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Colombia's democracy under threat
Viewpoint
Wednesday October 21st 2009
Rory Carroll reports from Colombia on supporters' attempts to change the constitution to allow President Alvaro Uribe a third term. Uribe is well-liked, but could be a threat to democracy
Wednesday October 21st 2009
President Alvaro Uribe. Photograph: Marcos Brindicci/Reuters
Colombia is running a rebranding campaign to convince tourists that the world’s former kidnap capital is now safe to visit. TV adverts show Bogotá boutiques, white sand beaches and smiling indigenous folk before a voice dipped in honey delivers the line: “The only risk is wanting to stay”.
It’s a clever campaign that works because the message is true. Colombia has become a safe and attractive destination for foreigners. Pablo Escobar is long dead and leftist guerrillas have been pushed deep into the jungle. Some 1.2 million tourists visited last year, double the number in 2002. Foreign investment has also jumped. It is an impressive turnaround for a country that once verged on being a failed state.
That line, however, has a darker meaning if applied to President Alvaro Uribe, now almost eight years in office; supporters are on the brink of changing the constitution to allow him a third term from next year. It was amended in 2006 to give him a second.
Uribe has been coy about whether he will seek election, but has done nothing to discourage his supporters’ constitutional moves.
The dilemma for Colombia is the risk to democracy if Uribe remains in power. Supporters say this idea is ridiculous. They believe the tough conservative leader saved democracy. He stood up to the Farc guerrillas, made the army strong and cities safe. He brought jobs, investment, stability. And Uribe is popular; polls predict a landslide if he is allowed to run next year. Supporters ask: what would be so bad about that?
Potentially, a lot. Under Uribe’s stewardship the country has made impressive gains. But scratch the surface of the shiny new Colombia and enamel flakes away. The president has centralised power and suborned institutions. For congress, the army and the intelligence services, all roads lead directly to the man in Casa de Nariño. Scandals have felled dozens of senior allies and officials – illegal wiretaps, bribes and links to narco-traffickers and paramilitary death squads. The army slaughtered hundreds of slum-dwellers and dressed their corpses up to look like guerrillas. And yet Uribe has emerged pleading innocence. The one institution that has maintained some independence is the supreme court, but it has faced repeated intimidation. Grant Uribe another term and judges may buckle.
With the media, Uribe is more thuggish and subtle than his neighbour and rival, Hugo Chávez. Venezuela’s president pulled the plug on critical TV and radio stations and created a sycophantic state media empire. Uribe has risked journalists’ lives by publicly accusing them of being terrorists, obliging them to flee before rightwing hit squads took the hint. “It was a threat made by the president on national TV,” said Hollman Morris, one of the reporters. The message to investigative journalists was clear, he said: expose wrongdoing by the state at your peril. Morris, speaking at a seminar in Bogotá, was mobbed like a rock star by journalists. He was a rare independent, outspoken voice.
Most of the other participants worked for three big media groups – El Tiempo, Caracol and RCN. They dominate news in Colombia and reflect an establishment line that muffles criticism of the president. Grovelling is less overt than Venezuela but self-censorship is rife. “There are lines we cannot cross,” said a radio reporter from Cali. A news editor from Medellín said: “We are living in a perfect civilian dictatorship.”
Uribe is not famous for charm. Once, aboard his jet, I asked questions that so agitated him he went purple and strained against the seatbelt.
The US regards him as a key ally, a bulwark against not just leftist guerrillas but South America’s anti-yankee tide. With US military and counter-narcotic officials no longer welcome in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela, the US wants greater access to Colombian military bases. But some Democrats, alarmed at murders of trade union leaders, have resisted a trade deal with Bogotá and opposed another term for Uribe.
Uribe took Afro-Colombian allies from Chocó, an impoverished coastal region of slave descendants, to Washington to bolster his case with black Democrats. They should have visited the swamps of Chocó. Security has improved – no recent murders, no burning villages. But it is a grim, neglected place. Poverty is extreme.
Government claims to have pacified the region aren’t true. Guerrillas are active in the highlands, and the lowlands are controlled by rightwing paramilitaries who quietly re-formed after a much trumpeted demobilisation. In towns like Vigia del Fuerte thousands of families live in shacks, too afraid to return to their farms, seized for palm oil plantations and protected by paramilitary thugs and government officials. “It’s not safe to go back,” said Arturo Moreno, forced off his land in 2002. He has no choice but to stay in the slums.
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