The Technocrat of Steel

By Tim Padgett and Ruth Morris/Bogota

Alvaro Uribe won the Colombian presidency last week by a landslide, but he can claim an even bigger victory: he lived to see election day. In a nation where politics often resembles Russian roulette--a mayor is murdered every three weeks or so in Colombia--Uribe became an especially vulnerable target for assassination when he declared himself the candidate who, if elected, would whip Colombia's vicious and seemingly invincible guerrilla armies. By the time the one-year campaign was over, the largest rebel group, the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, or FARC, had tried to kill Uribe at least three times, most recently by bombing his motorcade. Though the candidate emerged unscathed, the attempts on his life were a reminder that Colombia, locked more fiercely than ever in a civil war that is now 38 years old and has claimed 150,000 lives, is braced for more bloodshed after Uribe takes office Aug. 7.

Roused in part by the President-elect's hawkish talk, the U.S. Congress looks ready this summer to approve the Bush Administration's request for some half a billion dollars in military aid for Colombia; it would be the first time the U.S. has funded counterinsurgency in Latin America since the 1980s. In response, the Marxist FARC has stepped up its violence. That is drawing more fire still from the nation's outlawed right-wing paramilitary groups, the Colombian Self-Defense Units, or AUC, which are infamous for massacring villagers they deem friendly to the FARC. On election night, Uribe seemed to concede that his presidency could, at least in the short term, worsen Colombia's interminable agony. "I wasn't invited to a party," he told reporters. "Were you?"

Though he's an expert horseman, the Harvard-educated Uribe, 49, looks less like the Clint Eastwood persona he cultivates and more like one of the legions of owlish technocrats who took over Latin America in the 1990s. He was hardened as mayor of Medellin, the continent's most violent city. Though his father, a rancher, was a friend of Fabio Ochoa, the late patriarch of the city's notorious drug cartel (the two shared a love of horses), Mayor Uribe was a noted crime buster there. As governor of northern Antioquia and as a Senator, he built a reputation for fiscal skill and honesty--but also for having a prickly authoritarian streak. Human-rights groups are worried that he will be too soft on the right-wing paramilitary armies, which gained strength and cocaine wealth in Antioquia under his rule. Uribe insists that he has no links to those armies.

In any case, Uribe's rightward leanings weren't a campaign liability. The 18,000-member FARC lost its sheen as a populist insurgency years ago because of its record of taxing and protecting the cocaine business and its penchant for gratuitous kidnapping and indiscriminate killing--like last month's bombing massacre of 119 villagers in a church. When the government broke off fruitless peace talks with the rebels in February, Colombians' exasperation catapulted Uribe's candidacy. His chief promise: to professionalize Colombia's weak and inept military and double its size to more than 100,000 fighters.

It's a pledge he can't keep without foreign aid. Washington has given Colombia almost $2 billion in the past two years but has restricted the assistance to antinarcotics work. Now that the U.S. has officially deemed the FARC and AUC to be terrorist groups, the Bush Administration stands a good chance of freeing up direct military funds. But if the aid passes, warns a FARC comandante named Asdrubal, "the violence will get very, very grave. The U.S. will just make the war longer." American politicians also worry about the Colombian military's poor human-rights record.

And given Colombia's epically corrupt and feckless governing class, many in Washington wonder if the U.S. wouldn't be wasting its money on this oligarchy. But the conflict has already begun to destabilize a region of large significance to U.S. trade and oil. "No democratic nation can afford to be careless about Colombia," Uribe says--making it clear that even the U.S. could get a tough earful from the candidate the guerrillas couldn't kill.