Why Colombia Keeps Electing Presidents Tied to Murderers

[Judi Lynn]

To understand the Iván Duque Márquez victory this weekend, you need to understand the man behind him: former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez.
By STEVEN COHEN
June 18, 2018

Of the five presidential elections Colombia has held since 2002, Senator Álvaro Uribe Vélez has now won four: two under his own name, and two more on behalf of his hand-picked candidates. Yesterday, that candidate happened to be Iván Duque Márquez, a one-term senator and longtime international development technocrat. Duque made it to Congress on the strength of Uribe’s closed-list ticket: you vote for all the candidates, or you vote for none of them. Now he will move to Casa de Nariño, on the strength of Uribe’s coalition opposing the government’s ongoing peace process with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). With stately grey hair, a decent singing voice, and a seemingly sincere passion for the virtues of market-friendly tax adjustments, the forty-one-year-old was not, as many critics argued, too young to govern. He was just young enough to be (relatively) untarnished by his links to Álvaro Uribe Vélez—who, among a great many crimes, both proved and alleged, is currently being investigated for murder.

Uribe, the next Colombian president’s sponsor, left the presidency in 2010, when the Constitutional Court prevented him from extending term limits a second time. (Top Uribe ministers had bribed legislators to approve the first extension.) His administration was praised for bringing security to broad swaths of Colombia, which experts had predicted would become a failed state. Increasingly, it’s also remembered for illegal wiretapping and intimidation; extensive collusion with right-wing narco-paramilitaries; and the systematic murder of civilians to inflate the number of guerrilla deaths the military could claim for its success metrics. Members of Uribe’s inner circle have been convicted of political crimes ranging from the essentially venal to deeply authoritarian. But Uribe himself has yet to fall, and the eponymous right-wing uribista movement is resurgent.

In February, the Supreme Court began investigating Uribe for intimidating key witnesses—one of whom was later murdered outside Medellín—against him and his brother, Santiago, who is currently on trial for leading a death squad. The following month, Uribe’s Democratic Center party won a plurality of seats in the upcoming Congress; Uribe, the single most-voted candidate, will likely be Congress’s next president. In May, the U.S.-based National Security Archives released newly declassified evidence that Uribe launched his career with the support of Medellín’s cocaine mafia. Two days later, Duque won 40 percent of the first-round election vote. The week after that, the Supreme Court declared four incidents for which Uribe is being investigated—three paramilitary massacres during his governorship of Antioquia deparment and the assassination of the human rights lawyer who denounced them—crimes against humanity.

. . .

I spent the week before the elections speaking with Duque supporters in Uribe’s hometown of Medellín, Colombia’s second largest city, where Duque won 72 percent of the vote. Fear of Petro, “populism,” and the Castro-Chavist menace came up often, as did total faith for Uribe’s leadership. (“That gentleman has big, big balls,” said a street vendor hawking pirated DVDs across the plaza opposite the Mayor’s Office.) There was the devout Evangelical couple that warned me of Petro’s plan to close churches and impose “gender ideology” on young school children. A university student wearing a bright green polo shirt lectured on the economic benefits of cutting taxes for “job creators.” Some supporters refused to believe Uribe could be guilty of all the nasty things he’s accused of—“Fake News,” one middle-aged mother of three called it. But many others, like the small restaurant owner, “poor but hard-working,” from the paramilitary-ravaged Caribbean banana zone, believed the accusations and didn’t care. “I’ve never been a violent person,” said the owner. “But don’t you see how many addicts and muggers and bums there are in the cities now? When they did the social cleansings, all of that disappeared.”

More:
https://newrepublic.com/article/149185/colombia-keeps-electing-presidents-tied-murderers

I missed this when it was originally published, and totally appreciated finding it today. It still holds true, of course.