Uribe edges towards autocracy

ONCE a country with a healthy, even exaggerated, distrust of executive power, Colombia is on the brink of allowing Álvaro Uribe to seek an unprecedented third consecutive term as president. The Senate is due to vote on May 19th on a bill to call a referendum on the required change in the constitution. Once the text is reconciled with a version already approved by the lower house, it would be reviewed by the Constitutional Court, and could be put to the people in November. Mr Uribe has still not said whether he intends to run in the election due in May 2010, but he has done nothing to discourage the idea. If he is a candidate, on present trends he would win. But some influential Colombians—and outsiders—believe a third term would be a huge mistake for both Mr Uribe and his country.

Many Colombians credit Mr Uribe with transforming their homeland from a near-failed state to a buoyant, if still violent, place. Their gratitude won him a second term in 2006, after the constitution was changed to allow a second consecutive term. After seven years in office, he still enjoys an approval rating of 71%, according to Invamer-Gallup, a pollster. In a poll this month, 59% said they would turn out for a referendum; of those, 84% said they would back Mr Uribe’s right to run again.

The president has said that his overriding concern is the continuation of his “democratic security” policies, which have curbed violence, weakened leftist guerrillas and demobilised many right-wing paramilitaries. But in the same breath he suggested that he alone can ensure that this progress will continue: “Perpetuating oneself in the presidency troubles me, but I cannot be politically irresponsible,” he declared.

Some of those who oppose a third term have been among Mr Uribe’s closest aides. They include Fabio Echeverri, who ran both his presidential campaigns. There is some hesitation among government legislators: the Senate vote was postponed this week, though the main stumbling block involved demands for political favours.

“No to re-election”, declared Semana, Colombia’s leading newsweekly (which has generally been critical of the president), on its cover this week. Its main argument was that the checks and balances in the constitution are designed for a four-year presidential term and that an erosion of the separation of powers under Mr Uribe would be aggravated by a third term.

Such worries are all the greater because Mr Uribe’s rule has not been free of abuses and scandals. These include the army murdering innocent civilians and disguising their corpses as guerrillas killed in combat. This prompted the government to sack 30 officers last October, including three generals. So far 22 soldiers, including three colonels, have been arrested over these crimes. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights last year complained of “widespread and systematic” killings of civilians by the army. Prosecutors at the attorney-general’s office are investigating 1,296 such allegations since 2002.

The government insists that it is committed to ending and punishing such abuses, which it says are isolated. But its allies abroad seem to be becoming more sceptical. Mr Uribe enjoyed a close friendship with George Bush. The Democrats who control the American Congress have held up ratification of a free-trade agreement with Colombia, ostensibly because of worries about the killings of trade unionists. In March Britain announced that it was ending a scheme under which it trained Colombian soldiers in human rights (though it is maintaining counter-drug aid and giving money to civic groups and the judiciary). David Miliband, the foreign secretary, expressed concern that “there are officers and soldiers of the Colombian armed forces who have been involved in, or allowed, abuses.”

Another running sore involves the civilian intelligence service, known as DAS. Three successive directors of this body, each chosen by Mr Uribe, are being questioned by prosecutors over claims that DAS illegally spied on opposition politicians, journalists and Supreme Court justices. On May 8th the first of the three, Jorge Noguera, was charged with conspiracy and murder. He is accused of colluding with paramilitaries and helping to plan the murders of an academic, a journalist, a union leader and a politician.

Mr Uribe will shortly have the chance to propose a new attorney-general, who critics worry may be less zealous than Mario Iguarán, the incumbent. In a third term, the president could fill the Constitutional Court with his nominees. Senior judicial appointments must be ratified by Congress, but the president has enjoyed a comfortable legislative majority.

A second argument wielded by opponents of a third term is that national priorities have changed. Polls find that the economy tops security as a public concern. That is partly a tribute to Mr Uribe’s success, and partly a consequence of gathering recession. Third, Mr Uribe risks aggravating a worrying regional trend. In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez recently won a referendum abolishing term limits and followed it up by harassing opponents.

Assuming that Mr Uribe is not simply bluffing, and that his supporters in the Senate do not have second thoughts, would he really win? A deteriorating economy is probably the biggest threat to a third term. But Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think-tank, says that because he is seen as a “crisis president”, this could even help him.

There are other strong candidates. Juan Manuel Santos, the defence minister, is expected to resign soon in order to run, though he says he would not do so against Mr Uribe. Another contender is Sergio Fajardo, an independent who was a reforming mayor of Medellín, Colombia’s second city. If he doesn’t quit while he is still ahead, history may judge that Mr Uribe began to undo his own achievement.

Mexican teams barred from Bogota

Colombia has denied Mexican football clubs Guadalajara and San Luis permission to stage home Libertadores Cup ties in Bogota because of the swine flu outbreak.

"This decision has been taken on the recommendation of the World Health Organisation," the Bogota city government's sub-secretary for health Juan Varela told reporters.

"The decision has been taken because we are in stage five of a pandemic. The World Health Organisation is very demanding. They say we cannot have events with more than 40 people, when a country or origin of the virus is involved,"

"Unfortunately the teams come from a positive country and we are following the recommendation."

The South American Football Confederation (CSF) earlier announced the teams would stage their home matches at the Campin stadium on May 6 after barring them from playing in Mexico.

Guadalajara, Mexico's most popular club, are to due face Brazilian champions Sao Paulo in their second round, first leg tie, while San Luis are due to play Uruguay's Nacional.

The swine flu virus has killed up to 176 people in Mexico.

The Colombian Football Federation and the CSF have yet to comment on the decision.

The Libertadores Cup is the region's equivalent of the European Champions League competition.

Mexico is not a CSF member but three teams from the country take part in the Libertadores every year under a special agreement.

UK ends bilateral military aid to Colombia

Britain has quietly ended nearly a decade of military aid to Colombia's armed forces after accusations of gross violations of human rights, including the murder of civilians who were shot and reported as guerrillas killed in combat.

The Colombian government was "extremely surprised" by the decision to cut off the bilateral cooperation programmes, the deputy defence minister, Sergio Jaramillo, told the Guardian.

The British foreign secretary, David Miliband, announced the move in a written statement to the House of Commons last month, stating that the government "shares the concern … that there are officers and soldiers of the Colombian armed forces who have been involved in, or allowed, abuses".

"Our bilateral human rights projects with the Colombian ministry of defence will cease," the statement said.

The projects included a landmine clearance programme that had been under way since 2000 and a human rights training project that began in 2006. Together, funding for the programmes totalled £190,000 a year.

While the financial value is relatively small, the termination of British military aid has symbolic significance for Colombia. Jaramillo called the decision a "severe blow" to the armed forces from a "great ally".

"No other European country has worked as closely with the army as the United Kingdom," he said.

Colombia's military had long been accused of colluding with illegal rightwing paramilitary groups. Investigators are looking into 1,296 cases since 2002 of reported executions of civilians by army soldiers who dressed the victims in rebel uniforms and planted weapons on them to present them as legitimate guerrilla casualties.

The UN high commissioner for human rights described the practice as "widespread and systematic". Many of the cases came to light after a public outcry over the fate of 11 men missing from a poor suburb of Bogotá who were then reported as combat deaths thousands of miles away, days after their disappearance. Twenty-seven officers, including three generals were discharged over those killings.

A Foreign Office spokesman said none of the aid had gone directly to any of the units involved in the killing of civilians, adding it would be "extremely unfortunate" if they had, since the UK training programme had been aimed at raising awareness of human rights.

Jaramillo said that precisely because of the situation, "it makes no sense whatsoever to cut support for human rights at this critical time."

In November, the US, Colombia's largest military aid donor at about $500m (£340m) a year, suspended the eligibility for funding to several army units that were believed to be involved in the extrajudicial executions, known as "false positives".

While welcoming the UK's decision as "a step in the right direction", the London-based group Justice for Colombia said that the "more offensive" elements of British military aid, labelled counter­-narcotics assistance, was not affected.

The Foreign Office spokesman acknowledged it would continue to work with "some members of the armed forces" on anti-drug programmes. The UK does not reveal the financial value of that assistance due to "security concerns", he said.

The UK will also continue to fund landmine clearance projects through the UN office in Colombia, as well as more than £1m for civilian human rights projects, £900,000 to support UN drugs projects, and £250,000 to fight what has been described as rampant impunity from prosecution enjoyed by some Colombians.

In the statement to the Commons, Miliband said: "The challenge for the Colombian government is to ensure the strategic human rights principles we have helped to promote are embedded and consistently practised by all members of their armed services."

Bogotá: Building a Sustainable City

Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, transformed one of the world's most chaotic cities into a model of civic-minded and sustainable urban planning. He reformed public transportation, added greenways, built mega-libraries and created the longest stretch of bike-only lanes in the world. But along the way, he met tremendous opposition from the very people he was attempting to help.

Peñalosa describes the environmental and social importance of minimizing automobile culture.

Colombian writer winner of Ibero-American Literary Prize

Ángela Becerra was awarded with the third Planeta-Casamerica Prize for Ibero-American Narrative on Tuesday for her novel “Ella que lo tuvo todo” (She who had it all). The award was a $200.000 U.S dollars cash prize. Becerra’s awarded novel describes the story of a writer who suffers and accident and is unable to go back to writing. The winner selection was made out of 10 finalists works from seven countries. 493 writers initially entered the contest.

Escobar by Roberto Escobar; the Accountant's Story

In the museum of organised crime, Pablo Escobar deserves a room of his own. He was the first gangster billionaire, listed by Forbes magazine in 1989 as the world’s seventh richest man; in the late 1980s he offered to pay Colombia’s national debt as a way of fending off the ever-present threat of extradition to America. The rise of his cocaine-trafficking organisation, the Medellin cartel, triggered a period of mayhem unprecedented even by the standards of Colombia’s modern history.

There are passages in this biography written by Pablo’s brother and chief accountant, Roberto, that are jaw-dropping, especially when detailing the sheer ingenuity required in smuggling hundreds of tons annually into America and Europe. At first, simply packing the drug in aircraft tyres was effective. But as the cocaine craze began to grip the nightclubs of New York, Miami and LA, the inventiveness of the Medellin cartel reached new heights.

One of the most successful tricks early on involved stuffing cocaine into the vaginas of mares being transported to America for racing. But before long, the chemists of Medellin had perfected the technique of dissolving cocaine that allowed them to mix it with any liquid — wine, cooking oil, paint. If it sloshes around and originates in South America, it may well contain coke. Roberto explains how the chemists then blended it “into plastic, forming it into many different items, including PVC pipe, religious statues, and when we started shipping it to Europe, the fibreglass shells of small boats”. Consumers may wish to remember that during a night on the razzle they could well be snorting paint or fibreglass.

There are two schools of thought on Pablo, who was killed by a joint American/Colombian operation in 1993. The conventional assessment is of a murderous, power-crazed narco-boss who opened the sluicegates to a river of Colombian blood. Unsurprisingly, Roberto Escobar subscribes to the second, minority view. This sees Pablo as driven by the plight of Colombia’s poor. Once his coke business started attracting billions of dollars to Medellin, the munificent Escobar used these funds to provide for Colombia’s dispossessed, the campesinos and the urban poor in the barrios. Roberto occasionally drops in phrases like “of course, Pablo was no saint”, or “like all people, he had his bad side”, but this hardly does justice to the Armageddon unleashed by Escobar’s wars with the Colombian state and rival cartels. Not content with taking out opponents in stomach-churning fashion, Escobar was responsible for, inter alia, blowing up a passenger airliner mid-flight, assassinating a presidential candidate, and razing the HQ of Colombia’s version of MI5.

Despite this profound distortion, Roberto’s portrait of his brother is an important corrective. The traditional view of Escobar, most widely disseminated by Mark Bowden in Killing Pablo, ignores Colombia’s political, social and cultural peculiarities that encouraged the emergence of somebody like Pablo. And Roberto is right to insist that in the poor districts of Medellin Pablo’s significance is hotly contested; many still venerate him as an anti-establishment figure who distributed wealth from hard-living gringo yuppies to the destitute.

The great disappointment of this intriguing book is that Roberto glosses over the fascinating story of Pablo’s war with his great rivals from the south, the Cali cartel. In the early 1980s, the cartels struck a deal: Cali would control the New York market while Miami belonged to Medellin. Roberto skates over how in the late 1980s Pablo committed his biggest tactical error: he ordered his people to muscle in on New York. The response of the Cali cartel was not just to wage war on Escobar, but to deliver information to the Colombian government and Americans.

Roberto claimed that law enforcement was always two steps behind him and Pablo, but thanks to the Cali cartel’s collaboration, the cops were able to close in. The police caught up with the Cali cartel two years later, but despite the occasional success against leading bosses, the supply of coke to America and Europe has never dried up. America’s disastrous war on drugs is the guarantee that Pablo was only the first in a long, powerful line of narco-kingpins.

Camilo Villegas: 2008 Was A Breakout Year