Bogota, Colombia – Leftist guerrillas, by firing on buses and trucks in much of the nation, and rightist militiamen, who after laying down their guns are hoping to see a ballots-for-bullets trade-off, are protagonists of Sunday’s legislative elections in Colombia despite making up only a tiny slice of society.
As was expected, insurgents of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, have ignored appeals from the United Nations and other quarters to follow the lead of the country’s smaller rebel organization and declare a truce for Sunday’s balloting. Instead, the bigger force is pressing its campaign to impose by violence what it calls a “strike” aimed at paralyzing the country and impeding the vote.
FARC actions were affecting highways in at least a dozen of Colombia’s 32 provinces as of Friday. The threats by the group, which late last month backed them up with the massacre of nine passengers on a bus in the south, have created the same kind of anxiety insurgents have relied on to keep people away from the polls in past elections.
The rebels, estimated to number some 20,000, began the offensive in the already conflictive southern provinces of Caqueta and Putumayo and gradually expanded attacks to the northeast: Arauca, Casanare and Vichada; and northwest: Choco, Antioquia and Caldas.
Twenty-five people have been killed and 15 others wounded – mostly civilians – in the campaign, which has included bombings along with armed assaults on politicians and army-escorted caravans.
“The FARC is making every attempt to discredit democracy,” President Alvaro Uribe said this week in the central city of Villavicencio.
The chief executive, who is seeking a second four-year term in the presidential ballot set for May 28, called on Colombians to go to the polls Sunday as a gesture in defense of democracy.
A massive turnout this weekend, Uribe said, “is the best way to defeat terrorism, to tell the FARC that it has no other route than sitting down to negotiate.”
The incumbent’s bid to hang onto power through 2010 disturbs worries the guerrillas, who have made several attempts on the life of the 51-year-old attorney, beginning with his first presidential campaign in 2002.
The FARC does not want Uribe to remain in the office he has used to escalate military actions against the four-decade-old insurgency.
To maintain the peace for Sunday’s elections, the government has deployed more than 190,000 police and soldiers across the country, many of them posted at the roughly 11,000 polling places.
More than 26 million Colombians will be eligible to cast ballots as nearly 3,000 candidates vie for 102 Senate seats and 166 spots in the lower house.
Meanwhile, pressure from rightist militias and the presence in the contest of candidates allied with them – whether openly or covertly – has constituted another destabilizing element.
The paramilitaries’ penetration of public life in certain regions has been an open secret in Colombia for years, but it was still a shock in 2004 when the then-chief of the AUC militia federation, Salvatore Mancuso, claimed that his group effectively controlled more than one-third of Congress.
Uribe’s government embarked on a peace process with the AUC in late 2003, and since then more than 21,000 militiamen have laid down their arms on terms that guarantee relatively light penalties, even for the perpetrators of the numerous massacres and other atrocities blamed on the rightists.
Some of the ostensibly demobilized militias are being accused of pressuring communities to vote for AUC-allied candidates while obstructing the campaigns of office-seekers opposed by the paramilitaries.
A few weeks ago, several political parties backing Uribe found themselves forced to purge from their ranks candidates seen as too closely tied to the AUC.
But political analysts here note that most of those hopefuls remain on the ballot, having found other parties willing to accept them.
One of the paramilitary chieftains on Colombia’s north coast, a man known as “Jorge 40” whose unit is scheduled to demobilize soon, said that no one can stop the militiamen’s “being friends” with the populations they claim to have been defending.
“You have to understand that a friendship has been created with the communities, and we share thoughts and political ideas with some friends. But to go from that to exerting pressure, never,” he said.
Congressman Gustavo Petro, who leads the leftist Democratic Focus coalition and is now seeking a seat in the Senate, said that “Congress can be seized by drug trafficking.”
The militias, along with the FARC, have become large-scale cocaine traffickers over the past decade.
“The objective of ‘narco-paramilitarism’ is to get enough congress members elected to allow them to decide the legislative majorities,” Petro said. “With this power they will blackmail the nation’s next president. If they achieve that, Colombia’s future laws will be made by drug traffickers.”
Uribe, for his part, said recently that the country is on the verge of seeing “the paramilitary structure disappear.”
