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For Good of Colombia, Uribe Must Be
Stopped From Running Again
By Alvaro Vargas Llosa
No one who has talked to Colombian President
Alvaro Uribe can be surprised that his
country's Senate has now approved a
constitutional referendum that would allow
him to run in 2010. Uribe thinks that the
presidency remains his destiny.
There are still some institutional
obstacles, particularly the Constitutional
Court, but the decision will almost
certainly be made by Colombians at the
polls. The law requires a turnout of at
least 25 percent — almost the same number of
people who voted for him when he was
re-elected in 2006. For the good of
Colombia, Uribe, the most successful Latin
American president in a generation, must be
stopped.
There is no excuse for running again. There
are many candidates, including his former
defense minister, Juan Manuel Santos, who
are perfectly capable of continuing Uribe's
policies based on fighting Marxist
terrorists and fostering a business climate
conducive to investment. The argument Uribe
made the last time he changed the
constitution — that progress could be
reversed because the enemy was still
powerful — is no longer valid. The terms of
the Colombian conflict have been inverted:
It is now the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, not the state and civil society,
that is on the run. The economy, strained by
the global recession, is in much better
shape than it was. Anyone seeking the
presidency will be forced by a critical mass
of Colombians to embrace "democratic
security" as well as private investment and
open trade.
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But ultimately the reason why Uribe should
be stopped has little to do with utilitarian
considerations. The rule of law, a
fundamental principle of civilization, is at
stake. What Uribe is trying to do is what
most Latin American rulers have historically
done and what the region's populists
continue to do. His nemesis, Venezuela's
Hugo Chavez, can run indefinitely.
Bolivia's Evo Morales and Ecuador's Rafael
Correa have changed their constitutions for
their own benefit; Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega
and Honduras' Manuel Zelaya are attempting
the same.
No one has ever accused these leaders of
standing for the rule of law. But Uribe made
the rule of law the linchpin of his
presidency. Many of the ugly truths in
Colombian society — the umbilical cord
linking the paramilitary groups to the
establishment, the abuses committed by the
armed forces, the widespread corruption
originated in drug money — have come to the
surface because of policies that facilitated
the involvement of judicial institutions in
what used to be beyond the reach of the law
and because, unlike Chavez, Uribe has not
sent journalists into exile or expropriated
media outlets. By periodically subjecting
the constitution to the vain whims of the
president, Uribe is undoing everything he
has done for his country.
Latin America's problem was never economic;
it has always been political. The failure to
achieve prosperity is a byproduct of the
weakness of institutions that failed to
limit power and protect people's freedoms
and possessions. At the end of the 1940s,
Mariano Ospina Perez, one of Uribe's
predecessors, unleashed a civil war that
took the lives of 200,000 people precisely
because he thought himself bigger than the
constitution.
In Mexico, the reign of Porfirio Diaz,
justified by intellectuals of the
French-inspired "positivist" school that
thought dictatorship would accelerate
progress, led to the Mexican Revolution — a
carnage that took a million lives. The
"positivist" Brazilians who ruled the
country after the fall of the monarchy in
the late 19th century turned the military
into the dominant institution — and
eventually opened the doors of power for
Getulio Vargas, a man influenced by fascism.
These leaders, and many others, had one
thing in common — an inability to understand
that progress does not come from twisting
the law to fit one's social blueprint or
megalomania, however admirable that
blueprint and however justified that
person's high concept of himself.
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Uribe's supporters think his triumph has
been the near defeat of Marxist leftists in
Colombia. His real triumph has been the
progress made by the rule of law in many
areas; the near defeat of the Marxists was
the consequence of that progress. If he goes
ahead with the referendum and wins, the rule
of law will have suffered and his Marxists
foes will have snatched victory from the
jaws of defeat.
// Alvaro Vargas Llosa is the editor of
"Lessons From the Poor" and the director of
the Center on Global Prosperity at the
Independent Institute.
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