By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Mar 13 2006 (IPS)

After a landslide victory in Sunday’s elections, allies of rightwing President Álvaro Uribe will hold 72 seats in the Senate, against the opposition’s 28. The social democratic Liberal Party suffered a resounding defeat, meanwhile, and turnout stood at only around 40 percent.

The Conservative Party, which immediately threw its support behind Uribe when he took office in 2002, will now be the second-strongest party in Congress

The president has the support of parties that now hold a majority in both houses of Congress, and are the first, second, fourth and sixth-strongest forces in the legislature: the Partido de la U, the Conservative Party, Cambio Radical and Convergencia Ciudadana, respectively. The ruling coalition is also made up of four additional movements.

However, voters punished several politicians whose names have been identified with the extreme-rightwing paramilitary groups, which are blamed for between 70 and 80 percent of the war crimes committed in Colombia’s four-decade armed conflict.

According to analysts, the low voter turnout and the fact that 13 percent of voters cast void ballots cannot be entirely attributed to the leftist guerrillas, although they fomented abstention.

The Liberal Party captured a mere 17 seats in the Senate, compared to the 30 it was hoping to win. The left, represented by the Alternative Democratic Pole, will have 11 senators in the next legislature, making it the fifth strongest force.

Referring to the elections of 167 members of the lower house of Congress, León Valencia, director of the Corporación Arco Iris, a non-governmental peace and development organisation that drew up a map of the influence of paramilitary groups on the elections, told IPS that “The power in the regions of people with ties to the paramilitaries is reflected much more strongly in the lower house than in the Senate.”

The Liberal Party (PL) and the Alternative Democratic Pole simultaneously held internal elections to nominate their candidates for the May presidential elections, in which Uribe is expected to win a second term.

Horacio Serpa, Uribe’s former ambassador to the Organisation of American States (OAS), who has a negative image among voters according to opinion polls, was for the third time elected as the PL’s presidential candidate.

The PL, one of Colombia’s two traditional parties along with the Conservative Party, is now headed by former president César Gaviria (1990-1994), who served as secretary-general of the OAS from 1994 to 2004.

Although Gaviria assumed responsibility for his party’s resounding defeat, he said “the paramilitaries and ‘easy money’ played an important role in the legislative elections.”

When Serpa and Gaviria were in the OAS, the regional body decided to send a mission to Colombia to monitor the controversial demobilisation of paramilitary groups negotiated with the Uribe administration, which has been criticised by human rights organisations as a de facto amnesty and a legitimisation of the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC) paramilitary umbrella group.

In the view of Iván Cepeda, spokesman for the recently created organisation Daughters and Sons for Memory and Against Impunity, “it is still early to reach a conclusion on whether or not the power of the paramilitaries shrank, was strengthened or remained steady (in the legislature). We have to wait to see how the voting went across the country.”

On Mar. 9, the Daughters and Sons human rights group issued a communiqué urging voters not to cast their ballots for 13 candidates with ties to the paramilitaries.

So far, “there are 17 or 18 legislators who come from forces” that would appear to be linked to the AUC, said Cepeda, who cited “suspicious-looking local alliances.”

In the Santo Domingo Savio slum neighbourhood in the northwestern city of Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city, paramilitary fighters who had taken part in the disarmament process were seen lining up outside a tent identified with the city government, where a campaign office of Senator Rocío Arias – an open admirer of the paramilitaries – and PL candidate Jorge Morales functioned unofficially.

The mother of one demobilised paramilitary fighter reported that the former paramilitaries had been “instructed to present 10 votes each” for Arias and Morales, Luis David Obando, director of public opinion in the non-governmental Popular Training Institute (IPC) – whose experts observed the elections in conjunction with representatives of the National University – told IPS.

This “shows that the disarmed paramilitary apparatus continues to have a grip on certain areas, and that its control must be effective, given that there were lines of demobilised fighters” outside of the campaign tent, said Obando.

Arias was defeated, while Morales won his seat in the lower house of Congress.

Arias was one of the 13 candidates included on the list put out by the Daughters and Sons for Memory and Against Impunity, only six of whom were elected.

“One of the important phenomena that must be highlighted is that voters punished those candidates who are recognised human rights violators or have been publicly identified with the paramilitary groups,” said Cepeda.

Among the candidates on the list who lost the elections were retired General Rito Alejo del Río, who is blamed by local communities along the Atrato River for implementing a combined military-paramilitary strategy in that northwestern region that included massacres and caused forced displacement of large numbers of people in 1997, according to the pre-election statement issued by the Daughters and Sons human rights group.

Also defeated were two other military men on the list, and the pro-Uribe candidates Eleonora Pineda, Muriel Benito-Revollo, and Vicente Blel.

Meanwhile, nearly one million voters, out of a total of 10.78 million, took part in the Alternative Democratic Pole primary elections.

In the race for the leftist coalition’s presidential nomination, retired judge Carlos Gaviria handily defeated his rival, former guerrilla fighter Antonio Navarro, a member of the demobilised M-19 insurgent group-turned-political party.

In Bogotá, traditionally a Liberal Party bastion, the PL was the loser, slipping to third place, while the Democratic Pole came in second, even though it governs the city.

When it became clear on Sunday night that Uribe was the big winner of the elections, he addressed his archenemy, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels, in an unusually calm voice, urging them to consider “the possibility of a serious and urgent peace process.”

A presidential campaign without mudslinging and “personal attacks” is the right route to follow, added Uribe, whose rivals will be Serpa for the Liberal Party, Gaviria for the left, and conservative candidate Álvaro Leyva Durán.

The president’s three challengers have a common position in favour of peace talks and a negotiated solution to the civil war.

No serious violence was reported Sunday, only 29 minor incidents. However, the entire Atlantic coast, as well as the southwestern province of Cauca, experienced power outages that affected the vote tally. But the government only blamed the guerrillas in the case of Cauca.

The most serious incident that IPS was informed of by social organisations in the oil-rich province of Arauca, on the border with Venezuela, was an attack attributed to FARC against a water pipeline in the town of Saravena, which left local residents without water, in violation of international humanitarian law.

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