Choosing Legislators from Within Corridors of Fear
A war that goes on for 46 years — some would say over 60 years — gets tucked into all the most obscure tissues and corners and stories of a people. Its toxins surprise with surreal grotesquerie and impossible reasons. So in Colombia, our country’s "closest ally" in South America, where capitalism and competition have extended so far that purchasing and sale of kidnap victims and electoral votes have become signatures of a ruthless business sense. Where politics is a business.
I just returned from a two-week trip to Colombia as part of an international pre-electoral observation mission, in advance of March 14 Congressional elections, which will be followed by a presidential election on May 30. Just three months before Colombians elect a president, the incumbent front-runner — Álvaro Uribe Velez — has not yet declared whether he will run for a third term, which would require a constitutional amendment and a national referendum. The nation’s highest court is deliberating on whether the petitions and financing for such a referendum are legal. The uncertainty around Uribe’s candidacy has led the media to focus intensely on re-election, and neglect issues of debate for the Congressional campaign.
Our group of 22 people from seven countries fanned out in four groups to diverse regions, but we found remarkably similar practices. We talked with a range of political parties, election officials, social movement groups, organizations of people displaced by violence, journalists, and government officials, both elected and those from oversight agencies. Many people were able to tell us exactly how vote-buying and -selling works. If you are a community leader of a thousand people, a party may buy your votes, and the more votes you have to sell, the more you’re paid, per vote. The bigger the crime, the bigger the reward.
In many places our group visited, there is fear, and a wide distance between what ordinary people say and the discourse of government officials. The fear is located deep in the country’s emotional life, product of violence that has affected people throughout society. The city of Medellin, for example, had become the model for Uribe and Bush to bring U.S. Congressmen to show how far Colombia had come since the days of narco-capo Pablo Escobar murdering judges and setting off car bombs. But last year Medellin saw its homicide rate more than double, to some 2100 murders.
Medellin was also the site this month of the trial of soldiers for the 2005 massacre in the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó. A human rights attorney from the Judicial Freedom Corporation, CJL, with whom we work, and who has worked on cases involving the former Army commander, received credible information last week that a local armed group has been paid to kill him.
The generalized fear that we witnessed is a structural deterrent to the free debate necessary for democratic elections. If you are afraid what you say may offend an armed group, you’ll never touch a controversial issue. And if you can’t enter into substantive debate, why not buy and sell your political decisions? Political debate becomes a function of not only fear, but commerce.
We also heard people tell us that the national social aid agency, responsible for benefits for everyone from retired persons, to food for children, to those who are poor, to the country’s nearly five people displaced by violence, was telling residents in Medellin that if President Uribe is not re-elected, they would lose their benefits. Lately, as the prospects for changing the constitution to permit re-election have looked dimmer, agency officials have said that if Uribe’s protégé, ex-Defense Minister Juan Manual Santos, is not elected, they would lose their benefits.
It was our announcement on Monday of this alleged crime, known in Colombian legalese as "constrainment of the voter," that detonated a mini-scandal. The media attention so far is limited to Colombia. Maybe international media will pick up on the questions raised by these electoral issues, or maybe they’ll respond like a U.S. military officer with experience in Colombia to whom I commented that the process is corrupt. "What country in Latin America isn’t?" he asked me, as if to say, "So what?"
We did not go to Colombia to tell people that our system is better than theirs. Several Colombians commented on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to allow unlimited corporate contributions in political campaigns, something that is not legal in Colombia and that those who commented on it found offensive.
Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of an army-paramilitary massacre in the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó that took the lives of two families — including community co-founder Luis Eduardo Guerra, and three children aged 2, 6 and 11. They were killed with machetes, and dismembered. At the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s National Council meeting in Nyack, NY, we remembered the events as our team recounted them. Many are still seeking justice for the crimes committed. Memory of what happened supports that pursuit, and values the living community in San José that continues to work the land and advocate protection of campesinos in the area.
