Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Will Colombian Left fall into unity trap?

Socialist Resistance no21  |  page 19-20

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

Gearoid O'Loingsigh The left in Colombia will face some hard strategic choices before the country's next presidential elections. Colombia's right wing president Alvaro Uribe has won the backing of the Colombian legislature to stand for re-election in 2006. Although Colombia's 1991 constitution places a ban on presidents seeking re-election Uribe made it part of his platform to argue for just such a change. When he failed to win it through a referendum he turned to congress.

That his request was granted should come as no surprise. The current head of the paramilitaries (AUC) is on record as stating that 35per percent of There is the the deputies had danger that paramilitary connecthere will be an tions.

In response to apolitical these developments 'anybody but there is the danger that there will be an Uribe type of apolitical 'anybody campaign. but Uribe type of campaign. A number of prominent voices in Colombian politics talk of a possible unity candidate fronting an alliance including the Liberal Party,

Yet Uribe himself was a product of the Liberal Party and as the Liberal governor of the department of Antiquia oversaw the rapid spread of paramilitaries causing terrible violence throughout the area. The Liberal Party - affiliated to the Socialist International -also engaged in a campaign under President Samper against the peace communities of Uraba and Chocó which has left Samper facing criminal charges in a Pinochet style case soon to be brought against him.

Although the left in the form of the PDI has stated that it will run its own candidate and this would allow it to continue to make advances electorally, sections of the party may yet come under pressure to push for a unity candidate linked to the Liberal Party. Just as many sections of the US working class and progressive intellectuals have illusions in the Democratic Party many sections of the Colombian working class and progressives have Illusions in the Liberal Party

and particularly in that section of the party which is close to Horacio Serpa, a former vice president and also a former presidential candidate. The lack of clarity on the unity issue recently led to the PDI endorsing a candidate in the local elections in the city of Barrancabermeja who later turned out to have paramilitary connections and being forced to withdraw their endorsement after he had been elected.

The challenge for the PDI is to define Itself and decide whether it is just going to be another clientelist party manoeuvring with local elites or is it going to base itself on the mass of the Colombian people and offer the working class a real alternative.