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Next Sunday May 26 Colombians will go the polls to choose a new president after an electoral campaign in which 11 candidates are vying for the office. So what's new about this? Voters in nations around the world do this all the time. Yes, but not in a country rent by a violence in which 3,500 people are killed every year and 3,000 are kidnapped.
It's like having had elections in Afghanistan while a war were going on to dislodge the Taliban from their hold on an area the size of Switzerland. But, unlike the Taliban, the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) are not perched unprotected on a moon-like, hostile, barren environment; they are cozily ensconced in a protective rain forest dotted with fertile land that feeds them.
Like the Taliban, they are not interested in governing for any particular purpose through the levers of organized power. Terror will do fine, thank you, for keeping the people in line.
One of the candidates on the ballot has not been able to campaign lately; she was kidnapped by the FARC a couple of months ago and is still being held. The leading candidate, a 49-year old lawyer who has studied at Harvard and Oxford and whose landowner father was killed by the FARC during a botched kidnapping attempt, has canceled all public appearances since escaping a FARC bomb attack in April.
Like the Taliban, the FARC live off illicit drug production. But, while the Taliban was at the bottom rung of the drug traffic business-growing the opium-producing poppy which others process and sell around the world-the FARC earn their keep as armed thugs for the aristocrats of drug trafficking, the cartels who reap the largest benefits by marketing cocaine in the United States and Europe.
The FARC lack the few rickety helicopters and tanks the Taliban "liberated" in 1989 when the Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan-which, anyway, would not be of much use in their environment. Instead, their 17,000-man army is equipped with the best jungle-fighting weapons and communications technology drug money can buy-better, by and large, than the Colombian army had until early in 2001 the U.S. Congress addressed this imbalance by passing a $1.3 billion aid package aimed principally at improving the Colombian military's equipment, mobility and training.
And if this were not enough, for Colombians there's always the chance of being caught in the crossfire when paramilitary forces hired by landowners fight the FARC. In several fierce battles between them in recent weeks in different parts of Colombia's anarchic countryside, hundreds of people have been killed-including 117 civilians sheltering in a church in the village of Bojaya. The search is still on for the bodies of some 400 combatants and civilians presumed to have died in encounters between the FARC and paramilitary groups in distant jungle areas in the states of Antioquia and Choc—.
Nevertheless, the great majority of Colombians are set to keep their democracy going. It is expected that 12 to 14 million voters out of a total of 24 million will put aside these inconveniences and go the polls next Sunday. American voters should do so well.
Opinion polls show center-right independent Alvaro Uribe, who has pledged to boost military spending and crack down on the rebels fighting a 38-year-old guerrilla war, has 48 percent support, according to the poll by Invamer Gallup and Centro Nacional de Consultoria. But this is down from 51 percent in April, slipping short of the margin needed to avoid a runoff vote.
Second-placed Horacio Serpa, a 59-year-old former interior minister from the left-of-center opposition Liberal Party, who says he favors dialogue with rebels, has strived to chip away at Uribe's rock-solid lead by portraying his rival as a "warmonger."
If none of the candidates wins more than 50 percent of the votes, a second round of voting will be held on June 16. In that case, Uribe would win with 53 percent support versus 35 percent for Serpa, according to the latest poll.
Held by the FARC, Ingrid Betancourt, who at one time appeared to be a contender, trails at less than 2 percent.
Claudio Campuzano (claudio-campuzano@hotmail.com) is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com
