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Opinion: Colombia, the nastiest elections in the world

Caballero

October 27, 2000
Web posted at: 3:19 p.m. EDT (1919 GMT)

By Maria Cristina Caballero
Special to CNN.com

Maria Cristina Caballero is editor of investigations of "Semana", Colombia's weekly newsmagazine. Currently on leave, she is a Mason Fellow at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Caballero was recipient of the "1999 Committee to Protect Journalists International Press Freedom Award."

The United States is not the only country holding key elections these days. In Colombia, municipal and regional elections were held on Sunday October 29, although in some municipalities they were not even enough candidates.

The "nastiness" of the U.S. election is nothing compared with Colombia's, where 20 candidates for mayors of various towns have already been killed this election season. It's difficult in Colombia to say just who has murdered anyone -- 98 percent of killings are never solved -- but the Colombian Federation of Mayors believes that many candidates have been killed by the factions involved in Colombia's nondeclared civil war as part of a bloody intimidation campaign.

Gilberto Toro, director of the Federation of Mayors, said armed groups, both the leftist guerrillas and the right-wing paramilitaries, are threatening candidates in more than half of Colombia's 1,089 municipalities.

In the state of North Santander alone, paramilitaries caused 16 candidates from different political parties to resign. The factions are targeting candidates and elected officials who don't follow their "rules," which include failing to present reports to them, refusing to turn over a percentage of the municipal budget, or stopping them from helping themselves to municipally owned property such as cars.

Some mayors and candidates to be mayors are told that if they are not with the group that is threatening them, then they are enemies -- and therefore, military targets.

Since January 1998, 34 elected mayors have been killed. Being a mayor in Colombia is one of the most dangerous professions in the world, if not the very most. A recent analysis found that Colombian mayors are 25 times more likely to be killed than any other Colombian. And the Colombian rate of homicide is almost 10 times higher than that of the United States.

Since December 1998, 18 mayors have been pushed to quit, 50 have been informed that they are "military targets" of different factions, 26 are administering their municipalities from a distance (providing orders by telephone from the safety of a big city), and more than 100 mayors have been kidnapped.

Besides worrying about personal safety, Colombian mayors must constantly beware of full-scale attacks on their towns and cities. Between 1999 and 2000, the warring factions attacked almost 200 of the country's municipalities.

The paramilitaries frequently terrorize villages and commit massacres. After the attacks, many towns become ghost towns. The guerrillas, meanwhile, prefer to attack rural police and the mayor's headquarters and other official buildings, peppering them with homemade missiles. They don't seem to mind if they destroy the homes of many civilians in the process.

These attacks result in devastation. Toro calculates that the average in damages for each of these attacks on extremely poor communities is $1 million. The violence has already displaced more than 2 million Colombians. On October 18, 500 members of Colombia's largest guerrilla group, the Army Revolutionary Forces of Colombia, or FARC, attacked the municipality of Dabeiba, in northwest Antioquia state.

The guerrillas initially activated bombs and destroyed the mayor's office and the police headquarters. When the military forces tried to reinforce Dabeiba's embattled police, 54 military officials died, 25 of them after a Blackhawk helicopter was hit by the guerrillas.

Dabeiba -- located in a strategic arms and drug-trafficking corridor that reaches into Panama -- lies in ruins now. Simultaneously, FARC also attacked Bagado, a town 110 miles to the south. There the mayor's office and police barracks were also destroyed in yet another attempt by FARC to push back into the banana-growing region after being dislodged by the military and right-wing paramilitary militias some years ago.

Aura Zulma Ospitia, the mayor of Alpujarra, in Tolima State, has seen seven attacks on her little town.

"I always hide under mattresses in an effort to avoid the bullets. Half of my town, including my house, is totally destroyed as a result of the FARC attacks," Ospitia said. She was one of 12 Colombian mayors who recently visited Washington, D.C., in order to participate in discussions at Georgetown University and the National Endowment for Democracy.

"The guerrillas have informed me that they need my town's territory as a corridor for their troops. But I am not planning to surrender," Ospitia said.

Many mayors have quit after receiving dozens of threats. But other mayors, like Ospitia, will never resign. What makes them so brave? Many of them were born in the towns they lead, and they don't want to abandon their families and communities.

"I feel a commitment to continue helping my people, even in the middle of this mess," says Ospitia. The 12 mayors who visited Washington said they will not surrender to violence or give up their right to democracy. It is curious that in the United States, which has so long inspired the rest of the world toward democracy and is enjoying unprecedented prosperity, most people don't even vote, much less try to help the U.S. communities that really need it.

In Colombia, meanwhile, democratic elections are a matter of life or death. The mayors from Colombia and the Colombian people, in general, urgently need significant and constructive help from the international community, especially from the United States.

The recently approved $1.3 billion U.S. aid package to Colombia is not a package for peace, however: more than 80 percent of it finances combat helicopters and military training.

The United States should help Colombia strengthen all its democratic institutions. In that way, the United States could cast its own vote in support of Colombia's courageous democratic leaders, such as many of the mayors who risk their lives in an effort to defend Colombia's fragile democracy.

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