Colombia's 'Narco-Presidente'
By Jerry Meldon
June 1, 2006
Across South America, voters – fed up with what many see as deep-seated economic inequality and political injustice – have rejected Washington’s preferred candidates and elected populist or center-left alternatives. But Colombia’s reelection of President Alvaro Uribe Velez has bucked that regional trend.
Winning about 60 percent of the vote on May 28, Uribe now stands as South America’s last right-wing head of state, a lonely voice siding with George W. Bush. Diminutive and thin-skinned, the 53-year-old Uribe also remains an anti-communist hard-liner fighting an insurgency dating back to the Cold War.
Uribe’s reelection sets the stage, too, for a new round of confrontation between the Bush administration and the populist government of Hugo Chavez from oil-rich Venezuela, which borders Colombia to the east and which has spearheaded the region’s drive for greater independence from the policies of Washington and the International Monetary Fund.
Tensions between Colombia and Venezuela have threatened to boil over in recent years, with Colombian officials accusing Venezuela of supporting leftist guerillas known as the FARC and Venezuelans suspecting Colombia of aiding U.S. efforts to destabilize and eliminate the Chavez government, which has withstood several coup attempts.
In the past few months, evidence has emerged to support some of those Venezuelan suspicions. Rafael Garcia, a cashiered official of Colombia’s federal police agency (DAS), alleged that the DAS plotted to assassinate Chavez.
Garcia, the former DAS chief of information systems, was accused of taking bribes to erase police files that incriminated right-wing paramilitary leaders. He then went public describing the Colombian plot to kill Chavez, as well as DAS help for narco-traffickers connected to a right-wing “death squad,” the United Self-Defense Forces, known as the AUC.
Garcia also alleged that the AUC murdered union activists and engineered voter fraud four years ago to help Uribe get elected.
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Garcia, the former DAS official, alleged that AUC thugs used intimidation and fraud to give Uribe 300,000 of his 5.3 million votes in the 2002 election. During Uribe’s first term, the AUC also appears to have increased its penetration of key government agencies, including the DAS, roughly the equivalent of Colombia’s FBI.
(snip)
Colombia’s long history of violence – the origins of which Scott lays at the doorstep of a feudalistic oligarchy that dispossessed peasants and subjugated laborers with impunity – predates the first U.S. intervention in the early 1960s. (The 15-year-long “La Violencia” period began with the 1948 assassination of a popular presidential candidate.)
Furthermore, the crystallization of what had previously been a fragmented left-wing underground into an armed revolutionary guerilla movement, occurred in response, not prior, to U.S. intervention.(snip)
Significantly, the editorial continues, “Uribe’s administration has twice written bills that restrict the jurisdiction of the Constitutional Court, which is the most important remaining check on the president’s power. Uribe may try again if he is elected to a second term on Sunday.
More:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/053106a.html