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.''