Santos Victorious

Colombians elected former defense minister and Uribe ally Juan Manuel Santos to be their next president Sunday. As in round-one, it was not so much Santos’s win which was surprising but rather his margin of victory. With nearly all votes tallied, Santos took 69% of Sunday’s vote, compared to just 28% for his rival, Antanas Mockus. As the AP reports it, those numbers point to “the largest margin of victory in a presidential vote in modern Colombian history.” [Three percent of ballots were nullified, in a show of protest against both candidates].

According to the New York Times, other headlines behind Sunday’s poll were the remarkably high levels of abstention and multiple clashes between security forces and guerrilla groups which took the lives of at least 10 over the weekend [AFP puts the number killed at 17]. On the former, Al-Jazeera’s Lucia Newman, reporting from Bogotá says the heavy rains and the World Cup kept many voters indoors. Others say Colombians believed the results were well-known in advance and thus stayed home Sunday.

On the issue of violence, the Northern province of Norte de Santander, on the Venezuelan border, was the site of Sunday’s most deadly clashes. There six police officers were killed by rebel explosives.

While most credit the security policies of the Uribe government for Santos’s victory, Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue, says “the social and economic agenda has to be a top priority” upon assuming office. “Nearly half the population lives in poverty,” Shifter tells the Times, “and Colombia has the region’s highest unemployment level. His overwhelming support in rural strongholds can be interpreted as a demand for more jobs and better social welfare policies.” Colombian political analyst Jorge Restrepo echoes those sentiments, saying “Santos is seen as someone who can be trusted with the economy.”

But Santos’s early months in office will also surely be marred by the dark side of Uribe’s popular security policies – namely, the murders of innocent Colombians in the country’s “false positives” scandal. According to Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA), “[T]his whole issue is not going to go away.” The Huffington Post, meanwhile, throws doubt on the independence of Sunday’s vote, reporting on what it calls Santos’s “previously undisclosed role as a corporate officer of the company hired to run the nation's elections over the last decade.”

Behind the headline from a busy weekend:

· An important piece in the Sunday New York Times examines the plight of human rights defenders in Mexico. Marc Lacey reports, writing that “With a drug war raging around them and an unreliable judicial system in place, Mexico’s human rights activists have their hands full as they grapple with a growing new class of victims: themselves.” Rights groups are spending ever greater energy defending their fellow activists, the paper says. Meanwhile, as reports from international groups like Amnesty International show, threats and abuses continue to un-investigated by the country’s judicial system. “Although there are no precise tallies, human rights groups say that the number of activists who have been improperly singled out by the police, soldiers and government officials is in the dozens.”

· Besides human rights activists, the report also makes mention of the threats facing Mexican journalists, “silenced by shadowy gunmen.” In a recent NACLA interview, independent journalist Laura Castellanos, author of México Armado, discussed the threats she and others face for exposing drug war security abuses. And last week the issue of violence against journalists in Mexico (as well as in Honduras) made its way to Rep. Elliot Engel’s Western Hemisphere Subcommittee of the House Foreign Relations Committee. Alfredo Corchado at the Dallas Morning News has a good report on the hearing, which apparently moved quickly from issues of violence against Honduran and Mexican reporters to questions of censorship in Cuba, Venezuela, and Ecuador. [In fact, reading José Cárdenas at FP’s Shadow Government blog makes you think that press censorship in Venezuela was the only reason last week’s hearing was called. More on that later].

· Continuing with Mexico news though, the New York Times has another piece in its Sunday edition which says a new FBI report shows border violence on the US side of the US-Mexico border (as well as illegal immigration) actually on the decline. “While thousands have been killed in Mexico’s drug wars … F.B.I. statistics show that Arizona is relatively safe,” the paper writes. That’s unfortunately not the case in much of Mexico, however. Near Cancún, the latest “mass grave” was discovered over the weekend, containing at least 12 bodies. The Zetas are suspected of carrying out those murders. And finally, a new Time report (like an in-depth New Yorker piece from a couple of weeks ago) examines La Familia Michoacana, the messianic drug gang in the Tierra Caliente region of western Michoacan state which dominates the meth trade.

· Back on Colombia, Michael Reed-Hurtado head of the Colombia office at the International Center for Transitional Justice, discusses how the US extradition of Colombian drug lords is actually holding back justice. On the US extradition of Diego Fernando Murillo in 2008, Reed-Hurtado writes the following:

“As the United States poached these top criminals, it deprived Colombia's legal system of the chance to prosecute local crimes, robbed victims of the possibility for any resolution, sacrificed vital evidence that could be used in stopping further offenses, and might have pushed the country further away from building a lasting peace with its violent and virulent armed groups.”

Interestingly, Colombians now make up the second-largest group of non-US nationals in US prisons (at 57,000). [Mexican nationals are number one]. And while extradition was “once widely supported as a means of bypassing Colombia's massive legislative and judicial corruption,” Reed-Hurtado says “today it is so controversial that it has become the subject of a standoff between the [Colombian] presidency (Uribe has continued to support the policy) and the Supreme Court (which has tried to stay various extraditions).”

· US-Cuba migration talks restarted last Friday, reports AQ. The US is likely to use the forum to press the Cubans on the release of US contractor Alan Gross, analysts say. Doubts remain that “significant progress” will be made through the talks, however.

· On the island itself things are slightly more hopeful as Raúl Castro, dressed in a suit rather than his military fatigues, met with the Vatican’s foreign minister Sunday. Cuban state news said the two spoke of “an international agenda” during their meeting, which the Vatican’s foreign minister called “very positive.” Human rights groups are hopeful that a new round of prisoner releases may be forthcoming.

· IPS has a new report on “severe setbacks” in rights abuses cases in Peru, involving that country’s military. IPS: “Since early 2009, the Sala Penal Nacional, the highest-level court dealing with the human rights cases against armed forces and police personnel, has acquitted 65 members of the security forces and convicted only 15, according to human rights organisations that defend victims of the 1980-2000 civil war.” Of those 15 sentenced, 10 belong to the army, four to the police, and one to the navy. And, say many human rights groups in the country, the aim of a concerted military campaign against prosecution is ultimately to get former President Alberto Fujimori out of prison.

· The Financial Times says Brazil is pulling out of its attempt to broker the much discussed nuclear deal with Iran. More criticism of those efforts from the Economist this week as well.

· And finally, opinions. On Cuba, Carlos Saladrigas of the Cuba Study Group writes in the Miami Herald on the letter from 74 Cuban dissidents supporting an end to the US Cuba travel ban – and the reaction of anti-Castro hardliners. Here’s Saladrigas:

“At the core of this letter [from the 74] is the fact that, for the first time, a large number of notable figures ofCuba's internal opposition have come together to express their personal opinions on an important current debate about U.S. policy toward Cuba. They recognize in their letter that while U.S. policy is not their competence, they are clearly disproportionally affected by it. While the exile community has always played a key role in promoting U.S. policy toward Cuba, the signers are reminding us that there is no parity in the consequences and impact of those policies. They bear the brunt of the impact.”

A Scripps News editorial, meanwhile, also calls for the passage of Peterson bill, which would end the travel ban while also “allowing direct transfers between U.S. and Cuban banks. A New York Times editorial says the US and the international community must focus on keeping women and children safe in Haiti while also pushing for election planning. And back to press censorship with Andres Oppenheimer who focuses on the Zuloaga case in Venezuela but expands his argument to include other forms of “indirect censorship” which he believes are popping up around the region. “It's time for the OAS and nongovernment watchdog groups to expand their definition of censorship, going beyond the necessary investigations into the murder or legal actions against critical journalists,” argues Oppenheimer.