A reputation for honesty and incorruptibility has boosted the Green Party candidate's hopes of being elected president in Colombia, writes Peadar Kirby
THE GREEN Party candidate and former mayor of Bogota, Antanas Mockus, looks set to cause a major shift in Colombian politics by making a breakthrough in tomorrow’s presidential election and winning in the second round on June 20th. With only 2 per cent in the polls last December, support for the former university rector had increased to between 34 to 38 per cent by April, a level he has maintained since.
His main rival, former defence minister Juan Manuel Santos, was firm favourite to succeed President Alvaro Uribe when the latter’s bid to change the constitution to allow him run for re-election for a third term was rejected by the Constitutional Court in February last.
Yet, Santos, who is closely associated with President Uribe’s hard-line tactics against Colombia’s guerrilla movements, has struggled to keep level with Mockus in the polls. While he may scrape into first place tomorrow, polls are consistent that Mockus would beat him in the second round run-off which is required if no candidate wins 50 per cent.
The Green Party candidate’s success is in part based on the extensive use of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, which have helped to galvanise a large following among young people. Political scientists in Bogota told me this election has helped politicise many young people and predicted that Colombia’s traditionally low turnout of about 50 per cent could increase to between 65 and 75 per cent tomorrow.
The appeal of Mockus is also based on his well-known honesty and incorruptibility in a country where politics has been notorious for high levels of corruption.
Currently 135 members of the 298-seat Congress are under investigation for corruption and 50 of these are in prison. Many of these cases relate to the receipt of financing from right-wing paramilitaries and drug traffickers whose involvement in extensive human rights abuses such as murders and massacres is well documented.
One senior human rights lawyer told me that since Uribe became president in 2002, evidence points to the state having become more systematically involved in undermining the rule of law. For example, former heads of both intelligence and counterintelligence services are currently charged with illegal surveillance of members of the Supreme Court and of running a campaign to discredit them. A well-known Jesuit priest who works with a leading human rights NGO told me that the phones of himself, his Jesuit colleagues and many of his staff were tapped and close family members were systematically followed by security agents.
Another scandal implicating the Uribe administration is that of the “false positives”, namely the kidnapping of people in one part of the country whose bodies were later found hundreds of kilometres away dressed in guerrilla uniforms and claimed by the military as victims of their anti-guerrilla campaign. Altogether 465 cases have been documented since 2001 involving a total of 1,013 victims, peaking in the years 2006 and 2007. Senior members of the military and police working hand in hand with right-wing paramilitaries have been accused of these crimes, some of whom have confessed.
Paradoxically, despite the evidence of these abuses, Uribe maintains popularity ratings of about 70 per cent due to the success of his policy of “democratic security”. This succeeded in greatly weakening the Farc guerrillas through maintaining military pressure on them with US military assistance of some $700 million a year. Security in the main cities is now greatly improved though analysts point out that the Farc are far from being defeated and remain active in 298 municipalities, close to their level of activity throughout the 1990s.
The breakthrough of Mockus in the opinion polls therefore surprised media commentators since Santos was seen to have the advantage of being the Urbista candidate. However, unlike other candidates, Mockus has been clever in presenting himself not as an anti-Uribe candidate but, as he puts it himself, a post-Uribe candidate and he is expected to continue many of Uribe’s neo-liberal economic policies if elected. No evidence has yet emerged to implicate Uribe personally in the extensive human rights abuses. For example, just this week a retired police officer now in exile in Venezuela gave a media interview saying that the president’s younger brother, Santiago Uribe, had commanded a right-wing death squad run from the family’s ranch which had killed at least 50 people in the 1990s. But the former policeman said he had no evidence that President Uribe had any knowledge of these activities.
Yet the constant exposure by Colombia’s media and judicial system of such cases is now seen to be having an impact on the electorate and the popularity of Mockus is seen as evidence of a widespread desire to clean up politics. It also marks the end of the dominance of Colombian politics by the Liberal and Conservative parties and the breakthrough of a figure from outside the political system, essentially a civil society candidate backed by the country’s strong indigenous and human rights movements.
Tomorrow’s election also marks the arrival in Colombia, which has the third largest population in Latin America after Brazil and Mexico, of trends seen throughout the region over the past two decades as outsiders to the traditional party system emerged to take power. Examples are Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia. However, unlike them, Mockus does not present himself as a candidate of the “new left” and has refused overtures for an electoral pact from the candidate of Colombia’s new left party, the Democratic Pole, Gustavo Petro, who has about 6 per cent support.
Peadar Kirby is professor of international politics and public policy at the University of Limerick. He recently returned from a teaching visit to Colombia