May 22, 2006

The Rise of the Colombian Left

by Garry Leech

Given the continued popularity of Colombia’s right-wing President Alvaro Uribe, many analysts have viewed Colombia as the exception to South America’s shift to the Left. While it is true that Uribe will likely be re-elected on May 28—although it no longer appears guaranteed that he will win outright in the first round of voting—his nearest competitor is no longer a candidate from one of Colombia’s traditional political parties. Instead, the center-left Democratic Pole’s candidate Carlos Gaviria is running second in three recent polls. This unprecedented support for a leftist Colombian presidential candidate follows on the heels of the Democratic Pole’s successes in March’s congressional elections. The recent rise of the electoral Left in Colombia has primarily come at the expense of the centrist Liberal party as the country has become increasingly polarized between Right and Left.

Despite being linked to several ongoing political scandals, Uribe’s Teflon coating still appears to be intact. A recent survey by pollster Napoleon Franco shows that 57 percent of Colombians intend to vote for Uribe on May 28. While this is still an impressive figure, it is significantly lower than the 70 percent who supported the president a year ago. The slip in support for Uribe has benefited the Left as Gaviria has seen his poll numbers increase to just shy of 20 percent over the past few months. If this trend continues, there exists the remote possibility that Uribe will fall short of the majority he needs for a first-round victory and that Colombia’s presidential election will enter a second round with candidates on the Right and Left facing off for the first time in the country’s history.

Perhaps the most significant contributing factor to Gaviria’s growing support—and the Democratic Pole’s gains in the congressional elections—is the decline in popularity of the country’s largest party, the mostly centrist Liberal Party. Liberal presidential candidate Horacio Serpa is running third in the polls with 13 percent after finishing second in the last two presidential elections. The lack of support for Serpa echoes the Liberal Party’s poor performance in March’s congressional elections where it failed to obtain a majority in Congress for the first time in half a century.

Two factors have contributed to the polarization of Colombian electoral politics: the region’s shift to the Left and Uribe’s security and economic policies. The Colombian Left has not been immune to the continent’s leftward shift led by Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez. The same backlash against U.S.-promoted neoliberal economic policies that led to the election of leftist leaders in Venezuela and Bolivia—and quasi-leftists in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil—is also evident in Colombia. The regional shift to the Left, along with the continued implementation of IMF-imposed neoliberal reforms and the recent negotiation of a free trade agreement with the United States, has contributed to a revitalization of the Colombian Left.

At the same time, four years of Uribe’s Democratic Security Strategy and its related human rights abuses have pushed many Colombians who previously identified with the progressive faction of the Liberal Party further to the Left. Many supporters of Uribe have clearly taken an “ends justifies the means” stance towards national politics. Or to put it more succinctly: security trumps all. They repeatedly point to the administration’s success in reducing kidnapping and violent crime while ignoring growing evidence of the administration’s ties to paramilitaries and electoral fraud, its undermining of democracy, the country’s growing social inequalities, and rampant human rights violations perpetrated by the state—including killings, arbitrary arrests and crackdowns on civil society groups.

In just the past few months, a former Colombian intelligence officer revealed that for years the country’s secret police force—known as the DAS and answerable only to the office of the president—has worked closely with right-wing paramilitaries. Also, electoral judges in northern Colombia recently testified that paramilitaries rigged the voting in four Caribbean departments to ensure an Uribe victory in that part of the country in 2002. And just last week, state security forces ruthlessly killed an indigenous protester participating in a large demonstration against the free trade agreement and Uribe’s re-election. As a result of the excesses of the Uribe administration, increasing numbers of Colombians have turned to the Democratic Pole as the best hope of enhancing Colombian democracy, defending human rights and alleviating poverty and inequality. In other words, instead of weakening the political opposition, Uribe’s repressive security strategy is actually strengthening and emboldening the Left.

While Uribe is still likely to win re-election—probably in the first round—there is no denying that the Left in Colombia is on the rise. If this trend continues, it is not unrealistic to think that the Democratic Pole’s 2010 presidential candidate could prove victorious. In fact, such a scenario could even be considered likely given the current popularity of some of the party’s young congressional representatives such as Gustavo Petro, who received the second-highest number of votes nationwide in the election for the Senate.

Of course, whether or not the Left achieves such an unprecedented success in 2010 may well depend on whether or not the Uribe administration’s dirty war excesses contribute to a repeat of the slaughter of the leftist Patriotic Union in the late-1980s. Hopefully, the Democratic Pole will be spared the fate that befell its leftist predecessor and Colombia can show that it has finally moved beyond such barbaric electoral practices.

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