Cracks in the System
In an interview on a busy Toronto street, the Vancouver Media Co-op caught up with activist and physician Manuel Rozental to ask about the outcome and importance of the March 14 legislative elections in Colombia. He explains that while party representation has changed, Alvaro Uribe's ideas have remained in power. Paramilitary-death squad connected parties retained a stranglehold on the parliament, and leftist opposition Polo Democratico was weakened by a proposed alliance with the right.
“The situation in Colombia now is that we will have another four years of delivering the country to transnational corporations, of rampant corruption and delivering the national resources to private hands, like Agro-Ingreso Seguro, the huge scandal where the funding for the peasants was transferred to drug dealers and beauty parlours,” said Rozental.
“Finally, we will have, most likely and this is the most frightening scenario, we’re going to get closer and closer to an armed conflict in the region, an armed conflict from Colombia against Venezuela and Ecuador,” he said. “Colombia has become a threat for the whole region.”
Rozental predicted that former Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos, responsible for the false positive scandals, will become the next president of Colombia. “Resistance in Colombia is going to become even harder, and stronger,” he said.
“We’ll have more war, we’ll have more polarization – you’re either with FARC [the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia] or with the government- we’ll have more delivery of the country to transnational corporations, and the Colombia model will continue to be exported, as is the case in Mexico today,” he said.
Rozental explained the geography of resistance in Colombia, and the carrot and stick policy of the Colombian state.
Rozental linked Indigenous candidates elected to parliament to the rightwing project, and to the disintegration of the social movements, and he said that there is a common reading of the electoral process in Colombia. “They used to steal some leaders of social movements. Now, the model, the strategy, so refined, [is] that they are stealing entire movements. They are being swallowed,” he said.
“The economic model is dead, it’s finished, it’s in a crisis that it won’t come out of,” said Rozental. The project of social movements, he says, will be to work to change the entire system, before the earth can no longer support us.
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Re: Cracks in the System
By Morgan, Nick at May 17, 2010 19:57 PM
The striking thing is the level of corruption that characterised these elections. Blatant and disturbing examples of fraud, as Rozental notes, were a disgraceful feature of this process. But things have moved on dramatically now. The emergence of the Mockus campaign, again rightly mentioned by Rozental, has changed this panorama in a significant fashion. What we seem to be experiencing is a shift within the elites, as an important sector moves its support away from the Uribe regime towards a more "presentable" version of the right.. But Colombia isn't a fascist state at the service of multinational corporations. The state is constantly divided against itself and though there has been a sustained effort to take over the state by uribismo, there are institutions which defend democratic rights, and there are still public spaces within which the left can function. Fascism is corporate, institutional, vertical, permitting no space for dissent, essentially allowing power to do what it wills.This isn´t the case in Colombia today, where the system and the situation is much more complex. The very fact that Uribe couldn't wangle a third crack at the presidency is an important example of this. Fascist regimes use the police, army, and militias to destroy opposition and impose their will, whereas in Colombia this sort of violence has been privatised, which has allowed the state to claim that it's democratic and that such events are lamentable aberrations that have to be eradicated. This is an important difference and if we don't understand it we can't begin to understand a country like Colombia.
On the elections: the Polo has screwed up, no doubt, not least by using corrupt and clientelistic tactics in some notorious cases, but most importantly because it was never a real party but a collection of leaders, each with his own constitutency and huge ego. Petro will crash and burn in the polls, partly because he wasn't the first choice for so many of his own "party", which has been notably weak in its mobilization of grass roots support, and partly because he has been outflanked by the so-called "Green Wave" that masquerades as a radical break with the past but which actually represents the acceptable face of elite rule. In Gramscian terms, one could argue that the "Mockus moment" is a new bid to establish hegemony by a sector within the elites. The question is whether they can gain enough momentum by appealing to things that many Colombians obviously want, such as a crack down on corruption, an end to paramilitary violence, and a respect for democratic process, to defeat the machine politics, fear mongering and corruption of the "uribista" camp. But there is another point worth bearing in mind in that regard and that is that without Uribe there IS no uribismo. Santos may be the inheritor of a model, but he doesn't have anything like Uribe's ability to hypnotize the electorate. And these details matter.
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Excellent analysis of situation in Colombia and beyond
By Whitesell, Daniel at Apr 03, 2010 07:56 AM
Manuel Rozental does a great job of putting the current Colombian political situation into the broader context of what these types of political failures mean not only for the future of specific peoples and nations but also for the future of the vast majority of human beings on the planet.
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