Colombia's Magical Realism
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Colombia's Magical Realism
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
sent by Steven L. Robinson (activ-l)
Dissident Voice - May 31, 2007
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/05/colombia%e2%80%99s-magical-realism/
Colombia's Magical Realism
Magico realismo
by Paul Haste
Consider the parapolitica scandal: the state's participation in the
terrorism and assassinations that rightist paramilitaries have
inflicted on Colombia.
Ambassadors, congress representatives, senators, state governors - more
than 50 national and local elected representatives who participated in
state paramilitarism are under investigation, have been arrested or
jailed, or are wanted fugitives in Mixico and the United States.
Colombia's elite Santos clan - owners of the country's most influential
newspaper, El Tiempo, whose former editor is now the Vice President, and
whose cousin is the Defense Minister - are implicated in assisting to
organize the first paramilitaries in the Nineties.
The Foreign Minister resigned as her brother Senator was jailed, and an
arrest warrant was issued for her former Senator father - who is now a
fugitive on the run - wanted for collaborating with paramilitaries.
Accusations that the information director in the president's
intelligence service - Colombia's CIA - compiled hit lists targeting
union organizers and opposition activists to pass onto the
paramilitaries to assassinate.
Illegal surveillance operations against opposition politicians and
journalists investigating the parapolmtica scandal, resulting in several
senior police officers being fired, including the chief of police
intelligence - Colombia's FBI - and the national police chief.
The president's supporters in Congress, whose election the
paramilitaries claim to have bought or ensured through intimidation,
threats and terror, proposing a 'presidential coup' - closing Congress
to avoid the opposition taking control as more Uribista delegates are
jailed - a proposal the Interior and Justice Minister thought
'interesting.'
One might think that Colombia is in crisis; the president must be
isolated in his palace writing his resignation and waiting to be
arrested for acquiescing in the state's paramilitarization.
But according to the latest opinion polls, Colombian President Alvaro
Uribe Vilez has an unprecedented 85% approval rating.
Articles in Colombian newspapers are often unsigned, so as to avoid a
fate common to Iraqi journalists under American occupation; contentious
opinions are often met with threats, assassination attempts and forced
exile, but several newspaper columnists in Bogota have courageously
raised questions about the president's apparent stratospheric
popularity.
Referring to Colombians forcibly displaced as a paramilitary war
tactic, and to a poor barrio in Bogota, one writer asks, 'how many
desterrados or workers in Ciudad Bolmvar are interviewed in these
opinion polls?'
The opinion pollsters state that their interviews take place by phone,
and just in the largest cities. One pollster admitted that Colombia's
highest, or wealthiest strata, constituted almost 20% of respondents,
even though nowhere near 20% of Colombians are in this elite - even in
Spain the highest class is considered to constitute just 15% of the
population.
The fact that one hour interviews with respondents were conducted by
phone raised further concerns; just 54% of Colombians have access to a
private phone, and one can only speculate as to how many workers have
an hour's free time to answer questions. As another writer pointed out,
domestic workers cleaning expensive apartments in strata 6 zones - the
wealthiest areas - wouldn't have the time, but the rich whose time is
freed thanks to the labour of these workers, would.
In Colombia, where those in absolute poverty are 50% of the entire
country, some incredulous journalists refused to accept that the
opinion polls accurately reflected Colombian opinion. Those that
investigated a little deeper discovered that one influential opinion
poll director was an unapologetic Uribista, who expressed his contempt
for the poor by claiming the unemployment figures merely measured
'those who are not interested in work.'
But other unsigned articles seem to be designed to attempt to close down
debate; the business magazine Cambio claims that the president has a
'blank cheque' from 85% of Colombians to do whatever he wants, while
the political elite's magazine, Semana, without the slightest
reflection or doubt, confidently states that 'Colombians believe Uribe
is one of the greatest presidents.'
It is not clear who the writers at Semana have been talking to, but it
is clear on whose behalf the magazine makes this claim - Colombia's
richest man, Julio Santo Domingo, recently made the same claim and also
hoped that the Constitution could be changed again to allow Uribe to be
re-elected to a third term.
It is also certain that there are some Colombians whose opinions this
elite believes are not worth consideration.
On the Pacific coast live the most desperate and poorest citizens in
Colombia, descendants of Caribbean slaves brought to this tropical
rainforest in 1728 to mine gold for the Spanish empire. After the
Colombian Republic ended the slave trade in 1851, American precious
metal companies moved in to expropriate the land and still, American
fruit companies continue to exploit Pacific coast workers on banana,
sugarcane and palm oil plantations.
In the largest Pacific coastal state, Chocs, this relentless
exploitation has resulted in an incredible 85% poverty rate. At least
50 children have died due to malnutrition so far in 2007, and state
disinterest, according to the leftist opposition Polo Democratico, has
left health, education and nutrition in a critical and precarious
position.
'Chocs's cacaos' - the corrupt bosses in the state - have participated
in the paramilitaries cocaine wars, the Polo states, deliberately
displacing peasant workers that resist their communities'
militarization. The displaced have created desperate shanty towns on
the Pacific coast where, in scenes reminiscent of the poverty and
inequality in Haitm, many Colombians are now forced to scrape a living
on less than 2 dollars a week.
Colombia's most prestigious sociologist, Alfredo Molano, writes, 'Chocs
is a colonial state,' paramilitaries, politicians and corporations,
'have left children displaced, malnourished and dead.' Black Colombians
'have been exploited by the white elite and their racist, thieving
economic liberalism,' and this elite has been protected by Uribe's
Democratic Security policies that militarise the shanty towns and
criminalise dissent.
But in Colombia's magical realism state, editorial writers in Bogota are
convinced that 'Colombia's greatest president,' and his 'undisputed' 85%
approval rating, reflect reality. There is no desperate hunger in
Colombia, there are no desterrados - the paramilitaries are not
resurgent and union workers are not assassinated. '?Parapolmtica? ?Qui
es eso?' declares Semana. 'The president continues rising in the
polls,' headlines El Tiempo. It is as though the deeper the crisis
becomes, the more Colombia's elite retreats into their own reality, a
magical Colombia that will forever believe in the president's 2006
election campaign slogan, Con Uribe, mas que nunca - 'with Uribe, more
than ever.'
Sources
?Parapolmtica? ?Qui es eso? Report in Semana, Bogota, 12 March 2007.
.Ni qui niqo muerto, Alfredo Molano, El Espectador, Bogota, 31 March
2007.
Death squad scandal circles closer to Colombia's president, Simon
Romero and Jenny Carolina Gonzalez, New York Times, 15 May 2007.
Chocs: la crisis, las intervenciones, las mentiras de gubernamentales,
Polo Democratico Alternativo de Chocs statement, Quibdo, 18 April 2007.
Cuestionario para el encuestador, Daniel Coronell, Semana, 12 March
2007.
Desterrados: crsnicas del desarraigo, Alfredo Molano, El Ancora,
Colombia, 2001.
El largo brazo del narcoparamilitarismo colombiano, Hernando Calvo
Ospina, Telesur report, Caracas, 9 May 2007.
Dmas de tempestad, headline report in El Espectador, Bogota, 20 May
2007.
Presidente Uribe sigue arriba en encuesta, article in El Tiempo,
Bogota, 8 March 2007.
Cocaine wars, photographer: Scott Dalton, New York Times, 2007.
The best laid plans of presidents and war criminals: The unintended
outcome of Colombia's demobilizacion process, Garry Leech, Colombia
Journal, 17 May 2007.
!Ave Marma! Cover report in Cambio, Bogota, 20 May 2007.
Chocs - ?el pasado o el futuro? Aurelio Suarez Montoya, Centro de Medios
Independientes, Quibdo, 9 April 2007.
Entremeses, Alfredo Molano, El Espectador, Bogota, 20 May 2007.
La favorabilidad del presidente, O L Gonzalez, El Tiempo, Bogota, 12
March 2007.
Los niqos del Chocs, Libardo Muqoz, Centro de Medios Independientes,
Bogota, 30 March 2007.
Mas que complicado, Alfredo Molano, El Espectador, Bogota, 7 April 2007.
?Uribe III? Report in Semana, Bogota, 29 de enero de 2007.
Los errors de Gallup, Daniel Coronell, Semana, Bogota, 26 March 2007.
Barbacoa children and streets, photographer: Kris Lane, William and Mary
College, United States, 1995.
Paramilitary ties to elite in Colombia are detailed, Juan Forero,
Washington Post, 22 May 2007.
?Una encuesta embuchada? Marma Isabel Rueda, Semana, Bogota, 19 March
2007.
Al Chocs lo esta matando la rosca, Nistor Lspez, Quibdo report in El
Tiempo, Bogota, 1 April 2007.
La confianza en las encuestas, O L Gonzalez, El Tiempo, Bogota, 2 April
2007.
Momentos amargos, article in El Espectador, Bogota, 20 May 2007.
[Paul Haste is a union organizer from London who is currently living in
Bogota to improve his Spanish. He can be reached at
paul...@hotmail.com.]
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