Oblivion: A memoir by Hector Abad Faciolince – review

Hector Abad's tribute to his father, 'the communist doctor' murdered by Colombian paramilitaries in 1987, is warm, witty and moving.

In 1987 the Colombian novelist Hector Abad was phoned by a journalist with some startling news: "They're saying you've just been killed." He knew instantly that the rumours must refer to his father, whose name he shared and whose body was lying at that very moment in a pool of blood a few blocks away. Doctor, teacher and public health activist, Hector Abad senior was 65 years old when rightwing paramilitaries caught up with him on a Medellín street. The doctor had been on his way to pay his respects to a colleague murdered two days earlier, and was accompanied by an ex-student whom the killers finished off minutes later. Three speakers who paid tribute to the murdered doctor were themselves later killed. The son went into exile and survived.

"For almost 20 years I have tried to be him there, facing death, at that moment," Abad writes in a memoir that is partly a portrait of a singular father and partly a wider landscape of a beautiful country, full of potential, tearing itself to pieces. The title is from a line of poetry by Borges: "Already we are the oblivion we shall be" – words scribbled down by Abad's father on the morning of his murder. In writing the book, Abad explains, he hoped this oblivion might be "deferred", if only for a moment.

There is nothing here of the muted awkwardness described in so many writerly accounts of the father-son relationship. "I loved my father with an animal love," Abad writes. "I liked his smell and also the memory of his smell on the bed when he was away on a trip. I liked his voice, I liked his hands, his immaculate clothes and the meticulous cleanliness of his body."

The fathers of Blake Morrison and Michael Bywater, to take two other "father memoirs", were also doctors. Their sons record their sly manoeuvring in the social pecking order, men secure in the respectability conferred on public health in Britain since the 19th century. A continent away, the likes of Abad's father, while comfortably off, had no such tradition to fall back on. For Colombian conservatives in the 1960s and 1970s, demands for universal access to food, clean water and sanitation looked like subversion.

Abad recalls his father's tour of the children's hospital in Medellín when he was a child. At each bed he would ask, "'What's wrong with this child?' Then he would answer his own question: 'He's hungry.' And a bit further on: 'What's wrong with this child?' 'She's hungry … the same thing, nothing but hunger. Yet an egg and a glass of milk a day would be enough to keep these children from being here.'"

The writing is as warm, generous and witty as the man it portrays, and in his survey of Colombia's past ills Abad manages to write with the mellow thoroughness of an anger digested over many years. "Christian in religion, Marxist in economics and a liberal in politics," was Abad senior's creed, winning him contempt from the extreme left, hatred from the country's selfish, myopic conservatives and the spittle-flecked ire of the church hierarchy. A religious radio programme lambasted "the communist doctor" for his belief that the poor might also be allowed to have life before death.

Religion is an integral part of the story. As a young child, Abad spent the day in the company of a nun listening to the gory martyrdom of the saints; when his father returned in the evening, the two would pore over encyclopaedias. Abad's household was Colombia's ideological struggle in miniature, a playing-out of the Old World clash between Torquemada and Diderot that continued up to Dr Abad's violent death, and beyond. The then archbishop of Medellín, Alfonso López Trujillo (who a few years ago told the BBC that condoms let through the HIV virus), tried to prevent mass being said at the funeral, to the anguish of Abad's deeply pious mother and sisters.

Abad's fellow countryman Gabriel García Márquez famously began his novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold with the words "On the day they were going to kill him..." In Oblivion Abad employs a similar effect, only revealing the details of the murder towards the end of the book, its inevitability making the almost artless outpouring of filial love all the more unbearable.

OFAC Sanctions Colombian Public Official For Ties To Drug Trafficker

The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets control designated Guillermo Leon Valencia Cossio, the former regional director of the Colombian Prosectutor’s Office in Medellin, as a narcotics trafficker for his ties to druglord Daniel Rendon Herrera.

OFAC sanctions freeze all assets under U.S. jurisdiction. Herrera was designated in May 2009, and he faces federal narcotics importation and narco-terrorism conspiracy charges in the U.S. for allegedly having drug transportation networks throughout Colombia that facilitate the shipment of cocaine to the U.S. and Europe, the department said in a statement. Cossio, however, was arrested in August 2008 by Colombian authorities and is on trial for corruption and conspiracy to provide material support to drug traffickers, including Herrera.

“Today’s designation targets Guillermo Leon Valencia Cossio for his abuse of power as a public official in Colombia on behalf of Daniel Rendon Herrera’s drug trafficking organization,” said OFAC Director Adam J. Szubin in the statement.

The designation announcement came the same day as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime urged greater cooperation on stopping drug traffickers. “Drug trafficking continues to be the most lucrative line of business for criminals,” said Yuri Fedotov, a Russian diplomat who took serves as executive director of the UNODC. “Cocaine and heroin traffickers are earning almost $280 million every day, almost $12 million every hour, and almost $200,000 every minute.”

Separately, OFAC also announced the designation of Running Brook LLC and La Hacienda, two U.S.-based companies owned or controlled by Fernando Melciades Zevallos Gonzales, a Peruvian national himself designated by the agency as a drug trafficker.

The private companies helping conservation in Colombia

"If there was an Olympic Games for biodiversity, Colombia would be up there on the winner's podium."

Jose Yunis, the director of the Nature Conservancy in Colombia, is understandably proud of his country's abundant array of flora and fauna.

"We have the greatest variety of birds anywhere in the world, we rank third in reptiles, we have fish that you won't find in any other place. We have 10% of all the world's species here, in our jungle, mountain and water ecosystems."

In the Andes, 3,700 metres above sea level and only 30 miles (48km) from the capital Bogota, is the wild paramo or mountain plain.

It is a bleak, silent landscape and home to some rare species.

Signs along the road warn of spectacled bears, the only bear indigenous to South America, and andean condors soar on warm air currents high above the plain.

Mr Yunis is particularly fond of the pale green, pineapple-shaped "frailejones" which grow from the mossy ground.

"This is a very special species indeed. It has furry leaves that trap water from the fog and rain. The paramo is like a sponge soaking up water, it's where the lakes that supply our towns and cities form."

But this delicate ecosystem is under threat.

Just a little further down the valley the paramo stops abruptly, and a pastoral idyll begins.

Small fincas, or farmhouses, dot the hillside. Farmers wearing the traditional poncho and sombrero drive cattle along the road. And from the river's edge right up to the valley's dizzying summit there are neat rows of crops, clinging tightly to the steep mountainside.

Although picturesque, the farms are starting to encroach on the paramo. The andean forest, which should form a transition between low and highland, has all but disappeared, chopped down by the farmers to make way for their crops of potatoes, corn and carrots.

Mr Yunis said this would have disastrous consequences.

"When the rain comes the land will be washed away into the river, there are no trees left with deep roots to keep the soil in place. In 20 or 30 years, if we keep treating the land like this, it will be a desert; no plants, no animals, nothing at all," he said.

Deforestation is a major problem in Colombia, especially in its rainforests.

Every year around 400,000 hectares are cut down by settlers to make way for fields.

The war which has raged for years between left-wing guerrilla and right-wing paramilitary groups is now calming down, meaning that rural areas which were very dangerous are habitable once more.

The valley above Bogota was once the main route from the city to guerrilla hot spots in the south of the country. But a concerted campaign by the government against guerrilla groups such as the FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) has made it safer.

The soil erosion in the valley is leading to increased sedimentation of the river, and chemicals used in the crops are polluting it.

This threat to Bogota's water supply has prompted interest from some private companies, which are working with the Nature Conservancy on a project to protect the area.

It is being largely funded by Bavaria, Colombia's largest drinks company and a subsidiary of the multinational SABMiller, which uses water from the river to make its beer.

The project sees ecologists work with farmers to improve their production methods. In exchange, the farmers give up some of their land to create a protected zone around the river, so native species of plants and animals can thrive again.

But critics might argue that local people's ability to eke out a living on the land is more important than conserving the river basin and its biodiversity.

According to government statistics almost half of Colombia's population of 44m live in poverty, which means they survive on less than 280,000 pesos (£100) per month.

But the Nature Conservancy said the project would help these people too.

It is vital to preserve indigenous species, Mr Yunis said

"Take cattle farmers for example," he said.

"At the moment they've just got a couple of cows which have terrible pasture and don't produce much milk. We want to teach them to use better seeds, have better pasture so that they are better off, and can produce more from less land. It's a win-win situation."

In a greenhouse by the river, local farmer Vicente Vega is potting row upon row of tiny seedlings.

They are native species of trees and plants which are being reintroduced to the valley as part of the project, replacing non-indigenous ones like the pine tree.

"Insects and birds like the flowers on the native plants, they're much better than the pine, which no living thing would go near. And the pine trees were drying out the land," said Mr Vega. "The plants we're replacing them with don't."

Although the Nature Conservancy's prime aim is conservation, Bavaria would not have got involved in the project if it was just about biodiversity.

The company's sustainable development director, Juliana Ocampo, said: "Ninety per cent of our beer is water,"

"We agree with all the project's objectives but one of our strategic business priorities is improving water quality. Private companies can really help the environment, but you have to choose where you make an impact."

As the Nature Conservancy has found, the issue of biodiversity alone might not be enough to attract the funds needed to save habitats, unless perhaps an iconic species is at risk.

But if private companies can be persuaded that their interests are also at stake, there is some hope for native flora and fauna.

And considering the rate of deforestation in Colombia, projects like this will need to be implemented on a much greater scale if the country's natural riches are to be preserved.

Appointment of Colombian Ex-President Sparks Controversy at Georgetown

Former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe (left) was the object of protests last month at Georgetown University, where some demonstrators held up a sign saying, in Spanish, “Goodbye Uribe!”

Last month, Álvaro Uribe, newly minted as a visiting scholar at Georgetown, gave a guest lecture in a political-science class that ended with an embarrassing confrontation. From the stage of a small auditorium, the former Colombian president discussed free markets and security, two hallmarks of the strategy that by the time his eight-year tenure ended in August had transformed Colombia from borderline failed state to international success story and the U.S. government’s staunchest South American ally. Then he fielded questions from students. Nicholas Udu-gama rose from his seat in back, began to clap and, as he made his way down an aisle and onto the stage, accused Uribe of a wide range of human- and civil-rights crimes.

Udu-gama, 29, was pulled through a back exit and arrested, but this was no simple case of isolated campus activism. Uribe’s post at Georgetown has sparked a controversy at one of the country’s most esteemed international universities and across academia. On Sept. 29, more than 150 scholars, including 10 Georgetown professors and leading experts on Latin America and Colombia, signed a letter calling for Uribe to be fired. The letter, authored by a Jesuit priest, Father Javier Giraldo Moreno, one of Colombia’s foremost human-rights proponents, argued that Uribe’s appointment “is not only deeply offensive to those Colombians who still maintain moral principles, but also places at high risk the ethical development of the young people who attend our university.”

In a phone interview with NEWSWEEK, Udu-gama, part of a student-led coalition opposing Uribe’s appointment, spoke directly to the point: “This was Uribe trying to clean his image, basically, in front of our future leaders. He needs to be put in front of a criminal court.”

Such sentiments fly in the face of the usual narrative about Uribe as a man who beat back a guerilla insurgency, significantly reduced coca production, and jump-started his country's economy—and as someone who certainly would appear fit for an honorary university post. Georgetown had no comment, but in a statement said the university “is not endorsing the political views or government policies enacted by an individual,” and that “having such a prominent world leader at Georgetown will further the important work of students and faculty.”

It’s not uncommon or particularly controversial for a former high-ranking government official to settle into a teaching job—Madeleine Albright, ex-president of Spain José María Aznar, and former Bush defense official Douglas Feith, among others, have held professorships at Georgetown. But the commotion over Uribe’s appointment is part of a long-simmering struggle over his legacy that may be boiling over now that he’s out of power.

Human-rights accusations have dogged Uribe since he was governor of Antioquia in the 1990s, when allegations first surfaced about connections to the paramilitary groups that have been responsible for some of Colombia’s bloodiest violence. Uribe has not been formally charged with wrongdoing, but more than 100 of his political allies, including relatives, are under investigation for paramilitary ties. With the so-called false-positives scandal, meanwhile, Uribe’s administration received a considerable black eye after it was discovered that members of the Army had been killing civilians and dressing them as guerillas to inflate body counts. Last week, an investigation into the illegal wiretapping of human-rights workers, court justices, and Uribe’s political opponents implicated his chief of staff.

All this has made members of the faculty such as Marc Chernick, a professor at Georgetown’s Center for Latin American Studies who has worked in Colombia since 1980, unhappy to have Uribe as a colleague. “We’re quite dismayed that a man that has this level of allegations against him has been invited to teach and be affiliated with Georgetown,” Chernick says. “We don’t think we should lend the legitimacy of the university to him.” Adds Vanderbilt anthropology chair Lesley Gill, a Latin America specialist: “Uribe does not stand for any of the values that the United States claims to stand for.”

Yet the U.S. has done more to bolster Uribe’s international standing than a teaching position possibly could. On his watch, Colombia was the top recipient of U.S. aid outside the Middle East, and America trained Colombia’s military and began operating from bases inside the country. George W. Bush awarded Uribe the Presidential Medal of Freedom. At an appearance in Bogotá in June, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed him with the following remarks:

“I speak for President Obama and myself when I say that you, personally, have been an essential partner to the United States. And because of your commitment to building strong democratic institutions here in Colombia and to nurturing the bonds of friendship between our two countries, you leave a legacy of great progress that will be viewed in historic terms.”

To observers such as Peter DeShazo, the director of the Americas program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Uribe took charge of a perilous situation and brought improvements that have created a net gain in terms of human rights. “He could have done things better on the human-rights side. There’s no doubt about that,” DeShazo says. “But that said, the policies that his government carried out in exerting more state control over larger amounts of territory certainly, in the end, helped lessen the number of human-rights abuses.”

For all Uribe’s success, however, a more nuanced view of his presidency may be taking shape abroad—one that recognizes the security gains as well as the human-rights concerns that have bubbled up in their wake. Protests flared up over Uribe’s appointment as vice chairman of the U.N. commission investigating Israel’s Gaza flotilla raid this summer, and last week a number of human-rights groups joined the call for Uribe’s ouster at Georgetown.

A free-trade agreement with Colombia has been held up by the U.S. Congress since 2008 due to human-rights concerns—in particular, Colombia’s continued status as the world’s deadliest country for labor leaders. At the first meeting between the two leaders last year, Barack Obama advised Uribe not to seek a third term in office, which would have required altering Colombia’s Constitution.

Aldo Civico, a conflict-resolution expert at Rutgers University who has done extensive field work in Colombia, declined to put his name to the Georgetown letter. There’s a danger, he says, in taking a black-and-white view of Colombia’s problems, which have long been cast in shades of gray. “He achieved extraordinary results in terms of security. Results that no president before him was able to achieve,” Civico says. “But there was a dark side to those results. And we see them out there now.”

Uribe will deliver a fresh round of lectures at Georgetown early next month. His opponents have promised to keep pressing their case. And the university, willingly or not, will continue playing host to a worthwhile debate.

Colombian police find massive drug money stash hidden in houses

(CNN) -- Colombian authorities have found more than $29 million and 17 million euros in cash in two hiding places belonging to one of the country's most wanted drug lords, officials said.

Investigators acting on a tip uncovered a massive stash Monday in the nation's capital, Defense Minister Rodrigo Rivera told reporters.

The bricks of cash were found in homes belonging to Daniel "El Loco" Barrera, the national police said in a statement. Raids over the past month have netted a total of more than $140 million, police said.

Monday's find was part of the "biggest drug-money seizure operation in the country's history," Rivera said.

"With this operation we have broken the financial system of one of the drug trafficking groups that particularly monopolized the transport of cocaine hydrocholoride from Colombia to Mexico and Europe," said Maj. Gen. Oscar Adolfo Naranjo Trujillo, director of Colombia's national police.

In March, the U.S. Department of the Treasury said Barrera played a "significant role in international narcotics trafficking," noting in a statement that the Colombian government was offering a $2.5 million reward for his capture.

The statement said Barrera and partner Pedro Oliverio Guerrero Castillo operate primarily in the eastern plains of Colombia, between the capital of Bogota and the Venezuelan border.

U.S. officials allege Barrera has a partnership with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the Marxist guerrilla organization also known as the FARC.

A prize scalp

FRESH off a bruising strike on a camp belonging to the FARC guerrillas earlier this week, Colombia’s army announced an even bigger success today: the killing in a bombing raid of Víctor Julio Suárez Rojas, nicknamed “Mono Jojoy”. Mr Suárez was the group’s military-operations chief, a member of its seven-man ruling secretariat, and the commander of its Eastern Bloc, the strongest unit, with an estimated 4,000-5,000 fighters. Also known as Jorge Briceño, he is believed to have been behind the FARC’s direct offensives against army posts in the early 1990s, a wave of kidnappings of politicians and many of the organisation’s cocaine-trafficking operations.

Since Juan Manuel Santos was sworn in as Colombia’s president last month, the FARC had stepped up attacks on the military as a show of strength to the new government. After Mr Suárez was confirmed killed, Mr Santos, in New York for the UN General Assembly, said the death of a “symbol of terror” was “our welcome to the FARC” and “the most resounding blow against the FARC in its entire history.”

The government’s sustained campaign against the group has pushed them back to remote jungles and mountains, and claimed the lives of several top commanders, including Raúl Reyes, its “foreign minister”, who was killed by a bomb on a camp in Ecuador in 2008. Another leader, Iván Ríos, was murdered by his own bodyguard. And the FARC’s founder, Manuel “Sureshot” Marulanda, died of natural causes in 2008. Mr Suárez was perhaps the most valuable remaining target. “Jojoy was a living legend in the FARC”, says Ariel Ávila, a political analyst. “They respected him highly. This is a blow to the structure and culture of the guerrillas.” The government may reap additional benefits from the strike if it demoralises some of Mr Suárez’s followers and encourages them to demobilise. Mr Suárez has no clear successor.

UPDATE: Colombian officials have revealed how they located Mr Suárez. He suffered from diabetes, and had ordered a new set of boots to reduce his foot pain. The government intercepted that communication, and managed to insert a GPS tracking device in one of the boots before Mr Suárez received them. From that point on, his days were numbered.

China donates USD 1 million to Colombian Defense Ministry

An agreement was signed by Colombian defense minister, Rodrigo Rivera ,and China’s Colonel General Liang Guanglie, who arrived on Sunday to Bogotá on an official visit. The money will be spent to acquire defense equipment. "We have signed the Agreement on Free Help from China to Colombia for the sum of eight million yuan (about one million dollars) for the purchase of logistics’ material" said Rivera in an appearance before the press with Liang.

Ingrid Betancourt’s husband won’t read her book

“I will not read it, I prefer to leave that chapter behind”, said Juan Carlos Lecompte, Ingrid Betancourt’s husband, about the book she wrote, which was published this week, entitled “Even Silence Has an End”. In addition, her estranged husband demands part of the assets of the politician, who was kidnapped by the FARC in 2002 and released in the Jaque military operation in 2008. He also wants to include part of the royalties from Betancourt's book in their divorce settlement.

Santos meets Obama in New York

Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos declared himself “very satisfied” with the meeting he held on Friday with United States President, Barack Obama. The leaders spoke about the pending Free Trade Agreement between the two countries. Santos was one of the five presidents Obama invited for a private discussion in New York after attending the United Nations General Assembly. He revealed that they also discussed ecological issues, after being congratulated by Obama on Colombia military’s success in killing FARC No. 2, “Mono Jojoy”.

Santos to offer speech before the UN in New York

Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos will attend to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, and will offer a speech in which he is expected to expose Colombia’s advance’s in security issues. “In New York we will take advantage as is usual in these types of meetings to have bilateral meetings with many heads of state”, said president Santos, referring to Colombia´s intentions to use this trip to improve relations with other countries. Santos is also set to meet for the first time with President Barack Obama on Friday September 24.

Colombian army kills top Farc rebel leader Mono Jojoy

One of the most senior leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) has been killed, say reports.

Jorge Briceno, also known as Mono Jojoy, died in a military air strike in the Macarena region, known to be a Farc stronghold, local media said.

President Juan Manuel Santos said Jojoy's death was "the hardest blow" in the history of the rebel movement.

The Marxist Farc rebels have been fighting the Colombian authorities since the mid-1960s.
Jojoy was believed to be leader of the Farc's strongest fighting division, the Eastern Bloc, and had eluded Colombian security forces for almost 10 years.

The United States had offered a reward of up to $5m (£3.2m) for information leading to his arrest or conviction.

"A military source has confirmed that it defeated a group of rebels during an operation involving the four branches of the military," Colombia's attorney general Guillermo Mendoza said in a radio interview.

He said soldiers had found the body of Jojoy.

"The symbol of terrorism in Colombia has fallen," Mr Santos said.

"To the rest of the Farc: we are coming after you, we are not going to let down our guard."

A White House spokesman welcomed the news, calling it an "important victory" for Colombia.
Another 20 rebels were also killed in the attack, an official at the defence ministry told the AFP news agency.

The BBC's Jeremy McDermott in Bogota says Jojoy's death will be a major coup for Colombia's new President Juan Manuel Santos.

It also leaves the Eastern Bloc without a leader, which is likely to seriously affect rebel morale, says our correspondent.

The rebels have said they are prepared to find a political solution to the conflict, and have appealed to Mr Santos to enter talks.

But they have stepped up their violent campaign since Mr Santos took office on 7 August, killing more than 40 security personnel in the past month.

Mr Santos has said the rebels must give up their arms and release all the hostages they are holding before talks can take place.

It comes a few days after another guerrilla Farc commander, Sixto Cabana, was shot dead along with 27 other rebels close to the border with Ecuador.

The US State Department said Mr Cabana has been behind the export of hundreds of tons of cocaine around the world and was responsible for hundreds of murders.

Colombian youths in fear over Facebook hitlist

Colombian police are investigating the killings of three youths whose names appeared on hitlists published on the social networking site Facebook.

The hitlists warned scores of teenagers in the town of Puerto Asis, in southern Colombia, to leave town or be killed.

Two of the youths named were shot on 15 August, while a third was killed five days later.

Police have sent an investigative team, including internet experts, to find out who is behind the threats.

A local official said a criminal gang had recently expanded its operations to the area and was intimidating locals.

Diego Ferney Jaramillo, 16, and Eibart Alejandro Ruiz Munoz, 17, were shot dead as they were driving along a road on the outskirts of Puerto Asis in Putumayo province on their motorcycle on 15 August.

Colombian ombudsman Volmar Perez Ortiz said that at around the same time, anonymous threats appeared on Facebook, listing 69 local youths and telling them to leave Puerto Asis within three days or be killed.

Panic and fear

The names of the two dead teenagers had been on the list. The ombudsman's office said the authorities at first thought they were dealing with a hoax.

But the killing of a third listed teenager, Norbey Alexander Vargas, on 20 August prompted officials to take the threats seriously.

Since then, a second threat has appeared, on leaflets left on cars and addressed to the families of the youths.

"Please, as relatives, ask them to leave town in less than three days, or we'll see ourselves forced to carry out more acts like that of 15 August," it read.

Another list was published on Facebook on Monday, this time naming 31 local girls.

Putumayo province official Andres Gerardo Verdugo said the threats had provoked panic among the town's families, some of whom had fled.

Police officials have not yet commented on who may be behind the threats or why the youths had been targeted.

But the ombudsman's office said a notorious gang, the Rastrojos, had recently stepped up its criminal operations in the area.

Colombian court blocks military agreement with U.S.

The agreement has been a source of tension between Colombia and neighboring Venezuela.

The court said that the agreement must be sent to the Colombian Congress for approval before it can become effective.

The court ruled that the agreement over use of the bases was not an extension of treaties signed between the two nations in the past, but a new treaty that requires the approval of the legislature to be valid.

"It's certainly a big bump in the road, but it's not a huge setback," Adam Isacson, senior associate at the Washington Office on Latin America organization told CNN.

The congressional make-up is about 80 percent backers of current president Juan Manuel Santos and former President Alvaro Uribe, who was in office when the agreement was signed, Isacson said. So congressional approval could come quickly.

But there is also the possibility that it could drag for a year, he said.

Because the military bases agreement had not yet been implemented, there would be no major changes on the ground, Isacson said, adding that under previous agreements, the United States already has some troops in Colombia who will continue to operate under those previous treaties.

The United States says it needs to operate on the bases to help in its fight against terrorists and narcotraffickers, especially since the closure a few months ago of a U.S. base in Ecuador. The United States maintains similar "forward operating locations" in El Salvador and Aruba-Curacao.

Colombia's agreement to host the Americans has come under criticism in Latin America, particularly from President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

In the past, Chavez has likened the agreement to an act of war and accused the United States of wanting to stage military personnel nearby to destabilize his leftist government. More recently, he has said that Colombia has the right to pursue an agreement if it wants.

Santos Says Colombia Car Bomb Was ‘Terrorist Act’

Aug. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Colombian President Juan Manual Santos said a blast from a car bomb that shook the capital this morning was a “terrorist act” that “won’t intimidate” the nation.

The pre-dawn explosion occurred in Bogota at the intersection of 67th Street and 7th Avenue, in front of the studios of Caracol Radio and five blocks from the city’s financial district and the stock exchange. No fatalities were reported.

The blast injured as many as nine people, Hector Zambrano, Bogota’s health secretary, said in comments broadcast by Caracol television.

“We can’t let down our guard,” Santos said while visiting the site of the blast. “They won’t intimidate us. They want us to fall into that trap.”

Santos took office Aug. 7 vowing to maintain the outgoing government´s offensive against Marxist rebels, whose half- century campaign to topple Colombia’s democracy claims hundreds of civilian lives every year.

The blast blew out the windows of nearby businesses including branches of Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA and Bancolombia SA. Residents picked glass as helicopters flew overhead and soldiers in camouflage patrolled inside cordoned off streets nearby.

A twisted black ball of metal remained from the car, which held 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of explosives, Bogota Mayor Samuel Moreno said.

No Structural Damage

The blast caused no structural damage to buildings, Santos said.

Authorities yesterday deactivated a car bomb in the city of Neiva, in Huila province, newspaper El Espectador reported.

In 2003, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia killed 37 people and injured 200 with a car bomb at social club El Nogal. Military strikes have since weakened guerrilla groups, helping to fuel international investment in oil and mines and gains by the Colombian peso.

The peso has rallied 13 percent this year against the U.S. dollar, the best performance among 26 emerging market currencies tracked by Bloomberg. The peso strengthened by 0.1 percent to 1799.25 per dollar at 9:28 a.m. New York time.

The attack may be “designed to test the mettle” of the new government, analysts Roberto Melzi and Jimena Zuniga at Barclays Capital said today in a report. It won’t affect the economy or the currency, according to the report.

A wistful Uribe bids Colombians adios

A humble, sometimes wistful Alvaro Uribe bid Colombians adios Thursday, two days before his two terms and eight years as president are to end.

"I tried to carry out in the best way this big responsibility," he said in a 16-minute televised address during which he praised Vice President Francisco Santos as loyal and frank, and the members of his administration as honorable.

Uribe, 58, who gained plaudits for weakening the guerrilla movement that had controlled much of the country, said he was leaving seeds he hoped would take root and grow, one of them being "a country convinced that security is possible; that we have to recover security fully."

Uribe said he is leaving another seed -- "a country convinced that Colombia is a great destination for investment; that investment with brotherhood is the only road to employment."

Employment, linked to social security, is the way to overcome poverty and to build equity, he said.

Yet another seed: "A country convinced that it is possible to advance in social class."

Uribe praised Colombia's workers as "excellent" and said the international community has come to regard them that way too.

The president, who was denied running yet again by term limits, described his eight years of dialogue with Colombians as "a heaven on earth."

And he asked that his countrymen pardon him for any mistakes or failures that may have occurred under his watch. "The errors are mine," he said.

Finally, Uribe asked Colombians to support Juan Manuel Santos, his former minister of national defense, who is to succeed him for the next term. "I hope that it will be a period of great prosperity for the country," he said.

Colombia refutes Chavez, says it has no plans to attack Venezuela

(CNN) -- A spokesman for Colombia's president says the country has never had any intention of attacking Venezuela.

The comments came a day after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said he was deploying troops toward the border in case of an invasion.

"It is a clear political deception of his own nation," Colombian presidential spokesman Cesar Mauricio Velasquez told reporters Saturday.

On Friday, Chavez said special forces were moving to 10 districts near the Colombian border to be prepared in case Colombian President Alvaro Uribe issues an invasion order before he leaves office August 7. He also said he was reviewing war plans as tensions between the two countries rises.

Colombia and Venezuela are at odds over accusations that leftist rebels have found refuge in Venezuela.

Colombia says it has photographic evidence of camps belonging to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia -- known by its Spanish abbreviation, FARC -- in Venezuela. Colombia made its case before the Organization of American States earlier this month and asked for international observers to be allowed into Venezuela to verify the presence of the guerrilla group.

Venezuela denied the accusations, and in response broke off diplomatic ties with Colombia.
On Friday, Chavez told VTV that the Colombian government's accusations "have become a threat against our sovereignty, [against] our people and against the revolution."

Chavez said surveys by the Venezuelan National Guard have proven that rebel camps do not exist within the country's borders.

He accused Colombian officials and right-wing paramilitary units of plotting his assassination, while the Colombian government has accused Chavez of supporting the rebels.

Colombia's presidential transition

Still in charge
Álvaro Uribe tries to undermine his successor’s tentative reconciliation with Venezuela’s government

DURING Colombia’s presidential campaign, Álvaro Uribe supported Juan Manuel Santos, his former defence minister, as vocally as the election laws permitted. In return Mr Santos, who ran promising to continue Mr Uribe’s security policies, was appropriately grateful, making sure to credit the incumbent for his victory and promising to retain him as a “permanent adviser”. Yet Mr Uribe did not leave office willingly—his bid for a third term was found unconstitutional—and he started backing Mr Santos only after his preferred candidate lost in a primary. The cracks in this alliance of convenience are now starting to show. With Mr Santos’s inauguration just two weeks away, Mr Uribe seems to be trying to dictate his successor’s foreign policy, raising concerns that he may continue to meddle in national politics after leaving office.

Few issues are more sensitive for Mr Uribe than the alleged sheltering of Colombia’s FARC and ELN guerrillas by its neighbours. Thanks to the president’s relentless military assault, many fighters from both groups have fled across the borders. In 2008 Mr Uribe had Mr Santos raid a FARC camp in Ecuador, and complained that FARC arsenals included Swedish-made weapons that were originally sold to the Venezuelan government.

Mr Uribe has been careful about making such allegations public. Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s leftist president, whose relations with Mr Uribe have been stormy, reacted to the previous Colombian claims (and to an agreement updating arrangements under which American forces have access to Colombian bases) by imposing sanctions on bilateral trade and ordering troops to the border.
Yet on July 15th Mr Uribe’s defence minister, Gabriel Silva, revealed new evidence to the press. He played videos of guerrillas, including a top FARC member known as Iván Márquez, recorded at a camp whose GPS co-ordinates are 23km inside Venezuela. He also said that Rodrigo Granda, the FARC’s de facto foreign minister, and Carlos Marín Guarín, an ELN leader, had been seen in Venezuela. In response, Mr Chávez recalled his ambassador and cancelled his plan to attend Mr Santos’s inauguration. As The Economist went to press, Colombia was set to replay the videos, backed up by the testimonies of 12 demobilised FARC members, at a special meeting of the Organisation of American States.

Mr Uribe could have left all this to Mr Santos. But it seems he feared that his successor, who by comparison is more flexible and calculating, was being too friendly to Mr Chávez. Mr Santos is hardly a dove, but he argues that the only way to get Venezuela’s help against the FARC is to normalise relations. As a result, he had taken a few baby steps towards reconciliation, inviting Mr Chávez to his inauguration and choosing María Ángela Holguín, a former ambassador to Venezuela, as his foreign minister. Mr Chávez, for his part, said he “had a lot of faith” that Venezuela’s “relations with Colombia…would begin to change.”

That was too much for Mr Uribe. The selection of Ms Holguín irritated him, since she had clashed with him over several appointments she saw as repaying political favours. He is also thought to be displeased with Mr Santos’s choice of Juan Camilo Restrepo, a critic of many of his own policies, as agriculture minister, and with his successor’s plans to undo his merging of several ministries.

Mr Uribe first responded to Mr Santos’s gestures of engagement by sneering at what he called “cosmetic”, “sappy”, and “hypocritical” diplomacy, without naming names. He then released the tapes. And in case there was any doubt about the president’s motivation, Mr Silva explained that Mr Uribe feared that concerns over harbouring guerrillas “could be forgotten in this climate of rapprochement with Venezuela’s government.”

Mr Chávez has not fully swallowed Mr Uribe’s bait: he was careful not to blame Mr Santos for Colombia’s accusations, instead attributing them to a “power struggle between Uribe…and the new group of Santos.” He reiterated his denial that the FARC are active in his country. That flies in the face of overwhelming evidence.

But the timing of Colombia’s latest iteration of its claims blunted their effectiveness. Mr Santos has played down the incident. During a private meeting with Mr Uribe he is reported to have said: “You govern until August 7th, Mr President.” But not a day longer, was the implication.

Colombia Becomes the New Star of the South

In a time of emerging-market juggernauts, Colombia gets little notice. Its $244 billion economy is only the fifth-largest in Latin America, a trifle next to Brazil, the $2 trillion regional powerhouse. Yet against all odds Colombia has become the country to watch in the hemisphere. In the past eight years the nation of 45 million has gone from a crime- and drug-addled candidate for failed state to a prospering dynamo. The once sluggish economy is on a roll. Oil and gas production are surging, and Colombia’s MSCI index jumped 15 percent between January and June, more than any other stock market this year.

This is more than a bull run. Since 2002, foreign direct investment has jumped fivefold (from $2 billion to $10 billion), while GDP per capita has doubled, to $5,700. The society that once was plagued by car bombs, brain drain, and capital flight is now debating how to avoid “Dutch disease,” the syndrome of too much foreign cash rolling in. Stable, booming, and democratic, Colombia has increasingly become “a bright star in the Latin American constellation,” as emerging-market analyst Walter Molano of BCP Securities calls it. Michael Geoghegan, CEO of HSBC, recently picked Colombia as a leader of a nascent block of midsize powers, the CIVETS (after the smallish, tree-dwelling cat), which stands for Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey, and South Africa. “These are the new BRICs,” he said.

There is something else that is now separating Colombia from the rest of the pack: in a region known to swoon for chest-thumping autocrats like Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, and populist charmers like Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina, this nation has come to rely not on personalities but on institutions grounded in the rule of law. Exhibit A: the election of Juan Manuel Santos as president. A former defense minister known as a technocrat, he labored for years in the shadows of his predecessor, Álvaro Uribe, the massively popular and seemingly irreplaceable leader. Uribe’s hardline policies against drugs and thugs rescued the nation from almost certain ruin, and his 70 percent–plus approval rating seemed to go to his head. But his aggressive, if undeclared, attempts to lobby the Congress and the courts to change the Constitution to allow him to run for a third term grated on the Colombian elite. Against all predictions, the Constitutional Court turned down Uribe’s reelection bid, a show of institutional nerve that struck a chord in a region still populated by tone-deaf leaders. “Can you imagine the Argentine courts saying no to Cristina Kirchner?” says Johns Hopkins’s Latin America scholar Riordan Roett of the populist Argentine president, who often has bullied the courts and cowed Congress into submission.

But saying no to Uribe was hardly an automatic s’ for Santos. Low-key and bureaucratic, Santos was often dismissed as a ventriloquist’s doll with no script of his own. Instead, pundits and pollsters touted the rise of Antanas Mockus as the new face of Colombian politics. It turned out that Colombians were not looking for personalities but continuity. Tellingly, all the half-dozen or so serious candidates ended up endorsing the basics of the Colombian equation: security, the free market, and a rules-based democracy. Mockus himself at times sounded more hawkish than Uribe, trumpeting his crime-busting credentials as mayor of Bogotá and vowing to give no quarter to guerrillas and terrorists. Voters apparently wanted the original policies, not a copy, and, absent Uribe, went for the man who made Uribismo work. Santos garnered a record 9 million votes, a triumph larger even than his predecessor’s 2006 landslide. “Whether on security, democratic stability, or vibrancy, the strength of Colombia’s democracy is there for all to see,” says Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the Council of the Americas.

Santos makes an unlikely warrior. He is the scion of a powerful Colombian family—his great-uncle was president (1938–1942), and for decades his relatives controlled the country’s largest media group, El Tiempo. Santos trained as an economist at Harvard and at the London School of Economics. Before Uribe, he served as trade minister and then as finance minister, sponsoring tough pension and tax reforms and slashing government spending to beat one of Colombia’s worst recessions on record. But it was in defense, where he executed Uribe’s iron-fisted “democratic security” policy, that Santos made his mark, shedding the image of a bureaucrat. He launched precision raids on guerrilla outposts, including a predawn strike on a FARC encampment in the jungles of neighboring Ecuador, in 2008. That attack flared into a diplomatic incident in the Andes but also killed a top FARC commander, known by his nom de guerre, Raúl Reyes. In 2009 his security forces also rescued several of the guerrillas’ trophy hostages, such as former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt.

Grateful as voters are, that war is not over. The guerrilla groups, though down, have not been routed, and street crime has spiked in Medellín and Cali. Some 3 million to 4 million people are said to be homeless after years of clashes between security forces, paramilitaries, and narcotraficantes. And while the economy is growing again (at 4.4 percent a year), Santos inherits the second-highest rate of unemployment on the continent (12 percent); 45 percent of the population under the poverty line (17 percent in extreme poverty); and a cold war with neighboring Venezuela that has crippled relations with Colombia’s biggest trading partner after the U.S.

No one seems more aware of the challenge than Santos. While praising Uribe, Santos quickly sought to distance himself from his prickly mentor with a coded message of truce. Barely had the votes been counted when he announced a government of national unity and named job creation, fighting poverty, and building houses as his priorities, while also rebranding the government’s master policy from democratic security to one of democratic prosperity. And even as he declared that he and Chávez were like “oil and water,” he made a clear peace gesture to the Venezuelan leader by naming Maria Angela Holguin, a former ambassador to Caracas, for the delicate job of foreign minister.

Can Santos turn Colombia’s prestige into international cachet? Until now, his countrymen have been too consumed by internal battles to look much beyond the border, and Colombia has neither the wealth nor the clout to rival Brazil, where the charismatic President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is still sopping up all the diplomatic limelight in Latin America. But while the neighborhood colossus seems bent on punching under its weight by courting tyrants (like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) and keeping Western nations at arm’s length, Colombia is gaining kudos and clout. Prospering, democratic, and pro-Western—and with a new leader known more for his achievements than for his aura—the most conflicted nation in the hemisphere is now coming into its own.

Betancourt seeks Colombia kidnapping damages

The former Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt, who spent six years as a hostage of leftist rebels, is asking Colombia's government for compensation.

Ms Betancourt and her family are seeking $6.8m (£4.5m) in damages for emotional distress and loss of earnings during her time as a Farc hostage.

Colombian officials have expressed surprise, noting that troops risked their lives to rescue her in 2008.

They say she ignored advice not to go to the area where she was kidnapped.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) seized her in the south of the country while she campaigned for the presidency.

In July 2008, the group was tricked into handing Ms Betancourt and 14 other hostages over to soldiers masquerading as members of a humanitarian group that had volunteered to fly them by helicopter to a new location. No shots were fired during the rescue.

"The defence ministry is surprised and upset by the request, all the more due to the effort and zeal with which our public forces planned and executed the rescue," the ministry said in a statement on Friday.

"Men and women of the armed forces risked their lives while seeking the liberty of the hostages in an operation that Ingrid Betancourt herself called 'perfect'."

Ms Betancourt, a dual Colombian-French citizen, has spent most of her time since being freed with her family in Europe.

Abductions, either for political reasons or for ransom, have been common in Colombia in recent decades, earning the country notoriety as the kidnap centre of the world.

By 2001, it was estimated that some 3,000 people were being seized each year by armed groups and drug traffickers.

Since then kidnappings have declined, although the exact number of people still in captivity is disputed.

According to Fondelibertad, a government department responsible for co-ordinating anti-kidnapping efforts, 79 people were definitely in captivity as of February 2010.

Will Washington treat Colombia's Santos as an ally?

JUAN MANUEL SANTOS has demonstrated that pro-American, pro-free-market politicians still have life in Latin America. Mr. Santos, who romped to victory in Colombia's presidential runoff on Sunday, has no interest in courting Iran, unlike Brazil's Luiz Ignácio Lula da Silva. He has rejected the authoritarian socialism of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. A former journalist with degrees from the University of Kansas and Harvard, he values free media and independent courts. His biggest priority may be ratifying and implementing a free-trade agreement between Colombia and the United States.

So the question raised by Mr. Santos's election is whether the Obama administration and Democratic congressional leaders will greet this strong and needed U.S. ally with open arms -- or with the arms-length disdain and protectionist stonewalling to which they subjected his predecessor, Álvaro Uribe.

Mr. Uribe will leave office in August as one of the most successful presidents in modern Latin American history, though you would never know it from listening to his critics in Washington. He beefed up Colombia's army and economy, and smashed the terrorist FARC movement; murders have fallen by 45 percent and kidnappings by 90 percent during his eight years in office. Though most Colombians wanted him to remain in power, he bowed to a Supreme Court ruling against a referendum on a third term -- which means that unlike Mr. Chávez, he will leave behind a strong democratic system.

Colombia has nevertheless been treated more as an enemy than friend by congressional Democrats, who have steadily reduced U.S. military aid and worked assiduously to block the free-trade agreement Mr. Uribe negotiated with the Bush administration. The Obama administration, which has courted Mr. Lula and sought to improve relations with Venezuela and Cuba, has been cool to Colombia, recommending another 11 percent reduction in aid for next year and keeping the trade agreement on ice.

Mr. Santos's election offers an opportunity to revitalize the relationship. As defense minister, he demonstrated a commitment to addressing the human rights concerns that troubled some in Congress. He has pledged to seek better relations with both Venezuela and Ecuador, despite the material support those countries have provided to the FARC.

Ratification of the free-trade agreement would serve the administration's stated goal of boosting U.S. exports while bolstering a nation that could be an anchor for democracy and political moderation in the region. It would also allow the administration and Congress to demonstrate that friends of the United States will be supported and not scorned in Washington.

Ecuador Threatens to Cut Colombia Ties Over Spy Plot

QUITO (Reuters) - Ecuador's President Rafael Correa threatened to break off diplomatic ties again with Colombia on Tuesday over accusations that its agents wiretapped top Ecuadorean officials, including the leftist leader.

Difficult relations between Colombia and its neighbors are one of the top foreign policy challenges facing Juan Manual Santos, Colombia's incoming president-elect. A diplomatic spat with Venezuela is also affecting billions of dollars of trade.

Ecuador broke off diplomatic ties with Colombia in 2008 after a Colombian bombing raid on a FARC guerrilla camp on the Ecuadorean side of the border. Relations were partially restored in November, but not to the level of ambassador.

Agents of Colombia's DAS intelligence service tapped telephone conversations of Correa and his top officials after the 2008 raid, an Ecuadorean newspaper reported on Monday.

"It would not only be an obstacle to the re-establishment of bilateral relations. We would have to go back and break relations. This is extremely serious," Correa told reporters.

Colombia had no immediate comment on Correa's statement.

The two countries currently have lower level diplomats or charges d'affaires in place and had held encouraging talks in recent months about restoring full relations.

Colombia's Administrative Security Department, known by its Spanish initials DAS, denies the accusation of spying. The charge is being investigated by Correa's government.

The DAS has been hit by a string of scandals, including allegations of illegal wiretapping of judges, journalists and opposition politicians in Colombia.

The United States cut off aid to the agency amid charges that Uribe's advisers directed some of the abuses from the presidential palace. Uribe has said his government will disband the DAS and create a smaller, better-controlled agency.

First Sentences for Colombia Paramilitary Leaders

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- A Colombian court on Tuesday handed down the first prison sentences to leaders of the illegal far-right militias that demobilized under a peace pact with President Alvaro Uribe's government.

Edward Cobos, better known as ''Diego Vecino,'' and Uber Banquez, alias ''Juancho Dique,'' each received the maximum of eight years in prison dictated by the Justice and Peace law under which they surrendered.

They were also ordered to pay $385,000 each in restitution to relatives of their victims.

By submitting to the Justice and Peace process and confessing to their crimes, the two were able to avoid far harsher sentences of 40 years each for crimes that included ordering massacres, kidnapping and driving people off their land.

Reading the sentence, Judge Uldi Teresa Jimenez said Cobos and Banquez had committed ''serious violations of international humanitarian law, attacking civilians, displacing them from their land, taking the lives of non-combatants and looting their property.''

Cobos and Banquez are among some 50 warlords and 31,000 ''paramilitary'' foot soldiers who demobilized between 2003 and 2006. Among those, 4,100 have cooperated with the Justice and Peace process.

Despite the surrender deal, Colombia's provinces continue to be plagued by criminal bands composed in large part of former paramilitaries who profit from drug trafficking, extorting businesses and forcibly taking land from poor peasants.

The far-right groups arose when wealthy landowners and ranchers formed ''self-defense'' militias in the 1980s to combat kidnappings and extortion by leftist rebels.

But the militias evolved into autonomous criminal bands that coopted regional politicians and national lawmakers and infiltrated the DAS domestic security agency. Prosecutors say paramilitaries have confessed to more than 25,000 killings.

In 2008, the president extradited to the United States to face trial on drug-trafficking charges 14 top paramilitary leaders who have collectively confessed to ordering thousands of killings.
Uribe said they had continued to commit crimes from their prison cells, violating terms of the Justice and Peace law.

Cobos and Banquez were sentenced Tuesday for just three violent acts in Bolivar state on the Caribbean coast: the March 10, 2000, displacement at gunpoint of the entire village of Mampujan, the massacre the following day of 11 peasants in the village of San Cayetano and the April 2003 kidnapping of nine people in Isla Mucura.

''This is only one of the many cases for which these two men are being investigated,'' said Luis Gonzalez, head of the Justice and Peace unit of the prosecutor's office. ''Further ahead, there will be new charges and they will receive new sentences.''

However, under terms of the 2003 Justice and Peace law, the most prison time they can serve for all their crimes is eight years.

Because Cobos and Banquez laid down their arms in 2005, the two men will be eligible for release in three years.

A leading Colombian human rights activist, congressman-elect Ivan Cepeda, lamented that the sentences levied on the two men ''are not proportional to the damage they have done and the crimes against humanity that they committed.''

Santos' challenges in Colombia

The incoming president, who succeeds Alvaro Uribe, must transform himself from a military leader into a chief executive who can address a broad range of issues with diplomacy and finesse.

It's no surprise that voters in Colombia chose a tough former defense minister to succeed outgoing President Alvaro Uribe, who is leaving office after two terms. A resounding 69% of those who cast ballots opted for continuity, replacing Uribe, who made serious headway against the leftist guerrillas seeking to overthrow the government, with the man who helped him do it, Juan Manuel Santos.

Santos' military's successes against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia included a daring operation in which rebels were duped into freeing high-profile hostages, and a cross-border raid into Ecuador in which the FARC's No. 2 was killed. But as he heads to the Casa de Narino, the presidential palace, his challenge will be to transform himself from a military leader devoted solely to combating rebels into a chief executive who will be called upon to address a far broader range of issues with diplomacy and finesse. Awaiting him is a multitude of nonmilitary concerns: desperate poverty, entrenched government corruption, unchecked human rights abuses and rampant drug trafficking. He also has diplomatic fence-mending to do with neighbors Ecuador and Venezuela.

Santos comes with some heavy baggage. On his watch, the military developed an anything-goes swagger, not only when taking on guerrillas but also with noncombatants; troops were found to have killed civilians and claimed that they were guerrillas to boost their kill numbers and make themselves appear more successful. And if many Colombians became more optimistic about defeating the FARC, others are more hopeless about their government. Corruption permeates not just the military but the entire political system. Dozens of lawmakers have been indicted or arrested on charges of colluding with paramilitary death squads, the right-wing answer to the FARC.

The most pressing problem, however, is the economy. Santos, a Harvard-educated economist and former finance minister, is viewed as the capable steward the country needs during the global recession. It's not as clear that he'll be the man to deal with some of Colombia's other woes. Ongoing conflict between rich and poor, such as the frequent assassinations of workers attempting to organize unions, has become an international disgrace. Notably, it has hindered the ratification of a trade pact with the United States.

Santos has said he wants to forge a new relationship with the U.S. And this is an appropriate moment to do so, because financial aid to Colombia is being steadily reduced by the Obama administration. In the months ahead, Santos will have many of the same challenges as Uribe but fewer resources. Uribe, in a sense, was Colombia's wartime president. The military man who follows him will be charged with leading the country to peace.

Santos: Uribe's heir (almost) apparent

The results of Sunday's presidential elections in Colombia surprised pollsters and pundits alike. Everyone predicted a very tight race, with a second round almost inevitable. Instead, Juan Manuel Santos, the government-backed candidate of the U Party, handily outdistanced all contenders. He defeated his nearest rival, Green Party candidate Antanus Mockus, by 25 points and almost succeeded in avoiding the June 20 runoff.

What accounts for the rout?

After all, the country had been widely believed to be suffering from a measure of ``Uribe fatigue.'' Although Alvaro Uribe, Colombia's two-term president, remains personally popular -- his approval ratings are around 70 percent -- many thought that the cumulative effect of a series of scandals and endless political battles and tensions would leave a weary electorate bent on change and that Mockus, the former Bogotá mayor who shrewdly advertised himself as post-Uribe, not anti-Uribe, would benefit from such a mood shift.

The shift was real, and explained Mockus' remarkable political surge in recent months. In the end, however, neither Mockus's appeal nor the public's desire for change was enough to trump the allegiance Colombian voters felt towards Uribe, who was widely credited with bringing the country back from the brink of collapse and creating a widespread sense of greater security.

Uribe's tireless, take-charge style and military pressure managed to put the FARC rebels on the defensive. His government's deals with paramilitary forces, while seriously questioned, also kept the worst abuses in check. Security gains -- homicides and kidnappings dropped sharply -- were accompanied by economic progress. Psychologically, the country moved from despair to hope -- no mean feat.

On Sunday, Uribe was amply rewarded. Santos, who had served as Uribe's defense minister and had resources and party machinery behind him, not only came out on top, but together with the other two political parties that had been part of Uribe's coalition -- Radical Change and Conservative -- marshaled almost two-thirds of the total vote. (In 2002, Uribe got 53 percent of vote, and 62 percent in 2006.)

Uribe's potential heir

Though Santos lacks Uribe's common, political touch, he was well-positioned to be the popular president's heir. Santos himself had won widespread praise as defense minister, first with the controversial raid on a FARC camp in Ecuadorean territory in March 2008 and then with the highly acclaimed Operation Checkmate three months later that freed 16 FARC hostages, including three U.S. defense contractors held for six years and former presidential candidate Ingrid Bentancourt. Though this is Santos' first run at elected office, he had ably served two other Colombian administrations, as minister of trade and finance. His campaign was intelligent, and adjusted well to the Mockus phenomenon.

Mockus' pedagogy and penchant for symbolic politics played well, but took him only so far. When it came time to vote, some who had flirted with Mockus were not prepared to entrust the management of the country's security and foreign-policy agendas to a relative novice. Mockus didn't help himself with gaffes in the campaign about the possible extradition of Uribe or how he felt about Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez (he first said he ``admired'' and then ``respected'' him).

In fact, Chávez's chronic meddling in Colombia's campaign, with his attacks on Santos, helped arouse nationalist sentiment and only bolstered Santos' political standing. Colombians continue to worry about the FARC and their menacing neighbor, who Uribe was seen as having skillfully contained.

But Colombians also want to change politics as usual, which is what Uribe pledged in 2002 but failed to deliver and what the Mockus candidacy exemplifies. In the next three weeks Santos is likely to emphasize some of the themes that have been so successful for Mockus. In his speech Sunday night, he wisely called for national unity and signaled that he was committed to cleaning up Colombia's corruption.

But the loudest cheers came when he thanked Alvaro Uribe and said that he was Colombia's greatest president.

Competing priorities

Santos is well-known in Washington and, perhaps more so than Uribe, sensitive to international public opinion. He is committed to deepening the U.S.-Colombia relationship and is expected to press particularly on securing U.S. congressional approval of the pending free-trade agreement, negotiated and signed by both countries in 2006. His task will not be easy, and may be complicated by continuing concerns, especially among some Democratic lawmakers, about controversies that clouded the Uribe administration. Trade is not exactly high on the agenda, and the administration is inundated with other priorities.

But before Santos gets in full gear he will need to wait until June 20, when he will almost certainly become president-elect. In Colombia's changing climate, he is unlikely to take anything for granted.

After all, just over three months ago, before the country's Constitutional Court ruled against another reelection, the odds seemed good that the president over the next four years would be Alvaro Uribe.

Staying the course

By placing the presidency almost within the grasp of Juan Manuel Santos, Colombian voters chose consolidation over idealism.

FOR a candidate facing a tight vote, Juan Manuel Santos seemed unusually calm on the eve of Colombia’s presidential election on May 30th. A former defence minister, Mr Santos is the preferred candidate of Álvaro Uribe, the popular outgoing president. Yet his seemingly lacklustre campaign had allowed a race that might have been easy to become a struggle. The last published opinion polls, taken a week or more before the vote, had him tied with Antanas Mockus, a former mayor of Bogotá whose talk of a new, clean politics captured the imagination of middle-class Colombians. The polls also suggested that, in a run-off between the two, Mr Mockus would win.

But the relaxed Mr Santos said his own polls told a different story—and they turned out to be right. He won a commanding 47% of the vote compared with just 22% for Mr Mockus, and is all but certain to become Colombia’s next president in the run-off on June 20th.

His thumping score underlines how Colombians want above all to consolidate the progress made under Mr Uribe. Before he took office in 2002, the country had endured over half the world’s kidnappings and its highest murder rate. Much of Colombia was ravaged by leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries. Mr Uribe’s security build-up reduced the guerrillas to an irritant and persuaded the paramilitaries to demobilise. Greater security brought foreign investment and economic growth.

Mr Mockus bet that precisely because of these gains, Colombians now have other concerns. He insisted on the importance of “democratic legality”, called life and public funds “sacred” and said that in pacifying the country there should be no “shortcuts”. That was a criticism of the many scandals that have marred Mr Uribe’s rule. Perhaps the worst of them was the revelation that in a grotesquely misguided attempt to be seen to be winning, the army had killed scores, and perhaps hundreds, of civilians and dressed them as dead guerrillas.

Mr Santos retorted that as defence minister he dealt with this crime by sacking more than two dozen senior officers and drawing up new rules of engagement for the army. And he countered Mr Mockus’s rise by stressing that his own experience went beyond security. He is also a former finance minister and said that his priority as president would be jobs.

Mr Mockus’s honest idealism strayed into political naivety. He said he would support the extradition of both Mr Uribe and Mr Santos to Ecuador if the courts there persisted with charges against them over the bombing of a FARC camp just across the border in 2008. (He later backtracked.) He said he “admired” Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s leftist president, who has imposed curbs on Colombian exports and threatened war. Mr Mockus then claimed he meant to say “respected”.

Such missteps reminded voters that Colombia’s renaissance could be reversed. Mr Uribe himself capitalised with a barrage of radio interviews calling for the continuation of his policies. Although he was legally barred from endorsing a candidate, this amounted to a thinly veiled campaign for Mr Santos, the candidate of his U Party. The day after the vote, Mr Santos met Mr Uribe in the presidential palace and credited him with the victory. In addition, as a former independent running for the small Green Party, Mr Mockus lacked a political machine to get out the vote.

It is hard to see how Mr Santos might lose the run-off. He has already received the backing of the Conservative Party, which is part of Mr Uribe’s congressional coalition and whose own candidate fared poorly. Another former uribista, Germán Vargas Lleras, who came third with 10% of the vote, has also backed Mr Santos. Parts of the opposition will do the same: many legislators from the Liberal party prefer Mr Santos, who like Mr Uribe is a former Liberal, to Mr Mockus.

Ever the purist, Mr Mockus says he will not engage in political horse-trading. During the campaign he alienated the wealthy by promising new taxes and pushed away the left by rejecting overtures from the Democratic Alternative Pole party, saying it had factions that were close to the FARC. He now has just three weeks to try to rekindle the spark of popular enthusiasm he briefly ignited at the start of the campaign.

For Mr Santos the presidency is tantalisingly close, but it is not yet won. Perhaps the biggest threat he faces in the run-off is a low turnout, in a country where voting is voluntary. Only 49% of the electorate voted on May 30th. But he has done most of the hard work of persuading Colombians to stay the course that Mr Uribe set.

Ex-Defense Chief Leads in Colombia

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — A scion of a powerful Colombian family comfortably won more votes than an eccentric former mayor of Bogotá in presidential elections on Sunday, but narrowly failed to get the majority needed to prevent a runoff election in June between the two men.

The lead vote-getter, Juan Manuel Santos, the architect of crushing blows against guerrillas as a defense minister under President Álvaro Uribe, took 46.6 percent, against 21.5 percent for his main rival, Antanas Mockus, a French-educated mathematician who had unexpectedly emerged as a strong contender in the race, Colombian election authorities said Sunday night. Several other candidates garnered shares of the remainder of the vote.

Mr. Santos’s inability to win more than 50 percent opens the way for a new campaigning phase in which the two are expected to fiercely criticize each other’s capabilities yet again. Mr. Mockus has emphasized human rights scandals on his opponent’s watch as defense minister, while Mr. Santos has questioned if Mr. Mockus is ready to lead a country that faces resilient security threats from leftist rebels and drug-trafficking gangs.

Despite polls that briefly signaled that Mr. Mockus was within grasp of a victory, the results showed that many voters were instead ready to support Mr. Santos, who portrayed himself as the political heir to Mr. Uribe, a strong ally of the United States who lowered kidnapping and murder rates during his eight years in power.

“Of all the candidates running, Santos wears the pants when it comes to confronting the guerrillas,” said Fernando Morales, 37, a security guard, after casting his vote here.

“I don’t like Mockus much because he’s someone who lowers his pants to get attention,” Mr. Morales said in a dig at Mr. Mockus, who as a university dean rose to prominence in the 1990s after dropping his trousers and mooning an auditorium of unruly students. The episode forced Mr. Mockus to resign from his post, but gave him the publicity to run successfully for mayor of Bogotá.

Mr. Mockus, 58, won plaudits in two colorful terms as mayor after improving the quality of life in a city that had been plagued by car bombs and generalized chaos. Drawing on arcane philosophical concepts, he used mimes to curb traffic violations and persuaded Bogotanos to pay more taxes in exchange for improved services.

Mr. Mockus campaigned on an anticorruption platform, emphasizing scandals including wiretaps of prominent judges by Mr. Uribe’s intelligence agency and the killing of civilians by soldiers who then catalogued them as guerrillas in efforts to raise combat-kill statistics.

But at the end of the day many Colombians voted for continuity, even if Mr. Mockus’s message of accountability resonated. “Colombians want stability, but they also seem to want clean government,” said Cynthia Arnson, a specialist on Colombian politics at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

Just as Mr. Mockus ran an antiestablishment campaign as the head of the Green Party, Mr. Santos, 59, embodied the establishment that is the bedrock of support for President Uribe. Mr. Santos’s granduncle Eduardo Santos was president of Colombia; a cousin, Francisco Santos, is currently vice president; and his family wields influence through El Tiempo, a leading newspaper here in which it has a stake.

While Mr. Santos campaigned on his record of marginalizing the country’s largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, it still wreaks havoc in some areas. Underscoring this threat, the FARC killed two children in a grenade attack on the eve of the election in the remote hamlet of El Plateado in southwestern Colombia, the Colombian armed forces reported.

That episode followed an ambush by the FARC in the southern department, or province, of Caquetá last week that killed nine marines on a patrol, the biggest loss of life by the security forces since January. Indeed, the FARC’s resilience in recent months had emerged as an issue for some in Colombia ahead of the vote.

“Don’t let them say they’re leaving behind a country that’s a paradise,” Héctor Abad Faciolince, one of Colombia’s top writers and social commentators, wrote in a column criticizing the Uribe administration in the newspaper El Espectador on Sunday.

Other countries in Latin America are closely following the election here, especially Venezuela, where President Hugo Chávez, who has already traded barbs with Mr. Santos and who has tense economic and political relations with Mr. Uribe’s government, has vowed to limit trade further with Colombia if Mr. Santos wins.

“Mr. Chávez and I probably don’t agree on anything,” Mr. Santos, 59, said in an interview here, acknowledging that relations with Venezuela would be a challenge. “The concept of democracy, the concept of freedom, the concept of private property, the concept of the independence of the powers of the state. But if we respect the way we differ, we can have cordial relations.”

Shakira rejects Arizona immigration law

Colombian singer Shakira visited Phoenix, Arizona, to question the new law on immigrants that allows police to ask for documents to anyone they suspect may be in the country illegally. The artist expressed her solidarity with the Hispanic community and said that the new legislation "attacks human and civil rights".

Strange times in Colombia

The rise of dark horse Antanas Mockus to front-runner in Colombia’s presidential race has international tongues wagging. Some see him as a Trojan horse for Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Others compare him to Peru’s Alberto Fujimori, who went from outsider to dictator. And then there are those who think Colombians have gone cuckoo after so many years of internal war.

You would be forgiven for shuddering at the thought of a Green Party president who, as rector of a university, mooned his students, got married atop an elephant and, as mayor of Bogota, walked around the capital city in a spandex suit and sent about 400 mimes to enforce traffic laws. Not the kind of chap with whom Queen Elizabeth II is clamouring to have tea and scones.

And you would be forgiven for fearing Mr. Mockus’s foreign policy after he said he “admired” Mr. Chavez for submitting his rule to the ballot box (later downgrading the term to “respect”), or that he would extradite current President Alvaro Uribe should Ecuador, a Venezuelan ally, seek to try him for Colombia's incursion into Ecuadorean territory during an attack on a terrorist camp. (Mr. Mockus later apologized for not being an international law expert.)

No, Colombians have not suddenly decided to throw away the progress Mr. Uribe achieved in cornering the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), liberating the economy from insecurity and restoring morale. I would suggest they are trying, awkwardly, to preserve what is best about the President while rectifying the excesses of his era.

Juan Manuel Santos, who was Mr. Uribe’s successful defence minister, is locked in a close race with Mr. Mockus in the first round of the May 30 elections. Mr. Mockus has pledged to honour Mr. Uribe’s anti-FARC policy and recalled that he was commended by the President when, as mayor of Bogota, he collaborated with his security policy. And Colombia’s leftist party, the Democratic Pole, commands a humiliating 6 per cent in the polls.

But Colombians also want to evolve from a country in which a president towered above the institutions to one in which institutions temper political power. Mr. Chavez and Mr. Fujimori were originally elected by voters sick of weak governments. Mr. Mockus, who has risen under a very strong President, says Colombia’s chief problem is “illegality and the justification of illegality by people who normally behave themselves.” His ethical inclination – substantiated by two corruption-free stints as mayor – resonates in a country plagued with scandals ranging from links between the politicians and paramilitary organizations to political espionage by the secret police.

Mr. Mockus’s support comes from young people, urban areas and the middle classes. It is not poor Colombians but the elites who are craving for an end to political excess. The poor are supporting Mr. Santos – Mr. Uribe’s man. This tension between liberalism (in the classical sense) and authoritarianism has defined Colombian history since the tempestuous relationship between Francisco Santander (vice-president) and Simon Bolivar (president) in the republic's beginning. Currently, the tension occurs not just among Colombians but within Colombians: The same voters who give Mr. Uribe a 72-per-cent approval rating are making Mr. Mockus the front-runner.

But a Mockus victory is not a foregone conclusion. His rise as a candidate has been slowed because of his silly statements. Questions abound over his ability to govern, considering his party has only five senators and three representatives in the Colombian Congress, and his personal ambitions.

Marcela Prieto, executive director of Colombia’s Institute of Political Science, told me that “governability would not be a huge problem because the Liberal Party would back him, although he would have trouble putting together stable coalitions. As regards his unpredictability, the danger is attenuated by the fact that his is not a one-man effort: His campaign has brought together three former mayors of Bogota and the former mayor of Medellin, all of whom have strong egos and will act as checks and balances.”

I have seen too many anti-politicians not to fear Mr. Mockus turning into a Fujimori or a Chavez. But the more I observe Colombia, the more I am convinced that his support is for the right reasons, whether he delivers or not – meaning that Colombians will hold him in check if he wins and becomes messianic. And they will force Mr. Santos to restore the pre-eminence of institutions if he bests his rival. A comforting thought because I, too, was starting to think that this most admirable of countries was going cuckoo.

Mompox, Colombia: A town from the pages of Gabriel García Márquez

Colombia’s Mockus Sees Lead Narrow Before May 30 Vote

May 14 (Bloomberg) -- Colombia Green Party candidate Antanas Mockus’ lead over former Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos has narrowed less than three weeks before the country’s presidential vote, a survey by Datexco Company SA showed.

Mockus would beat Santos of the La U Party by 32.8 percent to 29.3 percent in the first-round vote and would win a second- round runoff with 47.9 percent of the ballots to 33.6 percent for Santos, according to the poll broadcast today on W Radio.

The company’s poll last week had shown Mockus with a 12- point advantage in first-round elections and an almost 22-point lead in the second round. A Centro Nacional de Consultoria poll published last night showed Santos with a slender lead in first- round voting and had the candidates in a statistical dead heat in the second round. A candidate needs more than 50 percent of the first-round vote on May 30 to avoid a June 20 runoff.

Datexco’s most recent survey was conducted May 11-13 and polled 1,200 people in 37 counties by telephone. The margin of error was 2.89 percentage points.

Santos, who was defense minister under President Alvaro Uribe, is credited with weakening the country’s biggest rebel group, known as the FARC. He has promised to continue the campaign against the Marxist guerrillas and attract foreign investment to the $242 billion economy. Mockus has also pledged to retain the security and economic policies of Uribe, while fighting corruption and improving education for Colombia’s 44 million people.

The peso weakened 0.5 percent to 1962.10 per dollar at 9:47 a.m. New York time from 1951.96 yesterday.

Colombia: and the Winner Is, Antanas Mockus

Over the past ten days, strolling along 7th street, a large, noisy and polluted avenue crossing Bogota from south to north, I was amazed to see the windows of apartments overspread with signboards of Antanas Mockus, the presidential candidate of the Green Party. It's the Colombian version of the Obama syndrome.

I am passionate about politics and become quite restless, and thus I resolved to take advantage of a blog's capacity to break down barriers. I decided to fast forward, to a day after the elections, that is, May 31st, and to explain why Antanas Mockus became the president of Colombia on the first round, defeating Juan Manuel Santos, the candidate of the oligarchy, who thought the presidency was his, even before starting campaigning.

These are the five reasons Mockus won the presidency.

1. Postmoderm vs. Traditional. Juan Manuel Santos emphasized security and the threat represented by Chavez. He tried to sound like Uribe, a president Colombians worshiped for his achievements in security. But Colombians were ready to move on. They did not care only about security, but also about human development, education, racial and sexual rights, environment, etc. Colombian sociologist Eduardo Pizzarro, in a recent column, underlined how post-materialist values have being gaining political priority, especially among the youth. Mockus and his vice president Sergio Fajardo were able to interpret a wider range of values Colombians care about today. Santos was more of the same, while Mockus embodied the novelty.

2. New vs. Old. Juan Manuel Santos tried desperately to portrait himself as a reincarnation of president Alvaro Uribe. Before starting the campaign he even said he would run only once Uribe gave him the green light. That was not very smart. Voters don't like a clone. Besides, Santos forgot that Uribe became president because of mass enthusiasm and of a large social movement outside the traditional political parties of Colombia. For Colombians, Uribe was not the expression of the elite but an alternative to politics as usual. Santos, a member of one of the most traditional oligarchic families of Bogota, represented the return to old politics. And the more Santos underscored how deep the roots of his experience in politics and in administration run, the more he reminded voters that he was an oldie. Mockus, instead, embodied the new, and was somehow perceived as the anti-establishment candidate. In this sense, Mockus represented the continuation of Uribe. Santos is involution, while Mockus is evolution.

3. Decency vs. Dirty. Why do you like Mockus? I asked several friends from all walks of life. "He calls out the best that is harbored in us," was the common answer. Voters just fell in love with this original former president of the Nacional University and twice mayor of Bogota. They fell in love not so much with his beard, but rather with his transparency, his simplicity, his honesty. They thought there was no better government program in Colombia then declaring war to endemic corruption and promoting a culture of legality. The buzz about Santos, instead, is that he believes ends, like winning the presidency, justify any means. I was struck to see how much resentment and aversion Santos was able to generate among different people. When Santos hired a Venezuelan publicist, known for being an expert in waging dirty campaigns and spreading false rumors against political opponents, the voters had enough, and deepened their support for Mockus. Voters had grown tired of the scandals and the corruption increasingly surrounding the Uribe administration of which Santos was a defense minister; the illegal interception and activities of the president's secret service agency, the DAS; the extra-judicial killings of more then one thousand innocent young men by the military; the linkages between corrupt politicians and the paramilitary; and the corruption that brought to the first reelection of President Uribe. Mockus embodied decency, while Santos....

4. Unity vs. Polarization. For eight years Uribe applied a rhetoric of enmity, radicalizing the hate of Colombians against the insurgency, and ultimately against everyone opposing his government. Uribe shaped a reality in black and white using a discourse of us against them. No surprise he felt greatly in tune with president Bush. The two indeed went along very well. The cloak of negativity this strategy produced, eventually tired people. Mockus' proposal was the exact opposite. He proposed a politics of togetherness, and called Colombians not to division but to unity. Santos represented polarization, while Mockus unity.

5. Participation vs. Machinery. Three weeks before the elections, Santos admitted that he underestimated the power of the Internet. Santos was confident that the traditional political machinery was going to deliver him the presidency. Mockus promoted a campaign of a different kind, one that empowered all citizens, especially young people, and stimulated their creativity and motivation. Individuals became formidable multipliers of Mocku's message. The campaign turned in a green wave that became bigger and stronger by the day, finally sweeping away Santos' aspirations. Most importantly, the wave cleared the field for an innovative and unique political experiment in Colombia. And God only knows how this country, embedded in decades of social, political and armed conflict, needs to try something new to get rid of old patterns of violence and corruption. Also in the campaign's strategy, Santos represented more of the same, and Santos the novelty - the deepening of democratic participation.

There is no guarantee of success with Mockus. No assured changed. The work ahead is titanic. But he represents a great and excellent opportunity. For now he achieved something already extraordinary in itself: to be elected by a totally free vote; free from drug lords, guerrillas, and traditional powerful machinery's influence. This in it self is a revolution. The biggest, not announced and non-violent revolution in Colombia.