Colombia: The Truth behind the Poll Figures

[Judi Lynn]

Colombia: The Truth behind the Poll Figures
News from Colombia | on: Friday, 15 July 2011


Colombian media have greeted the latest polls showing President Santos’ approval rating and the country’s economic growth with great fanfare. According to a recent poll, Santos’ approval ratings stand at 75%. Other figures show economic growth in the last trimester hit 5.3%. However, the economic growth figures say nothing about the distribution of that growth, and the approval ratings are open to question.

Opinion polls in Colombia, as elsewhere, are conducted in calls to household telephones. Colombian telecommunications networks mainly cover the larger towns and cities. Just three cities account for half of the country’s phone lines – Bogota, Cali and Medellin. Overall, Colombia has an average telephone line density of 17%, but in many rural areas this drops to less than 10%.<1> Therefore polls are heavily skewed towards the populations of the three main cities. Moreover, since they are conducted by fixed-line telephones, they cannot reach the more than 7 million Colombians who live on less than a dollar a day, and who cannot afford telephone lines.

Therefore the polls are really only an accurate indicator of the opinions of the population of Colombia’s three biggest cities with access to a fixed line telephone. They largely exclude the rural population and those too poor to have a fixed telephone line. According to ECLAC 39.7% of the urban population lives in poverty.

Some critics also point out that in a country with a high level of targeted violence against voices critical of the government, where there is a large network of paid informants, and where the intelligence services are known to have tapped telephones and pass information to paramilitary death squads, many people are unlikely to want to give their true opinions about political matters. Furthermore, threats against journalists mean that the media is largely uncritical of the substance of government policy reducing how much people know about the truth of the economic and political situation in the country.

More:
http://www.justiceforcolombia.org/news/article/1040/Colombia:-The-Truth-behind-the-Poll-Figures

As we know, this subject has been discussed right here by conscientious DU'ers representing the RIGHT side of this clearly understandable situation. There really is NO ROOM for attempted mockery of easily grasped facts.

[naaman fletcher]

1. Of course

Santos won the election handily. I support Colombians and the democratic choice that they made.

[Bacchus39]

2. yep, the poll on election day says it all n/t

s

[joshcryer]

3. These insults here toward people are certainly more carefully worded than on anti-Chavismo blogs.

That much is sure. ;)

(Hat tip, if one were to behave that way on DU they would be TS'd quickly.)

[Zorro]

4. Hey! Someone stole my unrec!

Whaaaahhh!!!!!

[Peace Patriot]

5. Thousands murdered for their leftist political views. Millions displaced by state terror.

Government illegally spying on all opposition, including judges and prosecutors, and drawing up hit lists for the death squads.

Some stranger calls you on the phone or shows up at your door and asks you what you think of the government, and you're going to say...what?

It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic how rightwingers love a "democracy" in which only rightwingers have civil rights and the right to live.

-----

True, Santos has tried to distance himself from all those political murders, about half of which have been committed by the Colombian military and the other half by their rightwing paramilitary death squads, and from the worst human displacement crisis on earth, and he is not accused of spying. But he was Uribe's Defense Minister for several years while these things occurred, including the military policy of awarding bonuses and promotions on the basis of "body count" which led to the huge "false positives" scandal (young men and some women murdered by the military and their bodies dressed up like FARC guerrillas, to up the military's "body count" and impress U.S. senators). ($7 BILLION in U.S. military aid!).

Uribe seems to hate Santos' guts, which is certainly a point in Santos' favor. But a 75% approval rating for a rightwing president associated with the military (Santos), in conditions as they are in Colombia, is just not believable. And I'm glad that we finally have an analysis of this situation that explains how that could happen.

I figured it had something to do with who got polled and with the climate of political intimidation. Uribe also had high approval ratings, by the way--which strained credulity even more. It was ludicrous, in fact. So, who is getting polled? People with phones. The poor don't have phones. And, even if they did--or even when they do--they are not about to say what they think of the government. And, typical of "free trade" countries, a pampered urban elite is created, as the lower rung of the corporatocracy, and they, of course, love the "new prosperity"--their nice apartments and houses, their new cars, their TVs, their good schools, their vacations, their shopping malls--and to hell with everybody else. The countryside may be in flames--five MILLION small farmers driven from their farms, mass murders by the military and its death squads--but they're comfy-cozy in their urban isolation and the ravaged poor from rural areas, driven by the millions into squalid urban barrios, merely make it easier to get maids and gardeners cheap.

These new urban elites are easily manipulable by the corporations and war profiteers who are running things. They are led like sheep into the whole corpo-fascist program of militaristic control of the poor, looting of the poor, privatization of public services, deregulation, the rich getting richer and destruction of "the commons." And when THEY get called on their shiny new telephones, they of course think the government is just great. They have been disinformed by the ditzy corporate media blaring from their shiny new TVs and/or have deliberately blinded themselves to the realities of poverty, displacement and death in their own country.

The hideous political atmosphere in Colombia that Uribe created has not been corrected. It will take decades to create democracy there. You don't have democracy by merely holding elections. You can claim that everybody is free to vote. You can claim that everybody can say what they think. You can put on a media show. That is not democracy. And in Colombia in particular the fascist wounds are very deep, and the poverty and displacement are extreme.

Criminy, they've had U.S. corporations--Drummond Coal, Chiquita--hiring death squads to take care of their "labor problem"! They've had Blackwater "training foreign persons for use in Iraq and Afghanistan" in Colombia! They've had a civil war going on for 70 years! They've had the Pentagon busily establishing "forward operating locations" and experimenting with "pacification" programs and drone aircraft. And on top of all this and more--the mass murders, the "false positives," the "Black Eagles," the 5 million displaced and the quarter of a million Colombians fleeing into Venezuela and Ecuador--they have a trillion+ dollar cocaine industry corrupting every institution and exacerbating every problem, fed by--not curtailed by--fed by!--the corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs." Uribe is a mafia don, like his mentors in the Bush Cartel. He is a "made man." That's why the Obama government has gone to such trouble to protect him from prosecution and "launder" his image. He is untouchable (at least for now). Courageous Colombian prosecutors and judges--despite death threats, despite being spied upon--have tried to go after him, and the U.S. government has acted to foil them, by getting death squad witnesses and spying witnesses out of the country and beyond their reach. The U.S. State Department sent a letter to the judge in the Drummond Coal case here, warning him off of forcing Uribe to testify. This tells you how bad the Uribe/Bush Junta collusion was. They can't let him be put on the stand!

That level of corruption--pervasive government, political and social corruption--is not easily wiped away. And to call these conditions "democracy" is absurd. No election result and no opinion poll in Colombia can be trusted. Santos and the U.S. are putting on a show, similar to the U.S. show in Honduras and Haiti.: the cosmetics of democracy, not the substance. There are certainly some leaders in Colombia trying to establish the basics of democracy--such as accountability. But it is very difficult for them and they are the exception. Santos, I think, like Obama, is tied down by the deals he made to achieve power. These include protection of Bush Junta criminals and putting on a "show" of reform with no real reform. Nothing democratic about it. All or most power is exerted behind the scenes--by the corporations and war profiteers who calling the shots--quite out of public view, with the public--"we the people"--there and here being quite irrelevant. Of course, the power brokers vs "we the people" is a perennial problem--in every country, and throughout history. The balance in the U.S. and in the U.S. client state of Colombia has gone way, way toward corpo-fascist (behind the scenes) rule and endemic corruption and away from democracy and good government "of, by and for the people." Indeed, our two countries are cauldrons of corruption and militarism, with the trappings of democracy as a front.

[naaman fletcher]

6. Your post is well written and reasearch as always,

but, how do you reconcile it with the voting results? Doesn't it look like, in fact, the voting results tend to mirror with polling?

[Bacchus39]

7. the polling leading up to the election showed a very tight race

and given that those with land lines tend to be wealthier, those were the people being polled showing a very even split. the election results however were a land slide. therefore, what conclusion can be drawn about who voted for Santos? I have one.

[Peace Patriot]

8. I don't think it matters what the voting results OR polls say in conditions like those in Colombia.

Thousands murdered. Millions displaced. Raging cocaine/arms industry. Out-of-control military. Pervasive, endemic poverty.

Two problems, if serious enough, simply trump democracy (i.e., voting, political speech), and they are: intimidation and despair/indifference. Re-read the above list. These conditions induce maximum states of intimidation and despair/indifference.

Colombia has chronic low voter turnout, and one of the worst rich/poor discrepancies in Latin America. Poor people and displaced people have enough to deal with, just to stay alive and feed their families. Add in fear--relatives, community members murdered for their activism--and you have huge incentives not to vote, not to participate, not to open your mouth and speak out, not to tell anyone your political views and not run for office or support others who do so.

You might have the outward form of democracy. You hold elections. But if you have on-going murders of trade unionists, journalists, human rights and environmental activists and other advocates of the poor, advocates of leftist policies or simply advocates of good government--and this has not stopped in Colombia; it is on-going, new murders, in addition to all the unsolved murders--elections and polls are virtually meaningless. Elections do not equal democracy. Many OTHER conditions must prevail, including lack of fear and the wherewithal to participate--and even if you solve the first two--remove the fear, provide decent incomes--creation of a culture of public participation is a long term project. Colombia is not even at square one. People are still being murdered for their political beliefs. How can you trust in any election result in this circumstance?

The same phenomenon that excludes the poor from polls because they don't have phones, excludes the poor from voting, from organizing voters, from running candidates and even from being interested in elections. That phenomenon is poverty itself--the desperate grind of merely staying alive, which includes, in this case, 5 MILLION people driven off their small farms, having to migrate, having to re-establish themselves and their families in strange circumstances, without skills or resources. And that figure is probably too low because there are reports of people being too afraid of the government to register as displaced. Add in fear--the knowledge that if you speak out, if you organize, if you try to participate--you may well be shot--and you simply do not have conditions in which democracy can function.

Elites function. The "bought and paid for" function. Corporations function. War profiteers function. The rich function. Criminals and thugs function. And in the case of a U.S. client state, the U.S. government functions. Elites choose the candidates. Elites fund the candidates. They control the election process. It is not democratic. A systematic campaign has been waged to decapitate the labor union leadership in Colombia--directly, by murder. Labor unions provide the main force for organizing the poor politically and getting out the vote. Can it be any clearer? Those who organize and get out the poor vote--the MAJORITY vote--have been murdered, in the hundreds. You're calling this a democracy!?

[naaman fletcher]

9. Thanks...

I will say, and this is just anecdotal, that every colombian I ever met in Panama was a big fan of Uribe. This is not just rich people. This includes employees at fast food resturants, etc.

Do you think its possible that the Colombian government has in fact won a propaganda war, successfully convincing people that the root cause of the problem was FARC?

[Bacchus39]

11. just remember you are talking with someone who has advocated

sending UN soldiers or military from some other international organization to occupy Colombia and to create a "democracy" in Colombia.

[Bacchus39]

10. Colombia does NOT have compulsory voting but Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina

Peru, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Chile do.

[Judi Lynn]

12. Admired your comment "the cosmetics of democracy, not the substance" in the post above.

Anyone reading your comments knows immediately beyond your eloquence, your grasp of facts, you have integrity, and honor.

That sets you TOTALLY apart from the advocates railing against the left 24/7.

Those of us who look for your posts because we WANT to see them appreciate every single word, and the time it takes to share them.

You have offered a deeply meaningful response to an article I was really hoping you would see. Thank you.

[gbscar]

14. Those conditions definitely limit and go against the free practice of democracy, but just as well...

...I believe, and this might be controversial from your point of view, that the existence of such atrocities should not prevent us from taking into consideration other factors, including both some of those that are closely linked to the same and others that are largely unrelated.

If we were to take that argument at face value, then there should never be any national, regional or local electoral result that upsets the wishes of the ruling Colombian administration. This is demonstrably untrue: in spite of all the intimidation and murder, there have been plenty of results that have gone against such wishes, whether because they led to the election of progressive candidates or even of those who might be otherwise opposed to the Colombian establishment for any number of reasons, from the political to the banal. Not even the Colombian upper classes themselves agree about every political issue, both for better and for worse. Some of them may even qualify as progressive in ideology if not in social or economic background.

Not enough, most certainly, and not as many as those we would potentially see in a fairer and freer Colombia, but assuming that if absolute democracy does not exist then there is no democracy at all is a very questionable position. I believe that there are, in spite of everything, brave individuals and many others who have fought -without arms- for a better Colombia and have gradually obtained certain victories regardless of everything you've discussed.

This much isn't enough, but it is something worth recognizing. Assuming that there would be radically different electoral results in all cases, if only there wasn't any reason to be afraid, is also questionable, when there are plenty of poor people who do not support progressive politicians. In fact, sometimes even scumbags are elected democratically, because they have manipulated or fooled their electorate without having to use rifles or guns. I'd say this is also part of the Colombian tragedy and something that tends to be ignored or underestimated whenever these discussions come up. Which is terrible, because you could end all violence and this particular issue would remain.

Having said that, I realize this may well be consistent with your own views of the U.S. political system as not truly democratic either, despite the many differences between both situations.

But then we come to another issue. The people -including both the poor, the displaced and other categories you have and haven't already mentioned- do not exclusively and uniformly fear the Colombian government as a whole. The entire system has lost a lot of legitimacy, yes, but there are those who fear the military or police and trust other government agencies or even their local politicians, all of them with their own virtues and vices but not automatically and monolithically murderous.

For one thing, even if you added up all the direct and indirect victims of state terror, there are also millions of poor Colombians who have not been affected by this specific brand of political violence and who, one way or another, have adapted to the system and simply do their best to survive from day to day. They may even be classified as indifferent, as opposed to intimidated, in many cases.

And there are, even within this flawed system and this sick society, Colombian officials who are genuinely trying to do the right thing. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose, and sometimes they get killed..and not just by the state or the paramilitaries. But at least some these people are alive and still struggling. I think they should be understood and supported instead of treated -through virtual ignorance of their efforts- like they are either part of the killings or profiting from the violence.

That this side of the coin isn't even considered as part of the picture seems overly simplistic.

To say nothing of the fact that, once again, there are many other sources of intimidation, violence and death that, in my opinion, cannot possibly be ignored if we are to understand the depth and complexity of the Colombian tragedy and the problems facing both its electoral system and its people as a whole.

Does this mean I'm promoting inaction and acceptance of the Colombian status quo? Not at all, but I believe the "truth" is not a simple thing and informed action should not ignore the complexities of the situation for the sake of making everything fit within a single line of thought. If this does not suit your own ideas, then so be it, but hopefully you will be able to see the constructive side of this message.

[gbscar]

13. The "truth" is both complex and nuanced. This article is, unfortunately, neither.

I've been absent from these forums for what feels like a long time, but it seems quite disappointing yet not entirely surprising to see such a low effort piece from the rather pretentiously named "Justice for Colombia" being presented as some sort of authoritative overview, let alone a novelty or breakthrough concerning this matter, when in truth it is nothing of the sort.

Let me be clear: This topic should not be the subject of mockery, not at all, but it definitely should be the subject of a true debate instead of undergoing largely uncritical acceptance or dismissal based on what appear to be unmovable ideological lines and reiterated slogans.

In other words, I do not believe one needs to hail from the right in order to disagree with certain aspects of this article, nor does one need to hail from the left in order to agree with some of its considerations. The only necessary trait for either outcome, at least in my personal opinion, would be a certain degree of individuality and intellectual analysis.

First of all, most of the information in this article has been presented by plenty of other sources. There is really nothing that hasn't been posted in this forum before at one point or another. It is simply not bringing anything new to the table at all. Nevertheless, this is far from being the main issue here, because arguably such a thing would ostensibly count as a positive if there wasn't anything else worth questioning about the article. Unfortunately, there certainly is.

Second, the unspecified authors (or authors) prefers to generalize whenever and wherever possible, instead of paying attention to multiple details and nuances concerning the complex issues mentioned. What details, you ask? Quite a few, enough to extend this discussion potentially indefinitely if a truly comprehensive step-by-step review of this piece were attempted, but let's start with just a couple.

Calls to household phones may be the main polling methodology employed in Colombia, as elsewhere in the world, but it certainly isn't the one and only method in regular use.

Polls based on direct personal interviews or even a combination of both methodologies (interviews for "lower middle class and down" plus phone calls for "upper middle class and up") are also present in an important minority of polls. Why is this not even considered?

It's not like you need to jump on a plane to Colombia and read obscure publications to find there is more variety than what has been reflected and taken for granted here. Most mainstream publications publish a number of different polls and include many of the basic technical details. Perhaps the language barrier has something to do with it, but clearly the people who work for "Justice for Colombia" have access to works written in Spanish...thus there is no such excuse for their shoddy research and/or misrepresentation of situations that are less simplistic than what their portrayal suggests.

What's more, even polls based on fixed telephone lines, despite their admitted limitations in terms of not reaching millions of poor Colombians, have included far more than the mere three cities that "Justice for Colombia" prefers focus on. Anywhere from at least four or five to 20 or over 30 different cities and municipalities have been polled from time to time, especially during electoral season. Once again, I dare to ask...why isn't this even mentioned?

There isn't even a single attempt by "Justice for Colombia" to put the number of rural vs. urban Colombians in context, considering the fact that the rural population of the country has been historically decreasing while the urban population continues to increase. This same fact could be used both in favor and against the line of thought represented by this article, depending on what conclusiones one reaches, but I presume it would open the discussion instead of narrowing it down to suit the purposes of the author(s) and nothing else.

Then we find the question of intimidation. This is also an underlying factor, no doubt, and definitely a very emotionally hard-hitting one considering the violence involved, but the topic should not begin and end with stating that since there have been a number of gross violations and abuses committed by the Colombian government and by right-wing forces (historically closely related but not necessarily one and the same, as if they were a monolithic hivemind), we should presume nobody would ever want to answer such polls sincerely.

There could be some truth to such an argument, but almost nobody has ever attempted to scientifically quantify or qualify the matter, let alone its actual context and all of the related statistics. This would also require identifying multiple sources of violence and how they all intimidate the population in different ways, but I see no such effort here. Instead, rhetoric appears to replace reason.

In addition, the fact that "Justice for Colombia" far too easily denies the existence of more or less substantial criticisms of Colombian government policy in journalistic circles can be countered by anyone who actually sits down and reads what has been written or published by openly critical individuals, including those who write for or participate in completely mainstream newspapers, magazines, radio/TV broadcasts and even mass market books.

A comprehensive link dump would be appropriate here, in theory, but it would probably be bad form since most of the regular visitors and readers do not have a working knowledge of the Spanish language, which is essential to addressing this point (and, to a lesser extent, many of the others).

Yes, there is intimidation and there is self-censorship. This does have an impact on the polls and, just as well, on electoral realities. But it does not seem very intellectually honest, in all honesty, to automatically assume this impact is inherently decisive or that the matter does not need to be considered any further.

Only a blind man would argue there is nothing wrong in Colombia or that these polls and the electoral system they reflect are completely accurate, but it is not exactly a sign of much foresight to refuse to even acknowledge the limitations of this argument and accept there is much more that needs to be discussed before arriving at any generalizations.

In the absence of such information, as well as due to several additional objections that may or may not be addressed later on, I cannot share the previously presented praise for this publication.

[joshcryer]

15. Thanks for that very balanced and considerate commentary.

It's much needed here sometimes. :hi: