Lately it actually seems like Antanas Mockus has a serious chance of becoming the president of Colombia. The poll by El Tiempo and La W says that Mockus would get 38.7% of the vote in the first round compared to Juan Manuel Santos’ 26.7%, Noemí Sanín’s 9.8%, German Vargas Lleras’ 3.3%, Gustavo Petro’s 2.8%, and Rafael Pardo’s 2.3%. On the second round, if Mockus and Santos are the two choices, Mockus gets a 41% to Santos’ 29%. The poll by CM& shows Mockus getting 34% of the vote to Santos’ 35% in the first round; however, in the second round, Mockus gets 50% to Santos’ 44%. An Invamer Gallup poll showed Santos winning the first round but Mockus getting 47% of the vote in the second round versus Santos’ 42%.
For an election that seemed like it existed merely as a formality just a few weeks ago, these results are a shock, to say the least. It’s hard to believe that barely three months ago almost no one really contemplated four years without Uribe himself, let alone there being a reasonable chance of his successor not taking power. The trends are favoring Mockus. It seems like in every poll, he’s getting closer and closer to Santos, now even surpassing him, even though not much has really changed. Mockus hasn’t done anything visible since selecting Sergio Fajardo as his vicepresident. He hasn’t really shined during the debates (which isn’t to say he performed poorly; he simply did as well as some of the other candidates who are getting negligible votes), and he’s had a few public slip-ups, the type that would be a giant media event in the United States but luckily get glossed over here. Santos isn’t bleeding voters, but it doesn’t really seem like he’s going to get higher numbers anytime soon. He already has his followers; people who want continuity already know he exists, whereas Mockus is still getting his name and status as the frontrunner opposition candidate out there.
The last time I got excited for a political candidate, the candidate himself wasn’t terribly great. Mockus is better, but the same principle applies. I’m not really expecting a Mockus victory, and even if he does win the elections, I’m not sure his presidency would be entirely successful, or even successful at all. But in a lot of ways, this election is like the Obama election. It was important then for people to vote for an idea, and against an idea, and such is the case here too.
Uribe’s government, and by extension Santos’ campaign, is based on the idea of Democratic Security, which really doesn’t mean a whole lot other than ‘fighting the guerrillas’. That’s his entire thing, really. That’s the premise of Santos’ campaign: we have to continue with security. We have to keep defending ourselves. We have to keep battling.
How true is that? When Santos was the Minister of Defense, Colombians found out that army had been killing civilians and dressing them up as guerrilla fighters, because they could get a financial reward for every body they delivered as a kill. There’s about 1,000 cases known so far, with little in the way of justice. If you think about this, it’s staggering. Hundreds, maybe thousands of deaths goes beyond ‘bad apples’ or ‘isolated incidents’, it’s a reflection of policy. In this case, the policy was to delivery corpses so that people would feel that some ’security’ was being reinforced.
Last year, it was also revealed that the DAS, the Administrative Department of Security, was illegally spying on various opposition politicians, judges, and journalists. Going beyond that, DAS officers were actually harassing people and threatening them with death, in some cases those officers being the ones assigned to ‘protect’ those people in the first place. The director of DAS, Jorge Noguera, was arrested because he was found to have collaborated with paramilitary groups in order to divert DAS resources to some of their activities, including murder.
While no one denies that there were some security improvements during Uribe’s presidency, the aforementioned incidents are a very serious matter. They are not something that can be brushed off and ignored. It wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest that under Uribe, the State and its various agencies became a bigger threat to citizens’ lives than they had been in the previous governments. That’s something that should be cause for concern, because there is a difference between the government, which supposedly represents the people and is placed in power by their votes, and guerrilla groups. There is a degree of moral culpability that we all share if our government is going around threatening and murdering people, which isn’t the case when it’s an external agent.
And yet, these events didn’t destroy Uribe’s presidency, and they haven’t destroyed Santos’ candidacy. Uribe was weakened, sure. But realistically speaking, if he had been able to run for a third term, he would have won, and Santos is still in very good position to take the Presidency. Why is that? Why has Uribe been a ‘teflon’ president?
Uribe has been worshipped during his entire presidency, sometimes in ways that were vaguely creepy. He wasn’t merely a president; he was a savior. I’ve heard more than a few people say Uribe is the best president of any country, for example. Or the best president in the history of Colombia, a claim that’s not entirely unreasonable coming from people who have only experienced National Front presidents and the dubious failures that followed, but hardly realistic, especially as more scandals come to light.
I believe that many colombians needed an Uribe, regardless of who he actually was. They needed this great savior figure, one that would help them fight against evil and help them survive. The two presidencies before Uribe’s were absolutely terrible. Samper’s presidency was spent almost completely in court when it was revealed that drug traffickers had financed his campaign. Pastrana’s presidency had tried a peace process that ended up being a resounding failure, showed the guerrilla group FARC to be wholly uninterested with the concept of peace and demostrated that they held incredible disdain towards colombians (FARC leader Marulanda infamously didn’t go to the first peace process meeting, and the photograph of Pastrana next to an empty chair became the defining image of the years). Colombians were being kidnapped at record levels, the state couldn’t guarantee anyone’s security, and the country seemed like it was becoming unlivable.
People needed this idea of a Great Man that would swoop in and save them. And in a way, Uribe did. The government fought against FARC, and security improved in the country. But to what cost? Besides the previously mentioned government scandals, there’s the fact that paramilitary groups took over vast regions of the country for many years, including Congress and in all likelihood the Casa de Nariño (presidential palace), and in the process committed a vast number of atrocities that are almost unspeakable in their depravity. The real tragedy of the paramilitary phenomenon is how much support it had from society, tacit and hidden support, but support nonetheless. Even not too long ago, you could still find people arguing “well, the paramilitaries fought the guerrilla, right? so maybe they were good”.
Colombia was in one of those moral quandaries. How far are you willing to go for protection? People were willing to go very far, and they simply looked the other way and downplayed or refused to acknowledge any terrible thing that happened. That’s why Uribe is a teflon president. Vast numbers of people have simply never been interested in seeing his government for what it really is, because they need to know they are being protected, they need to know they have nothing to fear anymore. And in the process, the country’s fallen even lower into the pit of immorality it was already in.
Like most other countries, we have our narrative, and it requires us to be ‘good’. The fight against FARC is such a narrative. It’s a view of the world in which colombians are good people, and they have an external enemy, which is FARC, and they are undoubtedly bad. We, the good, struggle against these evil forces, always ready to strike. It’s no big secret that rallying the people against a common enemy can be used to justify a lot, but like everything in the world, people can identify in others what they’re unable to see in themselves. There are some billboards against Antanas Mockus that have appeared in the past few days, and their premise is basically that under a Mockus government, other evil external forces (Hugo Chavez, Rafael Correa) will defeat us. It’s us against them, and if it’s not Chavez, or FARC, there’ll be a new Other to fight.
As Colombia’s become more and more poisoned, lots of people have simply refused to look within themselves and challenge their assumption about how good the country really is. How good can a country be if it’s willing to turn a blind eye to the executions of hundreds of civilians by the military, to the point where people would consider rewarding such an act with a vote? Many of the things that happened in the country had the general approval of the population, and a lot of these scandals aren’t seen as so bad. What gives? Fear?
A big part of Mockus’ surge is simply that he’s the opposition candidate. As soon as Mockus got the push he needed to get a bigger part of the vote than the other opposition candidates, his numbers started increasing dramatically until the point where he’s now the frontrunner in various polls. Could another opposition candidate have achieved this?
Maybe. I do think, though, that Mockus’ points are precisely what people who are looking deep within themselves are responsive to. His campaign is based on the idea of honesty and legality, and that’s one of the things he’s most known for, being a man with integrity. He’s the antithesis of ‘the ends justifies the means’, the candidate that’s most focused on the substance of those means, and the toll they can take on a country.
The days when anything that happened under Uribe’s administration would be defended to the death have been over for a while. It’s not clear which crisis was the one responsible for this. Maybe it wasn’t a single crisis, but simply the aggregate. Maybe it wasn’t even a crisis, and people are simply tired of Uribe. As the first president to be in power for eight years, he’s had more time to accumulate scandals and failures than the average president, which no doubt has ended up reflecting poorly on him.
Regardless of whether Mockus would manage to succeed in changing the mentality of Colombians, simply winning would be a large change in itself. It would mean colombians are able to look at the reality of their country and work towards fixing it, and themselves, instead of forever focusing on the external enemy. In a few months, we’ll be finding out just how much will there is out there.