidents and the remaining nine leftist parties have united to create, ‘should be the most democratic political party in Venezuelan history’, Chávez declared after his re-election, ‘there have been too many leadership appointments from above, including by me, but the PSUV’s leaders will be elected from the base. Choose the people you have faith in — there shouldn’t be the same faces as always — a new party needs new leaders.’

Activists uniting in the PSUV believe the president will be more responsive to decisions and demands made through a single, united democratic party, rather than to those made by individual supporters or activists in various splintered coalition partners, but more than this, Chávez is encouraging Venezuelans to raise their sights and take their political participation further.

‘Make the PSUV a party that doesn’t just fight elections,’ Chávez wrote in a pamphlet distributed to the hundreds of thousands of workers who took to the streets all over Venezuela on International Workers’ Day, ‘make it more a party that can fight the battle of ideas… one for which we should study, read and discuss the way forward.’

It is envisaged that elections will take place in July for the PSUV’s leadership and for delegates to the first party congress, to be held in August or September. The political program and priorities decided at this congress will then have to be ratified in an all-party ballot in November.

Inscriptions to the PSUV are already estimated to have reached more than 1,000,000, while some Bolívarian government officials are anticipating that three million PSUV members will eventually be registered when the first congress is held.

It’s clear that the revolution’s reality is far from the black and white caricature the American press constantly represents. It is also obvious that President Chávez’s united party initiative represents a more democratic and inclusive vision of participatory politics than the United States’ corporate parties, millionaire candidates and exclusive politics of a self-selected elite could ever do.

Sources

El discurso de la unidad, Hugo Chávez Frías, Caracas, 15 de Diciembre de 2006

Para la bancada roja la doble militancia es una ‘ambiguedad inaceptable’, Últimas Noticias, Caracas, 11 de Mayo de 2007

Marxismo, Leninismo, Bolívarianismo, Pedro Dumo, Caracas, 1969

Partido Comunista: Somos parte del proceso revoluciónario venezolano y no nos disolvemos, report in Tribuna Popular, Caracas, 8 de Mayo de 2007

Chávez aclara: No rechazamos a los que no quieren afiliarse al PSUV, report in Aporrea, Caracas, 6 de Mayo de 2007

Comunistas venezolanos definen postura ante partido unido, report in Prensa Latina, La Habana, 5 de Marzo de 2007

Rodríguez: PSUV es una necesidad estratégica, Agencia Bolívariana de Noticias report in Aporrea.org, Caracas, 12 de Mayo de 2007

Se resisten comunistas venezolanos para integrar partido único, AP report in El Universal, México, 4 de Marzo de 2007

El partido de la Revolución será el más democrático de la historia, Jorge Rodríquez, Agencia Bolívariana de Noticias report, Caracas, 20 de Abril de 2007

‘Patria, socialismo o muerte,’ Valentina Lares Martiz, El Tiempo, Bogotá, 11 de Enero de 2007

¡Uh, ah, Chávez no se va! Reportaje, Semana, Bogotá, 11 de Diciembre de 2006

Más de 1 millón de militantes captó el PSUV, Últimas Noticias report on Aporrea.org, Caracas, 15 de Mayo de 2007

Former Catholic priest, Fernando Lugo Méndez, is almost certain to be the presidential candidate of a rising leftist opposition to the perpetual rule of Paraguay’s Colorado Party in the 2008 elections.

A May opinion poll in the Asunción newspaper Última Hora indicated that 40.8% of Paraguayans intended to vote for Lugo, against just 9% for the probable ruling party candidate supported by the current president, Nicanor Duarte.

Should Lugo be elected, Paraguay will become the latest Latin American nation to spurn the United States and reject the divisive neoliberal policies that have only further enriched an exclusive elite at the expense of the indigenous and workers.

That Paraguay, controlled since 1946 by the Colorado (or ‘Red’) Party — including the 34 year extreme right wing military dictatorship of General Alfredo Stroessner — should even contemplate joining Venezuela and Bolivia and most of Latin America in electing a progressive leftist as president, demonstrates just how far politics have changed on this continent.

Not since an attempted revolution against the fascist dictator Morínigo in March 1947, has Paraguay experienced such a concerted and united challenge for political control from the left. Since the rightist Colorado party’s victory in the civil war of that year, political repression, authoritarianism and single party rule had denied space to workers, their unions, and indigenous Guaraní, leftist and communist activists to organize or oppose the government.

Even after Stroessner was deposed in a military coup in February 1989, the Colorado Party has continued to rule Paraguay through patronage and corruption — utilizing their advantage of decades of elitist control of the country to manipulate successive presidential elections — with disastrous results.

The General who overthrew Stroessner, Andrés Ródriquez Pedotti, who had amassed a large fortune during the dictatorship, was accused of profiting from heroin trafficking and ultimately denied a US visa even though he was president. His successor, Juan Carlos Wasmosy, appointed Stroessner’s supporters to government positions and on leaving office was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 4 years’ imprisonment.

The next Colorado administration saw the Marzo Paraguayo events in March 1999, when then president, Raúl Cubas, tried to pardon General Lino Oviedo who had been imprisoned for attempting a military coup in 1996. Cubas’ own vice-president, Luís María Argaña, instituted impeachment proceedings against Cubas, but was assassinated in the capital, Asunción, sparking riots and demonstrations which Cubas attempted to suppress by putting tanks on the streets.

After eight protesters were killed by the military, representatives in Congress voted to dismiss Cubas from the presidency, but before the Senate could ratify the impeachment, Cubas resigned and fled to Brazil. Despite the resignation of the president and the assassination of the vice-president, the Colorado Party continued to hold onto power through the accession of Luís Ángel González, the president of the legislature — which the party controlled — to the presidency of the republic.

However, González did nothing to improve the Colorado Party’s miserable record — even using a stolen armored BMW as his official car while illegally transferring millions of dollars from the Central Bank to accounts in the US. As soon as he lost his legal immunity upon leaving office, he was charged with fraud and embezzlement, convicted, and sentenced last year to 8 years in prison.

The latest Colorado president, Nicanor Duarte, elected in 2003 with 38% of the vote, has so far taken a less excessive approach to governing, and has attempted to pursue a centrist political line in the face of Latin America’s shift to the left, but the institutionalized privileges and patronage of the longest continual ruling party in the world continue to pressure the president to appease the right.

This reluctance, or inability, to change policies favorable to Paraguay’s elite, while all Latin America continues to elect and reelect progressive presidents who reject US priorities, has encouraged the country’s left to take the offensive and start to disprove Paraguayan sociologist Bernardino Caño’s assertion that the country has a ‘cultural fear of change’.

In 2006, a 50,000 strong demonstration took over Asunción to protest Colorado Party rule, and unionized workers, and leftist and indigenous organizations began to unite behind a Catholic bishop from one of Paraguay’s poorest areas, Lugo Méndez, who was speaking out forcefully against poverty and inequality.

Praising Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s Bolívarian revolution for favoring the poor, Lugo, the ‘Bishop of the Poor’, as he is now popularly known, continually challenged Paraguay’s traditional elite, questioning why ‘there are so many differences between the 500 families who live with a first world standard of living while the great majority live in a poverty that borders on misery.’

Last December, Lugo renounced his ministry to participate in politics, not just to defeat the Colorado Party, but to ‘be more ambitious… to change the country.’ A forceful orator both in Spanish and Guaraní, the indigenous language that most Paraguayans speak, he declared that ‘united in our diversity… we will not allow our dreams to be frustrated.’

The response from Paraguay’s Catholic hierarchy was swift. ‘Monsignor Lugo is in a state of contempt, exposing himself to the punishment of excommunication,’ said the president of Paraguay’s Episcopal Conference, Monsignor Ignacio Gogorza, ‘Lugo does not have the permission of the Vatican to go into politics, so he is leaving Catholicism for poor choices… he cannot leave the cloth simply by resigning. His life devoted to religion is for one’s entire life.’

On February 1, the Vatican denied Lugo’s request to be laicized. Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re wrote that Lugo must ‘remain in the clerical state,’ claiming that a bishop as a presidential candidate would be ‘a cause of confusion and division amongst the faithful and an offense to the laity.’

This indirect support for the Colorado Party from the Vatican has been further fueled by Lugo’s adherence to liberation theology — the ‘preferential option for the poor’ tendency within Catholicism that emphasizes a commitment to those less privileged — and which the official Church considers radical or revolutionary.

Although the Vatican’s rejection of Lugo’s resignation does not have legal force under Paraguay’s secular constitution, the closeness of the conservative Church hierarchy with the Colorado Party, and the Party’s control of the Supreme Court, Congress and Electoral Tribunal, could mean that Lugo’s presidential candidacy may be ruled invalid.

Lugo is undeterred, however, and returned to the streets in March with a 20,000 strong demonstration against the Supreme Court, whose justices are all members of the Colorado Party, calling on them to resign because of corruption and their partisan support for President Duarte.

Justice in Paraguay is ‘fast and cheap for the wealthy or those who have friends in power,’ Lugo told the demonstrators, ‘but new times are coming… a change can come in the short term… but we have to be aware to guarantee that the forces of chaos do not sabotage the awakening.’

The former priest continues to attract the almost unconditional support of many of the estimated 50% of Paraguayans who still live in poverty, and who have seen no gains from the failed neoliberal policies that the ruling party imported from the United States, but there are signs that support from the organized left in Paraguay is more qualified.

Communist Party activists have cautioned that workers ‘have to see what Lugo does, more than what he says,’ while the Popular Socialist Convergence Party points out that Lugo has considered an alliance with the traditional, and conservative, opposition coalition, Concertación Nacional, although no agreement has so far been formalized.

However, it is undeniable that most Paraguayans have expectations that the politics that Lugo says have ‘favored narrow, partisan interests over those of the nation’ will be defeated in 2008. United with organized workers and indigenous activists, the massive popular support behind Lugo’s challenge to the elite and their Colorado Party could finally end the control this privileged minority has had over Paraguay for the last 60 years.

Sources

Ex obispo en carrera a la presidencia, Gustavo Torres, Noticias Aliadas, Lima, 3 de Mayo de 2007

Paraguay’s ruling party faces threat of a populist bishop, Larry Rohter, New York Times, United States, 27 February 2007

La falta de justicia, Fernando Lugo Méndez, ABC Digital, Asunción, 12 de Abril de 2007

Obispo de los pobres candidato de Tekojoja, Ernesto Herrera, Tekojoja, Asunción, 23 de Diciembre de 2006

Duarte: Queremos cambiar la historia, interview, BBC Mundo, Asunción, 15 de Agosto de 2003

US military in Paraguay threatens region, Project Uncensored report, United States, 18 September 2006

Stroessner, Paraguay’s enduring dictator, dies, D J Schemo, New York Times, United States, 16 August 2006

Paraguay’s peculiar politics, Teo Ballvé, North American Congress on Latin America report in Upside Down World, United States, 12 April 2007

El ex obispo Lugo acepta unirse a la coalición opositora en Paraguay, EFE report in El País, Madrid, 2 de Marzo de 2007

El cura candidate, AFP report in Semana, Bogotá, 19 de Febrero de 2007

Venezuela takes an important step towards democratizing its media on 28 May when a billion dollar media corporation loses its television broadcast license to ‘those who almost never have a voice,’ in President Hugo Chávez’s words.

Radio Caracas Television — RCTV — and its multi-millionaire owner, Marcel Granier, who are about to lose their unceasing political war against Chávez and Venezuela’s Bolívarian revolution, are claiming that ‘independent media are being closed down,’ that Chávez is a dictator intent on ‘restricting freedom of expression and democratic rights.’

Reporters without Borders declares that RCTV losing its license is ‘a serious attack on editorial pluralism’, while editorials in US newspapers have predictably misrepresented the controversy, claiming Chávez is retaliating against his critics in the opposition media who ‘disagree’ with the Bolívarian revolution.

The reality is rather different. As Reporters without Borders doesn’t mention, perhaps understandably so, given its financing by the US State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy — which also finances rightist opposition political parties in Venezuela — RCTV was an active participant in the violent coup d’etat that deposed President Chávez for almost 48 hours in 2002.

On the day of the coup, RCTV abandoned all pretense to report news impartially, calling opposition supporters to illegally demonstrate at the Miraflores Presidential Palace in Caracas while showing the constant on screen message ‘Ni un paso atras’: ‘Not one step back.’

It deliberately showed film from one angle to falsely claim that Chávez supporters were firing on opposition demonstrators, when another camera angle would have shown that Chávez supporters were defending themselves from sniper attacks — no opposition demonstrators were in sight. The constant repeated broadcasting of this film was then used as justification for some military officers to declare their ‘disobedience’ to the president, and these declarations were faithfully broadcast to attempt to legitimize a military takeover.

The American editorial writers who fail to mention all this, also fail to comment on the Venezuelan media’s support for the subsequent fascist junta that took control in Caracas and proceeded to dismiss the entire Supreme Court and the Congress, suspend the constitution, arrest the democratically elected president and then sent armed police onto the streets to suppress any resistance.

A junta member, Admiral Victor Ramírez Pérez, thanked journalists on live TV the day after the coup, saying that the organizers ‘had a weapon — the media — let me congratulate you,’ and the businessman the junta chose to be ‘president’, Pedro Carmona, summoned media executives to Miraflores to ensure that opposition to the coup was not reported.

RCTV’s boss, Granier, denied he ever met Carmona during the coup, despite film showing his presence at Miraflores, and while Granier still refers to the junta leader as ‘President Carmona’, RCTV’s subsequent actions demonstrated that no instructions were necessary to keep it on message.

As Venezuelans took to the streets to demand the return of President Chávez, fighting the police and demonstrating at Miraflores in their thousands against the coup, RCTV, contrary to the constant coverage it awarded the opposition demonstration that led to the coup, intentionally blacked out this breaking news, and as RCTV production manager at the time, Andrés Izarra, later related, Granier himself ordered journalists ‘not to broadcast information on Chávez, his supporters or anyone connected to him.’

The Chávez demonstrators coming down from the poor shanty towns on the mountains above Caracas encouraged soldiers loyal to the president to take back Miraflores and arrest the junta. Helicopters were sent to the Caribbean island where the president had been kept prisoner, and barely 48 hours after the right had attempted to take Venezuela back to the military dictatorship of the Fifties, the coup had failed and Chávez had returned to an ecstatic welcome.

However, none of the resistance to the coup, the junta’s arrest or Chavez’s return could be seen on television screens. Amid the coup’s complete collapse, and on probably the most dramatic day in Venezuela’s recent history, RCTV was showing Warner Bros. Looney Tunes cartoons.

Other opposition media followed its lead. No rightist newspapers were printed or distributed the following day, but the leftist Últimas Noticias in Caracas told Venezuela what had happened, and the Chávista Panorama newspaper published four editions in 20 hours as its journalists reported on the coup’s stunning defeat.

It is not difficult to imagine that had CNN or the New York Times acted in the United States as RCTV had done in Venezuela, their executives would now be in Guantánamo, but President Chávez responded with restraint, imploring the media to think about the fascist nature of the junta it had supported: ‘Reflect a little, for God’s sake! It’s your country too!’

No journalists or media executives were jailed or persecuted after the coup, and once the opposition dominated Supreme Court declared that, in their opinion, ‘no coup had taken place,’ Pedro Carmona and other putchists were released, and the right once again went on the offensive against Chávez’s Bolívarian revolution.

Marcel Granier’s RCTV had abandoned any pretense at professional journalism, concerning itself with the political impact of its propagandistic ‘news’ broadcasts, rather than adhering to anything that resembled journalistic ethics. In all, five private television stations, reaching 90% of Venezuela’s viewers, and nine of the ten national newspapers, support the opposition.

Despite US newspaper editorialists claiming that the state is restricting criticism of President Chávez, it is clear to anyone who reads these newspapers or watches Venezuela TV, that the vast majority are implacably hostile to the revolution and critical of the president. There is no censorship, as there is in US client states such as Saudi Arabia, and journalists are not intimidated or assassinated as in México and Colombia.

US President Bush’s recent inaccurate claim that Venezuela has ‘repressive laws’ that ‘severely restrict the liberty of the press,’ hardly stands up to scrutiny, especially when, as Venezuelan Vice-President Jorge Rodríquez pointed out, ‘the only television channel closed down for political reasons during this Bolívarian administration was the pro-Chávez Canal 8 in 2002. It was taken off the air on the first night of the coup by Pedro Carmona’s fascist junta.’

The disproportionate criticisms have more to do with Chávez’s challenge to the unaccountable elite that clearly limits ‘editorial pluralism’ by using its ownership and control of the media to present its own privileged interests as those of all Venezuelans. Accustomed to operating their lucrative commercial television channels for decades without democratic oversight, this elite has come to believe this privileged position is their ‘right.’

Chávez has pointed out that broadcasting licenses are concessions, and are not granted in perpetuity. In fact, Venezuelan law and the Bolívarian Constitution confer certain responsibilities, such as ensuring the public receives ‘true and accurate information,’ on the media corporations that are granted these concessions, as does the respective media laws in the United States and most other countries.

RCTV’s concession to broadcast on Venezuela’s terrestrial Canal 2 frequency expires on 28 May. The government has decided not to renew RCTV’s concession, citing, among other crimes such as not paying taxes, the station’s failure to provide ‘true and accurate information’ during the 2002 coup, when its executives intentionally refused to report breaking news and critical information to the public and imposed its ‘cartoon blackout.’

‘This decision is an irreversible fact,’ William Lara, Venezuela’s Communications and Information Minister declared, ‘the Constitutional, legal and regulatory basis for the decision is solidly incontrovertible.’ For the first time in Venezuela, the privileged media elite has come up against a government that cannot be bought, bribed or intimidated.

Moreover, the Bolívarian revolution’s originality doesn’t stop with challenging elite interests. A new television service, Televisora Venezolana Social (Venezuelan Social TV or TEVES), will take over the Canal 2 frequency, Chávez has announced. It will be run by an independent foundation and have independent, community and alternative programming and participation, promoting Venezuelan film and program production.

Although the new TEVES station will initially receive government financing, which the British state financed BBC rather ironically claimed ‘might affect its independence’, it will not be required to broadcast government programmes such as Chávez’s ¡Alo, Presidente!, and it will be able to take commercial advertising to eventually allow it to be self financing.

Corporate media in almost all countries is often unresponsive, unaccountable and inaccessible, permitting virtually no popular participation in film production and programming. Venezuela’s attempt to start to democratize the broadcast media has been met with predictable criticism from that corporate media, who continue to insist that a tiny, wealthy elite — and not a democratic government elected time and time again with a massive popular vote — should have the right to control what is seen and heard on the airwaves.

As for Granier and RCTV, some in the opposition believe it is no loss to have the station lose its license. ‘RCTV wasn’t even good at propaganda,’ wrote one anti-Chávez columnist citing Chávez’s return after the coup and massive election win in 2006, ‘the point of giving up journalism is to increase the political effectiveness of what is broadcast, and on that score RCTV has certifiably failed.’

But all is not lost for the anti-Chávez opposition — RCTV can still broadcast on cable and satellite, and should there be news it doesn’t like, it will be free to black it out with as many Looney Tunes cartoons as it likes.

Sources

La no renovación de la concesión a RCTV es irreversible, Agencia Bolívariana de Noticias report in Aporrea.org, Caracas, 2 de enero de 2007

Bush critica restricciones a la libertad de expressión, headline report in El Nacional, Caracas, 4 de mayo de 2007

Publicados en Gaceta Oficial estatutos de Televisora Venezolana Social, Radio Nacional de Venezuela report, Caracas, 15 de mayo de 2007

El periodismo de Venezuela en 2002, Eleazar Díaz Rangel, Últimas Noticias report in BBC Mundo, Caracas, 4 de abril de 2007

Venezuela, National Endowment for Democracy report at grants/Venezuela, United States, 2005

RCTV: Censorship or broadcaster responsibility, PR Watch report, Center for Media and Democracy, United States, 19 January 2007

Not about free speech, George Ciccariello, Caracas report in Counterpunch, United States, 12 January 2007

The 47 hour coup that changed everything, Gregory Wilpert, Venezuela Analisis, United States, 13 April 2007

Chávez/RCTV: ¿censura o decisión legítima? Salim Lamrani, Progreso, United States, 7 February 2007

¿Una revancha política? article in El Espectador, Bogotá, 13 de mayo de 2007

Hugo Chávez, the media, and everybody else, Nicki Mokhtari and Larry Birns, Council on Hemispheric Affairs report, United States, 19 January 2007

US papers hail Venezuelan coup as pro-democracy move, report in Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), United States, 18 April 2002

Lara: Granier patea los derechos de los usarios, Prensa Ministro de Comunicación e Información statement on Aporrea.org, Caracas, 6 de enero de 2007

Media accused in failed coup, David Adams and Phil Gunson, St. Petersburg Times, United States, 18 April 2002

Las perlas de un fascista mediático, Lubriorama Stereo film, director: Luigino Bracci Roa, Venezuela, released: May 2007

Venezuela investiga el ‘Carmonazo,’ Carlos Chirinos, BBC Mundo, Caracas, 5 de octubre de 2004

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Bórd Scannán na hÉireann film, directors: Bartley and O’Briain, Eire, released: September 2003

Venezuela’s press power, Maurice Lemoine, Le Monde Diplomatique, París, August 2002.