As Colombians prepare to vote, Ana Carrigan reports from a country in which it can be hard to tell the authorities from the criminals
On Sunday week Colombians will vote for the person they would like to lead this troubled country through the next four years. Current president and candidate Álvaro Uribe Vélez, the most popular Colombian leader for decades and President Bush's last unconditional Latin ally, last year persuaded congress and the courts to change the constitution so he could run for a further four years. His re-election bid has the backing of the United States embassy, the financial and business community, and Colombia's upper, middle and lower-middle classes.
According to the polls, Uribe maintains a commanding lead over his rivals and is on track to win his re-election bid in the first round. And yet, according to the driver - and passionate "uribista" - who brought me from the airport the elections are going to be "a cliffhanger".
So which is it? Yes, the political landscape in Colombia is volatile. And no, the picture reflected in the polls may not necessarily be the same as the one out on the streets of Bogota. Look away from the establishment communications, start to read the e-mails that flood the inboxes of the working press, and the picture quickly changes. If I were taking bets on the elections next week, instinct tells me that the driver is probably more accurate than the polls.
This will be the first time in 50 years that an incumbent president is running for re-election, and it has made the opposition very nervous. Uribe's opponents are fearful that if the re-election succeeds there will be nothing to stop him from repeating the experiment.
Enrique Parejo González, a highly respected former justice minister now running for the presidency on behalf of the movement of Reconstrucción Democrática Nacional, is convinced that the survival of Colombia's democracy is at stake. For Parejo, Uribe's re-election bid is "convulsing the little institutional stability we had left", and it must be stopped. Parejo is just one of many observers and analysts who believe that if Uribe wins in the first round of the elections next week, he will change the constitution again to prolong his power beyond 2010, "imitating other extreme right-wing regimes, for example Pinochet in Chile, or Franco in Spain".
Álvaro Uribe came to power in 2002 in the chaotic aftermath of his predecessor's failed peace negotiations with the Farc guerrillas. He was elected with a mandate to restore order and security and crush the guerrillas. During his tenure, the military was strengthened, the guerrillas were driven back into the mountains, security improved dramatically on the major highways and in cities large and small, and the president won the fanatical loyalty of his upper- and middle-class constituents. There is a name for his greatest fans. Local people call them "furibistas", and as the name implies, they are filled with fire and fury and a fair dose of fanaticism too. Their hero is beyond good and evil.
According to Parejo, "people put their hopes in Uribe because the propaganda made them believe he was capable of solving their problems. People were sold on the idea that he was a kind of Messiah come to save them, but it isn't so. What he is up to is consolidating the power of the paramilitaries for his own ends."
INDEED, THE NEW president brought an additional, parallel agenda with him when he moved into the Palace, the ramifications of which the Colombians have only recently started to grasp. With support and encouragement from the US embassy, Uribe initiated a so-called "demobilisation process" to disarm and legitimise the right-wing, drug-trafficking paramilitaries and their mafia bosses. As Colombians prepare to go to the polls next week, the consequences and implications of this still incomplete "paramilitary peace process" are now at the epicentre of domestic and international concerns.
Not least because the fate of the president's re-election is now inextricably entwined with the commitments he is known to have made to killers and drug traffickers.
At the centre of the Uribe government's negotiations with the paramilitaries is the Justice and Peace law. This has been specifically crafted to grant the paramilitaries and the drug traffickers legal protection from the long arm of the International Criminal Court for atrocities, and from extradition demands by US courts for trafficking cocaine and heroin.
This grim reality has been brewing for some time. It is more than 20 years since Pablo Escobar and his Medellin cartel systematically murdered those who resisted them. Ever since, Colombian society has become accustomed to co-habiting with its local mafia in an uneasy, collective complicity. In the last four years, that complicity has stretched to include a tolerance for the mafia's armed wing, the "narco-paramilitaries".
PABLO ESCOBAR IS long dead. But his surviving friends are doing well in President Uribe's Colombia. Their henchmen have infiltrated everywhere. They are in the Congress and the judiciary, in the police forces and army barracks, in tourism and agribusiness and cattle breeding and construction. Only now they want more.
But who are "they"? It used to be that those who decided the life and death of their fellow citizens were unknowable. Shadow men, they were always referred to as "the dark forces". But now the "dark forces" have emerged in the pages of the national press with faces and names and life histories and political agendas.
Now they could be sitting at the next restaurant table flashing gold chains and drinking €150 bottles of wine. They, or their bodyguards, might be living in the duplex apartment across the hall, or buying a dozen €400 silk shirts in one of the fashionable, luxury boutiques that have multiplied around the expensive restaurants and luxurious apartment buildings in Bogota's respectable, residential north. Or they could be beside you at the traffic lights behind the tinted windows of some of the new SUVs that clog Bogota's traffic-jammed streets (almost 150,000 such vehicles were sold in Colombia last year.)
"They" are the mafia. The Colombian mob. Legitimised and amnestied, they run regional governments and municipalities from the border of Venezuela to Panama and beyond. They have spent several years infiltrating the state's institutions - the intelligence services, the judicial system, the drug police, the secret police, the customs service.
In 2002, using the well-worn strategies of intimidation and bribery to impose their hand-picked candidates, when the parliamentary elections were over they could boast that they now controlled 35 per cent of the Colombian Congress. No one knows, or no one dares tell, what percentage of Congress they gained in the last parliamentary vote in March.