RICARDO DE LIMA
Essayist
On Tuesday 30 November, the House of Representatives of Colombia approved a constitutional reform allowing the immediate re-election of the President of the Republic, which includes the current chief executive, Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who, in his electoral campaign of 2001 and 2002, always declared his opposition to immediate re-election. Nevertheless, and once in the Presidency of the Republic, he denies any cunning has occurred, but this legislative act has been denounced by members of the opposition in the Congress of the Republic throughout the past year. (1)
The original arguments were not very intelligent and actually reduce to one argument: President Uribe is doing well and requires more than four years to win the war against violence. For that reason, it would be best for President Uribe to continue governing as expressed by his Minister of the Interior, Sabas Pretelt de la Vega. The debate promoted by the opposition forced the instigators of the re-election to sharpen their arguments, which could be summarized in the following way: (i) in order to win the war, the policies of democratic security must be allowed to continue, and this can only happen if Uribe can extend his mandate by four more years, (ii) democratic political culture has advanced in Colombia, which means that the electoral campaign will be counterbalanced; the final decision will rest in the hands of the electorate, (iii) there is a system for checks and balances, and guarantees for the opposition, (iv) the control organisms will guarantee that the executive will not abuse his power. These summarize the arguments in favor of immediate re-election.
The power of clientelism
The previous arguments are sophisms of distraction, and the principle of equality was flagrantly violated. In effect, the plan did not empower the current mayors and governors so they could run for the Presidency without losing their position. This proposal was expressly denied in the Senate plenary in the sixth debate and in the House plenary in the eighth debate.
Regarding the abuse of power and the use of the State Treasury, very clear tracks have been left in the proceeding of the project with the purchase of parliamentarians so they would vote in favor of the legislative act. Those opposed shown by their absence. Justice until now has shone by its absence (the Council of State acquitting Yidis Medina) and the total absence of the Office of the Attorney General to establish a performance frame, whilst in the Constitution of 1991 the intervention of public officials is expressly prohibited. On this point, the Office of the Attorney General keeps quite a strange silence.
The final blow, which provoked a timid reaction on the part of the conservative parliamentarians, occurred in the same week of the vote. In effect, the pro-Uribe in the Senate of the Republic and the House of Representatives refused to discuss and approve the statute of the opposition that would guarantee the opposition in the presidential campaign communitarian advice for an open electoral campaign. Senator Antonio Navarro has declared that President Uribe has had more than 290 hours of television air time to increase his mandate. Therefore, there is no information balance; the State Treasury is openly used to defend the cause of re-election and the control organisms are conspicuous by their absence. Of the four arguments only one reduces to "the political maturity of Colombian public opinion" who daily face an affront by the establishment and the mass media, monopolized by the main economic groups of the country (five companies control 82% of all the mass media in Colombia). (2)
Those behind immediate re-election
During 11 years, the enemies of the Political Constitution of 1991 did not have unity of control, as they do now. The Uribe block is a staunch enemy of this constitution, mainly due to three essentially similar points. In the first place, it is an enemy of the division of powers, a key element to any democratic state. This division of powers is exercised in Colombia by the judicial power at the head of the Constitutional Court. Uribe encourages the Court's use of power for promoting ignorance by the Supreme Court of Justice and the Council of State. At the same time, he has announced a constitutional reform plan to debilitate constitutional control by way of a trusteeship and by overhauling the substantive contents of presidential decrees in states of emergency or during internal commotion.
The Uribe block, secondly, does not agree with the organization of political parties and, thereby, the independence of Congress and the banacada functionaries; in fact, Uribe has even promoted the fragmentation of his own party, the Liberal Party. Uribe wants a messianic policy and feeds the anti-political discourse.
A third factor unifying the enemies of the 1991 Constitution is its character of guarantees, and its social character. Regarding this first aspect, it promotes and makes appropriate, although still against the international community, a legislative act that confers powers to the judicial police of the Armed Forces, allowing these same forces to cut communications and detain, without judicial order, Colombian citizens for up to 36 hours. In good time, the Constitutional Court declared this legislative act unconstitutional. Regarding the character of guarantees of the state and the militancy against this character, a large number of the reforms transacted in Congress are against the rights of workers, of pensioners, and deal with the failure of the judges to value the rights of patients, victims of displacement, etc.
Therefore, the re-election of Uribe has managed to create a solid block of enemies of the Political Constitution of 1991 around the sacred, traditionalistic values in the old constitution of 1886. They reflect the interests of the old block of landowners and industrialists and, to a lesser extent, of the urban middle-class very well. That is what represents the block that surrounds the aspirations of Uribe to stay more than four years, if the Constitutional Court declares the reform constitutional.
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(1) The denunciations against the parliamentarian Yidis Medina demanded punishment before the Supreme Court of Justice and administratively in the Council of State have been quite remarkable. The latest demand by several non-governmental organizations that sought for the loss of investiture to sell its vote in exchange for state investments in the Magdalena Medio region, failed in its favor for the Council of State, an organism genuflecting before the executive and enemy of the Political Constitution of 1991. Also, the absence of Teodolindo Avendaño in the third House of Representatives vote was remarkable. With the turn-around of Yidis Medina and the abstention of Teodolindo Avendaño, the re-election success scraped through a vote in the First Commission of the House, where the final vote in the third debate of the first return was 18 votes in favor and 16 against.
(2) All that remains in the finalizing of the re-election reform is the agreement on and the final plenary vote of the exact text. The conservatives retired from the plenary on Tuesday 7 December, when it should have been approved. The argument is that they did so because the pro-Uribe people failed to fulfill the agreement of allowing the statute of the opposition to go through.
