Bogota, Colombia – Amid the cheering and tropical music at his campaign stop, Alvaro Uribe looks out of place – more of a testy bureaucrat than the leader of Colombia’s most popular government in decades.
With a micromanager’s feel for numbers, the president answers questions on everything from crime rates to health insurance. He doesn’t have to smile much or press flesh; his victory in the May 28 election looks certain – something that will come as a relief to the White House, which regards him as a free-market believer and ally in a region where left-wing leaders have been gaining significant ground.
“Uribe has done what no other president did in 50 years; he gave us security, tranquility and confidence,” says Hernando Sastoque, a 65-year-old community leader in the audience at the Bogota school that Uribe is visiting.
Uribe knows that security is his ace and in his answers he keeps returning to it. It was his promise of a “firm hand” against violent crime and the country’s leftist insurgency that swept him from near last place to a handsome victory in 2002, and he has boosted the armed forces and police by nearly a third.
Homicide and kidnapping rates are still among the world’s highest, but murders have fallen to near a two-decade low, and kidnappings are down by nearly three quarters.
ap polls put him around 40 points ahead of his nearest challenger, and that’s despite accusations that while focusing his war on Colombia’s left-wing rebels and their drug-trafficking, he has allowed the country’s murderous far-right paramilitaries to grow into a potent political force.
As much as policy, Uribe’s hard line against the leftist rebels is personal: The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC, killed his father in a botched kidnapping in 1983.
Many Colombians have experienced similar horrors, and sense that Uribe articulates their pain.
“The secret to Uribe’s popularity is that he thinks and feels like your average Colombian and people can sense that,” said Tulio Chinchilla, a former presidential adviser, now a law professor at the University of Medellin.
While Colombians pride themselves on their enjoyment of wine, dance and food, in their president they opted for a 53-year-old yoga-practicing ascetic who starts work before dawn, continues into the night and obliges his staff to keep pace.
His friends say he’s a man who eats for energy not pleasure, rarely drinks and, according to one friend, “learns the words of songs to speak them, not sing them.” Other than riding horses, the friends say, Uribe’s pleasures lie in the intellectual world, in particular the history of Colombia and the U.S. civil war (he knows the Gettysburg Address by heart).
His anti-rebel offensive meshes perfectly with the interests of Washington, whose State Department’s list of “foreign terrorist organizations” includes three left- and right-wing groups in Colombia.
“President Uribe is a strong and principled leader. I admire his determination,” President Bush said in welcoming him to his ranch last year.
At home, however, his critics call him authoritarian, self-righteous and unwilling to accept criticism. They say he has made dangerous deals with the violent right to combat the left.
He and his advisers “project this messiah image, saying that only he can bring the country out of chaos,” said Maria Jimena Duzan, a columnist with Colombia’s most influential newspaper, El Tiempo.
The critics say Uribe acts in the tradition of Latin American strongmen who trample the judicial and legislative branches.
“He’s very feudal, authoritarian, he manages the country like it’s his farm,” said Duzan.
The constitution limited him to one term so he rammed an amendment through Congress to give him a second, and triumphed, his accusers say, by giving cushy jobs to relatives of those who voted for the amendment.
The most serious accusations link him to drug-trafficking and right-wing paramilitaries.
Opponents have seized on his generous distribution of airplane and pilots’ licenses while director of the civil aviation authority from 1980-82, the heyday of Colombia’s cocaine cartels. A U.S.
Defense Intelligence Agency report dated 1991 and released under a public records request in 2004 suggested Uribe was a “close personal friend” of the late Pablo Escobar, history’s most notorious drug trafficker.
The U.S. government disavowed the report, saying it stemmed from uncorroborated information.
Since his governorship of the northwestern province of Antioquia during the mid-1990s, critics have questioned Uribe’s ties to the paramilitaries responsible for some of the worst atrocities in recent Colombian history.
Uribe was elected months after the collapse of three years of fruitless talks between leftist rebels and Uribe’s predecessor, Andres Pastrana. Critics say Uribe has since presided over the “paramilitarization” of Colombia, with the right-wing militias infiltrating positions of power at the local and national level.
While waging war on leftist rebels, he launched a peace process with the right-wing paramilitaries, which had first arisen nearly three decades earlier to protect wealthy landowners and drug traffickers from guerrilla kidnapping and extortion.
And in a scandal rekindled by the country’s leading newsmagazines in recent weeks, a jailed member of DAS, Colombia’s equivalent of the FBI, alleged that the organization was compromised at its highest levels by paramilitaries.
DAS members allegedly drew up hit lists of paramilitary opponents and labor activists, some of whom were later assassinated, and tipped off paramilitary leaders to police operations planned against them.
Uribe says those publishing the allegations are unpatriotic.
“These accusations don’t do harm to Alvaro Uribe, but to the international confidence that has been gained over the past three years,” he said in a radio interview in April.
Days later, unknown assailants killed the sister of former President Cesar Gaviria, head of the main opposition Liberal Party, in an apparent kidnapping attempt that convulsed the nation.
Horacio Serpa, the Liberal Party candidate whom Uribe beat in 2002 and who is challenging him again on May 28, voiced fears that the killing presaged a dirty war against politicians.
He questioned whether Uribe had really made Colombia safer.
“I’m worried for those in politics,” he said. “In every party.”
