"Mark Him on the Ballot - The One Wearing Glasses"
By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, May 8 , 2008 (IPS) - "With Uribe, we thought: this is the guy who is going to change the country," the 41-year-old fisherwoman told IPS. That is why her fishing and farming village of 800 people in the central Colombian region of Magdalena Medio decided overwhelmingly to vote for current President Álvaro Uribe in the 2002 presidential elections, when he first ran. The woman agreed to talk to IPS on the condition that she be asked neither her name (we will call her "L.") nor the name of her village.
The main city in the fertile region of Magdalena Medio is Barrancabermeja, an oil port on the Magdalena River, which runs across Colombia from south to north before emptying into the Caribbean Sea.
What convinced the villagers to vote for Uribe? "Because the region where we live is poor, very poor, it’s so difficult to find work, and when I heard him say ‘I am going to work for the poor, I am going to help them,’ I thought ‘this is a good president’."
When the rightwing president’s first four-year term came to an end in 2006, most of the villagers decided again to vote for him, reasoning that he just needed more time to reduce poverty. The odd thing was that in both the 2002 and 2006 elections, despite the fact that the villagers had already decided to vote for Uribe, the far-right paramilitaries, who had committed a number of murders since 1998, when they appeared in the region that was previously dominated by the leftwing guerrillas, pressured the local residents to vote for Uribe anyway.
The paramilitaries did not kill people to pressure the rest to vote for Uribe, as they did in other communities, but merely used "threats," said L. "If you don't vote for Uribe, you know what the consequences will be," the villagers were told ominously. And on election day, they breathed down voters’ necks: "This is the candidate you’re going to vote for. You’re going to put your mark by this one. The one wearing glasses," they would say, pointing to Uribe’s photo on the ballot, L. recalled.
More:
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42290~~~~~And you know how popular he is because the corporate media tells you that? Just as they told you the Iraqi soldiers were throwing premature babies out of incubators, and Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Yeah, we know.
~snip~
For one, opinion polls are unreliable in Colombia. Pollsters tend to reach only middle and upper class urban residents. Poor and rural Colombians, who tend to not have access to landlines or other standard survey methods, are rarely surveyed.
http://www.thewip.net/contributors/2010/06/fundamental_change_in_colombia.html~~~~snip~
On 13 March 2008, Colombia’s biggest-selling daily newspaper, El Tiempo, reported that Uribe had won a record 84 per cent approval rating in a Gallup poll. The poll was extensive, with one thousand Colombians in different parts of the country being interviewed. However, an examination of how such samples are conducted and tallied casts doubt on whether they supply an accurate picture of public sentiment in Colombia.
What is seldom understood about the vast majority of these polls is that the opinions are gathered through telephone interviews via landlines. This methodology is highly problematic for several reasons.
First, many Colombians do not have landlines. While cell-phone use is widespread in Colombia, simple infrastructures such as landlines are not. Not only villages and medium-sized towns, but also some major cities, lack the infrastructure to ensure even electricity on a daily basis, let alone fixed-line optical networks.
Second, interviewees can easily be identified through their landline status. This lack of anonymity inevitably counts against the expression of negative opinions of the president and government.
Third, polls such as the above claim to represent the opinions of a diverse range of Colombians from around the country, yet interviewees are frequently drawn only from the wealthier districts of Colombia’s four largest cities—Bogotá, Cali, Medellín, and Barranquilla. Unwarranted prominence is given to the views of a minute percentage of the population who have access to landlines. Since Uribe’s election as president, opinion polls in Colombia have focused on a handful of dominant urban centres, ignoring the countryside, where many of his most committed opponents live. As one media outlet so brazenly put it, “Colombian pollsters rarely survey the whole country because they consider responses in war-afflicted rural areas unreliable.”13
Lastly, it must be noted that the timing of March’s Gallup poll was convenient as regards promoting an impression of popular support for the state. Polling took place within a forty-eight-hour period immediately preceding one of the largest anti-state rallies in Colombia’s recent history. The interviews were conducted between 4 and 6 March, shortly after the killing of one of the FARC’s most prominent leaders, Comandante Raúl Reyes, during a Colombian military incursion into Ecuadorian territory—a significant victory in the eyes of the elite. Ironically, as polling ended, a quarter of a million Colombians, many of whom defied death threats, held marches and rallies around the country on 6 March in a nationwide day of protest against state and paramilitary atrocities under the Uribe administration.
When a geographically wider poll sample was taken weeks later, Uribe’s support fell markedly. In May 2008, one thousand citizens were polled in not four but seventeen of Colombia’s primary urban centres; Uribe’s support dropped by almost 20 per cent. This slump in approval corroborated the research of myself and others. I have repeatedly found that the further one travels away from the handful of Colombia’s more affluent urban centres—and the closer one gets to the barrios, rural communities, villages, and territories—greater opposition is expressed towards the state and the current administration. The activist and economist Héctor Mondragón has consistently maintained that Colombians throughout the country have remained opposed to Uribe during his time in office. While it cannot be argued that there is mass opposition to the state, the overwhelming support for Uribe indicated in opinion polls is highly questionable.
http://www.worlddialogue.org/content.php?id=433~~~~snip~
.... the opinion polls so regularly quoted in both national and international media are suspect, being based on landline interviews ith 1000 or so inhabitants of the four largest cities. In the context of widespread paramilitary terror it would be foolish to assume respondents being honest in a telephone interview with an unknown interlocutor. That most Colombians do not own landlines is another factor making these polls unreliable, according to the author, in addition to the fact that the polling companies refuse to poll in rural areas.
http://lse-ideas.blogspot.com/2010/04/book-review-revolutionary-social-change.html~~~~snip~
The polls are conducted only in the cities and using landline telephones. This eliminates many families in the lower stratas and all people in the pueblos and out in the country. The people who are polled are the ones who have most to win with Uribe's policies and who are constantly exposed to Uribe-supporting media. The polls are only showing that a 60% of those who are polled support Uribe....not that a 60% of the polutation as a WHOLE support Uribe...
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:T49fhagjpl4J:poorbuthappy.com/colombia/post/delegative-democracy-the-case-of-colombia1/+Colombia+polls+unreliable+poor+not+polled+no+phones+landlines&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
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