A Bullet-Riddled Candidate Defies Fears, Seeks Colombia Presidency

With three bullets still embedded in his body, Sen. Ernesto Samper is back on the campaign trail, seeking the presidency of Colombia and mentally prepared to die.

Samper was struck by 11 shots in March when assassins killed another politician from a rival party while they were chatting at the Bogota airport. Samper had 22 minutes to live, the paramedics calculated. He was brought to the hospital with only six minutes to spare.

During his long recuperation, he read messages of support scrawled in the guest book in the hospital lobby. It was then that he decided to rejoin the campaign for the ruling Liberal Party’s nomination.

Not long afterward, his friend and party rival, Luis Carlos Galan, was assassinated at a political rally Aug. 18.

That killing prompted Colombia to launch an all-out war against the cocaine cartels, which in turn vowed to retaliate. A nation accustomed to political violence, which claimed an estimated 4,000 lives in 1988, has been shaken in the past month by a barrage of bombings, arson attacks and still more bloodshed.

In this climate of fear, Colombians like Ernesto Samper--police officers, judges, journalists and politicians--have found reserves of courage and patriotism to carry on.

It is not a matter of whether one is afraid, Samper said, because “everyone in Colombia is afraid, and has reason to be. It is rather a matter of how you deal with your fear.”

Helped by his physician, who is also a psychiatrist, Samper said he taught himself to be ready for death. He also took the security measures that are a way of life for public figures in Colombia: bodyguards armed with machine pistols, an armored Renault car, traveling different routes at varied times.

In an interview in the car during a trip from a Bogota suburb to the Senate downtown, Samper recalled the shock of his three children when he was shot, and their feelings as he presses forward with the campaign.

“My son said the other day, ‘Daddy, you only go to funerals. You don’t have enough time for us.’ That is a very good expression of what is happening here,” he said.

His black hair graying at the age of 39, Samper is tall but unimposing, with soft features and a flat, understated voice. When he speaks of his decision to wage the campaign, it is almost with embarrassment that he says: “I realized I could not leave my political career, because many people put their hopes in me and wanted me to go forward. My responsibility at this moment is to my country and its people.”

He still has “a bit of pain,” and, of course, the fear.

“It is a matter of becoming accustomed to the idea that it can happen,” he said. “Sometimes I think that what is happening to me is like a nightmare, like a Greek tragedy. You know perfectly well what is happening, and what could happen, but you can’t stop it. You can’t pretend otherwise.”

Both politically and personally, Samper would seem an unlikely target for the assortment of killers at work in Colombia today. An economist and lawyer and an uninspiring speaker, he looks very much the economics professor that he has been since 1970 at Colombia Central University. He has not been an outspoken crusader against the cocaine lords. Nor is he from one of the left-wing parties, whose leaders are frequent targets of death squads.

Yet he supports President Virgilio Barco Vargas’ assault against the traffickers and is an important symbol of the ruling Liberals. In Colombia, that is enough to make anybody a potential target. The easy-going former mayor of Medellin, the traffickers’ main outpost, was shot to death while riding in his car Tuesday.

Samper, from a respected middle-class family, is one of three major candidates seeking the party nomination. From his base in the reformist wing, he had joined Galan in challenging the party hierarchy to become more democratic, in part by holding a party primary rather than choosing candidates in the back room. The charismatic Galan had been the front-runner, with Samper running second in opinion polls.

On March 3, Samper was at the airport speaking with Jose Antequera, a former Communist youth leader and senior official of the left-wing Patriotic Union Party, when gunmen opened fire on Antequera, killing him instantly. Many of the bullets that struck Samper apparently passed through Antequera first, and Samper remains convinced that he was not a target that day.

Samper said he owes his life to his wife, Jaquin. “When she heard some of the sicarios (hired killers) cry, ‘Kill him, kill him,’ she thought the cry was meant for me. She covered me with her body and pushed me back, while the shooting was still going on.”

Then his wife rushed to get him into a car and to the hospital. He spent some time in a hospital in Colombia--his older son was the first person he recognized--and then was flown to Miami for further treatment. The doctors decided that it would be too dangerous to remove the three remaining bullets, one of them lodged near his spine.

Antequera was assumed to have been killed by one of the country’s right-wing death squads, which are often said to work in alliance with the drug traffickers. Victims have included both leftists and those who oppose the cocaine lords. Samper said he had no doubt that “I was shot by the same people who killed Galan.”

Public political campaign rallies are out in Colombia these days, and Samper meets instead with small groups of invited guests to discuss his policy platform and to ask nonpolitical experts in different fields to help him draft programs in his race for the March 11 primary and May general election.

Samper has not made the struggle against drug-trafficking a central campaign theme, as had Galan.

A decade ago, when marijuana was the major drug problem, Samper suggested legalizing cultivation and having the government buy up the crop. He now opposes legalization.

He also was among those who attacked the government’s treaty with the United States permitting extradition of Colombian drug traffickers to face trial in the United States. He considered it an abdication of national sovereignty. Barco reinstated the treaty, which was overturned on a technicality by the Supreme Court in 1987, as an immediate reaction to Galan’s assassination.

Samper remains equivocal about extradition, saying, “I understand that the political circumstances have made necessary the application of extradition, but that doesn’t mean that the problems of extradition have disappeared. I continue to believe that it is not the ideal solution.”

He said, however, that Galan’s death marked a turning point in Colombian attitudes toward drug trafficking.

“The people became much more radical. . . . Before, there was more tolerance--not that we accepted it, because 90% of the people were against the traffickers, but they are also against extradition. Now, the public will is very explicitly in support of the president.”

Yet Samper also stresses what he sees as imbalances and shortcomings in President Bush’s anti-narcotics program announced Sept. 5. In addition to $65 million in emergency military aid to Colombia, the plan calls for spending $261 million for the Andean nations in the coming year.

That amount, Samper said, does not amount to 5% of the total program and is just one-fourth of what Colombia will lose because the U.S. government helped end a world coffee agreement, punishing Colombian exports.

“We don’t only need help for the war. We also need funds for peace,” he told reporters at a breakfast.

Samper also objected to the kind of aid that the United States is sending Colombia, including slow-flying jet fighter-bombers.

He complained that while Colombia was receiving bombers, at least 14 states in America have decriminalized marijuana use, and he scoffed that the U.S. plan includes showing educational videos to discourage cocaine consumption.

“The fight against drug trafficking must be extended to the streets and parks of the consuming countries,” he said. “We do not accept that drug trafficking be considered a sickness in the consuming countries and a crime in the producing countries.

“Let’s not let Colombia be converted into the Vietnam of the war against drugs,” he added.

For now, Samper sees no room for negotiations with the traffickers.

“We must win this war,” he said. “What is at stake is the survival itself of the Colombian institutional system.”