COLOMBIA: Voters Expected to Back Uribe’s ‘Firm Hand’, Economic Achievements

By Constanza Vieira Reprint | | Print |

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, May 18 2006 (IPS) - The May 28 presidential elections in Colombia are looking more and more like a referendum on the administration of President Álvaro Uribe, who is slated to win a second term. Voters will also demonstrate on election day whether they want to see a continuation of his hard-line stance towards the leftist rebels, or are more inclined towards efforts to bring about peace talks.

Curiously, that dilemma has not been raised in opinion polls – or at least the results have not been released – as it has in the past when voters have been questioned as to their views on the best way to put an end to Colombia’s four-decade armed conflict..

If survey results turn out to be accurate, there will be no runoff election, and Uribe, a rightwing landowner who has declared all-out war on the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), will take 55 percent of the vote.

That would basically be a repeat of the 2002 elections, when Uribe avoided a second round by garnering 53 percent of the vote – amid an abstention rate of nearly 54 percent – on a campaign promise of defeating the FARC in two years.

Although four years later, the FARC continues to control as much as 40 percent of the country (mainly remote rural areas and villages), many of those who back Uribe argue that the government merely needs more time to show results in its war on the guerrillas.

“Uribe represents strong-arm tactics. So if people vote for Uribe, they’re voting for a ‘firm hand’ approach,” Ana Fernanda Urrea, an expert in political and electoral research, told IPS.

The president remains popular although his image has suffered somewhat from a major scandal involving allegations by judges and others that vote fraud provided a boost to Uribe in 2002, and that the DAS security agency had close ties with the paramilitaries and was involved in the murders of union leaders.

To judge by the latest door-to-door poll carried out in at least 30 of the country’s 1,098 towns and cities, not even an alliance of all of the other presidential candidates would be able to defeat Uribe, whose supporters won 70 percent of the seats in the Senate and a similar proportion in the lower house of Congress in March.

Uribe’s closest rival is former interior minister Horacio Serpa, of the opposition Liberal Party, who has only 15 percent poll ratings which, furthermore, are dropping.

The candidate for the leftist Alternative Democratic Pole is Senator Carlos Gaviria, a former president of the Constitutional Court, whose ratings – of just 13 percent – are on the rise.

The other candidates – former Bogotá mayor Antanas Mockus and former government minister Enrique Parejo – are polling below the margin of error.

Another former cabinet minister, Álvaro Leyva, who proposed a strategy to achieve a ceasefire in six months, bowed out of the race last Sunday, complaining about “intimidation” from authorities rather than protection.

“It is technically impossible to revert the current tendency,” said Urrea. “The opinion polls would have had to have been really poorly carried out,” as has occurred in other elections, although there was never such a huge gap between the front-runner and his nearest rival.

Nevertheless, “we don’t really know what exactly is going to happen,” said Urrea.

While the rural population “is still very much influenced by the old party clientelism and is afraid” of the illegal armed groups, “urban voters are much more apathetic, which is negative, but on the positive side, they are also much more independent.”

In the analyst’s view, Gaviria could turn in a surprise performance, because of the difficulties in accurately gauging voting intentions in Colombia’s large cities.

In January 2002, three years of peace talks between the FARC and the government of conservative president Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002) – currently Colombia’s ambassador in Washington – broke down.

At the same time that the Pastrana administration was engaged in peace talks with the FARC, it was drawing up Plan Colombia – a largely U.S.-financed anti-drug, and later counterinsurgency, military aid plan – in conjunction with U.S. officials.

While Plan Colombia was implemented in the first few years of the 21st century, the extreme rightwing United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC) – the paramilitary umbrella group – some of whose leaders are drug lords, blocked exploratory talks between the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the government.

The ELN is Colombia’s second-largest leftist rebel group, which like the FARC emerged in the mid-1960s.

Buoyed up by the fact that Colombian voters are sick and tired of the armed conflict, Uribe promised “democratic security.” Under this policy, networks of civilian informants have been set up to support the armed forces in their war against insurgents, and the security forces were granted police powers.

According to Uribe, his “democratic security” policy differs from the “national security doctrine” that led to widespread human rights abuses under dictatorships in Latin America during the Cold War era in that the entire population must actively cooperate with the armed forces and other authorities to defeat the “terrorists” – the term he uses for the guerrillas.

Although the government recognises that there is still a long way to go, official statistics reflect a significant reduction in the levels of violence, especially since the AUC declared a ceasefire in December 2004.

One of the results of the controversial closed-door negotiations between the Uribe administration and the paramilitaries, which are currently completing a “demobilisation” process, was that AUC leaders must now be more careful about committing crimes, because of the risk of being extradited to the United States, where several paramilitary leaders are wanted on drug trafficking charges.

During Uribe’s term, the number of kidnappings has been reduced by 73 percent, and the homicide rate fell 40 percent, according to official figures up to late 2005.

But some opinion polls indicate that the most pressing concern of voters is not the armed conflict, but their pocketbooks.

“According to the Gini coefficient (used to measure income inequality), the wealthiest 20 percent of the population receives 80 percent of national income, while the middle class is becoming increasingly impoverished,” economist César González, a former president of Colombia’s banking association, told IPS.

Perhaps the real secret of Uribe’s popularity lies in the fact that his term has coincided with a recovery of the economy after a crisis that broke out in 1998, under Pastrana.

During the crisis, businesses went under, private investment fell to seven percent of gross domestic product (GDP), emigration and unemployment soared, and the country’s human development level suffered setbacks, especially in 1998, 1999 and 2002.

The drop in household income during the crisis forced many parents to pull their children out of school, especially at the university level, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The economic rebound that began in early 2002 resulted in political capital for Uribe, who now boasts that GDP grew 5.75 percent in 2005.

As the president pointed out this week, private investment rose to the equivalent of 15 percent of GDP under his government. That figure includes the purchase of large national companies, like the Bavaria brewery, acquired by Britain’s SABMiller, or the Colombian Tobacco Company, which was bought by the U.S. Philip Morris.

Unemployment fell from 15.7 to 11.8 percent, although analysts note that the government modified the manner in which the rate is calculated. And while the underemployment rate rose to 36 percent in 2005, it has once again dropped to 29 percent, according to government figures.

Experts also say the government modified the way the poverty rate is estimated. Uribe reported that the proportion of the population living below the poverty line dropped from 60 to 49 percent during his term and the proportion living in extreme poverty from 20 to 14 percent.

Meanwhile, a free trade agreement signed with the United States in February, the text of which has not been made available to the public, delighted the productive sectors that will benefit but drew loud opposition from sectors that will be hurt, especially agriculture.

It has yet to be seen how Uribe’s chances for reelection will be affected by the line-up of forces for and against the free trade agreement with Washington.

Indigenous and campesino organisations held demonstrations and other activities around the country on Monday to protest Uribe’s reelection, the free trade deal with the United States, the civil war, the increased militarisation of the country, and the forced displacement that affects between two and three million Colombians, depending on the source of the estimate.

The groups demanded a negotiated solution to the armed conflict, and opposed the impunity enjoyed by the paramilitaries who have taken part in the disarmament process. They also called for the return of around four million hectares of land seized by the AUC.