Colombia asks: Is Uribe peace or war?

The front-runner in Sunday's presidential election is a mystery in a country yearning for good government and calm.

By DAVID ADAMS, Times Latin America Correspondent
© St. Petersburg Times
published May 23, 2002

BOGOTA -- In violence-torn Colombia, the front-runner in Sunday's presidential election is reduced to campaigning from inside an armored van.

Although he leads by a wide margin in opinion polls, Alvaro Uribe rarely shows his face in public these days. After narrowly escaping a bomb attack last month in the coastal city of Barranquilla, he canceled almost all live appearances, opting instead for a virtual campaign of teleconferences broadcast to rallies across the country from a heavily guarded studio in the capital.

"The other candidates are walking around the country. Here I am in Bogota in this van and I cannot go to any place because of the violence," he lamented during a 20-minute interview conducted in the back of the blue Ford.

After an early morning TV appearance at the studio, Uribe, 49, was en route to his office, dubbed the "bunker" by aides, at a hotel where he spends the day in a suite with bulletproof doors and windows.

Despite the security measures, Uribe holds a commanding lead in polls leading up to Sunday's vote. With 49 percent, he leads his nearest rival by 26 points, almost enough to give him outright victory and avoid a runoff next month.

After the collapse this year of peace talks with the country's main guerrilla army, Colombians are deeply divided over the country's political future. Some fear that Uribe, under the slogan "A firm hand and a big heart," is heading the country deeper into conflict. His campaign pledges include a dramatic increase in military spending, and the creation of a controversial 1-million-man civilian defense apparatus.

His candidacy is being closely watched in Washington at a time when the Bush administration is considering broadening its involvement in Colombia beyond the war on drugs.

More than just a candidate, to supporters and foes alike, Uribe is a phenomenon -- and also a conundrum.

Policy wonk or warmonger? It's hard to know what to make of him. A diminutive, professorial career politician with boyish features, he has studied at both Harvard and Oxford universities. Those who know him best describe him as a no-nonsense administrator with a successful record in government.

But to others he is a wolf in sheep's clothing, with alleged ties to drug traffickers and extreme right-wing paramilitaries. Despite his preppy appearance he has a short fuse and has been known to angrily storm out of interviews if the questions don't meet his approval.

Uribe blames his negative image on rumors that have no basis in "the facts" about his 30-year political career. "There are people who know me and people who don't know me," he said. "It is more important to take into account my results than the rumors of my adversaries."

Part of the reason for the discrepancies is that Uribe has spent most of his career in his home province of Antioquia, a fiercely proud and independent region in the northwest of the country.

Once home to the infamous Medellin drug cartel, led by Pablo Escobar and the Ochoa family, Antioquia is the country's most industrious yet violent province. Its legendary sicarios, or hired guns, have consistently made Medellin the world's murder capital.

Uribe is the son of a wealthy horse breeder and coffee farmer who was murdered by guerrillas in the 1980s. The elder Uribe had frequently been linked to the Ochoa clan, who shared his passion for show horses.

Uribe denies that the relationship between the two families went beyond horses. After he was elected mayor of Medellin in 1982, at 29, Uribe also came under suspicion of ties to the cartel bosses whose fabulous narcotics wealth gave them enormous influence in the city.

As head of Colombian Civil Aviation in the 1980s, Uribe also presided over a boom in airport construction and licensing of pilots and local airlines. His detractors say it was no coincidence that many of those rural airstrips and licenses were exploited by the drug trade.

Uribe says he was not in charge of day-to-day licensing applications. The man who was, Cesar Villegas, was murdered this year by an unknown gunman.

At his own request, Uribe said, his handling of the aviation job was investigated, and cleared, by the attorney general's office. "They found that everything I acted as a director of that office was transparent (and) in accordance with the law."

While suspicions about Uribe's past refuse to die, most Colombians appear ready to let the matter drop in the absence of incriminating evidence. Analysts point out that in the early 1980s the official war on drugs had yet to be declared. Colombians from all walks of life, including many businessman and otherwise respectable figures, fell into the temptation of the easy money drugs brought in.

Uribe later served in the Congress, and then spent a year studying in Harvard, before being elected governor of Antioquia in 1994.

It was as governor for three years that his reputation as a public administrator began to take root. Although his governorship was not without controversy, he launched a series of innovative projects that are the backbone of his presidential campaign.

He personally spearheaded a $70-million school voucher program with financial backing from the World Bank, the first of its kind in Colombia. Working closely with private, nonprofit groups, including the Roman Catholic Church, the program greatly extended educational coverage to poor communities in a province where an estimated 150,000 children had no schooling. The voucher concept has since been adopted nationally.

Uribe also brought in experts from Harvard University to help design a unique conflict resolution program to tackle problems of domestic abuse and delinquency. In three years more than 82,000 teachers, student leaders, battered women and abusive husbands were put through tolerance courses. The program, which was extended to members of the Colombian military, guerrillas and paramilitary, is now being used in other parts of the country.

"We have seen a very high success in behavioral change," said Sandra Ceballos, the former program director who was elected to Congress in March and is an Uribe campaigner. "It has helped change attitudes to conflict."

Uribe's interest in social policy is confirmed by U.S. analysts and former officials familiar with the projects. Michael Shifter, a Colombia expert at the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank, recalled meeting Uribe in 1996.

"He paced my office talking about educational reform," he said. "He seemed quite serious about the subject and obsessed by the details. That's why he's interesting. This is a guy who clearly gets into policies. He's very focused, very disciplined."

But another of his Antioquia projects was less successful and would end up tainting his governorship. In an effort to pacify the province, Uribe actively promoted a government civil defense program known as the Convivirs.

A benign idea at the outset, by most accounts it morphed into a Frankenstein monster. Designed to encourage civilians equipped with radios to provide the police and military with information on guerrilla movements and common crime, the program instead created a network of armed vigilantes.

Abuses followed as the Convivirs turned their guns on civilians suspected of collaborating with the guerrillas. The situation got so out of control that the Convivirs were phased out in 1997.

"It was a bad idea," said Malcolm Deas, a professor of Latin American studies at Oxford University, where Uribe spent a year studying on a British government scholarship after ending his term as governor.

"It was a half-baked program, but it touched on a real problem," added Deas, who was Uribe's sponsor at Oxford. "The country does need a system to bring civilians and the military closer together. But it has to be well-structured."

Undeterred, Uribe now wants to revive the concept on a national scale. No program in his campaign manifesto has caused more alarm. Critics fear the civil defense groups will only feed into the rising phenomenon of paramilitary activity that is one of the country's greatest scourges.

In recent years, as Colombia's small and poorly equipped armed forces have proved themselves incapable of combating the guerrilla threat, illegal and well-armed paramilitary groups have been spawned across the country, ruthlessly taking the law into their own hands.

Until a lull in paramilitary killings, human rights groups had fingered the paramilitary for the majority of the 3,500 annual slayings the country has witnessed in recent years.

To make matters worse, the leaders of the main paramilitary group, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, have publicly adopted Uribe as their candidate.

Uribe rejects their support and brushes off criticism of the civil defense concept. He insists that if elected he will order the military to combat guerrillas and paramilitaries alike.

He compares the idea to community policing in the United States. "My idea to organize people to cooperate with the police and the army is the same. In the rule of law every citizen has to help the legitimate institutions with this problem of violence."

Critics warn that despite recent reforms that have increased the military's size, professional soldiering skills and fighting capability, the armed forces are still in no position to protect civilian informers.

Uribe has yet to define his new, improved civil defense scheme. But his campaign promise is of 1-million men, armed only with radios.

"That's simply ridiculous, and irresponsible," said Eduardo Pizarro, one of Colombia's top political scientists. "They can't be protected. They will be defenseless targets."

Currently a visiting fellow at Princeton University, Pizarro was forced into exile two years ago after he was targeted for assassination himself, shot five times by a suspected paramilitary gunman.

Even so, Pizarro and many other educated Colombians find themselves -- reluctantly and almost in disbelief -- siding with Uribe's candidacy. "Colombia needs someone like Uribe who is prepared to govern, for good or for worse," he said.

That has also been Uribe's campaign message. "The construction of the Colombian state," his posters promise, as though it never existed.

It may sound like idle propaganda, but it's not all that far-fetched, analysts say.

"Colombia has always been a lightly governed country," said Deas, who is known for his British understatement. "Governing is not necessarily part of a Colombian politician's list of priorities. Everyone is fed up with that, and Alvaro is very keen on governing."

Uribe has also made fighting political corruption a major plank of his campaign. Colombia's last two presidents, Ernesto Samper and Andres Pastrana, both ended their terms with pitiful popularity ratings, due to frustration over the violence and allegations of government corruption.

"I'm all for a firm hand if it attacks white collar crime as well as the violence," said Stetson University criminal law professor Luz Estela Nagle, who was a judge in Antioquia before moving to the Tampa Bay area. "The biggest problem in Colombia is white collar crime. If Uribe fixes that, other things will fall into place."

U.S. analysts have warned Uribe that Washington -- Congress in particular -- will judge him harshly if Colombia's human rights situation gets any further out of hand.

"I have told him you cannot underestimate the human rights community (in the United States)," said former U.S. Ambassador to Colombia Myles Frechette, who knows Uribe well. "He doesn't believe in arming thugs, but he does believe that Colombia has to solve its own problems."

But Uribe accepts that can't be done without U.S. financial support. He has openly called for increased U.S. military aid in tackling the guerrilla and paramilitary threat. But until now Washington has only provided counterdrug support, through a $1.3-billion drug crop eradication program known as Plan Colombia.

The Bush administration is considering asking Congress for new money to directly help Colombia take on the threat of armed insurgents, who are largely financed by drugs, as well as extortion and kidnapping.

"There's a real potential problem he could face," Shifter said. "Once he's in office there will be international pressures on him regarding the paramilitary. How he handles that will be a major test. I don't see Congress being very happy if these kind of atrocities aren't brought under control."

-- Times correspondent Sibylla Brodzinsky contributed to this report.

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