Neo-con support for Uribe reveals double standard

Last month the Colombian constitutional court rejected a bid by right-wing President Alvaro Uribe to hold a referendum that might have seen him elected to an unprecedented third term in office – and US hawks think that’s a good thing.

At first glance, this seems odd, because Uribe is the best friend the US has in Latin America, with Colombia being the recipient of the third largest amount of US military aid after Israel and Egypt (Afghanistan and Iraq aside) ever since former President Bill Clinton introduced the anti-drugs Plan Colombia programme in 1999. Uribe is also an avowed enemy of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez.

Uribe had already won a constitutional amendment in 2005, enabling him to run for a second term in 2006. US neo-conservatives have been vociferous in denouncing leftist presidents trying to cling to power. Indeed, there is a bit of a fad going on in Latin America at the moment for prolonging one’s tenure through the democratic process, with Chávez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and most recently, Honduras’s President Manuel Zelaya — who was overthrown for his efforts – springing to mind. (It has to be said, however, that former Argentine President Carlos Menem – a darling of the IMF and the Clinton administration – was a re-election trailblazer back in the 1990s, and no one said boo).

Uribe, however, is being hailed a champion of democracy for giving it a go and failing.

“Uribe is the ultimate hero of this story,” writes arch neo-con Robert Kagan in the Washington Post. “Whatever his personal desires, he allowed the court to do its job without interference. Whatever his accomplishments, including defeating terrorists and giving Colombians hope, his greatest gift to his people will be a society and political system based not on the power and appeal of an individual but on the rule of law”.

As Kagan says, it is probably true that Uribe “would almost certainly have been reelected had he been allowed to run again. He is overwhelmingly popular in Colombia … If anyone could make a case for a third term, it was Uribe”. But it was good for Colombia, Kagan thinks, because “a successful democracy must also rest on strong institutional and legal foundations that are above any one man…”

True, but is Uribe the hero Kagan thinks he is? Why does the Colombian president not fit the “autocratic leader” epithet Kagan likes to hang on others who are less friendly to the United States?

Worst of all, in the interests of objectivity Kagan could have mentioned past reports by the US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) linking Uribe with none other than Pablo Escobar, head of the Medellín cartel and the kind of drugs baron that Plan Colombia was devised to help stamp out.

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