COLOMBIA: Though well behind in the polls, Carlos Gaviria Diaz has given the nation's left a new sense of hope, writes Ana Carrigan in Bogotá
This weekend in Bogotá, the campaign for the presidential elections next Sunday closed with two dramatically different rallies.
On Friday, at seven o'clock in the evening, President Álvaro Uribe, accompanied by his wife and two sons, arrived to address his supporters in the Plaza Bolivar.
Three rings of security police surrounded the square, closing off all the surrounding streets.
There was a large and diverse crowd, yet the historic plaza was by no means full, so that the following day the press reported that there was no way to estimate whether the crowd numbered 10,000 or 20,000 people. The party leaders each spent one minute addressing their followers before the president took the microphone and spoke for an hour and 15 minutes.
His speech touched on all the emotive issues that feed his popularity. The word "love" featured many times, as in love for the patria, love for Bogotá, love for the Bogotanos. The word "authority" also featured, accompanied by a detailed explanation of the difference between "authoritarianism" (bad) and "firm, impartial authority", the source of all strength and security.
He also addressed the paramilitaries, for it so happened that on the previous night the constitutional court had thrown a spanner into the peace process by ruling that several key clauses of a law granting the paramilitary leaders virtual amnesty were unconstitutional.
That Friday afternoon, the paramilitary spokesmen had accused the magistrates of being "para-guerrillas" and "agents of subversion" under the influence of "ferocious communism".
So the president reassured them that so long as they kept faith with him, he would keep his commitments to them. He closed, promising a secure and thriving nation.
Then it was Sunday. Same place, a sunny afternoon. The closing rally of the left had been billed as a celebration for peace and for life. The invitation had gone out over the internet, calling on the candidate's supporters to come to the plaza for a party with some of the best Colombian musicians.
"Come listen to the music, sing, dance, have a terrific time and help us build democracy together." This time the crowd, estimated at 40,000 people, filled the great plaza and overflowed down the approach streets.
There were families with small children; poor people from the southern barrios who had taken two hours to get there; Indians from the oldest Colombian tribe, the recognised fount of national wisdom, wearing traditional dress. Every Colombian intellectual in Bogotá was there; academics and poets and musicians and artists.
The writer Laura Restrepo read a message from Portuguese novelist José Saramago, who called Gaviria a democrat of integrity with an ethical vision of life and of what politics should be. It was another country.
These were the citizens of that "other Colombia", the one without power or money, the one that doesn't exist on the pages or screens of the establishment media, nor does it exist for the international press. Yet this is the country with the brains and the sensibility and the imagination.
By six o'clock that evening, when their hero, Carlos Gaviria Diaz, arrived, they had been waiting for four hours to give him a tumultuous reception.
So who is this new leader of the Colombian left? Senator Carlos Gaviria Diaz is a 68-year-old former magistrate and president of the constitutional court. The owner of a head of bushy white hair and a white beard, he might seem an unlikely candidate for a young and radical left-wing party. Yet his appeal to voters across the social spectrum has provided the major surprise of the campaign.
A deeply serious and articulate intellectual; a radical in a social context fractured by extremes of poverty and inequality; an agnostic in a country still ruled by the most reactionary church in Latin America; a man of the law in a country that has known precious little law and where impunity reigns supreme; a committed democrat in a context where the left has historically been vulnerable to the charge of complicity, or at least sympathy, with the Marxist guerrillas of the Farc, Gaviria is rated the best candidate the Colombian left has ever had.
On Sunday evening he spoke for just 20 minutes. "Never," he said, "has the dilemma facing Colombians been clearer: the choice is whether to prolong an authoritarian and reactionary regime or to build a democratic society which will eliminate the shameful inequities that stain Colombia."
When his speech was over, a friend turned to me and shouted: "Do you understand what's happening here? These people believe they are going to win the election next week!"
The conventional wisdom has it that this is pure madness. The latest poll gave Uribe 54.7 per cent to Gaviria's 23.7 per cent.
And yet . . . something utterly extraordinary and unexpected has been happening during this presidential campaign. Call it the rebirth, after more than 60 years, of the Colombian left. Call it a rediscovery of a collective new Colombian identity. Call it a wind that has blown in over the Andes, bringing hope for change to this most isolated and reactionary bastion of the extreme right.