Although it was to be expected, former president Álvaro Uribe’s return to politics in Colombia has caused a stir and has a clear aim: to block two of his successor Juan Manuel Santos’s pet projects — reparations to victims of the armed conflict and the restoration of land to displaced peasant farmers.

Juan Manuel Santos explains his land restitution plan on Wednesday Oct. 20. Credit: Office of the Colombian President

“We have gone back to the simplistic formula of whether or not Uribe agrees,” columnist María Teresa Ronderos exclaimed, adding that “It’s as if Santos’s presidency had come to an end and his predecessor had come back, eager to take the reins.”

The same sense of bitter surprise was expressed by columnist Francisco Gutiérrez: “The eight-year ‘Uribista rumba’ is still marking its rhythm.”

And Gustavo Petro, the leader of the centre-left opposition party Alternative Democratic Pole, quipped “As far as I can tell, he hasn’t left.”

Surprising or not, Uribe’s reappearance on the public scene has an immediate objective: blocking two draft laws pushed by Santos since he took office on Aug. 7.

The laws would return to their original owners millions of hectares of land stolen during the armed conflict and pay reparations to victims of the war, regardless of who victimised them: the far-right paramilitaries, left-wing guerrillas, or government forces.

Uribe continues to insist on the same argument that he already used last year to sabotage an earlier draft law on reparations: that the victims of the illegal armed groups cannot be put in the same bag as the victims of the so-called “false positives” scandal — young civilians killed by the army and passed off as guerrilla casualties in the military’s counterinsurgency campaign.

The way things stand now, the families of the “false positives” victims will have to wait for a legal ruling before receiving any compensation at all.

But the bill that Santos personally presented to Congress — a sign of the importance he attaches to it — on Sept. 27 would compensate all victims.

With the same obstinacy, the former president is fighting a change that the government draft laws would introduce: in land dispute cases, the burden of proof of demonstrating ownership would no longer fall on the peasant farmers who were forcibly displaced, but on the current landowners, who would have to show that they legally acquired the land in question.

Under the present system, it is the displaced farmers, many of whom have no formal deed to the land that was passed down in their families for generations, who have to prove ownership.

Uribe argues that this aspect of the bill “could undermine investment in the countryside.”

Former senator Petro says the former president’s attempts to interfere with the land restitution and victims’ reparations bills are not the result of a personal crusade, but are ideological in nature.

“The extreme right, the hard core of ‘Uribismo’, is the political expression of ‘latifundismo’ (vast land tracts in the hands of a few) ready to sabotage the reforms, through a combination of all forms of struggle: political and violent,” he said.

This is only one of the difficulties faced by the flagship policy initiative of the government of Santos — a member of the former president’s right-wing Party of the U, and a former defence minister under his predecessor, who has been distanced however from Uribe, his mentor, since taking office.

The ambitious plan is looked at with scepticism by critics like former finance minister Rudolf Hommes (1990-1994). “These are just, popular measures, but fervour is not sufficient to implement them effectively, if funds are not available,” he argued.

The problem of funds becomes abundantly clear when taking into account the cost that full compensation to victims would entail, because merely handing back their land is not sufficient – the property must be returned free of debt. But the accumulated debts on the land claimed by displaced farmers amount to 188 million dollars.

Speculators and investors have come flocking, offering indebted displaced farmers a deal: they take on the debt, after purchasing the land at a low price.

In an attempt to fight this new land grab, Agriculture Ministry officials are facing down a powerful group of investors in the Montes de María in northern Colombia.

So far, peasant farmers have sold 75,000 hectares at an average of 275 dollars per hectare, which are resold by the buyers at 715 dollars per hectare. But the massive purchases have come under government scrutiny, in an attempt to prevent fraudulent transactions.

Sociologist and historian Darío Fajardo mentioned another serious obstacle: “As long as those who benefit from the present situation (the unequal distribution of land) and from the resources of the state continue to form part of the power structure, the concentration of property ownership will continue to expand.”

Fajardo, a former representative of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), was alluding to the large number of legislators who are landowners and who will stand in the way of any bill that threatens their interests or those of their friends.

One of the steps taken by the lawmakers was to combine the land restitution and victims’ reparations draft laws into one bill, which Petro said was a tactic aimed at hindering their passage.

In a laborious legal operation, the government has begun to track down and annul fraudulent land titles that had been issued with the support of judges, notary publics and land registry offices.

And to all of these difficulties is added another problem pointed to by Petro: although victims may get their land back, they will go under in two months because the current economic model does not favour food crops, but the large-scale production of biofuels.

The murders of 40 rural activists since 2002, who were fighting for the return of land to displaced farmers, are an alarm bell and an indicator of another hurdle, which Petro described as one of the tactics used by “latifundistas” or large landowners: the continued wave of violence.

Eduardo Pizarro, director of the government Reparations and Reconciliation Commission, said the situation was so bad it had been necessary to draw up a map of risks faced by people in 1,102 municipalities, where the restitution of land was a factor involved in the level of criminal violence.

The precedents for the current land restitution policy were premonitory: in the 1950s, attempts at land reform were drowned in blood.

What Santos is now trying to do raises fears of another violent backlash, because of the breadth of his aims, which would affect the land ownership structure.

“This would be the biggest leap made in overcoming poverty and inequality in decades,” Petro maintained.

According to the government, there will be a “reorganisation of the countryside” and “benefits for ethnic minorities” — indigenous and Afro-Colombian people who have often been forced off their land.

Although he has reservations, Fajardo admits that the changes that would be brought about by the land restitution and reparations laws would make property structures in the country more democratic.

Despite the obstacles that are emerging in the ambitious undertaking, the Colombian press has begun to highlight the government’s progress.

On Oct. 16, the front-page headline in the El Espectador newspaper was “Land Restitution Plan Underway”, with the article reporting on the return of 312,000 hectares to some 130,000 families.

Another paper, El Tiempo, reported that day that “300,000 hectares will be handed over to peasant farmers” in the next six months, when 130,487 families will receive title deeds to land that was being returned or distributed to them.

However, Agriculture Minister Juan Camilo Restrepo said the programme was moving ahead “at a snail’s pace.”

Three hundred thousand hectares are a drop in the bucket compared to the 4.5 million hectares that have been taken from peasant farmers.

Although many believe it’s a mission impossible, the Colombian government of Juan Manuel Santos is prepared to use all necessary resources to return their land to some four million peasants displaced by the war, and guarantee intensive use of the country’s arable land, as part of an ambitious agricultural policy.

Despite the enormous difficulties it faces, there are two reasons that make this policy one of the top priorities of the administration of conservative President Santos, who took office in August.

In first place, “it is an essential factor for growth and development,” as columnist León Valencia wrote in the El Espectador newspaper.

And secondly, it is a sine qua non for the success of any peace programme, in a country caught in the grip of civil war for nearly five decades. “The international community, United Nations agencies, the Organisation of American States — all are fully aware that this issue will decide the future of the country,” said Christian Salazar, head of the United Nations human rights office in Colombia.

Both economic development and peace become impossible dreams when they run up against the long-standing problems of land dispossession and heavy concentration of rural property in Colombia.

The resulting situation is clearly illustrated by the statistics: in 1984, 32 percent of the land was in the hands of just 0.55 percent of landowners, while 85 percent of the country’s farmers had less than 15 percent of the land.

And over the following 19 years, the imbalance grew. The number of large landowners shrunk while the land in their possession expanded. By 2003, 0.4 percent of landholders had 63.6 percent of the country’s farmland, while the proportion of small farmers rose to 86.3 percent, and their share of land plunged to 8.8 percent.

The new government’s proposals are aimed at redressing injustices. A bill on “land restitution” would require the current landowners to prove ownership by showing legal documents, and under another bill, the state would acquire land to be used immediately in the land restitution programme.

The coordination of these programmes with operations of territorial control is to guarantee the safety of peasant farmers. In recent years, 41 rural leaders involved in the struggle to reclaim seized land have been murdered.

But this is an old war. It appeared to be over when President Alfonso López Pumarejo (1934-1938 and 1942-1945) passed an agrarian reform law in 1936, which stated that private property had a social function to fulfill, and authorised the state to expropriate idle land. The law did not, however, actually manage to modify the structure of rural property.

Decades of violence stimulated a 1961 land reform, and in 1968 President Carlos Lleras Restrepo (1966-1970) pushed through an agrarian reform programme that was cut short in 1973, under the government of Misael Pastrana (1970-1974), by the Chicoral Pact, an agreement between the traditional parties and landowners’ associations that put an end to land redistribution efforts.

Since then, government policies have failed to modify the land ownership structure. And the mass displacement of peasant farmers over the past two decades, as they have been forced off their farms by far-right paramilitary militias and drug trafficking groups, has further aggravated the situation.

The power of the “terrateniente” or wealthy landowner has been respected by the authorities, but will now be confronted by Santos and Agriculture Minister Juan Camilo Restrepo.

The bill on land restitution has one novel aspect that is key to removing one of the biggest obstacles facing peasants in their struggle to reclaim their land: up to now, the burden of proof of demonstrating land ownership fell on the farmers who were forced off their land by violence, threats or deception.

But most poor campesinos do not hold legal title to their land, which has been passed down for generations.

The new law, by contrast, would require the current owners to prove that they legally acquired the land.

The second bill would speed up slow legal cases to allow the government to gain possession of some 130,000 hectares of land in the hands of drug traffickers who are currently facing prosecution or are in jail.

But the most difficult part of this complex, obstacle-strewn process is guaranteeing the safety of campesinos who dare to return despite the threats from new “owners” who back their shady claims to ownership with weapons.

Those who predict that the process will fail do so based on past and present events that show that any attempt at modifying the land ownership structure in Colombia leads to violence.

Salazar, the UN representative, is not optimistic: “It will be a very tough fight, and we can expect strong reactions.

“Above and beyond the political agreements reached and the specifics, we see implementation as the most complex aspect,” he said. “There will be a difficult phase of negotiations, characteristic of a democracy. But afterwards the law must be enforced, and from the experience of years we know that in the places where the greatest efforts are made to restore property (to the original owners), there is more violence, and the threats are constant.”

But Valencia wrote that “it is a condition for reconciliation. An agrarian programme was the banner waved by Manuel Marulanda (the leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or FARC, who died in 2008) to win thousands of campesinos over to the armed uprising of the 1960s.

“It was also the call to campesinos voiced by Father Camilo Torres, at the emergence of the ELN,” the National Liberation Army, the second-biggest rebel group, to which the columnist himself used to belong.

Santos’s agrarian reform policy has another aim: reduce the land dedicated to cattle ranching, which currently amounts to 38 million hectares. By the end of his four-year term, only 20 million hectares should be used for that purpose, according to Agriculture Minister Restrepo.

The other 18 million hectares should be under crop cultivation, which currently only takes place on 3.7 million hectares of land.

When the Colombian government announced in November that it had reached a deal to give the U.S. armed forces access to seven military bases, the news provoked surprise and protests, like when an unfair clause is discovered in a contract that was blindly signed.

Except that in this case, the Colombian people were not even aware that any agreement had been signed.

The opposition invoked article 173 of the constitution, according to which Congress must authorise the presence of foreign troops in the country.

But the government of former President Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) argued that it was a “simplified agreement” arising from the extension of a 1974 military treaty with the United States, and thus did not require congressional approval.

Opposition politician Carlos Gaviria, who is a former Constitutional Court magistrate, argued however that it could not be considered a “corollary” to a broader treaty, but was a treaty in its own right.

Analyst Hernando Gómez Buendía said the agreement “does not form part of the U.S. programme of military aid to Colombia, but represents the start of Colombian military aid to the United States.”

In the verdict handed down Tuesday, the Constitutional Court ruled that the deal is not a “simplified agreement” but a treaty that involves new obligations on the part of the Colombian state, as well as an extension of previous obligations, which means it has to be submitted to Congress for approval and reviewed afterwards by the Constitutional Court.

The Court thus struck down the agreement on the argument that it was unconstitutional.

But the government of President Juan Manuel Santos, who took office Aug. 7, may put the accord before Congress.

The magistrates listed some of the commitments undertaken in the agreement: it authorised access and use of military installations by foreign military and civilian personnel; allowed the free circulation of foreign ships, aircraft and tactical vehicles in the national territory without the possibility of inspection or oversight by national authorities; and authorised the carrying and use of weapons by foreign personnel in the national territory.

It also granted diplomatic immunity and privileges to contractors and subcontractors, and to people overseeing U.S. personnel, while setting vague time frames for the leasing of the bases.

The Uribe administration turned a deaf ear towards the complaints of other South American nations and the protests of many Colombians.

The verdict, which was written by Judge Jorge Iván Palacio, referred to the concerns, fears, protests and arguments that had been set forth, such as the worry that the agreement would shift the balance of power in the region.

The main effect of the Court decision is that it strengthens Colombia’s relations with the rest of the region.

When the countries of South America expressed their concern as a bloc that U.S. access to the seven bases posed a threat, Colombia became the most isolated country in the region.

Despite the Uribe administration’s attempts to ease the worries of its neighbours, the bases were seen as a platform that would allow the United States to keep a close eye on the nations of South America.

The government’s promise that U.S. forces would only use the bases to fight “drug trafficking, terrorism and other threats” failed to convince, especially after Colombia’s March 2008 bombing attack on a Colombian guerrilla camp across the border in Ecuador, in which U.S. military technology was used.

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa believes a U.S. plane and other technology as well as advice allegedly used in the attack on the FARC rebel camp came from the Manta air base on Ecuador’s Pacific coast, which was leased to the United States from 1999 to 2009.

Opponents of the bases say that if it needs to carry out counter-narcotics actions, the United States already has the Tres Esquinas and Larandia bases in southwest Colombia and the Arauca base in the northeast, as well as the network of radar stations installed after the U.S. military forces pulled out of Panama in 1999.

The terms of the treaty, read closely by presidents in neighbouring countries, are not reassuring. The objectives mention the fight against “terrorism” — without defining the term — as well as continued impunity for regular officers and troops operating at Colombian bases.

These aspects, seen from the outside, made Colombia look like a servile ally of the United States, in an agreement running counter to regional security and to the new foreign policy focus of the countries of Latin America.

Just as the Aug. 10 agreement between Santos and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez to renew ties between the two countries cleared up relations with one of Colombia’s biggest trading partners, the Constitutional Court ruling may help clear up tension with other countries in the region.

The treaty was an attempt by the Uribe administration to draw the United States further into the armed conflict with the leftist guerrillas. Referring to the rebels as “terrorists,” when U.S. President George W. Bush (2001-2009) had called on the entire world to get involved in the “war on terrorism,” was one of the tactics aimed at reaching that objective.

The terminology used by the government to describe the leftist insurgents — “communists”, “drug traffickers”, “appalling crimes” — was aimed at “selling” the war against the guerrillas to the United States.

The U.S. military technology and presence worries governments on which the resource-rich Amazon jungle depends. The loud protests against the military base agreement voiced by Chávez were partly motivated by fears of what would happen to Venezuela’s Orinoco heavy oil belt.

The Court’s ruling that the accord is unconstitutional helps ease such concerns and is seen as good news by the governments of Colombia’s neighbours.

The Ecuadorean public recalls the Manta air base for the hundreds of conflicts generated by the U.S. military in their relations with the native population.

There were attempts to calm fears that such conflicts would be multiplied by a factor of seven in Colombia, with promises that the U.S. troops would not enjoy impunity from prosecution.

But the situation is quite complex: the United States has 735 bases around the world, and each one is a potential source of conflicts with the local population, which, if they were handled in accordance with the laws of each country, would completely undermine the constitutional duty of U.S. authorities to protect their citizens.

The Constitutional Court verdict also helps ease the humiliating sensation of seeing U.S. military personnel get off scot-free or, at the most, be tried in the United States.

But there is no need to get ahead of ourselves. President Santos, who helped draft the agreement as Uribe’s defence minister, may still submit it to Congress, where he has a healthy majority. Uribe would have done so.

Twenty-three African palm plantation owners, who invested 34 million dollars in Colombia up to 2003 and have spent another 15 million dollars on a palm oil refinery, are soon to be sentenced by a court.

Military checkpoint on the Atrato River. Credit: Jesús Abad Colorado/IPS

They are charged with, the forcible displacement of 5,000 small farmers and invasion of 100,000 hectares of land that is legally the collective property of Afro-Colombian communities in the jungles of Chocó, a province in the northwest of the country.

Lawyer Carlos Merlano, one of the accused, who works for the Urapalma company, agreed to plead guilty to the charges against him and testify against others involved, in exchange for leniency.

The case would be just another land dispute, but for the involvement of the army, notary’s offices, state bodies and even the Agriculture Ministry.

With the country’s attention focused on the actions of president-elect Juan Manuel Santos, this case has hardly been noticed, and yet it is part of the legacy of outgoing President Álvaro Uribe which the new government will have to deal with when it takes office in August.

The prosecution accuses leaders of ultra-rightwing paramilitary groups such as Freddy Rendón (alias “El Alemán”); a woman called Sister Teresa Gómez; and a palm plantation owner from Antioquía, a province bordering Chocó, Rodrigo Zapata, of colluding in crime for profit.

Thirteen years ago, some 5,000 black and mestizo (of mixed indigenous and European descent) small farmers fled from their homes and lands as a result of a terror campaign waged by 80 paramilitaries who went from farm to farm announcing: “We need your land. Sell up and leave; if you don’t sell, your widow will.”

The operation was commanded by paramilitary leaders Carlos and Vicente Castaño, two brothers who own Urapalma – one of the nine companies involved in an agro-industrial project to convert the extensive and fertile lands between the Atrato and Murindó rivers into plantations devoted to the production of biodiesel from palm oil.

The paramilitary offensive to take over the land did not stop at threats. Crops were destroyed, homes were burned and community leaders who protested and tried to organise resistance were killed. These actions were supported by the army.

Investigations in the area by prosecutors and non-governmental organisations, on which the verdict of the Constitutional Court will be based, describe paramilitary checkpoints that were set up close to those manned by the state security forces, where any small farmer could be detained on suspicion of collaborating with leftwing guerrillas or belonging to the Communist Party.

Paramilitary groups were organised to fight the guerrillas who took up arms in 1964 and had moved into these regions.

Accusing a small landowner of collaborating with the guerrillas was enough to make him a military target.

General Rito Alejo del Río, now serving a prison sentence for murder, ordered the bombing of the Cacarica river area in the north of Chocó in 1997 “to fight subversion”, which together with harassment from the paramilitaries provoked the displacement of the black community.

Between 2001 and 2005, the prosecution documented 15 mass displacements, 13 of which were attributed to the paramilitaries, one to the guerrillas and one to the army.

The prosecution and officials of the Colombian Institute for Rural Development (INCODER) found that contracts and titles for these lands are full of irregularities, such as falsified public documents.

Prosecution investigators were surprised to find that a 2000 sales contract for a property of 5,890 hectares had been signed by a man who drowned in the Jiguamiandó river in 1995.

The Agriculture Ministry encouraged these agro-industrial projects by granting generous loans for land purchases and infrastructure for extensive plantations.

Through state agencies like the Autonomous Regional Development Corporation for Chocó and INCODER itself – which is now under judicial investigation – officials in charge of assessing loans granted state funds to companies owned by paramilitaries.

Companies owned by Vicente Castaño were granted 2.8 million dollars from agencies like the Financial Fund for the Agricultural Sector (FINAGRO) and the Agrarian Bank, and three of the nine companies under investigation received over 6.8 million dollars.

Protests by non-governmental organisations and community councils to bodies like the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) set the wheels of justice in motion.

The cause of the Afro-Colombian communities of Jiguamiandó and Curvaradó has been taken up by the IACHR, the Inter-Church Justice and Peace Commission, the Catholic diocese of Quibdó (the capital of Chocó) and the Administrative Court of Chocó.

In December, the Administrative Court gave the government a deadline of one month for the palm growers to vacate legally protected territories.

Complying with the court order, the Interior Ministry prepared to hand over the land to a local management board that was supported by only four community councils out of 24. The remaining councils denounced this board as a front for the palm plantation owners.

The Constitutional Court vigorously opposed the land management board about to be installed by the Interior Ministry, and ordered another board that would safeguard the rights of the black communities.

So far, this conflict has not been included as part of the new government’s programme. But it will have to be addressed, as it is part of the legacy it will inherit.

Few doubt that former defence minister Juan Manuel Santos will be the next president of Colombia, and that he will continue the policies of President Álvaro Uribe. Santos, as Uribe’s heir, will basically be more of the same.

The legacy of the right-wing Uribe, who has governed since 2002, is described in starkly black and white terms, and is seen as a blueprint for the next four years, after the Jun. 20 presidential runoff election.

Although she is a staunch critic of Uribe, political analyst Claudia López admitted that “He is leaving behind a better country than the one he found in 2002, when the guerrillas seemed invincible and violence was at a record high level in Colombia.”

But, she added, “This was at the cost of weakening virtually all of the country’s institutions.”

Colombia has been in the grip of a civil war since 1964, when the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrillas rose up in arms. The far-right paramilitary groups emerged in their present form in the 1980s, to combat the leftist insurgents alongside the government forces.

This South American country is the top supplier of drugs to the United States — the world’s single biggest market for drugs — and the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid, after Israel and Egypt.

Columnist Juan Carlos Botero offered a summary of what Uribe has achieved: he demobilised the paramilitary militias, backed the FARC into a corner, revived the economy, and curbed kidnappings, massacres and attacks by armed groups on towns and cities.

In fact, Uribe is reaching the end of his second term with popularity ratings of over 70 percent.

But on the other side of the equation, Botero listed a number of scandals: over the so-called “false positives” — young civilians killed by the army and passed off as guerrilla casualties in the military’s counterinsurgency campaign — and over the government’s Agro Ingreso Seguro (stable farm income) programme, under which some of the country’s largest landholders received millions of dollars in subsidies.

Other scandals have involved bribes to legislators, ties between pro-Uribe lawmakers and the paramilitaries, and years of spying on human rights defenders, opposition politicians, journalists and even Supreme Court judges by the domestic intelligence agency that operates directly under the authority of the president’s office.

The writer also pointed to the country’s international isolation as a result of human rights abuses and the various scandals, and to the constant rifts between the government and the judiciary.

When Santos argues why voters should cast their ballots for him next Sunday, he talks about safeguarding Uribe’s legacy and the “indisputable progress made in terms of boosting security, social coverage and investor confidence.”

But those who know him say Santos did not spend his whole life preparing himself to become president just to play the part of a docile heir apparent.

The direction that Colombia will take over the next few years should be examined in juxtaposition to the personality of the man expected to become the next president, after taking 46 percent of the vote in the first round on May 30, compared to 21 percent for his nearest rival, Antanas Mockus of the Green Party.

At the age of 14, Santos stated that he wanted to become president; at 16, bucking the trend among his generation, he enrolled in the naval academy. He studied economics and business administration at the University of Kansas and went on to earn master’s degrees at the London School of Economics and Harvard.

Disciplined and single-minded, and with a reputation as an experienced and no-nonsense decision-maker, he served as foreign trade minister (1992-1994), finance minister (2000-2002) and defence minister (2006-2009).

With his tough exterior, he sacked 27 army officers — including three generals — over the “false positives” scandal, and was a constant presence in photos and television coverage of military successes against the guerrillas.

Santos has promised to generate more formal sector jobs, in a country with an unemployment rate of over 12 percent — higher than the South American average of eight percent.

He also says he will create no new taxes. But economists point out that he would be taking over a country with a budget gap. “The government has a hole equivalent to five percent of GDP,” said the dean of economy at the University of the Andes, Alejandro Gaviria, a former government director of planning.

Another of his campaign pledges is emergency programmes to assist and foment employment among young people.

Listening to Santos’s list of campaign promises during a recent debate, his main rival Mockus, a two-time former mayor of Bogotá, merely responded “And where’s the money?”

The opposition’s wariness has been further fueled by observations that six of Santos’s 10 specific campaign pledges are slightly modified versions of the Green Party’s initiatives.

Columnist William Ospina wrote that the elections represent merely a replacement of one caste — wealthy rural landowners, like Uribe’s family — by another — prominent urban families, like Santos’s.

What will undoubtedly be kept alive by Santos, according to Ospina, is Uribe’s “democratic security policy,” under which “the theft of land, forced displacement, espionage, killings with state weapons, subsidies to the privileged, and scandalous levels of poverty have prevailed.”

Colombia is one of the 13 countries in the world with the largest gaps between rich and poor, according to the Gini index, which measures income inequality.

Forty-six percent of the country’s 42 million people live below the poverty line, according to official figures.

Those who back Santos believe in the “governability” that having a majority in Congress will give him, and that his economic policy will reflect his personal generosity.

That generosity was described by his long-time domestic employee, Mónica Martínez. After Santos and his brother Enrique won the King of Spain International Journalism Prize in 1985 while writing for the El Tiempo newspaper, owned by their family, they played cards to see who would get the money.

When Santos beat his brother, he stood up and handed the entire amount to the family’s maid, so she could buy a house of her own.

The death threats against Catholic priest Javier Giraldo painted on walls in the Colombian capital may have come from far-right paramilitaries, the military, drug trafficking gangs or groups with interests in African oil palm plantations.

Jesuit priest Javier Giraldo. Credit: Jesús Abad Colorado/IPS

Nor can it be entirely ruled out — even if it is a remote possibility — that they were spray-painted by left-wing guerrillas. After all, the first people killed in the San José de Apartadó Peace Community, which Giraldo supports, were slain by a faction of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) that dominated that part of the northwestern province of Antioquia.

Despite the powerful enemies he faces, Giraldo, a dedicated human rights defender, refuses police bodyguards. Besides his total distrust of anyone who carries a weapon, Giraldo has said he could not bear it if someone else were injured or killed during an attempt on his life.

His distrust of armed groups was accentuated when he began 15 years ago to advise and support 600 rural families who had settled a strategic spot in Urabá, a resource-rich Caribbean coastal region of Antioquia.

The bishop of the local diocese, Isaías Duarte, warned them: “You will be expelled from here because this is a corridor of war.”

The families were living along a route to the gulf of Urabá, on the border with Panama — a strategic drug, arms and contraband smuggling route.

Back then, in 1995, the military offensive to push them out of the region had already started. The bishop, who was murdered in March 2002, advised them to declare themselves a peace community.

In March 1997 they did so, in the presence of international observers. The community declared that they did not support any side in the armed conflict, and would not allow anyone carrying weapons to enter their territory.

They immediately drew the ire of the guerrillas, the paramilitaries and the army alike. And big agribusiness interests, egged on by the negative propaganda against the community, began to see them as a subversive group with ties to the leftist insurgents.

Giraldo and the organisation he founded, the Inter-Church Justice and Peace Commission, have been outspoken critics of military and paramilitary abuses in Colombia’s nearly five-decade armed conflict, which is largely rooted in disputes over land and the heavy concentration of land ownership.

According to a 2002 Colombian government study, 61 percent of the country’s arable land was in the hands of 0.4 percent of all landholders, while 57 percent of landholders were peasant farmers who owned only 1.7 percent of the land.

Although land reform was outlined in a law passed under President Alfonso López Pumarejo (1934-1938) and implemented under President Carlos Lleras Restrepo (1966-1970), large landowners have consistently fought and undermined such efforts.

In San José de Apartadó, Giraldo clearly saw the power of the oil palm business which, in alliances with the military and paramilitaries, drove local peasants away to seize their land.

As the families fled the intimidation and violence, huge bulldozers came in to destroy everything, even the cemeteries. “The people who came back after six or seven years didn’t recognise their land, which was crisscrossed by irrigation ditches,” the priest said in an interview for this article.

“In a small town called Santa Lucía I tried to find the cemetery, but everything had been demolished,” he added.

Another problem that emerged was corruption in the army, which had ties to the paramilitaries and was often at the service of the oil palm growers.

“The connection between the army and the paramilitaries was very obvious. General (Rito Alejo) del Río’s Genesis plan had been drawn up with an eye to local populations where the guerrillas might have an influence,” Giraldo said.

Operation Genesis was designed to pacify Urabá “by fire and sword” in 1997, leaving dozens dead and thousands displaced.

At the start, San José de Apartadó was a bastion of the left-wing Patriotic Union and Communist Parties — support that Operation Genesis was designed to castigate.

But in Giraldo’s view, the biggest weakness of all is the inoperative justice system.

“With the idea of not allowing abuses to go unpunished, because impunity breeds repetition, a large number of lawsuits were brought, and I gradually discovered that justice in Colombia is merely testimonial,” he said.

“They told me, bring the witnesses, and I convinced many peasants to testify. And after they gave their testimony, they were killed,” the priest said.

He then turned to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Under the pressure exerted by the regional court, 10 members of the military are about to be sentenced for the February 2005 killings of eight adults and three children in the San José de Apartadó Peace Community.

After the killings, right-wing President Álvaro Uribe ordered a police unit to be stationed in the middle of San José de Apartadó, despite the community’s protests.

When the first police vehicles showed up, the families fled with whatever belongings they could carry, to a plot of land along the road where they had their community crops and gardens.

They set up shelters in the area, which little by little, with the aid of European governments and NGOs, has turned into the village of San Josesito de la Dignidad.

Paramilitaries, some of whom were accused of taking part in the murders, have moved into the old community of San José de Apartadó. Bars, shops selling contraband merchandise, and guns have made their reappearance in the village.

Local media outlets report that in the 13 years since San José de Apartadó became a model of civil resistance, 197 members of the community have been killed and hundreds have been tortured, forcibly disappeared and displaced.

Giraldo’s solidarity with the peasant farmers and his outspoken opposition to the human rights abuses and crimes explain the threats.

“At first I was afraid, but now the threats have become routine. And besides,” he responded calmly, “when you compare it to what so many people have gone through, you see they are suffering much more.”

Colombian presidential candidate Antanas Mockus of the Green Party has been gaining as many as 10,000 new fans a day on Facebook. From just 200 friends at the start, he now has more than 450,000.

Poster on Facebook page. Credit: Antanas Mockus campaign

But his popularity is not limited to social networking sites. This week, he surpassed his main rival, former defence minister Juan Manuel Santos, becoming front-runner in the polls for the May 30 presidential elections.

Occasional and diehard bloggers expand on what is reported in newspapers and magazines in Colombia and elsewhere. Influential columnist Daniel Coronell wrote in Semana magazine that “a government of Antanas Mockus and the Greens would not look anything like what we have seen before.”

In an article in the Colombian daily El Tiempo, Uruguayan columnist Laura Gil compared her country’s newly inaugurated charismatic leftwing president José Mujica with Mockus, when the Colombian candidate says he wants to be president “so there will be less suffering and more happiness.”

After studying Mockus’s campaign messages, José Fernando Isaza, rector of the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University, concluded that in a government led by the former mayor of Bogotá (1995-1997 and 2001-2003), political opponents would not face persecution, the slogan “life is sacred” would be respected, and public funds would not be used to buy support.

Whereas anger against the leftist FARC guerrillas helped put rightwing President Álvaro Uribe in office in 2002 and keep him there in 2006, it is now bitterness over the scandals and missteps that have tainted the government and its allies that would appear to be driving Mockus’s campaign, which is based on promises of a break with the recent past.

Mockus, a mathematician and philosopher of Lithuanian descent, appears to be the embodiment of the rejection of Uribe’s political practices and the promise of a very different kind of politics.

After trailing other candidates, Mockus overtook Uribe’s former defence minister Santos in the polls this week for the first time.

According to a poll conducted by Ipsos-Napoleón Franco, a local polling company, 38 percent of respondents said they would vote for Mockus, compared to 29 percent support for Santos. And in the Jun. 20 runoff that will be held if no candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote, the Green Party candidate could take 50 percent, versus 37 percent for Santos, the pollster found.

In a Gallup poll, meanwhile, Mockus had 47.9 percent support in an eventual second round, against 42.2 percent for Santos, who represents the governing Party of the U.

As support for Mockus has grown, Uribe accused the candidate of being a threat to the continuity of his “democratic security policies” — which embody his government’s hardline approach in Colombia’s armed conflict — because of the alleged weakness of the former mayor’s stance towards the FARC.

When Uribe first took office, in August 2002, the insurgents fired rockets at the presidential palace in Bogotá, which was governed at the time by Mockus.

But when Uribe’s accusation against the former mayor was reported, TV stations dusted off recordings of a ceremony in which the president himself decorated Mockus for his achievements in the area of security.

The president, however, continued his line of attack, referring in another speech to what is needed to beat the insurgents, and saying “lame horses” would not be able to do the job — a clear allusion to the news reported by Mockus two days earlier, that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

The Colombian press attributed Uribe’s reaction to the government’s jitters over Mockus’s unexpected rise in the polls.

But the candidate’s openness and transparency in revealing his disease seems to have outweighed the concerns, and he has continued to gain fans in Facebook and support in the polls.

Mockus looks like the consummate anti-politician. When announcing his candidacy, he took many by surprise by saying “if you are going to vote for me, but are not doing so out of conscience, then you shouldn’t vote for me. Vote for whoever your conscience tells you to.”

In an Apr. 19 debate with the five other presidential candidates, Mockus was asked whether he would bomb a neighbouring country in circumstances similar to the Mar. 1, 2008 incident when the Colombian army launched an air attack on a FARC camp across the border in Ecuador, killing FARC’s international spokesman Raúl Reyes and 24 other people.

Mockus responded emphatically that he would respect the constitution and international treaties signed by Colombia, and that if necessary he would turn to the international courts — showing the audience that he was a candidate of a different stripe.

His words have come as a refreshing change in a country that has witnessed the use of the power of the state to spy on and discredit opponents, as in the scandal over the domestic intelligence agency DAS’s wiretapping of journalists, politicians and even Supreme Court justices; the use of vote-buying and threats by armed groups to influence election results; and the use of slanderous insinuations designed to pressure judges and magistrates.

Mockus and two other former Bogotá mayors — Enrique Peñalosa and Luis Eduardo Garzón — formed a team and ended up joining the Green Party.

After an innovative campaign in which all three set aside their personal ambitions for the good of the whole and acknowledged and supported the qualifications of the others while urging people to choose whoever they liked best, Mockus was elected as the Green Party candidate in an open primary on Mar. 14.

The other two immediately threw their weight behind him, and former Medellín mayor Sergio Fajardo joined up as Mockus’s running-mate after abandoning his own independent presidential candidacy.

For the members of the Green Party ticket, education is an obsession. They make a unique pair: both are mathematicians and former mayors — academics-turned-politicians.

Academia is seen as a pacifying element in today’s civil war-torn Colombia — a peaceful power in the midst of a scenario of political parties weakened and tainted by scandals over ties to paramilitaries and drug traffickers and a lack of an opposition capable of awakening any degree of enthusiasm in voters.

The pessimistic believe the old practices will win out, pointing to the Mar. 14 legislative elections, when the Organisation of American States observers’ mission reported vote-buying and intimidation by illegal armed groups in several provinces.

But a growing green tide hopes otherwise.

The front-runner in the polls for Colombia’s presidential elections, Juan Manuel Santos, has come under fire from his rivals for his role in the scandal over young civilians killed by the army and passed off as guerrilla casualties, which broke out while he was defence minister.

Juan Manuel Santos with President Álvaro Uribe. Credit: "Santos Presidente" campaign web site

“All you have to do is look at the statistics: the period when the highest number of non-combat killings was…when Santos was minister,” the opposition Liberal Party’s presidential candidate Rafael Pardo said in early March.

Santos, who was defence minister from July 2006 to May 2009, is the candidate backed by right-wing President Álvaro Uribe, in office since 2002.

The scandal, which broke out in September 2008, led to the removal of three generals and 24 other officers and noncommissioned officers, as well as the November 2008 resignation of then army chief Gen. Mario Montoya, regarded as one of the promoters of the so-called “body count” system, which used incentives like weekend passes, cash bonuses, promotions and trips abroad to reward soldiers and officers for “results” in the counterinsurgency effort.

The magnitude of the phenomenon was such that more than 60 prosecutors have been assigned to the nearly 1,300 cases involving the murders of over 2,000 civilians – including 59 minors and 122 women – who were presented as battlefield casualties.

This South American country has been in the grip of civil war since 1964, when the left-wing FARC and ELN guerrillas rose up in arms. The far-right paramilitary groups that emerged in the 1980s to combat the leftist insurgents alongside the government forces remain active despite the reported demobilisation of tens of thousands of their numbers between 2002 and 2006.

The “false positives” story was first reported by the press in September 2008, when a human rights official in Soacha, a vast shantytown in the hills on the southwest side of Bogotá, denounced that the bodies of young men who went missing from the neighbourhood in January of that year had appeared in a morgue in northeastern Colombia.

According to one description, a short, dark-skinned, robust young man with a military-style haircut had recruited them to travel to faraway jobs.

The recruiters targeted young men – manual labourers, students or the unemployed – between the ages of 17 and 32 in different parts of the country.

Forensic exams showed that the young men from Soacha had died between 24 and 48 hours after leaving their neighbourhoods or towns.

“Those boys died in combat; the troops found them as part of intelligence operations,” said Gen. Paulino Coronado, the army commander in the northeastern province of Norte de Santander.

But the prosecutors found the army’s arguments unconvincing, because it appeared impossible for the young men to have travelled so far and engaged in armed combat so soon after they left their homes or workplaces.

The explanation was as illogical as the image of one of the bodies that was exhumed: a young woman wearing shorts and tennis shoes, who according to the army had been killed in combat.

The initial doubts about the military’s explanations arose from the short lapse of time between the victims’ departure from Soacha and their deaths.

The number of victims quickly grew, from the original 11 to 19 just one week after the first media reports. And on Sept. 27, 2008, the El Tiempo newspaper reported that the office of the public prosecutor was investigating 400 cases in which hundreds of active and retired members of the security forces were implicated in non-combat killings.

But despite the magnitude of the accusations, then defence minister Santos claimed he knew nothing about the killings.

A week after the discovery of the first bodies was reported, he said in an army officer promotion ceremony: “I have a hard time believing it’s true.”

“We prefer a demobilised combatant to a captured one, and a captured one to a dead one,” he stated at the time. “There will be zero tolerance for this kind of action.”

A year later, the public prosecutor’s office was preparing to bring charges against two colonels, one major and 43 rank-and-file soldiers for charges like aggravated murder, conspiracy to commit crimes and forced disappearance.

But the killings have not come to a halt.

After President Uribe said in March that “this kind of killing is not occurring any more in Colombia,” the Jesuit Centre for Popular Research and Education (CINEP) reported that between November 2008 and December 2009, there were nine reported cases of “false positives”, as the civilians passed off as battlefield casualties are known.

Accused and hassled by his political adversaries, Santos will have to explain the implementation of “directive 024” issued in 2005, which established incentives for members of the army based on the number of “positives” or casualties in the counterinsurgency war.

The minister eventually ordered then army chief Gen. Montoya to visit the military divisions to warn that the body count system “is not valid in the war the Colombian state is waging against the illegal groups.”

The system of incentives created by the 2005 directive had not been used by Santos’ predecessors in the Defence Ministry.

Former defence minister Marta Lucía Ramírez (2002-2003), who originally planned to run in the May 30 elections, said Santos was trying to pass off the body count system as an older practice: “When I was minister, the combat deaths system was eliminated, at my express insistence.”

Pardo, meanwhile, also a former defence minister, said “Santos has to assume responsibility, because this happened under his nose, and he has no explanation as to why he did not control it, why it kept happening, why it was a systematic practice. He has to be investigated in connection with this.”

Even Santos’ campaign chief, Rodrigo Rivera, said a year ago that “political responsibility cannot merely rest with the military; that is, the defence minister must be held accountable, so that he knows that whether or not he remains in his post depends on putting a halt to these incidents.”

The tension generated by the accusations prompted Uribe to attempt to come up with an explanation, as columnist Ramiro Bejarano, an outspoken government critic, wrote in the El Espectador newspaper on Mar. 28.

“A strange version came from Uribe, according to whom a witness that he met with in the United Nations offices informed him that the people responsible for the ‘false positives’ were drug traffickers who had infiltrated the 15th Mobile Brigade in Ocaña,” Bejarano wrote.

Uribe has come out in defence of Santos, the candidate for the president’s U Party.

But the question of the “false positives” could have a serious impact on the former defence minister’s presidential aspirations.

During Sunday’s legislative elections in Colombia – in which rightwing President Álvaro Uribe’s allies were the big winners – polling stations in one-third of the country’s municipalities were at risk of violence, corruption or fraud, according to the ombudsman’s office and election observers, who reported vote-buying and pressure on voters.

Jorge Rojas, president of the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (in foreground). Credit: Constanza Vieira/IPS

Some of the public were also alarmed at the appearance of the National Integration Party (PIN), a reincarnation of the National Democratic Alliance (ADN) party, which was banned by the electoral court due to irregularities.

The organisers of the controversial ADN are in prison or under investigation for their ties to the far-right paramilitary militias, which are accused of heavy involvement in the drug trade as well as appalling human rights abuses in this South American country that has been in the grip of an armed conflict since 1964.

The legislative polls drew attention worldwide not only because they were seen as an indication of voter intention for the May elections – in which Uribe would have won a third term hands down, according to opinion polls, if the courts had not thwarted attempts last month to modify the constitution to allow him to stand again – but also because of scandals that have surrounded Congress for years.

As an editorial in the El Espectador newspaper put it, “Over the last eight years, Congress has been caught up in the worst crisis in its history.”

There have been corruption scandals involving legislators swapping votes for government contracts or public posts, as well as the so-called “parapolitics” scandal in which one-third of the members of Congress have either been arrested or investigated since 2006 for alleged ties to the paramilitary groups.

According to a report by the Bogotá think tank Corporación Nuevo Arco Iris, 13 of the candidates on the electoral list of the U party are currently under investigation in the scandal, as well as 11 from the Conservative Party, six from ALAS and five from Radical Change – all of which form part of Uribe’s governing coalition – and five from the opposition Liberal Party.

Despite the legal prosecutions, many politicians have found a way to maintain their influence through relatives or friends who act as their front men.

Controlling Congress through others is an old practice that was used by druglords like the late Pablo Escobar (1949-1993) of the Medellín cartel, Gilberto and Miguel Rodríguez of the Cali cartel, and paramilitary chief Salvatore Mancuso, who shocked the country when he boasted that the paramilitaries controlled 30 percent of Congress.

The Rodríguez brothers and Mancuso are in prison in the United States, to which they were extradited along with other paramilitary chiefs on drug trafficking and money laundering charges.

Columnist Hernando Gómez Buendía said the next president would basically be picked in Sunday’s elections, in which the big winner was the U Party, led by former defence minister Juan Manuel Santos.

The U Party’s strong showing Sunday prompted Santos, the poll favourite for the upcoming presidential elections, to declare that “Today the U party has won – the party of President Uribe.”

According to government spokespersons, the elections were the smoothest and calmest in 30 years.

But foreign observers reported that vote-buying and fraud was as bad as, or worse than, in the last elections. They also denounced undue pressure on voters, such as the threat of blocking poor voters’ access to health care if they did not cast their ballots for a given candidate.

When the election results began to trickle in, there were celebrations in a number of prison cells in Colombia. Álvaro García, a former senator sentenced last month to 40 years in prison for ordering a 2000 massacre of 15 peasants in the northern town of Macayepo, made sure he will continue to be active in politics in his region through his sister Teresita García, who was elected to Congress Sunday.

Other newly elected legislators are the wife of a former governor who was sentenced to seven years in prison; the son of an imprisoned lottery businesswoman charged with murder and money laundering; the political partner of a congressman; and the cousin of a former senator who is on trial.

In short, the two parties with the largest number of legislators in prison or facing prosecution were the big winners Sunday.

The U Party won 27 seats in the 102-member Senate, while the Conservative Party took 24. The two parties also garnered the largest number of seats in the 166-member lower house: 44 and 47, respectively. Between them, the two main ruling parties won over 50 percent of the seats in both houses of Congress.

As a result, over the next four years, Uribe will enjoy a stronger political influence than any of his predecessors did.

Sunday’s results also indicate that the phenomenon of “parapolitics” – the alliance between political and paramilitary leaders – is alive and well.

The non-governmental Electoral Observers Mission (MOE) denounced widespread vote-buying and fraud, including scholarships in exchange for votes, ballots cast using the identity cards of people who have been forcibly disappeared, or people voting with other people’s IDs.

And according to the head of the Organisation of American States (OAS) election observers mission, Enrique Correa, in the northern town of Magangué, votes were paid for at the polling stations.

Now that the governing coalition’s hold on power was strengthened in Sunday’s elections, there are no guarantees that these corrupt practices will disappear.

To judge by the outcome, the link between the drug mafias and paramilitaries and success at the polls was strengthened.

By contrast, election platforms offering a chance for change fared poorly on Sunday: the leftwing Alternative Democratic Pole will now have eight senators, instead of 10.

And presidential candidate Sergio Fajardo, a former mayor of Medellín, saw his hopes buried in the polls.

Those who are pessimistic over Uribe’s continued influence are starting to look to the Green Party, now that former Bogotá mayor Antanas Mockus (1995-1997 and 2001-2003) won the party’s primaries – the only sign of change on Sunday.

“Displaced from democracy”

On Saturday Mar. 13, 200 people from the southwestern department of Nariño, on the Pacific coast, were fleeing harassment by Los Rastrojos, a paramilitary group.

Do those displaced by the war effectively have the right to vote?

“In January and February, 3,300 people were displaced, especially in the Pacific coast region,” Jorge Rojas, president of the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES), a prominent local human rights group, told IPS. “These were massive displacements of people pushed out by paramilitary groups. These people aren’t even thinking about the elections – they’re focused on surviving.”

The government acknowledged that at least 54,000 internally displaced persons had difficulties voting.

Colombia has one of the largest populations of internally displaced people in the world, numbering nearly five million according to CODHES.

“The displaced, because of their situation, are not only displaced by the armed conflict, but would appear to be displaced from democracy. There are no guarantees for them to participate in elections,” said Rojas.

* With additional reporting by Constanza Vieira (Bogotá).

What would have happened in Colombia if the financing of former president Ernesto Samper’s (1994-1998) election campaign by the Cali cartel had not been uncovered?

Last cover of Cambio news magazine. Credit: Revista Cambio

What would things be like if the scandal over the links between rightwing politicians and the far-right paramilitaries had been swept under the rug by Congress?

And if the existence of hostages (like Ingrid Betancourt) held by the guerrillas had never been reported, and the country remained indifferent to their plight – would everything be the same today?

Many Colombians have been asking themselves such questions since the recent announcement of the closure of the influential weekly news publication Cambio – to be turned into a monthly general interest magazine – and the dismissal of its two top editors.

Cambio was well-respected for its investigative journalism, with each edition reporting on scandals and wrongdoing in this South American country that has been in the grip of an armed conflict for nearly five decades.

In 1995, Cambio journalist María Cristina Caballero reported that the Cali cartel had distributed “Samper for President” T-shirts during the Liberal Party candidate’s campaign.

That was the thread that led to the unraveling of the scandal over the millions of dollars that the Samper campaign received from brothers Gilberto and Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, the heads of the Cali cartel.

Over the years, Cambio magazine has kept many people from turning a blind eye and has prevented the cover-up of many a scandal.

But in recent weeks, the publication’s investigative reporting drove the circumspect officials at the Foreign Ministry to distraction by revealing details of the deal under which Colombia agreed last year to grant the United States the use of seven military bases.

The magazine also broke a scandal implicating former agriculture minister Andrés Felipe Arias, who is close to rightwing President Álvaro Uribe, in the handout of farm subsidies to wealthy business families, under the government’s Agro Ingreso Seguro (roughly, “stable farm income”) programme.

The programme enabled the government to distribute millions of dollars over the last three years to some of the country’s largest landholders who have made sizeable contributions to Uribe’s campaigns.

In 2006, Cambio magazine, which has been published since 1994, was sold to the Casa Editorial El Tiempo, Colombia’s leading media conglomerate, in which Spain’s Grupo Planeta – the Spanish-speaking world’s largest publisher – holds a controlling interest.

“There were members of the board (in Cambio) who thought so much investigative reporting and denunciations were not a good idea,” said the magazine’s chief editor, María Elvira Samper, who was laid off. “I think the irritation with the editorial line and the worries about profit margins coexisted.”

In the statement announcing the decision to basically close the magazine, the Casa Editorial El Tiempo said the “business model” had been exhausted, and the publication was not bringing in the expected profits.

But Samper and Cambio director Rodrigo Pardo, who was also dismissed, cited first-hand data to show that the magazine was doing just fine.

“A profit was turned in 2009, and for 2010 (advertising) sales already exceeded 1.5 billion pesos (750,000 dollars),” said Pardo.

“It is not to be credited that an organisation like El Tiempo would have to close a magazine that was generating profits,” he added.

To say that the Santos family, which historically owned the Casa Editorial El Tiempo and now shares control with Grupo Planeta, has close ties to the government would be an understatement. Francisco Santos is vice president, and Juan Manuel Santos served as defence minister from 2006 to 2009.

“What they are punishing and shutting down are Cambio’s investigations of public figures close to the government,” wrote columnist Héctor Abad.

Another public figure close to Uribe, former presidential adviser José Obdulio Gaviria, called Pardo a “chief of the bigornia”, an outmoded term that basically means “criminal” or “no-good.”

The “silent operation” to close down the news magazine involved two stages.

At noon on Wednesday, Feb. 3, two executives, Luis Fernando Santos and Guillermo Villaveces, called Pardo and Samper into their offices to inform them of the decision to turn Cambio into a monthly general interest magazine.

The news magazine was to come out for three more weeks before Samper and Pardo would be let go and other staff changes would be carried out, and the new editorial guidelines would go into effect.

The two chief editors began to work on the next edition, in which they planned to inform their readers of the reasons for the magazine’s transformation into a monthly entertainment publication and of the impact of the decision on journalism in Colombia.

But their work was abruptly cut short on Monday Feb. 8, when a new resolution by the board made Samper and Pardo’s dismissal effective immediately.

Many believe the weekly news magazine is being shut down in punishment for its reports on not only the Agro Ingreso Seguro farm subsidies scandal, but also on the so-called “false positives” – young civilians killed by the army and passed off as guerrilla casualties in the counterinsurgency war – and the illegal wiretapping of opposition politicians, activists, journalists and even Supreme Court judges by the DAS, Colombia’s main intelligence agency, as listed by columnist Alfredo Molano (see sidebars).

“Journalism that investigates, that asks questions and does not yield to pressure is a threat to the state of opinion that they want to impose on us,” wrote columnist María Jimena Duzán.

Criticism was also sparked by the editorial position voiced by Grupo Planeta chairman José Manuel Lara, who said “today, an editor goes to ask people what they would like to read, and then seeks out the qualified specialist who can give them what they want.”

That clashes with Pardo’s reference to “journalism’s social responsibility with respect to democracy and fomenting public debate.”

Others have pointed to the awkward relationship between journalism and the profit motive. “There were too many business deals in the middle of all of this,” Abad wrote, noting that Grupo Planeta is reportedly awaiting government approval for the purchase of a third TV station in Colombia.

Cambio’s disappearance as a serious news magazine is regrettable “when the country needs more, not fewer, spaces for debate, and when it needs free media outlets,” wrote columnist Santiago Montenegro.

In the view of journalists, what happened to the magazine is a sign of the growing corporate control over the media and news in general.

* With additional reporting by Constanza Vieira and Helda Martínez.

The latest killings of Awá Indians in southern Colombia – 12 members of a family, including four children and three teenagers –, the forced displacement of hundreds of native villagers, and death threats against indigenous leaders and teachers are signs indicating that their demand to be considered neutral in the armed conflict is still being ignored.

The Aug. 26 murders were preceded by the killings of at least 17 members of the Awá community in February by the left-wing FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrillas, and by death threats against Indigenous Unity of the Awá People (UNIPA) leaders.

Some become obstacles for the armed groups, as awkward witnesses. That was the case of Tulia García, one of the Aug. 26 victims, who had seen armed men detain her husband Gonzalo Rodríguez on Aug. 23 and later found his body, with shots to the head.

According to a statement by Human Rights Watch, “Colombia: Investigate Massacre in Southern Region; Possible Army Involvement and Effort to Eliminate Witnesses in Killings of 12 Indigenous People”, García had accused the army of killing her husband.

The Awá collectively own the land and rivers in the Gran Rosario reservation or “resguardo” in the southwestern province of Nariño, a place of strategic value for the armed groups. They also have strong boys and young men that the armed groups recruit, against the wishes and cultural values of their families.

The Awá are intimately familiar with the region, but refuse to serve as guides for any group that carries weapons. Like other indigenous communities, “they are opposed to any form of violence,” as missionary Antonio Baraín explains.

Any of these reasons, or all of them together, could be the explanation for the murders of the Awá. And any of the armed groups, or all of them, could have been their killers.

So far this year, 10 different waves of forced displacement have brought hundreds of people to the Pacific port town of Tumaco, in Nariño, near the Ecuadorean border.

In June, 517 people fled to the town from villages in the area, and 1,062 did so in July and August, according to a statement by the Catholic diocese of Tumaco. Meanwhile, the recruitment of minors by armed groups has increased.

A total of 62 teachers are facing death threats, 14 of whom have fled the region, and 173 people have been murdered this year, according to the forensic institute – or more than 260, according to the local diocese.

Fifty forced disappearances have been reported this year. And based on reports of common graves, authorities from the attorney general’s office and the forensic institute are seeking remains along the Chagüí River, in the villages of Candelilla de la Mar and La Guayacana, and in the area along the border with Ecuador.

In June, the corpses of seven people killed three or four months ago in La Guayacana were brought into the morgue.

The statistics reflect a region at war.

Caught in the crossfire of the various armed groups, the aim of the Awá indigenous people is to be left alone. The FARC and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN), far-right paramilitaries, drug trafficking gangs and army are all active in the area.

With a gesture of indignation, Oscar Ortiz, secretary of UNIPA, said “all of the armed actors are in the region, and they are all murderers.”

Like indigenous communities and other groups around the country, the Awá have tried to remain neutral in a conflict not of their making, but have ended up as victims.

In September 2002, the press in Colombia covered an “uprising” by the people of El Charco, also in Nariño, against a group of paramilitaries who had seized control of the town a year earlier. The natives finally got fed up with the abuses and shows of force and, armed with sticks and machetes, forced the paramilitaries to leave. In the fight, one paramilitary was killed and four were wounded.

Two months earlier, local residents had stood up to the guerrillas in the Guambiano indigenous reservation in the neighbouring province of Cauca.

In response to death threats against indigenous mayors, the Guambiano responded with sit-down vigils and rallies to back up local functionaries acting in the name of Colombia’s indigenous authorities. “Threatening a mayor is not only an attack on the state, but is also an interruption by force of a process of which we all form a part,” said one of the local authorities.

Despite the risks, the indigenous people insisted on confronting the guerrillas unarmed. “Indigenous resistance does not consist of a show of force, but cohesion,” said a local anthropologist.

It was that common front that convinced the insurgents to temporarily pull out of the area. A month later, the guerrillas laid siege to a nearby municipality, Jambaló, whose local indigenous council had approved resolution 007, in which its 13,000 inhabitants declared “civil resistance.” And in the face of the threats from the leftist rebels, they announced: “Your weapons will not be met here with violence, but will be met by guards watching over their people, armed only with staffs representing their authority.”

More effectively than by taking up arms, the Guambiano have attempted to distance themselves from the conflict by refusing to cooperate with any armed group.

That is the same policy followed by the Paez Indians, also from Cauca, who in July 2003 did not hesitate to defy the guerrillas who kidnapped Swiss citizen Florian Arnold Benedite, head of “Manos por Colombia” (Hands for Colombia), a non-governmental development foundation that works in that area.

Some 2,000 unarmed indigenous people surrounded the spot where seven FARC combatants were holding Benedite and Paez leader Ramiro Pito. Their unity, strength in numbers, opposition to the conflict and demand to be respected as non-combatants did more than weapons could have done, and secured the captives’ release.

Non-indigenous peasant farmers have also followed the path of nonviolence and civil resistance in the face of armed groups, even the army. The best-known case is that of San José de Apartadó in the northwestern province of Antioquia, which declared itself a “peace community” in 1997, but with less success.

More than 100 people in the community have paid for their decision to remain neutral in the conflict with their lives.

The most recent massacre in San José de Apartadó, where eight adults and three children were killed in February 2005, had clear similarities with the Aug. 26 murders of the 12 members of the Awá family. Members of the army – three officers and 12 non-commissioned officers – as well as paramilitaries were charged with the murders in March 2008.

Like the peasants in the peace community who said “no” to all of the armed groups, the Awá had become an “estorbo” – a Spanish term used by the indigenous leader Ortiz when referring to the Aug. 26 murders, which means “nuisance,” “hindrance” or “obstacle.”

While the street sweepers clean up huge piles of rubbish in the Tercer Milenio park in the centre of the Colombian capital, young police officers have been posted there to prevent any more people displaced from their rural homes by the armed conflict from trying to camp there.

For four months, more than 5,000 people took refuge in makeshift tents and shelters in the park – an area of 16.5 square kilometres that had been recuperated by the Bogotá city government and transformed into a beautiful public park.

The sea of improvised shelters turned it into a sea of poverty and unmet needs, just a few blocks from the presidential palace and city hall.

The newspaper headlines about the removal of the displaced families referred to it as an eviction or “recovery” of the park, while emphasising the agreement reached with the leaders of the protest camp.

But the seemingly endless procession of people carrying mattresses, pots and pans and other utensils, bundles of clothing, wooden stools, old TV sets and the odd piece of furniture caught on film by the TV cameras looked no different from the all-too-familiar scenes of families displaced from their homes, except that this time it happened in the very heart of the Colombian capital.

When displaced families occupied the San Francisco church, also in central Bogotá, four months ago, they eventually left as the result of an agreement reached with the authorities. The same thing happened when they abandoned their camp in the Plaza de Bolívar. And there were talks and promises again on May 26, when 850 displaced persons exchanged their tents in the Tercer Milenio park for spots in temporary shelters and the offer of 400 jobs.

On Aug. 3, the rest of the families left the park with a bit of cash from the government and a commitment that it would invest nearly three million dollars in productive projects.

The occupations of the church, the public square and the park were held to demand government assistance for their plight.

But their prior experiences indicate that a real, in-depth solution to their problem is still a distant prospect. Their departure from the park demonstrates, to those willing to see it, the impotence of the government’s social policies and the limitations of its flagship “democratic security” policy.

Weak social policies

The phenomenon of forced migration in Colombia has existed since the Spanish Conquistadors arrived in the 16th century. Local historian Hermes Tovar describes the Colombian population as in a state of constant flight, forced off their land by warring factions or by the state security forces.

Another historian and sociologist, Darío Fajardo, identifies three waves of forced displacement over the last 110 years. At the start of the 20th century, the Thousand Days War (1899-1903) between the opposition Liberal Party and the government in the hands of the Conservative Party turned Colombia into a country of people fleeing their homes – the first wave.

In the second wave, between 1946 and 1966, two million people – one-fifth of the population – were forced to abandon their homes due to renewed fighting between supporters of the two parties. During that time, Bogotá became a city of migrants: 71 percent of the male population had come from outside of the city, according to the 1964 census.

The third, which began in the 1990s, has been caused – like the previous waves – by criminal gangs, warring factions, and government forces.

According to the Bogotá Health Secretary, between 30,000 and 50,000 displaced persons flood into the city every 24 hours – people forced to flee their home provinces by the far-right paramilitary militias, the left-wing guerrillas, the army, drug gangs and other forms of organised crime.

This has given rise to a new class of more than four million people in this country of 40 million – rural workers and small and even medium-sized farmers stripped of their rights, as French researcher Daniel Pécaut has pointed out, saying the problem in Colombia today is that those displaced by the war have nowhere to go.

The Constitutional Court upheld that view when it received more than 1,150 complaints and requests for writs of protection from displaced families.

The judges were fully aware that the legal complaints represented just the tip of the iceberg. No one knows exactly how many people have fled, leaving behind their land and belongings under the threat of violence. Nor is it clear who has lost exactly what. The lack of coordination between government officials, agencies and institutions had made the legal action brought by the 1,150 families ineffective, and it was clear that the problem had gotten completely out of the government’s hands.

That outlook formed the backdrop to a landmark 2004 Constitutional Court ruling and 50 other legal decisions that have followed it in the last five years, all of them aimed at enforcing the rights of internally displaced persons.

Democratic security

The families forced to leave the Tercer Milenio park on Aug. 3 were probably not familiar with that history.

“Public policies on the displaced have been implemented not out of political will, but due to judicial orders, because the government is generous towards investors, banks and companies, but too weak to provide reparations to the victims,” said Jorge Rojas, head of the non-governmental Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES), the entity that has most closely followed the phenomenon of forced displacement.

Some of the families who had taken refuge in the Tercer Milenio park made use of the agreement with the authorities to get free bus tickets back to their home villages or towns, carrying the cash from the government in their pockets.

Families with one or two members received just over 250 dollars, and those of five or six members were given around 800 dollars.

But the stories of those who have returned home have usually borne very little resemblance to their hopes or dreams.

According to statistics presented at an international seminar on forced displacement in March, only 16 percent have dared to return home, and they did not find suitable conditions.

An investigative report by columnist Claudia López clearly showed that the displaced have good reason to be afraid to return home: the armed groups who took over their property continue to control their land, and government protection is so inadequate that the few who do return merely relive the nightmare and are expelled again, or seek refuge elsewhere, in a few cases in shelters offered by the government in scant restitution for what the war has taken from them.

In the 1960s, it went by the name of Latin American Security Operation, or Plan LASO; today it is known as Plan Colombia. Back then, the aim was to weed out communism; now it is to combat drug trafficking, while at the same time dealing a blow to the guerrillas.

But at that time or today, the interests of the United States are at stake, although the killing takes place in Colombia – whether in the fight against communists, guerrillas, drug traffickers, or all of them together.

In May 1964, the teletype machines were clicking as a United Press International (UPI) cable arrived from Washington about “a group of special forces technicians of the United States Army…sent to Colombia with (the) purpose of instructing soldiers and police in counter-guerrilla tactics.”

The advisers formed part of a campaign started by President Alberto Lleras (1945-1946 and 1958-1962) and continued by his successor Guillermo León Valencia (1962-1966).

The UPI cable goes on to say that “one of the principal tactics employed in the counter-guerrilla operations was the implementation of psycho-warfare which brought about the cooperation and trust of the indigenous population.”

The tactics used in the June 1964 attack on Marquetalia, a remote mountainous region in central Colombia, left no doubt as to who provided the advisers and training for the Colombian troops that, commanded by Colonel José Joaquín Matallana, started their offensive by dropping leaflets from the air urging local peasant farmers not to support the guerrillas.

At the same time, loudspeakers from helicopters blasted messages calling on local residents to support the army, and announcing the imminent fall of the communist leaders operating in the region, who founded the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) – the main rebel group today – that year.

A few days later, the bombing and machinegun fire began in areas where the communists were reportedly hiding. Shortly afterwards the helicopters brought in troops. As FARC founder Jacobo Arenas later recalled, 800 airborne troops were flown in and began to take control of the highland area, in combination with troops who were advancing on the ground.

The tactics, similar to those used in the Vietnam war (1964-1975), were coordinated from Neiva, the nearest large town, by U.S. military advisers.

According to then president Lleras, the country needed the help, due to the inadequate training of Colombian troops and the magnitude of the communist threat.

Today, Colombia is the third-largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world, after Israel and Egypt.

That was then, this is now

Trying to play down the significance of the Colombian government’s decision to give the U.S. Department of Defence access to between three and five military bases – the number is not yet clear – government spokespersons have said in the last few weeks that it is merely an extension of Plan Colombia, the anti-drug and counterinsurgency strategy financed by Washington since 2000 – which is partially true.

Over the last 50 years, the U.S. military presence in Colombia has taken on different shapes and gone through different phases, but it has remained steady.

After a Colombian Battalion took part in the Korean War (1950-1953), this country’s commitment to the fight against communism became irreversible. Successive governments and the army were involved in the U.S.-led defence of the continent against the “communist threat” until a new danger emerged: drug trafficking. With the same enthusiasm, they aligned themselves with the U.S. in the fight against the drug traffickers.

Colombia became a U.S. military objective after several developments coincided.

One was a confidential memo from Peter Bourne, special adviser on drug abuse to President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981), which charged that prominent politicians, including Liberal Party President-elect Julio César Turbay (1978-1982), had connections to the drug trade.

The left-wing Colombian magazine Alternativa went even further, portraying Turbay on its cover as a Mafia boss.

The influential U.S. magazine Esquire reported that even high-level Colombian officials were involved in the trafficking of marijuana.

It was also reported that thanks to surveillance flights by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), under Operation Stopgap, the U.S. Coast Guard was intercepting Colombian shipments of marijuana at sea.

To that was added pressure from Carter and then DEA Administrator Peter Bensinger, who in the name of Colombia’s “national security” raised the need for counter-drug military action.

The U.S. military or police presence has been a constant factor in the Colombian army’s involvement in the fight against drugs.

It has also been a factor in the campaigns for the eradication of coca and poppy crops by aerial spraying of herbicides, and in the fight against nationalistic opposition to the extradition of Colombians to be tried on drug charges in the United States. A record number of 800 people were extradited during the two terms of current right-wing President Álvaro Uribe.

At other times, the U.S. military presence had to do with the installation of radars, nominally to carry out surveillance of drug flights, but actually to gain effective control over the airspace from strategic points.

Direct actions

To these forms of influence are added different operations, like naval manoeuvres with which the U.S. navy and air force make their presence felt around the world.

President Virgilio Barco (1986-1990) complained about anti-drug manoeuvres in Colombian waters by the nuclear cruiser USS Virginia and the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy, which caused tension with the administration of George Bush (1989-1993).

Shortly before that incident, then Defence Secretary Richard Cheney (1989-1993) declared the war on drugs a “high-priority national security mission.”

Then Attorney General Dick Thornburgh said at the time that the United States was prepared to send troops to Colombia, if the Barco administration requested it.

The Colombian newspaper El Espectador reported on Feb. 10, 1989 that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) would create specialised anti-drug commandos.

Former Los Angeles County District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi went so far as to write that invasion was not only a right, but a duty because of the threat that the drug trade posed to U.S. sovereignty.

Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich seconded the idea of invading countries with serious drug trafficking problems. At a congressional hearing in October 2000, Republican Congressman Dan Burton of Indiana said “Colombia’s fate is a national security threat to the United States.” Against that backdrop, the scandal that broke out in 1994 when U.S. marines disembarked and built a school in Juanchaco, a fishing village on Colombia’s southwest Pacific coast, was at the very least overblown.

When U.S. resources and advisers shifted their focus and instead of going after drug traffickers began to pursue guerrillas, the U.S. military presence in Colombia took on new connotations.

As clearly stated by former Colombian Foreign Minister Alfredo Vásquez in 1991: “The military assistance is aimed at fighting the guerrillas.”

More dramatic evidence of that was when FARC insurgents shot down a small plane in February 2003 transporting U.S military contractors who were carrying out surveillance in a rebel-controlled area. The three were held hostage in the jungle until their rescue in a July 2008 army operation.

U.S. military action in Colombia has gone beyond more limits than are readily apparent. The United States government has demanded legal immunity for U.S. military personnel, obtained information that it has not shared, caused mistakes like a bombing of civilians in Candelaria in the north of the country, and is now jeopardising this country’s relations with the governments of neighbouring countries.

The negative reaction by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and others to the announcement that the U.S. would be given access to Colombian military bases did not receive any reassuring response, but only a vague promise by Uribe that they would only be used to go after “drug traffickers” and “terrorists.”

In his report to Congress, the Colombian president tried to calm worries over the decision. But neighbouring countries and Colombians who have followed with concern the foreign armed presence in their national territory for half a century are anything but calm.

Colombian journalist Hollman Morris phoned an international news agency and said in an agitated voice: “I am being followed by the police.”

As he left his apartment on the north side of Bogotá, he saw a police car on the other side of the street; when he reached his parents’ apartment a few minutes later, to drop off his kids, another car was parked near the building.

And when he reached the spot where he was planning to meet with this reporter, a third car with plainclothes police officers made it clear to him that orders had been given to follow him.

Ten days earlier, President Álvaro Uribe had publicly accused Morris of being an accomplice of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) because of his newspaper coverage of the release of a group of kidnapped victims by the insurgent group.

A few weeks later, Morris commented in a meeting of journalists on the “chilling” discovery of a dossier in his name that had been kept for some time by the Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS) – Colombia’s domestic secret police service, which answers directly to the office of the president – when its offices were searched on orders from the attorney general’s office in the midst of a scandal over widespread illegal wiretapping.

The file contained photos and information on his parents, siblings, wife and children, and on his day-to-day movements, with a level of detail that reminded those looking at it of the thorough investigations carried out by hired killers while planning their hit jobs.

Morris is one of the reporters who was targeted by the DAS, which illegally eavesdropped on a wide range of opponents of the right-wing Uribe administration. Searching through DAS computers, investigators from the attorney general’s office found that the secret police had intercepted the phone calls and e-mails of Supreme Court justices, opposition lawmakers, reporters and even the likely presidential candidate of the opposition Liberal Party, Rafael Pardo.

The ongoing scandal over illegal wiretapping operations by the DAS has led to the resignation of the director of the intelligence agency, María del Pilar Hurtado, and investigations of the last four directors as well as 30 DAS agents.

The similarities of the case with the Watergate scandal, which forced U.S. president Richard Nixon (1969-1974) to step down, have been cited by opposition figures calling on Uribe to resign – not a likely outcome, however, due to the president’s high level of popularity and Colombian society’s jaded attitude towards such scandals, which are all too common in this country.

Before DAS

The government of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (1953-1957) replaced the security police by creating the Servicio de Inteligencia Colombiano (SIC) in 1953, which was answerable to the president’s office and used methods like those of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the U.S.

The SIC worked in close coordination with the state Office of Information and Propaganda, in activities like monitoring the press, with advice from Karl von Merk, a former secretary to Nazi Germany’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, according to a report by journalist Alberto Donadío.

The SIC, DAS’s predecessor, played a significant role in the investigation of Rojas Pinilla’s political opponents.

In April 1955, the SIC searched the headquarters of the Liberal Party and, based on letters from guerrilla leaders in the regions of Tolima and Llano, accused the party’s leader, Alberto Lleras, of being involved in subversive activities.

The SIC also alleged that it found evidence to accuse the dean of the National University law school, Abel Naranjo, of communist infiltration after the bloody events of Jun. 9, 1954, when the army opened fire on student demonstrators.

The SIC set out on a mission of sniffing out communists in Colombia, which included spying on and arresting reporters. Hernando Santos Castillo, who later became director of the newspaper El Tiempo, was arrested painting anti-government graffiti in downtown Bogotá. Around the same time the then presidential candidate of the Conservative Party, Guillermo León Valencia, was arrested as well.

Another activity carried out by the SIC was denounced by a military commander in the western province of Valle del Cauca, who said SIC agents were operating in complicity with “los pájaros” in that province – the term used to refer to paramilitary squads at the service of conservative elites.

Similar activities were carried out at a Feb. 5, 1957 bullfight, when numerous SIC agents infiltrated among the public beat dozens of spectators who booed Rojas Pinilla’s daughter María Eugenia when she arrived. According to U.S. Embassy reports, 20 people were killed.

The DAS era

The DAS, created by decree in 1960, continued the SIC’s work, under the shelter of the state of siege and the security statute (the latter was adopted in late 1982) – instruments that almost became part of the legal system after the 1991 constitution was passed.

According to a later draft law on the state of emergency, searches and wire tapping could be carried out without a legal warrant. The draft law was denounced at the Eighth Human Rights Forum, held in 1996, which stated that under the government of president Julio César Turbay (1982-1986) “an addiction to such practices, justified in the name of defence of the fatherland, had been instilled in the young officers.”

Not as crude as torture and dungeons, the tradition of hounding and eavesdropping on political opponents has been maintained and refined with the latest technological advances.

Vans with equipment that can simultaneously tap 16 calls in an area of 70 metres followed judges, politicians and journalists in recent months

In the days of General Rojas Pinilla, the focus was on hunting down communists and dissidents. Today, involvement in activities opposed to the government is more dangerous than being a communist.

For example, the Supreme Court judges began to be followed when they started investigating and arresting legislators who had worked together with far-right paramilitary groups to manipulate elections and electoral results.

Besides wiretapping their phones, the DAS investigations looked at bank accounts, tax returns, parties the judges had attended, trips they had taken, gifts they received – anything that might possibly be used to discredit them.

While the opposition and journalists saw these activities as an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the judges who were investigating more than 60 Uribe allies in Congress for their ties to the paramilitary militias, the government insinuated that the magistrates were involved in money laundering, had ties with drug traffickers, or were accomplices of the guerrillas.

The documents, instructions, archives and photos gathered by the investigators of the attorney general’s office show that at least 50 people were spied on without a legal order, “in line with the democratic security policies” of the Uribe administration, as a memorandum from a detective to the DAS counterintelligence director states.

The targets of surveillance “are being politically persuaded to mobilise a bloc that could counteract the election of the president,” says another of the agents describing his work in Pasto, in the south of the country, referring to the possible approval of a constitutional amendment to allow presidents to run for a third term.

Because the DAS, like the now-defunct SIC, is directly answerable to the president, there is little doubt about the origin of the orders for illegal wiretapping and surveillance.

But the investigations by the attorney general’s office and the office of the public prosecutor have only led to offices near Uribe, and no further. And although the DAS wiretapping operations are eerily similar to Watergate, the difference lies in that the scandal has not yet reached the president’s desk.

Visibly indignant, former Colombian president César Gaviria (1990-1994) denounced this week what he called an “appalling” article in a draft political reform law currently under debate in Congress.

He was referring to “article four, which allows paramilitary chiefs to run for popularly elected posts, to enter into contracts with the state, and to become public employees. They are trying to turn what was knocked down by the Constitutional Court and the Justice and Peace Law into something that is consecrated by the constitution,” said Gaviria, the head of the opposition Liberal Party.

Although article four ended up being removed from the draft political reform law, partly due to the public outcry, the controversy to which it gave rise revived the uneasy sensation that the construction of a paramilitary state in Colombia has been moving forward, step by step.

The article in question was not the first time that Colombia’s far-right paramilitary groups have figured in a privileged position in initiatives put forward by the Colombian government. Shortly after he began his first term, in 2002, rightwing President Álvaro Uribe proposed that Congress issue a general pardon for paramilitaries and allow them to have direct parliamentary representation.

In his second term, which began in 2006, just after the outbreak of the scandal over politicians who benefited at the polls thanks to pressure on voters by the paramilitaries – locally dubbed the “parapoliticans” – the president has promoted measures aimed at securing the release of the numerous members of Congress in prison on charges of having ties to the paramilitary groups.

In a report titled “A las puertas del Ubérrimo” (At the Gates of Ubérrimo – the name of the Uribe family ranch), prominent human rights defenders Iván Cepeda and Jorge Rojas pointed to much earlier signs of the president’s tendency to favour the paramilitaries.

For instance, as governor of the northern province of Antioquia, Uribe granted a permit to the private security cooperative Convivir Horizonte, at the request of paramilitary chief Salvatore Mancuso in 1996, “after they had already committed 10 massacres,” say the authors of the report.

That same year, the then governor justified providing long-range weapons to the Convivir, which were paramilitary groups set up by large landowners to protect their land and livestock, as well as their lives, which were threatened by guerrillas that were harassing rural estates in Antioquia and neighbouring Córdoba.

While Uribe governed Antioquia, from 1995 to 1997, the mutual admiration between the governor and the leaders of these groups was clearly evident. According to Uribe, they were “a transparent model” and “a support group for the military forces.”

For his part, Cepeda and Rojas wrote, “Mancuso did not conceal his admiration. ‘Uribe has maintained a firm stance,’ he said. And Carlos Castaño (another paramilitary leader) said Uribe ‘is the man closest to our philosophy’.”

These close ties were put on open public display on three occasions, which have taken on special relevance today.

The first was the homage paid to General Rito Alejo del Río, known as the “pacifier of Urabá,” who is now facing charges for ties to paramilitary groups in that northwestern Colombian region. At the ceremony in Bogotá, Uribe was the keynote speaker.

He was also the chief speaker at a ceremony organised by ranchers in Córdoba in honour of the leader of their association, Rodrigo García Caicedo, known as part of the inner circle of the Castaño brothers and as an advocate of the doctrine of the self-defence groups.

The celebration of the 10th anniversary of the El Meridiano newspaper in Córdoba provided another clear sign of that close relationship. The paper’s owners are on the list of those who finance the paramilitary Self-Defence Forces of Córdoba, as shown by documents in the hands of the Attorney General’s Office. Uribe’s presence and participation in the event were broadly covered and highlighted in the pages of the newspaper.

An incident that was an embarrassment to Uribe, because of the then governor’s proximity to the paramilitaries, was the 1998 murder of lawyer Jesús María Valle. A few days before the prominent lawyer was killed, the governor had publicly referred to him as an “enemy of the armed forces.”

As president of the Antioquia branch of the Permanent Committee for the Defence of Human Rights, Valle had denounced an alliance between the paramilitaries and the army in the killings of 19 people in the municipality of Ituango in 1996 and 1997. The link between Uribe’s public berating of Valle and his murder, pointed to by the El Colombiano newspaper, prompted a heated exchange of letters between Uribe and the paper.

At the end of his term as governor and the start of his campaign for the presidency, Uribe named General del Río, who is now under arrest, as his security adviser; made Roger Taboada, who currently faces an arrest warrant, as his campaign treasurer in Córdoba; and included José María Maroso, presently accused by the Attorney General’s Office of financing the paramilitary United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), as a member of his campaign staff.

Twenty of the friends involved in Uribe’s campaign turned out to have signed the so-called Ralito pact, a paramilitary initiative, and today are accused of forming part of an alliance with the extreme-right groups, many of which were closely associated with drug trafficking.

The secret Ralito pact was signed in 2001 by paramilitary chiefs and more than 50 politicians with the stated aim of “refounding the country.”

As Interior Minister Fabio Valencia Cossio defended controversial article four of the draft political reform law, this history of alliances and close ties with the paramilitaries appeared to be an explanation of the latest attempt at favouring the far-right groups.

The incidents from the past are further underscored by the revealing numbers provided by the Supreme Court and the Attorney General’s Office. Of the more than 80 legislators under arrest or investigation in connection with the “parapolitics” scandal, 60 – in other words, 75 percent – belong to the governing coalition. If article four of the draft law had been approved, they would have been the first to benefit.

Pragmatic political arguments were set forth to justify the attempt to benefit them, in order to keep their seats from being left empty.

According to commentator Rodolfo Arango, based on official data, “a total of 2,324,751 votes” for pro-Uribe candidates were compromised by the parapolitics scandal.

What would appear to really matter then is to preserve a decisive number of votes, to maintain the pro-Uribe majority in Congress.