Colombia’s New Leader Holds Cards for Change

Facing a national crisis of violence, Colombia’s Liberal Party is adopting revolutionary changes in political management.

The compromise-and-consensus politics under which Colombia has been governed for 30 years, with the Liberal and Conservative parties sharing responsibility, is coming to an end. One party, the center-left Liberal Party, will be in full control beginning today.

President-elect Virgilio Barco Vargas takes office with a Cabinet made up entirely of Liberals and independents. The Conservatives refused to accept any Cabinet post after Barco declined to negotiate changes in the platform on which he was elected in May.

Barco, 65, won the election in a landslide. He received over 4 million votes, 1.6 million votes more than the Conservative candidate. A Communist candidate received 3.5% of the vote.

On the eve of the inauguration, the weekly La Semana observed: “Barco is the first president in many years who is holding all the cards in his hand: public opinion, his party and the Congress. That’s an enormous amount of power.”

The change of leadership sets the stage for major social, political and administrative reforms that form part of Barco’s prescription for the economic crisis. And Barco’s ways of dealing with Colombia’s critical problems promise to be very different from those of his Conservative predecessor, Belisario Betancur.

On the issue of law and order, involving left-wing guerrillas who have been in frequent clashes with the army recently, Barco has said that he will continue Betancur’s policy of pacification--on the condition that the guerrillas give up their arms.

Betancur allowed the guerrillas to keep their weapons even after they accepted a supervised truce. The Communist Party’s Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, the largest guerrilla force, agreed to the truce and ran candidates in the March congressional elections.

Recently, however, several of the group’s municipal officials were assassinated, and there have been clashes with the military in so-called pacified areas.

Barco has emphasized the need for agrarian reform--giving land to peasants--and rural and urban slum programs for improving sanitation, literacy and housing that he regards as indispensable to pacification.

Betancur said the same things, but Barco brings modern management skills to these problems. In dealing with economic problems, Betancur made speeches containing folksy stories and quoted Spanish poets. His administration lacked follow-through.

Barco is expected to follow a more dynamic economic policy, with a heavy emphasis on exports and a goal of a 6% annual growth rate. This may lead Colombia to abandon the commitment to austerity that Betancur made to the International Monetary Fund.

Barco has formed a government team of young executives and professionals who were chosen on the basis of their skills, not on political recommendations.

“There are going to be a lot of new faces in this government--young blood,” said a Barco personnel aide who manages a computerized talent bank with 600 names.

The change from Betancur to Barco will come none too soon for Efrain Giraldo, a 20-year-old vocational school graduate who is out of work. He was standing in line with a dozen other job applicants outside a savings and loan association that had advertised for an office machine clerk.

“I have been out of work since before the elections in May, and I voted for the Liberals because Barco promised jobs,” Giraldo told a reporter. “Now I want to see if I wasted my vote.”

Millions Seeking Work

Millions of other Colombians are also looking for work, and most of them are young men and women. Official statistics show that 15.2% of the country’s labor force was unemployed in July. This is the highest level since Colombia started keeping labor records and reflects serious financial problems in the industrial and banking sectors, which are crippled by $1 billion in bad loans.

Unemployment is concentrated in the larger cities, where 70% of Colombians now live. This shows that urban migration has aggravated the employment problem and may be the cause of much of the violence.

New slums in industrial cities like Medellin and Cali, both of which now have more than a million people, are centers of political violence, crime and drug abuse. The Aguas Blancas slum, outside Cali, became the underground headquarters of the leftist M-l9 guerrilla movement. Shantytown dwellers are frequently caught in crossfire between soldiers and guerrilla forces.

Hundreds Kidnaped, Killed

Amnesty International, the London-based human rights organization, said in a report last month that 600 people were kidnaped or killed by military or “paramilitary” gunmen in Colombia in the first half of this year.

The report did not cover the deaths of hundreds of soldiers, policemen and municipal officials who were killed by guerrillas flouting an amnesty and truce offered by Betancur. It also left out hundreds of kidnapings for ransom and incidents of extortion against rural landowners and industrialists committed by groups that could have been guerrillas or just common criminals.

In Colombia’s pervasive violence, it is no longer easy to identify the assailants or their motives. In some instances, political guerrillas and drug traffickers seem to have linked up for mutual gain.

As the world’s major source of cocaine, Colombia is a hotbed of drug-running organizations that are directed from Medellin or Cali or Bogota.

After the gangland-style assassination of Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla in April, 1984, Betancur promised a “war to the finish” against drug traffickers, and they promptly went underground. Two years later, some big processing laboratories have been destroyed but not one major trafficker has been convicted.

Justice Assassinated

Not long ago there was another assassination. Hernando Botero Borda, a justice of the Supreme Court, was shot to death. He had received numerous telephoned threats because he was considering U.S. petitions for the extradition of drug smugglers being held here.

U.S. drug enforcement officials say that action in Colombia’s anti-narcotics program, in which $60 million has been invested, has slowed noticeably in the last six months.

If Barco is to take a stronger stand against the drug underworld, Colombia’s laws will have to be changed to allow prosecution for smuggling conspiracy as well as for drug possession and trafficking.

And the judges will have to be protected: 27 of them have been killed in the last two years.