Thursday 27 November 2008, San José, Costa
Rica
COLOMBIA:
Financial Scandal a
Hurdle to Uribe’s
Re-election
By Mario Osava and
Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA (IPS) -
Five thousand people
chanting anti-government
slogans in the Colombian
capital’s central
Bolívar Square reflected
the sharp fall in
popularity of right-wing
President Álvaro Uribe,
whose bid to reform the
constitution to allow
him to run for a third
term in 2010 has
suffered serious
setbacks in Congress.
The protests held in the
square daily over the
past few days became
massive on Tuesday, with
thousands of
demonstrators chanting
"No More Uribe".
They were reacting to
the government’s
decision to shut down
the DMG investment
company, which triggered
rioting and unrest in
the southern departments
(provinces) of Putumayo
and Nariño last week.
Some 600 protesters from
Putumayo, on the border
with Ecuador, joined the
street march and
demonstrations in
Bolívar Square.
The crisis unleashed by
the closure of the DMG
investment scheme, which
was founded by David
Murcia Guzmán (the name
comes from his
initials), has had
"extremely serious"
economic and social
consequences, Nariño
Governor Antonio Navarro
told the Senate Tuesday
night.
Navarro estimates that
90 percent of people in
Pasto, the capital of
Nariño, had invested
money in the company,
which reportedly has
1,017,000 investors in
that province, more than
half of the entire
provincial population.
In Putumayo, where DMG
began to operate, the
situation is even worse,
warned the governor, who
called for a "bailout
and solidarity fund" to
curb the social effects
of the collapse of DMG.
Economic activities have
been brought to a halt
for the past week in the
two provinces by a
general strike and
violent protests in
which several people
were injured Wednesday
in the crackdown by the
security forces.
"We all used to be Uribe
supporters," a protester
in Bolívar Square told
IPS, while others around
him agreed. The shift in
public opinion could
drag along with it more
than four million
Colombians who invested
their savings in DMG,
according to official
figures.
"Uribe, in my view,
became a dictator," said
a Bogotá resident
originally from southern
Colombia, who only
identified himself as
"U".
U, wearing a suit and
tie, said he had 30
million pesos (around
14,000 dollars) tied up
in DMG, and that he was
reevaluating his
previously favourable
view of Uribe in many
areas, including his
"anti-terrorism"
policies.
His initial scepticism
with regard to the offer
of 100 percent returns
in six months was
dispelled partly by the
fact that the company
had been operating, and
paying its taxes, for
seven years without
complaints from clients.
U plans to sue the state
for failure to take
action against the
company.
"It is a massacre of
workers," said
Concepción Robelto, who
lost her job eight years
ago due to the
privatisation of the
health sector promoted
by Uribe when he was a
senator, and is now in
trouble again because of
the closure of the DMG
-- another decision by
Uribe.
"We’re poor again,"
lamented her 19-year-old
disabled daughter.
Robelto said her family
is scraping by selling
natural products.
People all over Colombia
have been affected by
the shutdown of DMG, not
just in Putumayo and
Nariño, as the
government has implied,
said Robelto and other
protesters who live in
Bogotá, like Eliana
Niño.
She said DMG was able to
pay high returns because
"it didn’t waste money
on advertising" and paid
lower taxes than banks
because of its operating
formula.
DMG provided its
investors with prepaid
debit cards, with which
clients made purchases
in the company’s
department stores until
they had used up what
they invested.
Six months later, DMG
gave each client the
amount of their initial
investment, whether or
not they had made
purchases. The products,
mainly home appliances
and electronic goods,
were slightly more
expensive than the
competitors’ products,
but most of them were
contraband items,
Attorney General Mario
Iguarán said Wednesday.
Many small farmers in
Putumayo sold their land
and homes and moved into
the city after investing
their money in DMG,
which allowed them to
stop farming coca and
rent a place to live.
The returns promised by
the company were higher
than what they could
earn by selling coca
leaves, farmers in the
town of La Hormiga told
IPS a year ago.
DMG "is a sales company,
not a pyramid scheme,"
said Carmen Marín from
Bogotá.
In her view, the
government is trying to
mix up the operations of
Murcia Guzmán’s company
with fraudulent pyramid
schemes, in which the
first investors get rich
off the money poured in
by the next, more
numerous, waves of
investors, who end up
losing everything.
Pyramid schemes have
mushroomed in Colombia,
becoming a serious
social problem around
the country in the last
few months, and forcing
the government to take
measures to curb the
effects.
Murcia Guzmán "didn’t
steal money from
anyone," said Marín,
while the crowd chanted
"Free David" and "David,
amigo, el pueblo está
contigo" (David, our
friend, the people are
with you).
H, another protester who
did not want to give his
name, sold "a small farm
with two cows and a
horse" to invest 50,000
pesos (some 23,000
dollars) in DMG, only to
see his dream of buying
a bigger farm go up in
smoke.
With respect to the
accusation that DMG was
actually laundering drug
money, Saúl Español, an
activist with the
movement that is
fighting the eviction of
900,000 families who
have been unable to meet
their mortgage payments,
said the government also
receives drug money, but
without redistributing
it like DMG.
Murcia Guzmán was
arrested on Nov. 19 in
Panama, where he has a
number of businesses,
and was extradited to
Bogotá, accused of money
laundering and other
charges.
Other DMG managers are
in prison or on the lam,
and dozens of the
company’s branches have
been shut down, in
Panama and other
countries as well.
Finance Minister Óscar
Zuluaga said in the
Tuesday night session in
the Senate that DMG was
"a mafia created to
undermine the state,"
and alleged that it has
ties with drug
traffickers, far-right
paramilitaries and
left-wing guerrillas.
DMG was trying to
"generate a climate of
unrest and rebellion
against the state,"
while it defrauded
people out of their
savings, said police
chief General Óscar
Naranjo.
It took a while for the
company to be shut down
because the authorities
had to follow the rules
of a state of law, he
said.
Uribe’s loss of
popularity among
millions of Colombians
who are furious that DMG
was closed could throw a
serious wrench into the
president’s re-election
plans.
Two pro-Uribe lawmakers
for Putumayo and Nariño
announced that, in
response to the clamour
from their voters, they
would not support the
draft law to call a
referendum to enable
voters to decide whether
or not Uribe could run
for a third term.
Due to the loss of those
two votes, a committee
in the lower house of
Congress voted down the
draft law Wednesday
night -- the first of
four votes needed to
pave the way for a
referendum, which some
observers now say is
impossible.
The more than four
million signatures
collected to demand a
referendum on the
re-election question, in
a multi-million dollar
campaign whose source of
financing was not clear,
were transported to the
electoral authority’s
offices in armoured
trucks that belonged to
a security
transportation company
with ties to DMG, which
was also taken over by
the government. |
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