Campaigning ahead of next weekend’s first round of presidential voting has wrapped up in Colombia. Two recent polls (here and here) show uribista Juan Manuel Santos still running neck-and-neck with the Green Party’s Antanas Mockus, with neither candidate likely winning the 50% necessary to avoid a second-round. As Infolatam reports, that fact has led to a new series of discussions between Mockus and the left-leaning Polo Democrático Alternativo about a possible second-round alliance (the Polo Democrático’s candidate, Gustavo Petro, will likely finish in a distant third next Sunday) while Santos will no doubt be courting first-round voters of Conservative Noemí Sanin in round two.
An interesting report from AFP looks at the different demographics backing both Mockus and Santos – and the “two Colombias” they represent. Age seems to be one of the most significant points of political division. Mockus has 42% of youth support (ages 18 to 24) compared to Santos’s 30% with the same age group. However, among older voters (54 and older), the numbers are flipped. Forty-three percent support Santos and just 24% back the former Bogotá mayor, Mockus. The report also says an important rural-urban divide splits Santos-Mockus voters (the former largely supporting Santos and the latter Mockus).
And the Washington Post’s Juan Forero has a new piece out this morning which reignites an old issue ahead of Sunday’s vote. The Forero report says new information suggests that the younger brother of outgoing president Alvaro Uribe led a “fearsome paramilitary group in the 1990s … that killed petty thieves, guerrilla sympathizers and suspected subversives.” Juan Carlos Meneses, a former police major in the northern Colombia town of La Carolina, tells the paper that Santiago Uribe trained paramilitary fighters at the family’s Antioquia ranch in the early 1990s [Uribe was formerly a senator and governor of the state before assuming the presidency]. The revelations, the Post writes, “threaten to renew a criminal investigation against Santiago Uribe and raise new questions about the president's past.” Forero was able to speak with the younger Uribe who denies the latest charges, but, the Post writes, “human rights advocates who have first-hand knowledge of Meneses's allegations said his declaration amounts to powerful evidence that should trigger an investigation.” According to Argentine human rights activist, Adolfo Perez Esquivel, who has heard Meneses’s full account, the police chief’s claims incriminate not only himself and the brother of the president “but also President Uribe” himself.
To other stories from the weekend:
· The Jamaican government has declared a state of emergency in parts of the capital of Kingston as supporters of a notorious drug trafficker fight the possible extradition of their leader to the United States. Christopher “Dudus” Coke is holed up in a West Kingston neighborhood, and his supporters have already torched a police station and traded gunfire with security forces in the area, says the AP. The New York Times says the showdown comes after PM Bruce Golding approved the extradition of Coke to the US last week.
· An in-depth New York Times investigative report published in the paper Sunday reveals human rights atrocities committed at a prison in Les Cayes, Haiti, following the January earthquake. According to the Times, Haitian authorities shot and killed somewhere between 12 and 19 unarmed prisoners (with up to 40 others wounded) in the days following the quake – and then sought to cover the executions up. Haitian human rights leader, Myrtil Yonel, calls the event “a massacre.” The full 7-page story can be read in-full here. Also on Haiti, facing intense opposition, President René Preval may be reconsidering the idea of extending his mandate if elections are not held as scheduled. And an NPR report looks at the reopening of schools in Port-au-Prince. “One of the strongest signs of life returning to normal four months after the earthquake is that each morning, the streets are once again filled with children in school uniforms,” the report begins.
· In Cuba, there is much talk this weekend about discussions between the Cuban government and the Catholic Church over the release of several political prisoners. IPS reports that Raúl Castro met last Wednesday with the archbishop of Havana, Cardinal Jaime Ortega, and with the head of the Cuban bishop's conference, archbishop Dionisio García. The discussions focused on “matters of common interest” and the “favorable development of relations between the Catholic Church and the Cuban state,” sources indicate. The meetings, which OAS Sec. General José Miguel Insulza praised a “positive sign” over the weekend, are said to have lasted some four hours, and Cardinal Ortega indicated afterwards that talks “got off to a magnificent start” and “must continue soon.” This morning the Miami Herald adds to the story, reporting that talks may have led to a deal in which Cuban authorities agree to “move sick political prisoners to hospitals and other jailed dissidents closer to home.” The paper, quoting an independent journalist on the island, calls the announcement a “stunning concession to the recent avalanche of criticisms of [the government’s] human rights record.” More talks between Cardinal Ortega and Raúl Castro are expected to occur later in the week.
· A report from the Washington Post over the weekend says US authorities are very satisfied with a recent rise in drug war-related extraditions from Mexico to the United States. However, other shortcomings obscure this particular success. “In fact,” the paper posits, “the extraditions might be responsible for a surge in brutality.” “Mexico extradited 107 alleged criminal offenders last year, far more than in any previous year, and is on pace to top that number in 2010, according to Justice Department statistics.” But, the piece continues, “extraditing high-ranking mobsters has sparked more ferocious turf battles both within the cartels and between rival organizations.” In the words of Sen. Richard Durbin, chairman of the Senate subcommittee on human rights and the law, “While extradition can be effective in the short term, it is not the long-term solution to illegal drug trafficking.”
· The Wall Street Journal also suggests that attempts to thwart the flow of drugs into the US is fueling new turf wars and rising drug violence along the border. From Ciudad Juarez, the paper has the following analysis of the emergent drug retail market in the border city:
"Traffickers, unable to get some drugs to Americans, began to sell them in Ciudad Juárez. That has left the city of 1.3 million people—once mainly a transit center for drugs—with a pattern of mounting crime similar to that of the U.S. cities where drugs are headed, namely killings at street corners between gangs vying to be the town's principal drug dealers. Even in cases when drugs begin flowing back across the border into the U.S. again, some amount remains destined for local consumers.”
· And the family of Diego Fernandez de Cevallos has asked Mexican authorities to end their investigation into the disappearance of the former PAN leader. “A photo of a shirtless, blindfolded man resembling the gray-bearded politician appeared on social networking sites late Thursday,” the AP reports. And the family now apparently prefers to negotiate the release of Fernandez de Cevallos from alleged kidnappers on its own.
· The LA Times says behind Brazil’s attempt to broker a deal in Iran last week are the ambitions of an emergent world power. “I think the basic reason for this is that Brazil wants to be recognized,” says Rubens Ricupero, a former diplomat and one-time secretary general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. “In the case of Iran, I think it is the first concrete example in which that same desire to be a global player has manifested itself politically.” Oliver Stuenkel, a visiting professor of international affairs at the University of Sao Paulo expresses a similar sentiment. “For Lula, the Iran thing isn't important as such. He's making a broader argument that current structures of global governance are unjust, and that emerging powers should have a greater say.” In the words of former Brazilian ambassador to the US, Rubens Barbosa: ‘Lula is not ideological, he is pragmatic. He was a unionist and what he did more than anything in life was negotiate, with heads of businesses, between rich and poor, between developed nations and underdeveloped nations. He has that vision.” [More on the matter in a couple of good opinions at Real Clear World, here and here].
· Also in a show of the changing terms of Latin America’s engagement with the world, Bolivia’s Evo Morales finished up a European trip over the weekend. In Norway, he received pledges of Norwegian assistance with “environmentally-friendly” development of the Bolivian oil and gas industry. And in Finland, a deal that would send clean energy technology to Bolivia in exchange for organic agricultural goods topped the president’s agenda.
· Finally, a handful of opinions. Mary Anastasia O’Grady on the “too-close-to call” Colombian elections. Andres Oppenheimer on Mexico’s own immigration problems – namely its poor treatment of migrants from Central America. “Arizona has just passed a bad law that opens the doors to racial discrimination, whereas Mexico has passed a good law that fights racial discrimination, but the country doesn't do much to stop police abuses against undocumented immigrants,” he argues. An editorial in the Miami Herald salutes the leadership of the Church in Cuba for beginning human rights talks with the Cuban government. Independent Cuban journalist Oscar Espinosa Chepe, also in the Herald, calls for more US-Cuba cultural exchanges of artists and musicians. And Sarah Stephens, director of the Center for Democracy in the Americas, calls for close collaboration between the US and Cuba over the BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.
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