Right exclusion

A pro-American president won in Colombia

In Colombia, the current head of state, 53-year-old Alvaro Uribe (pictured) , won the presidential election. 62% of eligible voters in the country of 44 million voted for his re-election. His opponent, Senator Carlos Gaviria, nominated by the leftist opposition, trailed by almost 40%. Gaviria's ratings dropped sharply during the election campaign after reports were published in the pro-government press that the left-wing President of neighboring Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, was allegedly financing the senator through dummies.

The vote showed that the population supports Uribe's tough course in solving two interrelated problems. The authorities have launched a battle against illegal paramilitary groups, which have killed more than 200 thousand people in 42 years of actual civil war, and the drug business in which these groups are involved. These include the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), whose ranks consist mainly of landless peasants raised in the traditions of Maoism, and the right-wing United Self-Defense Forces (USD), represented by landowners of various calibers.

A charismatic leader and brilliant speaker, Uribe, a lawyer by profession, began fighting drug trafficking in 1982 when he became mayor of Medellin. In 1983, his father, also a famous lawyer, who spoke out against the Medellin drug cartel, was killed. Uribe himself, first elected president in 2002, survived 18 assassination attempts. They were a consequence of the implementation of the “democratic security program”, which provides for the eradication of “narco-terrorism”, including through the creation of an agent network of a million informants. Over the past three years, the number of murders has halved. However, US intelligence agencies admitted that in 2005, clandestine coca production in Colombia increased by a quarter. Despite the fact that the United States, which considers Uribe its closest ally in Latin America, has invested about $4 billion in the anti-drug Plan Colombia.

“It is incorrect to define Uribe simply as a staunch ally of the United States,” Marina Chumakova, director of the Center for Political Research at the Institute of Latin America of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Vremya Novostei. “He is one of the few Latin American leaders who are pursuing effective policies that give people the opportunity to live more or less peacefully in their own country.” According to the expert, under Uribe’s predecessors, who flirted with the FARC, things got to the point where they seized more than half of the country’s departments and were even going to declare them “independent.” According to Ms. Chumakova, “the only one who is resisting the leftist threat to crush transnational corporations (TNCs) in the region is Uribe.”

Uribe combines the forceful suppression of “narco-terrorism” with statements of readiness to negotiate with any organization that has renounced terrorist activities. In March of this year, they announced the disarmament of 30 thousand OSS militants, who, as Marina Chumakova explained, used weapons “not against government troops, but to protect plantations and transport corridors for the export of coca from competitors.” The action had a propaganda effect ahead of the elections, in which parties supporting the president won 70 of the 102 seats in parliament. It was the support of the parliamentary majority that allowed Uribe to change the constitution last year in order to stand for a second term.

Uribe's re-election was greeted with relief in Washington. On the map of Latin America, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay and Chile, which have moved to the left, have already turned red, not to mention Cuba. Nicaragua may be added to them, where a legitimate return to power of Sandinista Daniel Ortega is not ruled out. Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, according to Marina Chumakova, cherishes a plan to surround Colombia with a “left ring.” Chavez and his Bolivian counterpart Evo Morales, who has already nationalized oil and gas multinationals in his country, openly support Ollanta Humala, a left-wing ex-lieutenant colonel who could be elected president of Peru, Colombia's western neighbor, in the June 4 elections.

The “leftward movement” of Latin America is a consequence of the failure of neoliberal reforms, which reflected in the 1990s the expectation that “America will open its arms and free its market for Latin American goods,” Deputy Director of the Institute of Latin America of the Russian Academy of Sciences Boris Martynov told VN. According to him, “now the poles of wealth and poverty are growing throughout the continent, and the middle class is eroding.” “Under these conditions, it is completely natural for the emergence of ideas related to a more or less radical revision of the neoliberal project, and the emergence of people who put these ideas into practice,” our interlocutor noted.

Alexander SAMOKHOTKIN