Summary: Donald Trump’s threat to Colombia, the nomination of the Green Alliance’s 2018 presidential candidate and their talks for a coalition, internal divisions in the Liberal Party over 2018 and other news
Decertification? Donald Trump’s threat to Colombia
After North Korea and Venezuela (among others), Colombia was the latest target of US President Donald Trump’s sabre-rattling foreign policy of threats. Trump threatened Colombia that he may decertify the country as a drug war ally if it didn’t reduce coca cultivation and cocaine production.
Under the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, the US President annually identifies the main drug producing and/or transit countries (this isn’t a determination of a country’s counternarcotics efforts or level of cooperation with the US), but also designates any countries that had “failed demonstrably, during the previous 12 months, to make substantial efforts (i) to adhere to its obligations under international counternarcotics agreements […]” – something commonly known as ‘decertification’. According to the FRAA, decertification means that US government assistance to the country in the subsequent fiscal year can only be provided if the president determines that such assistance is vital to US national interests or that the country has made substantial counternarcotics efforts subsequent to decertification.
As under President Barack Obama’s last designations, only Venezuela and Bolivia are currently decertified among the list of 22 drug producing or transit countries. However, according to the Trump administration’s official presidential memorandum, “the United States Government seriously considered designating Colombia as a country that has failed demonstrably to adhere to its obligations under international counternarcotics agreements due to the extraordinary growth of coca cultivation and cocaine production over the past 3 years, including record cultivation during the last 12 months.” Trump decided not to decertify Colombia because its police and armed forces have been close law enforcement and security partners of the US and because “they are improving interdiction efforts, and have restarted some eradication that they had significantly curtailed beginning in 2013.” However, Trump explicitly kept the threat opened: “I will, however, keep this designation […] as an option, and expect Colombia to make significant progress in reducing coca cultivation and production of cocaine.”
According to the UNODC’s latest coca cultivation census (released in July 2017 for 2016 data) coca cultivation – or, as Donald Trump calls it, ‘coco cultivation’ – increased by 52% from 2015 and reached 146,139 hectares, the largest area affected since 2000 (over 160,000 ha.) and comparable to the levels of 2001 (144,000 ha.). Coca cultivation had decreased significantly between 2001 and 2006 (to about 77,800 ha.) and from 2007 to 2012 (to a record low of 47,790 ha.) but it has been rapidly growing again since 2013 – 48,100 (2013), 69,100 (2014), 96,000 (2015) and now 146,100 hectares. The US government’s own estimates are always higher, and according to a White House (ONDCP) report released in March, coca cultivation reached 188,000 hectares in 2016.
In tandem with the increase in cultivation, the potential production of fresh coca leaves increased by 33.5% to 606,100 tm and potential production of cocaine hydrochloride increased by 34% to 866 tm. The UNODC estimates that one hectare cultivated with coca yields a potential production of 8.6 kg of cocaine base and 6.9 kg of cocaine hydrochloride.
The UNODC report cited as potential reasons for the increase in coca cultivation:
- The peace agreement raised expectations about receiving benefits ‘in return’ for coca crop substitution.
- The peace agreement, and different negotiations with local peasant movements since the 2013 agrarian protests, have increased incentives for coca cultivation because of the perception that the benefits of development projects will mainly be directed at coca cultivators.
- A perception of a reduction in risks associated with illicit crop cultivation because of the suspension of aerial aspersion and the possibility to prevent manual forced eradication through road blockades and community protests.
- A change in public terminology, from ‘illicit cultivation’ to ‘cultivation for illicit use’, may have been interpreted as an authorization to cultivate coca.
- A reduction in alternative development efforts throughout the country because of the change in policies and strategies with the peace agreement.
- The price of coca leaves has decreased by 3% from last year, to 2,900 pesos per kilo ($0.95), but this remains high compared to 2013 (2,000 pesos/kg).
- Greater capacity of the cocaine hydrochloride production complexes and new strategies to extract coca derivatives.
- Increased international demand, particularly in the largest market (United States). Domestic drug use has also increased.
- The demobilization of the FARC created a ‘power vacuum’ in many regions and led to a re-accommodation of illegal groups, which changed market dynamics (many buyers).
- I would add the traditional, long-term factors which still favour coca cultivation – weak state presence, activity and presence of illegal armed groups, violence, poverty/underdevelopment, very poor infrastructure limiting access to legal markets and higher revenues for peasants from coca than from any other legal crops.
The core element of the drugs section of the peace agreement is a program for the substitution of illicit crops. These programs, in theory, are to be developed through participatory planning with the affected communities, but this lofty aim has not necessarily been translated into practice so far or it has faced solid resistance from local communities, who are demanding greater commitments from a government they instinctively distrust. In these programs, the communities should commit to the voluntary, concerted substitution of crops and full permanent dissociation from cultivation, harvesting or commercialization of illegal crops; while the government commits to implementing local alternative development plans and other supports. In cases of individual refusals, the government will manually eradicate crops, while in cases where no local agreement is reached, the state will proceed with eradication, prioritizing manual eradication wherever possible but with aerial aspersion open as a last resort. This viewpoint of the drug problem, supposed to address and resolve the social causes of coca cultivation (poverty, lack of opportunities, lack of other lucrative crops) through dialogues with the communities involved in coca cultivation, is very different to the typical ‘war on drugs’ policy pushed by the United States and Plan Colombia.
Needless to say, this quasi-historic high in the extent of coca cultivation complicates the ‘post-conflict’ situation and the implementation of the peace agreement with the FARC, which devotes an entire section to ‘resolving the problem of illicit crops’ (and another section to the interrelated issue of rural reform and development). These results are also damning for the Santos administration’s drug policy, which moved towards addressing drugs as a public health issue, “a social and human approach that puts people – not drugs – at the centre of policy”, with three priorities: reducing drug use, reducing territorial vulnerabilities through development and a “rational and effective” policy to dismantle organized criminal structures. As part of these policies, the most famous but also most contentious aspect of Colombia and the US’ interdiction strategy (infamous Plan Colombia), aerial aspersion/spraying with glyphosate, was suspended in October 2015. Since 2006, Colombia has shifted away from aerial aspersion – an ineffective, costly, environmentally and socially harmful strategy which hurts the ‘weakest link’ of the production chain (cultivators) the most – towards attacking the processing and exportation phase (‘measured’ by seizures, lab destructions and offer reduction). Aerial aspersion dropped by 40% between 2006 and 2010 and by 63% between 2010 and 2015 (37,200 ha. were sprayed in 2015).
Donald Trump doesn’t care much about Colombia, and doesn’t seem to be very aware of what’s going on there (he doesn’t seem to know or care about the peace process), but he clearly favours the ‘traditional’ war on drugs strategy which is in disagreement with the Santos administration in Bogotá. Trump had already mentioned the record high coca cultivation and cocaine production in Colombia during his first meeting with President Santos at the White House in May 2017, but had made no threats (besides ‘hopes’ that Colombia would fix it) – signalling that Trumpian Washington’s priority in Colombia would be drugs, and not the peace process. Trump’s decertification threat was a cold shower.
The Colombian government responded forcefully at first – “nobody needs to threaten us to confront this challenge” – and later was a bit more measured, downplaying the credibility of Trump’s threat and underlining both the government’s successes and its continued willingness to cooperate with consumer countries. The government, while it is aware of the increase in coca cultivation, claims that it has a successful strategy to eradicate or substitute 100,000 hectares, including 50,000 ha. in 2017 (Santos has reiterated that aerial aspersion doesn’t work). The government also, as it typically does, presented numbers on seizures – 378,260 kg of cocaine hydrochloride seized in 2016 (a record high), 1.04 million kg of coca leaves seized in 2016 (highest since 2007) and so forth.
Juan Manuel Santos recently met with Trump in New York before the United Nations General Assembly, but as part of a multilateral meeting on the situation in Venezuela where Trump also invited other Latin American leaders (from Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Panama). At his speech at the UNGA, Santos said that the war on drugs hasn’t been won and isn’t being won, so new strategies are needed, and that “it is time to accept with realism that while there is there is consumption, there will be supply, and that consumption will not end.” Emphasizing that Colombia had perhaps paid the highest price of any nation in the war on drugs, “the remedy has been worse than the disease”. He advocated for the policy his government has followed at home: treating drug use as a public health, rather than criminal, issue and that it was time to discuss ‘reasonable regulation’.
As Semana explained, Trump’s threat was annoying to Colombia but not serious. He made this threat in a routine, annual presidential declaration (not on Twitter or in a speech) and what was written is true (pretty rare for Trump). The slight to Colombia is that it was put in nearly the same spot as Venezuela and Bolivia, which have governments openly hostile to the US and its drug policies. However, in practice, Washington is still treating Colombia as one of its top allies on the continent and Trump (and Mike Pence) are looking to Santos – and other ‘like-minded’ moderate/centre-right and pro-American Latin American leaders (Peru’s PPK, Argentina’s Macri, Brazil’s Temer and Panama’s Varela) – for support against Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela.
In Colombia, the opposition – led by former president Uribe, who was popular in conservative circles in the United States during the W. Bush administration – jumped on Trump’s threat to support their claim that Santos’ drug policies have failed. Former ambassador to Washington Juan Carlos Pinzón, a lesser-known presidential candidate who wants everybody to forget that he owes his entire career to Santos, got into a heated debate with his successor as defence minister, Luis Carlos Villegas, over the issue.
Trump’s threat of decertification brought back nasty memories of Ernesto Samper’s presidency (1994-1998), when the United States – under President Bill Clinton – decertified Colombia for three years in a row (March 1996, February 1997, February 1998), primarily because of the ‘Proceso 8.000′ scandal – the Cali cartel’s financing of the Samper 1994 campaign – and Samper’s controversial absolution by the House’s accusation commission in 1996. Because of the Proceso 8.000 and decertification, US-Colombia relations significantly worsened during Samper’s presidency. The US’ drug certification policies are disliked in Colombia and Latin America, seeing it as a unilateral and arbitrary ‘imperialist’ decision (it’s true that the certification designations do read as report cards handed out by the teacher to his bad students). As this 1998 article from Foreign Policy in Focus lays out, “the certification process is resented in Latin America and elsewhere as a unilateral, sometimes arbitrary and hypocritical exercise by the world’s largest consumer of illegal drugs” and that it has been an ineffective tool in the drug war.
A former president of the Supreme Court in jail
Francisco Ricaurte, former president of the Supreme Court of Justice, turned himself in to authorities and was arrested on September 20, anticipating an arrest warrant. One day before, disgraced former anti-corruption boss Gustavo Moreno had told authorities that he had paid a 550 million peso bribe to Ricaurte to ‘change the course’ of the trial against senator Musa Besaile in 2015, as part of Colombia’s ongoing judicial corruption saga (see also, for Besaile: first edition of my Colombia Digest; the master extortionist). As La Silla Vacía wrote, Ricaurte was ‘the symbol of judicial clientelism‘. Ricaurte is the first former president of Colombia’s Supreme Court to have been arrested. An incumbent Supreme Court magistrate, Gustavo Malo, elected with Ricaurte’s support and accused by Moreno of having been in on the bribery schemes, is now facing a formal investigation in the (useless) commission of accusations of the House.
A Green candidate and the potential ni-ni coalition
On September 14, the Green Alliance (Alianza Verde) nominated senator Claudia López as its presidential candidate. But she may not be on the ballot in May 2018. She is in talks with two other candidates, Jorge Enrique Robledo and Sergio Fajardo, to form a coalition and choose a single presidential candidate from the three of them. The Green nomination was decided by a poll (in 35 municipalities and 1,500 respondents), in which Claudia López won 34% against 17% for her rival, senator Antonio Navarro Wolff (but 46% said ‘none of the above’…).
Claudia López is a political ‘outsider’ (for real), perhaps best known and most popular for her invectives against corrupt politicians and the ‘mafias’. Until she was elected to the Senate, an institution she had previously called a ‘nest of thieves’, in 2014, she was a researcher and columnist – but an active figure in some of the most important political events since the 1990s. Claudia López has a degree in finance, government and IR from the Universidad Externado, a Master’s in public admin and urban policy from Columbia and has been working on a doctorate in political science from Northwestern since 2013. As a university student in 1989-90, López was part of the Séptima papeleta movement, the (elite) student movement which pushed for a constituent assembly and a new constitution. Many of the most prominent figures of the séptima papeleta, like López, went on to distinguished careers in politics, academia or civil society. Claudia López was secretary of communal action during Enrique Peñalosa’s first municipal administration in Bogotá between 1998 and 2000.
She became most famous, however, as a media columnist (in El Tiempo, Semana, La Silla Vacía, Caracol Radio) and researcher (for the Corporación Nuevo Arco Iris and the MOE). Her work on ‘atypical results’ in the 2002 congressional elections, published in Semana in 2005, began the parapolítica scandal. In 2010, López edited the book Y refundaron la patria…, which details the links between politicians and illegal ‘mafias’ (paramilitaries, guerrillas, drug cartels) and their effects on Colombia’s political system. Her academic research has served as the basis for her current political discourse against the ‘mafias’ and corrupt politicians.
Not mincing her words, López is frank and direct – a style which has won her many enemies and a few trials for libel and slander. In 2009, López was controversially fired from El Tiempo for a column in which she criticized the newspaper’s coverage of the Agro Ingreso Seguro scandal, claiming that it was an “induced fabrication to support their desired interpretation of the political effects of the scandal” – that is, misleading reporting to implicitly favour Juan Manuel Santos’ presidential candidacy and hurt Andrés Felipe Arias, seen as Santos’ main uribista rival for the presidency in 2010 (and the man criminally responsible for the scandal, as agriculture minister). The Spanish editorial group Planeta had gained majority ownership of El Tiempo in 2007 from the Santos family, but the Santos family – at the time – still retained a minority stake and influence over the editorial line. At the bottom of her column, the newspaper rejected her claims as ‘false, malicious and slanderous’ and treated the column as a letter of resignation.
In 2011, a judge in Bogotá acquitted her of insult and slander, after former President Ernesto Samper had sued her for a 2006 column about the Proceso 8.000 in which she said that Samper had ‘sold himself to the mafia to win the presidency’ and insinuated that Samper may have interceded in plans to assassinate potential key witnesses. In acquitting her, the judge argued that freedom of opinion and expression – as foundations of democracy – prevailed over the honour of public figures. Samper seems to have buried the hatchet, but Claudia López doesn’t want to have anything to do with him – she explicitly refused an invitation to a lunch he held with other presidential candidates in Cali a few months ago, saying that doesn’t accept invitations from him.
More recently, Claudia López lost a slander trial to former housing minister Luis Felipe Henao (a close ally of Germán Vargas Lleras), who she has called ‘corrupt’ without proof. In a decision confirmed on appeal to the Supreme Court, she was forced to retract her statements.
Claudia López jumped to the political arena in 2014, running for Senate with the Green Alliance. She won over 81,000 preferential votes – the most out of any Green senatorial candidate, including Antonio Navarro, who has a much longer political trajectory. Her vote was a heavily urban voto de opinión (ideological vote not ‘controlled’ by clientelist machines or personal favours). López has been one of the most active senators, with a strong presence and following on social media (Facebook and Twitter). She was especially active on legislative debates like congressional salaries, the creation of a fundamental ‘right to water’ and spearheading the opposition to senator Viviane Morales’ controversial referendum to ban same-sex adoption. Her pugnacious, upfront and direct personality and style – not hesitating to call her rivals corrupt or parapolíticos to their faces – unsurprisingly made her rather unpopular with her colleagues in the Senate. She also quickly grew frustrated with the customs and traditions of congressional politics in Colombia – the exchange of favours with the government, clientelism, the pork-barrel spending (mermelada) to ‘secure’ votes and the heavy layers of egotism and hypocrisy. During a committee debate in July 2016, senator Viviane Morales told López to ‘seek psychiatrist treatment’ for her ‘megalomania’. In a country where machismo and social conservatism remain strong, Claudia López stands out – not only as a woman, but openly gay and in a relationship with Green representative Angélica Lozano (who has a very similar political style).
Claudia López announced her presidential candidacy in December 2016, announcing that she would seek to be part of a broader ‘civic coalition’ in 2018. Claudia López strongly supported the peace process and the peace agreement with the FARC – and has been active in congressional debates on the bills and constitutional reforms to implement the agreement – but she views peace with the FARC as something of a fait accompli, or at least a less pressing issue than her new battle cry – fighting corruption and los corruptos.
As a way of launching her candidacy among the general public and ensuring free publicity for her campaign, Claudia López spent the better part of the first seven months of 2017 gathering signatures to request a consulta popular (type of referendum) against corruption (the ‘consulta popular anticorrupción‘). In July, Claudia López and her supporters submitted a record-breaking 4.3 million signatures to the Registraduría for her consulta popular – her initiative got more signatures than the one for Uribe’s second reelection (4 million), the previous record holder. The Senate must approve the organization of the consulta by October or November, and, if approved, it would then be held within 3 months of the Senate’s decision, so probably between January and February 2018 (if it gets there, it’d need a simple majority on each question and meet a turnout quorum of 33%). Whether or not it is approved and gets voted on is not really important – what is important is that her consulta popular has given her a strong platform (and popular ‘backing’ of 4+ million) on the one issue which may come to dominate the 2018 campaign, especially in view of recent scandals. The actual contents of the consulta, for now, seem even less important – but it consists of seven questions which she claims will ‘defeat corruption’ (I’m not so sure): reducing congressmen’s and senior officials’ salaries, jail for the corrupt and termination of all public contracts with them, transparent public tenders, participatory budgeting, obligation for congressmen to annually report on their legislative activities and performance, mandatory asset declarations for all elected officials and three-term limits on Congress and local elected bodies (assemblies, local councils, neighbourhood boards). In any case, the anti-corruption, anti-establishment and anti-politician discourse is one with lots of potential in the current climate – voters, at least those who respond to pollsters, are very pessimistic, hate Congress and the traditional political parties and seem increasingly fed up with corruption and the corrupt ‘political class’.
Claudia López’s rival for the Green nomination – who never stood much of a chance, despite everything – was Antonio Navarro Wolff, a veteran politician with a singular trajectory and well-recognized political record. Navarro joined the M-19 guerrilla group in 1974 and demobilized with the rest of the group in 1990, by which time he had ascended to become the number two figure in the organization behind Carlos Pizarro Leongómez – although with a more political than military role. He was wounded in two attacks against him. By all indications, Navarro was not involved in the M-19’s infamous attack on the Palace of Justice in downtown Bogotá in November 1985, because he was recuperating from an amputation in Cuba. Navarro participated in the final peace talks, between 1989 and 1990, which led to the M-19’s demobilization and transformation into a legal political party. The new party’s presidential candidate, Carlos Pizarro, was assassinated on orders of the Castaño brothers during a commercial flight in April 1990, and Navarro stepped in to replace the party’s assassinated candidate. In the 1990 presidential election, Navarro won 12.5% of the vote – at the time one of the strongest performances for a candidate outside of either traditional party. However, the AD M-19’s initial momentum quickly died out – in part because it lost its initial shine and novelty value – and Navarro’s second presidential candidacy, in 1994, ended with less than 4% of the vote. Navarro was one of the three co-presidents of the constituent assembly (1990-91), in which the AD M-19 held a third of the seats.
He later served as an acclaimed mayor of Pasto (Nariño) from 1995 to 1997, representative in the House from 1998 to 2002, senator from 2002 to 2006 and governor of Nariño from 2008 to 2011. He ran for the presidential nomination of the newly-founded Alternative Democratic Pole (the Polo) in 2006, but lost the primary to Carlos Gaviria, the more left-wing candidate. Like many other founding members of the Polo, Navarro – who has always tended to be moderate, consensual and pragmatic (recognized more for his efficiency as an administrator and legislator than as an ideologue) – distanced himself from the Polo, and allied with Gustavo Petro – who left the Polo in 2010 to form his own party, Progresistas, which carried him to the Bogotá mayoralty in 2011. Upon finishing his gubernatorial term, Navarro went to work for Petro as his secretary of government – the most prominent municipal cabinet position in the city – but resigned after just three months in office. Navarro was one of the negotiators of the merger between the Greens and Progresistas in late 2013 – an odd merger in that Petro ultimately stayed out, and relaunched a second Progresistas in 2014, without Navarro and many others who had since joined the Greens. Navarro withdrew from an anticipated Green presidential primary against Enrique Peñalosa and instead ran for Senate, winning a seat but with a disappointing result – he won 55,400 preferential votes, over 25,000 votes behind Claudia López, a newcomer. A similar scenario played out this year for the Green nomination: Navarro is popular and highly respected, but he clearly lacked Claudia López’s presence and following on social media or her quasi-daily visibility in the national media. In fact, little was heard of Navarro’s campaign, in part because López and Navarro like one another and there were no public spats between the two (as is happening in most other parties right now). Given his age (69), some doubted that he had any real interest at a presidential candidacy and considered his candidacy as a strategy to retain visibility and launch his reelection campaign for the Senate. As was already clear before the results were even announced, Navarro, in ‘compensation’ for losing the nomination, will run for reelection to the Senate.
As I said, López’s nomination doesn’t mean that her name will be on the ballot. On September 18, a few days after it was confirmed that she’d represent the Greens, a more concrete step was taken towards a coalition with senator Jorge Enrique Robledo (Polo) and former governor Sergio Fajardo (Compromiso Ciudadano). Robledo, Fajardo and López come from different places politically – Robledo is a very left-wing senator (from the nominally Maoist MOIR faction of the Polo), famous and popular for his hard-hitting ‘political control’ debates in Congress but also his very left-wing economic views; Fajardo, a mathematician, was a very competent and successful mayor of Medellín (2003-2007) and governor of Antioquia (2012-2015) with a centrist independent image. Fajardo and López are moderate on economic issues (and don’t focus on them), while Robledo is very left-wing (anti-capitalist, anti-free trade etc.); Robledo and López are national-level politicians, while Fajardo has had trouble breaking through nationally and has few prominent political supporters of his own; Robledo and López are with registered parties, while Fajardo’s movement isn’t legally recognized. They are, however, united by some important common denominators: all three have credibility and experience on the anti-corruption theme (and all three have made it one of their political priorities), all three are recognized ‘independent’ figures in that they are with neither Santos nor Uribe (ni-ni) and have vocally criticized both the government and uribismo. Anti-corruption, support for the peace process and independence from both the government and uribismo would be the basic political and ideological foundations of this coalition.
In June, the three candidates – along with Navarro and Angélica Lozano – took a selfie at a dinner party, widely seen as the first step towards forming a coalition which would have a single presidential candidate in May 2018. Now, on Sept. 18, the three candidates held a public event at the capitol at which they signed a basic political platform with vague common goals (anti-corruption, promotion of science and technology, entrepreneurship, environmental protection etc.) but also made clear that, through some sort of mechanism yet to be defined, they will select a common presidential candidate and try to run common lists for Congress (providing the political reform, still held up in the House, passes in time to allow that). They have yet to decide how they will choose a common candidate – and this may be one of the more difficult questions to resolve, given that all three candidates appear strong in their own right. The three options being considered are, in order of likelihood, an open primary between the three in March 2018 (concurrent with the congressional elections), a poll (like for the Green nomination) or by consensus. Most seem to assume that they will hold an open primary between the three, like how the Greens held a successful open primary between its three main leaders (Peñalosa, Mockus, Lucho Garzón) in March 2010, which led to the green wave (ola verde) that never was. This open primary could possibly be open to Humberto de la Calle, depending on how the Liberals handle their presidential nomination (see below); former left-wing Bogotá mayor Gustavo Petro, however, appears to be excluded from this coalition (for now).
A successful open primary with high turnout and a commitment between the candidates to support the winner without recriminations could give the new coalition a spurt of momentum (a second ola verde) carrying them into the last leg of the presidential race with real possibilities of winning. Robledo, apparently trying to bury his reputation as sectarian and dogmatic, assured that he would participate in the coalition “in the place where I need to be”.
The divided Liberal Party (again)
Colombia’s old Liberal Party is, for the umpteenth time, internally divided – this time over the 2018 presidential elections. The Liberal Party has a strong congressional caucus to defend and a relatively solid (though rather small) electoral base behind it, but political parties are definitely not in style right now – especially when even politicians with their own parties are registering their presidential candidacies through signatures (Vargas Lleras). The Liberals have several presidential hopefuls, but are hopelessly divided on how they should get around to actually choosing one (and, like everybody else, they fight their internal battles in the public eye). The Liberal Party’s national congress, where everybody hopes that these issues will be settled, opens on September 28.
Until a few days ago, there seemed to be four strong presidential candidates and two minor ‘testimonial’ candidacies from senators seeking to get free publicity and more visibility to launch reelection campaigns. The four candidates were former chief peace negotiator in Havana (and former vice president, from 1994 to 1996) Humberto de la Calle, former interior minister Juan Fernando Cristo, senator Juan Manuel Galán and senator Viviane Morales; the two minor declared candidates are senators Luis Fernando Velasco and Edinson Delgado.
Humberto de la Calle is a veteran politician who has held nearly every single important national office, save for the presidency. After several years out of the spotlight, he regained public visibility and popularity as the government’s chief peace negotiator in the peace talks with the FARC in Havana. De la Calle has been highly praised for his skilled management of the peace talks, particularly during the most difficult moments. Using the peace agreements and the peace process as his main political platform (the ‘incarnation of the agreements’), he has launched his presidential candidacy – probably with the Liberals, but explicitly leaving the door open for an ‘independent’ candidacy (through signatures). Humberto de la Calle has a lot of support in the media, who enjoy hyping up his candidacy, but is struggling in the polls despite his personal popularity being relatively intact (maybe because defending the peace agreements isn’t an easy sell right now). He doesn’t have much support with the Liberal machines and political bosses (who don’t appreciate his aloofness with them), but he does have one major asset – the explicit support of former president César Gaviria, who is expected to be easily acclaimed as the new leader of the party at the upcoming national congress (although his favouritism for de la Calle isn’t going down well with the others, especially Galán). De la Calle has been the most active in the national media, notably getting attention with his attacks against who he considers his two main rivals – Uribe and Vargas Lleras (in a recent interview, he says that they ‘must be defeated’).
Juan Fernando Cristo was a senator between 1998 and 2014 (his seat was ‘inherited’ by his brother Andrés Cristo) and interior minister from 2014 until May 2017. As interior minister, he was the man behind some of the government’s most important legislative initiatives since 2014 – the ‘balance of powers’ constitutional reform in 2014-5, congressional support for the peace process and plebiscite in 2016 and some of the laws required to implement the peace agreement in 2017. Cristo, with his background as a four-term senator and the networks he maintained as interior minister (a portfolio effectively in charge of managing relations with congressmen and corralling votes in Congress), has the support of a majority of the Liberal congressional caucus (and the old machines that come with them). Recently, 10 senators (out of 17) and 30 representatives (out of 39) representatives signed a letter which was seen as an endorsement of Cristo’s candidacy. However, as a career politician at time when nobody likes them, Cristo has low name recognition and is not very popular among the general public. La Silla assumes that Cristo’s candidacy won’t go very far, but he can bring to the eventual Liberal candidate the crucial support of the machines and political bosses (and to hold them together so that they don’t go over to Vargas Lleras). Despite all that’s being said about 2018 being the year of the anti-establishment, anti-politicians or whatever, the importance of the machines – of all parties – in defining the winner next year is not to be underestimated.
Juan Manuel Galán, senator since 2006, is the son of the late Luis Carlos Galán – the Liberal presidential pre-candidate assassinated by ‘the mafias’ (Medellín cartel, Liberal senator Alberto Santofimio and sectors of the intelligence community) in August 1989, who in death has become a powerful mythical symbol of courage and honesty in politics. Juan Manuel Galán has built his political career on the back of his family name and his martyred father’s legacy – and his popularity in polls show that the Galán name still carries lots of weight, even in 2017. Galán has very weak support among the party machinery, congressional caucus or leadership but he has the nebulous backing of ‘public opinion’ – in voting intentions polls, although no Liberal candidate breaks 10%, Galán consistently appears as the strongest one (in the vicinity of 4-6%). But it’s still early days, a lot of Galán’s support in polls is likely very fickle (name recognition + personal popularity) and may not bother showing up in an actual primary.
Viviane Morales was the odd woman out among the four main candidates. Viviane Morales is an evangelical Christian, and her electoral base since 1994 has been evangelical Christians – a strong, perhaps ‘captive’ electorate, but one with very socially conservative religious views theoretically out of sync with the liberalism that Liberal Party claims to defend from time to time (when it looks good to do so). Back in the Senate since 2014, Viviane Morales’ main battle was her referendum to ban same-sex adoption. Her referendum first gathered 2.1 million signatures and was submitted to Congress (which needs to adopt a law organizing the citizen-initiated referendum). It was approved in the first two debates in the Senate – in commission and in the plenary respectively, in September and December 2016. In the plenary back in December, 52 senators voted in favour while 21 voted against. Viviane Morales’ own Liberal Party split 4-8 in the vote (with, notably, Horacio Serpa and Galán voting against), but it had strong support from the CD (18), Conservatives (12-1), ‘the U’ (10-4) and CR (6-2). In May, when the referendum was debated in commission in the House, the government – which had come out against it – finally moved it machines and networks to sink it, so the commission voted by a wide margin to table (‘archive’) the referendum. Opponents of her ‘discriminatory referendum’ argued that, by its wording, her proposal would not only ban same-sex couples from adopting children but also singles. The risk that singles would be banned from adoption proved to be the breaking point in the debate, which swung most Conservative and ‘U’ representatives to oppose the referendum. Juan Fernando Cristo, in his final days as interior minister, personally attended the debate and vote in the commission and, from behind, ensured its failure. Incensed by the government’s role in killing her referendum, Viviane Morales became directly critical of Santos and his administration. She has also broken ranks with her party on the issue of the peace agreement, where she claims that ‘modifications’ are necessary without ‘cutting it up’ like uribismo wants to do (and accuses de la Calle of having made a ‘big mistake’ in Havana).
Viviane Morales launched her candidacy explicitly calling on the “immense majorities of believers in our country, to all Christianity, to Catholics and evangelicals” to “save Colombia” with “majorities, democracy and values”. Although the evangelical ‘constellation’ is politically divided, with some churches – most prominently the International Charismatic Mission (MCI) – close to the uribista CD, Viviane Morales has substantial support among the evangelical community (particularly her church, the Iglesia Casa Sobre la Roca).
For months now, the Liberal presidential hopefuls have been divided amongst themselves on the way they should settle the presidential nomination. There are three options: consensus (I too wish I could bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles), an open or closed primary on November 19 or an open inter-party primary in March 2018. The first option will never happen, even if de la Calle falsely claims that’s how ‘every party in the world’ picks their candidates (really?). Humberto de la Calle has explicitly warned (most recently on Sept. 12) that he’s dead-set against a primary in March and that he would quit the party to run as an independent if that was to happen. De la Calle’s main supporter, Gaviria, added weight to his threat by saying that he too would quit the party if the party didn’t decide quickly enough. Officially, he considers – with reason – that delaying a decision until March would be too late, when all other candidates are already campaigning. Besides, de la Calle’s goal is to be the candidate of a broader coalition, either with the López-Robledo-Fajardo trio (who would welcome him as an independent, but maybe not as a Liberal) or with a ramshackle ‘coalition for peace’ with parts of the divided Partido de la U and Clara López. A late primary in March would not give him time to negotiate a coalition around himself in time for the first round. De la Calle wants the nomination settled by the end of the year, which would realistically mean an open or closed primary on November 19 (a date already set aside for potential party primaries by the CNE). Cristo now seems to be amenable to a primary in November, although earlier it seemed as if he supported a primary in March.
Galán and Morales want an open primary in March, to coincide with the congressional elections. A primary held in March rather than November would have higher turnout, which benefits both Galán and Morales. Galán because of his confidence in his polling numbers and his ability to draw a large electorate and voto de opinión, because of name recognition, his personal popularity or his family name. Viviane Morales has a strong evangelical Christian electorate – 54,000 votes at the bare minimum (her preferential votes in 2014) but which could, in theory, be up to 1-2 million. Given that the evangelical electorate is one of the most disciplined electorates – which showed its real weight in the 2016 plebiscite – Viviane Morales would have had a real chance at winning an open, high-turnout Liberal primary on the back of strong evangelical turnout. Viviane Morales winning the primary would have been an embarrassment of massive proportions – not only for the Liberal leadership, but also the government.
The Liberal leadership didn’t really mind her as long as she brought evangelical votes (and did her things), but as the campaign heated up, the Liberal leadership – a camarilla according to critics – became visibly worried about Viviane Morales and began questioning whether she had a place in the party. Senator Horacio Serpa, another veteran politician and outgoing party co-director, suggested that all Liberal presidential candidates publicly commit themselves to supporting the peace agreement with the FARC and the peace process with the ELN in Quito – and that those who didn’t couldn’t be considered Liberal candidates. Serpa’s suggestion was quickly taken up by all other candidates (who had already criticized Morales) and Gaviria, in the form of a ‘declaration of liberal principles’ which all pre-candidates would need to sign. This ‘declaration of liberal principles’ includes support for the peace process and respect for minority rights (Galán added: especially same-sex couples and singles wishing to adopt children). It’s fairly obvious that the ‘declaration of principles’ was directed at one candidate and designed to exclude her. Unsurprisingly, in a video posted to her YouTube channel, the senator said that she would not sign ‘this trap’, which would force her to ‘abandon my Christian and democratic principles’. She vehemently attacked Gaviria, Serpa, de la Calle, Cristo and Galán and hardened her criticisms of the peace agreement with the FARC, with a discourse increasingly similar to that of Uribe and Ordóñez. She announced, unsurprisingly, that she would not compete as a Liberal but assured that she is still a presidential candidate. However, outside the party, Viviane Morales’ candidacy faces a potentially fatal obstacle: it is too late for her to legally run as an independent (through signatures), which would likely break the law on ‘double militancy’.
The Liberal leadership has succeeded in excluding Viviane Morales from the field and in practically scuttling her candidacy altogether. The next step, perhaps more difficult, will be keeping the party united (and prevent leakages to Vargas Lleras or the ni-ni trio) while deciding how they will choose their candidate for 2018. Assuming they can surmount that, they face an even more daunting challenge: retaining a strong congressional caucus in March 2018 and be a decisive player in the presidential election.
Other news
Another presidential candidate will register her candidacy through signatures rather than by seeking a party’s nomination: Marta Lucía Ramírez, the Conservative Party’s presidential candidate in 2014, will register her candidacy through her own movement – Por una Colombia Honesta y Fuerte (For a strong and honest Colombia) and quit the Conservative Party. She has also confirmed that she wants to be the candidate of the Uribe-Pastrana ‘coalition of the No’. The decision was not unexpected, as Ramírez had been very critical of the Conservative Party’s continued proximity to the government in Congress and in patronage appointments. She is the third important Conservative figure to effectively quit the party in recent months, after Alejandro Ordóñez and Andrés Pastrana. Ramírez was the Conservative Party’s candidate in 2014, performing unexpectedly well with 1.99 million votes (15.5%) and a solid third place despite lacking the support of a majority of the party’s congressmen.
One story went viral on social media in Colombia this past week. Juliana Hernández, wife of CD senator Alfredo Ramos Maya tweeted the picture of a passenger on an Avianca domestic flight, slouched and sleeping, wearing a green Cuban revolutionary hat, writing “I didn’t want to get on the same plane as a FARC guerrillero, Avianca told me this is discrimination and didn’t even let me get off”. Her only ‘evidence’ being that the man was wearing a Cuban revolutionary hat – and nothing else. Her tweet, however, went viral on the uribista Twitter-sphere, with the hashtag #SancionSocialALasFARC – and calling for ‘social sanctions’ to ‘FARC guerrilleros’ on the street (anti-uribistas find that this reeks of ‘false positives’). The woman’s husband, senator Alfredo Ramos Maya, got in on the trend as well.
The passenger’s son found out that his father was the one in the picture (who didn’t realize that somebody had taken a picture of him). He tweeted to Juliana Hernández, clarifying that the man in the picture was his father, a retired teacher who has nothing to do with the FARC. Her initial reaction was to block the son, who persisted in seeking out a correction and apology. Juliana later unblocked him and published a short paragraph, insincerely apologizing while justifying her initial accusation and engaging in cheap politicking – she claimed that, upon boarding the plane, she ‘received information’ that a guerrillero was on board, she ‘rectified if this was not so’ and offering apologies for any harm caused; she finished with the traditional uribista stump speech on ‘demanding justice’ and ‘rejecting impunity for criminals of the FARC’. The passenger’s son was unsatisfied, feeling that Juliana hadn’t made clear that his father was not a FARC guerrillero. Minutes later, she offered more sincere apologies, deleted the original tweet and deleted her Twitter account.
Beyond the sheer stupidity of stigmatizing innocent people on the basis of their choice of hats, the incident reveals the difficulty in overcoming deep-set hatreds to build peace and reconcile a society broken and wounded by the longest armed conflict in the Americas. There is, understandably, a very widespread desire to see the FARC’s criminals pay for their crimes – it is a desire which many feel will not be satisfied by the transitional justice system (JEP), according to which the FARC’s leaders will not need to go to jail or be politically ineligible if they admit to their crimes in due time. Senator Alfredo Ramos Maya’s idea of a ‘social sanction’ against demobilized guerrilleros being reintegrated into civilian society stems from this feeling of ‘impunity’, but it is very dangerous – not just for the inherent risks at vigilante justice and ‘false positives’, but also because it stigmatizes a large group of people (about 10,000) who are not all responsible for reprehensible war crimes and crimes against humanity. After all, post-conflict reconciliation involves a great deal of sacrifice and the ability to surpass deep-set hatreds and rancor to build peace, in which differences are respected and tolerated. The fantastic Colombian TV series La Niña (Caracol TV, 2016), available on Netflix, reflects on many of these issues and difficulties (if you want to watch something about Colombia, watch that instead of Narcos).
Colombian Reflections 
