Jail Proves No Bar to Power in Colombia
Tarnished Lawmakers Expected to Entrench Influence in Regional Elections

By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 27, 2007

BOGOTA, Colombia -- On the surface, the Democratic Colombia political party couldn't be in a worse position on the eve of local elections.

The party's leader, Mario Uribe, a cousin of President ¿lvaro Uribe, resigned from the Senate to face charges that he collaborated with paramilitary death squads. Two other former senators are in jail, including one accused of planning an assault in which 16 peasants were killed with rocks and machetes. In all, the party's entire four-man bloc in Congress has been purged, casualties of a year-long scandal that has linked 42 lawmakers with paramilitary groups.

But that hasn't stopped Democratic Colombia, which has close ties to President Uribe. The party and four others whose leaders are either under arrest or under investigation for alleged links to the illegal groups are fielding 26,455 candidates in local elections Sunday. Electoral monitoring organizations say those candidates, a third of the total, are expected to win as many as eight of 32 governorships, perhaps a quarter of the mayoral seats, and hundreds of other posts -- ensuring that leaders tied to paramilitary groups retain national influence.

"They need to maintain real power in politics, and the way to maintain it is in the provinces," said Alejandra Barrios, director of the Electoral Observation Mission, a monitoring group that is closely tracking campaigns. "What they're trying to do is maintain the local political power that they first got in 2000 by building a relationship with paramilitary groups."

Though jailed, politicians including ¿lvaro Araujo, a former senator from a powerful political family, and Dieb Maloof, the head of Colombia Viva, are actively supporting candidacies nationwide, say electoral monitoring groups and political analysts. Mario Uribe recently said that his party remains healthy, with more than 5,000 candidates. And the political hopefuls themselves have hardly denied maintaining ties with the tarnished lawmakers.

"The jailed congressmen are well-known and respected citizens," Marta S¿enz, who is running for the governorship in Cordoba province, a hotbed of paramilitary activity, told the newspaper El Tiempo.

Jorge Carlos Barraza, running for governor in Sucre, admitted maintaining ties with ¿lvaro Garc¿a, a powerful former senator who has been accused of orchestrating killings. "I've visited ¿lvaro and the other politicians from Sucre who are in jail, but not to look for help, but because they're my friends," Barraza said.

Some lawmakers in Congress, among them allies of President Uribe, supported legislation that would have hobbled or dismantled parties whose leaders were found to have ties to illegal armed groups. But the proposals failed in Congress, with members of the parties tainted by paramilitaries vigorously opposing them.

"Really, there was no political will to resolve the problem by approving those bills," said Elisabeth Ungar, a political scholar at the University of Los Andes in Bogota who directs Visible Congress, a group monitoring the legislature.

Powerful paramilitary groups once spread terror and controlled cocaine-trafficking corridors across Colombia in their effort to erode support for Marxist rebels. With their disarmament in 2006, evidence began to surface showing how perhaps a third of Congress conspired with paramilitary commanders to smuggle cocaine, embezzle regional government funds and liquidate opponents.

Most of the implicated congressmen were members of a bloc that was loyal to the president, a stalwart ally of the Bush administration, and approved a law that permitted him to run for reelection last year. They also supported a law governing the disarmament of paramilitary fighters that was criticized by the United Nations and some on Capitol Hill for providing too many loopholes for paramilitary commanders to evade justice.

"They supported many laws, including the free trade treaty and many others," said Sen. Gustavo Petro of the opposition Democratic Pole party, referring to a trade agreement with Washington. "How legitimate are those laws? There's a problem with legitimacy in the Congress."

But even so, Colombians last year reelected most of the "para-politicos," as they have been dubbed here. Claudia L¿pez, a political analyst and newspaper columnist who first revealed how paramilitary groups and politicians collaborated to steal elections, said the tainted parties they control won seven governorships in the 2003 elections, more than a quarter of 1,000 mayoral seats then up for grabs, and more than a third of the country's 12,000 town council seats.

"That's a great deal of power," she said. "To sum up, they have about one-third of the political power in Colombia."

Uribe's administration has said little about the tainted parties and instead has focused on the violence directed at candidates by Marxist rebels. The authorities say 20 candidates have been killed, nearly as many as in the elections in 2003.

"Colombia reaches this electoral process without the paramilitary terrorist pressure of the past," Uribe said last Sunday. "But the criminal gangs of narco-trafficking and guerrillas still cause damage, even though we've weakened them."

Electoral monitors say the problems are more complex, and threaten the future of democratic institutions. Vote-buying is rampant. And the Electoral Observation Mission says ballots in half the country's 1,100 municipalities are at risk.

Barrios said that if the tainted parties do well, it will help them retain the influence needed to approve legislation to weaken prosecution efforts against their leaders. "The objective is how to get these people out of jail," Barrios said.

Di¿genes Rosero, director of a group in the coastal city of Barranquilla that is observing the elections, said many of the candidates of the "para-parties" have little political experience or name recognition. Once they win, he said, they'll be expected to fully support the party bosses.

"These parties will ask for payback after the elections," he said. "They'll say, 'We helped you get in, now you need to give us contracts, now you need to help us.' "