By Julio César Londoño, EL ESPECTADOR, August 19, 2024
https://www.elespectador.com/entretenimiento/gente/alvaro-uribe-entre-la-infamia-y-el-mito/
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
Although his star has lost its brilliance, and is very unlikely to recover it, we have to recognize that, because of his shrewdness and his great influence in national politics, Uribe is already a figure comparable to Turbay Ayala and López Michelsen.
The former President of Colombia is not a subject easily defined. His aspect and his manners are those of a very composed man, but he can explode very suddenly, and throw a punch, as he did, for example, at Fabio Valencia Cossio right in the Department Registry on the day that Uribe was chosen Governor of Antioquia. In his speeches, he alternates between colloquial language, with fatherly scoldings, and the statistics and analysis appropriate to a man in government. With the 21st century already in full swing, he governed like a leader at the beginning of the last century, like Juan Vicente Gómez, let’s say, who governed the Venezuelans as if they were his children and Venezuela as if it was a big ranch. Or like the tyrant in “The Autumn of the Patriarch”, who stopped the Presidential procession to get down and fix the sewing machine that belonged to one of his godmothers.
That’s one of the reasons for his popularity. In a nation with millions of orphans, speaking literally, and with other millions of citizens that are orphans of the government, Uribe embodies the figure of a father. In him, many see the personification of authority, justice and protection.
Perhaps the secret is the fusion that he invented. Uribe thinks of politics as an authoritarian exercise, and he professes the market economy strictly, but he communicates with the people in a warm and paternal style. This seesaw between statesman, patriot, and godfather in flesh and bone has seduced millions of Colombians.
He didn’t get a scratch from the attacks on him, and they only served to reinforce the myth: he can’t be accessed by either bullets or judges. They say that in one of his most serious attacks, when the conspirators exploded several kilograms of explosives when the Presidential procession was marching through Baranquilla, he got out of the car, reassured his retinue, and directed the operation of the withdrawal.
He’s a very good communicator, maybe even better than Belisario Betancur, and the management of his image has been extremely effective. He uses television for his addresses, and he controls the details of the set; he prefers to broadcast live, so that nobody edits his speech.
One of his most difficult years was 2023, when the FARC blew up the El Nogal nightclub. (“Colombia is weeping, but will not surrender,” he said then.) and when they assassinated the Governor of Antioquia, Guillermo Gavíria, and the Peace Commissioner, Gilberto Echeverry. To finish that year off, the people he loved rejected the referendum, and the President disappeared from the scene for a week. “He stayed in bed,” said Alfonso López Michelsen. But perhaps his bitterest moment came on August 7, 2010, when Juan Manuel Santos made it clear that he had his own governing agenda, and that it was very different from that of his mentor; words that Santos confirmed in the early days of his term as President when he invited Hugo Chávez to Cartagena and de-activated the war between Colombia and Venezuela that Uribe and Chavez had been planning with demented enthusiasm because of the killing of Raul Réyes in a guerrilla encampment in Ecuador.
In his personal life, the worst moment was the murder of his father at the hands of FARC guerrillas. That man, Alberto Uribe Sierra, a countryman and a take-charge kind of guy, put up a fight against some guerrillas that were trying to kidnap him from one of his ranches, and he was killed in a firefight. Others have said that it was the revenge of two campesino brothers for the rape of their sister by Uribe’s father, a version that León Valencia included in his historical novel, “The Shadow of the President”.
But he also knows the honey of triumph, for sure. He won the Presidential election in 2002, in spite of running with a favorability of 1% in the polls. He has attained a level of popularity bordering on idolatry, and a leadership superior to that of such powerful leaders as Turbay Ayala and López Michelsen. But his happiest moment was the triumph the “No” vote in the 2016 referendum for peace. It was his payback to Santos. He rained on Santos’ parade. This time it was Santos who “stayed in bed”.
Three gentlemen of the night
Uribe has some things in common with the two most powerful military chieftains in Colombia in recent years, Tirofijo (Sureshot) and Carlos Castaño. Both of them were animals for war, because the war had taken from them some people they loved very much; both had such powerful enemies that they had to stay permanently within their rings of security that surrounded them day and night, like insomniac talismans, and all three are the children of that spiral of hatred and retaliation that covered the last 70 years of Colombia’s history.
Let’s remember The Violence, with a capital V, that started in 1948 with Gaitán’s assassination, and that the FARC were born in 1964 as a self-defense movement that was trying to protect the campesinos from official violence. Twenty-one years later, the Castaños mounted a private security business, the AUC, to defend the rich campesinos that were being impoverished by the defenses of the poor campesinos now being enriched at their expense. And Uribe won the 2002 elections by promising them that the government would recover their monopoly by force, that is, by defending the ordinary citizens from so much defense.
If he could have measured the acts of Fate that contorted his destiny, Marulanda certainly could have made a fortune selling cheese and panela[1], which was his job in his youth when he wasn’t playing tangos on his violin. Or he could have retired as Minister of Public Works, the entity that taught him how to handle explosives when he was employed opening up roads in Tolima.
Castaño could have ended up in an internet cattle business, spoiling his young wife, Kenia, and reading his favorite authors, Machado, Benedetti, Kissinger, Gabo, and Oriana Fallaci (He had two other weaknesses: ladies, rubbing elbows with the bishops, and another, as a boy, snacking).
Instead of living in the midst of dozens of bodyguards, Uribe could have been a Bohemian horse whisperer, writing poetry, not doing yoga, sipping his aguardiente instead of bio-energetic potions and floral essences.
But because Destiny cannot bear to see any of us happy, it entwined the fates of the three. Because of that, Marulanda’s outlook was full of loathing, seeming to be sick and tired of triumphs and betrayals. He put the establishment on its knees, definitely, but he knew his victory was wrapped in a humiliating defeat: the FARC ended up looking just like their enemies, the establishment, the paramilitaries, and the drug traffickers.
That’s why Castaño ended up entangled in his contradictions—between the bushes of coca, the chainsaw cables, and the flags of “the fatherland”—and, finally, he disappeared from the panorama. They say he was killed at the orders of his brother Vicente Castaño, because Carlos was going around negotiating his surrender to the North American authorities, which had made Vicente nervous.
Therefore, Uribe is not one to laugh. He’s more serious than most; he’d been leading this pageant of clowns of our politics for too long, and he ended up being a caricature of everything he had criticized.
The desk
On the table in the center of the reception room of his office at the President’s Palace there were three ants, one yellow, one blue, and a red one; they were called, predictably, “work, work, and work”. On one side there was a copy of the Constitution bound in leather, and a tiny box of tools, a piece of soft cotton, a microscope, a screwdriver, and a little can of oil (Three in One). He used to use this equipment to make little repairs to lessen his feelings of stress. (They say he still uses this therapy.)
Above his presidential desk, he used to keep, in the order befitting his psycho-rigidity, the nine little vials of floral essences that Elsa Lucia Arango, his bio-energy physician, prescribed for him; some potions that the former Oxford student created for the faith of the campesinos of Antioquia. In the closet, where Andrés Pastrana kept the cigars that Fidel Castro sent him, he had the best collection of maps of Colombia that could be obtained. If you need a map of the nation’s mines, of neighborhood trails, or of Mapiripán, you can be sure that you can get one from the ex-President. His room had no windows, because those in charge of his security were afraid that the FARC would put a rocket through the opening.
Analysis of his terms
Uribe has been criticized for high unemployment statistics, his administration’s low performance in social development, and the patronage practices he resorted to In order to get his bills through Congress, and the number of his supporters that have been jailed. (They say he has a broader back than Ernesto Samper.) They also criticize his horrendous capacity to polarize, and some sectors criticize the warlike emphasis in both his administrations. But you have to admit that the war was the flagship of his campaign; that’s why he was elected. Uribe channeled the people’s hatred for the FARC and promised to finish them off. He put his every effort into that, and he almost achieved it, but the price was extremely high: he fortified the paramilitaries, with corruption they multiplied by the thousands, who left eight million victims, and plundered the campesinos out of ten million hectares, according to the figures by Colombia’s Controller’s Office. The statistics are colossal. Ten million hectares are 4.5 times the area of Valle del Cauca, or 209 times the urban area of Bogotá.
The good results in the war and in the economy. (Colombia’s economy grew by 6.7% during two consecutive years, 2006 and 2007!). That guaranteed his re-election for the 2006-2010 term. All of this was good propaganda for him. If the FARC launched a new offensive, that fortified the war-making policies of his administration. If they made a tactical retreat, that increased our “sense of security”. If another corruption scandal broke out, the head of a Minister was tossed to the gallery. If there was an attack, there he was with his thundering megaphone and his gimmicks for the media. If the Armed Forces suffered military reverses, some general would be called upon to answer for it. (More than 30 generals were removed between 2002 and 2010) and his popularity grew like a lather.
The positive economic results could be imputed in part to the good management by the Finance Minister, Óscar Iván Zúluaga, in part to the economic wave the region was surfing between 2004 and 2007, and also to a series of privatizations of public services with good conditions for private enterprise, which generated higher foreign investment.
Right now
After he left the President’s Palace in 2010, Uribe’s star has had gleams and power outages. The two triumphs by Santos caused pain to his soul. The first was a betrayal and the second was when Santos defeated his candidate, Jorge Juan Zúluaga; but he got even in 2014 when his young affiliate, Iván Duque, defeated Gustavo Petro.
His multiple criminal problems had their worst moment on August 4, 2020, when the Supreme Court of Justice handed down a ruling confining him to house arrest for the crimes of procedural fraud and subornation of perjury. The ex-President was a prisoner for 67 days when a judge ruled that he could be released and there respond to the charges. But on May 25 of this year, he suffered another hard blow when the Attorney General’s Office formally charged him with the same crimes for which he had been arrested and confined.
Another tough moment for him and for the traditional politicians took place in the regional elections of 2019 when the three most important cities in the country came into the hands of mayors representing alternative parties: Claudia López, Daniel Quintero, and Jorge Iván Ospina. To top it off, his archenemy, Gustavo Petro, was elected President in 2022. Right now, the Democratic Center Party controls 10% of the mayors’ and governor’s offices and Departmental Assemblies in the country, and 20% of the Parliament, a figure not to be ashamed of.
Even though his star has lost its shine, and it’s very improbable that he will recover that, you have to admit that because of his shrewdness and his longtime influence in national politics, Uribe is now a figure comparable to Turbay Ayala and López Michelsen, and with more presence in the national imagination than either one of them, because Uribe has been in the media so much more. Almost mythical. And the political myths, you know, serve for two things: to clothe with epic vestments his most brazen lies, and to affix a seal to his metaphors that helps us decipher the reality and lead the processes that make a country great. Unfortunately, we know now that the Uribe myth only served the first thing. Colombia has never been divided as aggressively as in the last few years. Nobody held the cards of triumph in the war as he did, his popularity and the economy.
Uribe took these jewels. He hung onto them with great care. He molded them with fire. He massaged the mixture with fanatical fervor until he turned it into a magma of nonsense and blood in which we are now splashing around in the stupidest possible way. No leader in the history of Colombia has possessed such a conjunction of the stars. No leader, not even the monstrous Laureano Gómez, has ever been the cause of tragedies like those Uribe spawned, or put as many roadblocks for the wheels of history and social progress, or split up national unity in the way that he did.
[1] Panela: water with sugar and cinnamon.