Unprecedented Turnout for the Left in Colombia

BOGOTÁ: With 90.1% of the votes counted in the Colombian presidential election, president Álvaro Uribe Velez, who last year succeeded in changing the Colombian constitution to allow him to be the first president ever to run for reelection, is clearly the winner with 62.17 of the vote. But in an historic turn of events for the Colombian left, Alternative Democratic Pole candidate Carlos Gaviria has received, so far, 22.10 percent.
For decades, the left in Colombia has been mostly excluded from electoral politics in. The two-party system gave voters the choice between the right-wing Conservative Party and the centrist pro-establishment Liberal Party (with some Liberal politicians tending so much toward rightwing authoritarianism that party differences made little sense to outside observers). Every major left or opposition candidate for the Colombian presidency has been murdered before Election Day even arrived since Jorge Eliécar Gaitán’s 1948 assassination, the event often pointed to as setting off the still-ongoing civil war. When the Patriotic Union party was formed in the mid-1980s as part of a peace agreement to allow the armed left to reenter legal politics, thousands of party activists and candidates were murdered in a 10-year campaign of terror that only intensified the conflict.

Four years ago, in the election that brought independent narco-candidate Álvaro Uribe to power, the candidate of the Left, Luis Garzon of the newly-formed Independent Democratic Pole, received only 6 percent; 680,000 votes in a nation of 45 million. Today, a candidate long known for his support for major drug policy reform (decriminalization and an end to fumigations), who has opposed Uribe’s “Democratic Security” policy of total war against the both the armed insurgency and the nonviolent social movements, and who has come out strongly against Uribe’s much-celebrated Free Trade Agreement with the U.S., has nearly quadrupled that vote.

More coverage and analysis to come, so stay tuned…