Profile : Colombian Leftists Pin Hopes on Ex-Guerrilla : Few expect Navarro to be voted president. But if he makes a good showing, he could be pivotal in politics.

Eight years after M-19 guerrillas seized Colombia’s Palace of Justice, triggering a debacle that left 11 Supreme Court judges and 94 others dead, former rebel leader Jose Antonio Navarro Wolff wants to be president.

The onetime revolutionary, who more than any other figure came to symbolize one of Latin America’s best-known guerrilla movements, has his work cut out for him. First he must explain his relevance to a nation that long ago tired of leftists and guerrillas.

Eyes intent behind wire-rim glasses, Navarro says his long-shot candidacy for the presidency of Colombia will embrace a wide spectrum of people fed up with a narrow political system of “last names, lineages and pressure groups.” The goals of social justice, peace and democracy that M-19 guerrillas said they were fighting for have yet to be achieved, he says.

M-19, formally known as the April 19 Movement, surrendered its weapons in 1990 and, thanks to a resounding victory in Constitutional Assembly elections, joined in the writing of a new constitution. But last year, M-19 suffered a humiliating defeat in parliamentary elections.

In many ways, the future of Colombia’s left now rides on the 45-year-old Navarro, and the difficulties he faces offer a warning to leftist politicians throughout Latin America. As Navarro sought to broaden his party’s appeal, he diluted its message and alienated many longtime followers in the process. Some of the harshest critics said he had sold out.

Political observers give Navarro little chance of winning but say he could play an important role in an alliance if the other two likely candidates--Andres Pastrana and Ernesto Samper, of the Conservative and Liberal parties respectively--split the vote. The elections are scheduled for May.

“There are people who see Navarro as the only alternative,” said Salomon Kalmonovitz, the dean of economic sciences at the National University. Navarro, he says, is the only one of the three candidates who has criticized the government’s economic liberalization program and is seen by some as having credibility on the peace issue.

Navarro, an intelligent and charismatic British-trained engineer, virtually incarnates M-19, which he helped found in 1973 as a nationalist movement committed to opening Colombia’s closed democracy to greater participation and social justice.

As a guerrilla, he reached the upper echelons of power in the M-19 military structure, served time in jail and nearly died from a grenade attack in 1985, which left him with garbled speech and a false leg. (He was not present at the Justice Palace tragedy.)

As a man of peace, he helped coax three other guerrilla movements into 1990 negotiations with the government and led M-19 to a spectacular victory later that year in elections for a constitutional assembly.

He recalls the signing of Colombia’s 1991 constitution, with mechanisms for greater participation and individual freedoms, as M-19’s “most honorable moment.”

“In a little more than three years, M-19 has gone from an (armed) force recently come down from the mountains to an alternative force of power in this country,” he said. “For the first time since 1850, the nation has had (an M-19) minister who was from neither the Conservative nor the Liberal parties, and for the second time an alternative movement has managed to get more than 20% of the vote.”

But M-19 has also lost much popularity since the constitutional assembly, and critics say Navarro is partly to blame.

As a guerrilla movement, M-19 attracted many people from the urban middle class and the slums with theatrical operations such as the theft of revolutionary leader Simon Bolivar’s sword or the hijacking of trucks for distribution of milk to the poor. But its populism, both then and now, never included concrete proposals for change.

“M-19 has never distinguished itself for a clear concept of how a state, government or economy should be organized,” said Rodrigo Losado, a professor of political science at Javeriana University in Bogota.

That fuzziness turned the movement into an enormous circus tent for everyone from former Marxists to an adviser to the nation’s largest economic group. It also rendered it ineffective in changing the system it had fought for nearly a decade.

Disillusionment with the former revolutionaries left them with just 7% of the vote in parliamentary elections last year.

Further, M-19 became involved in scandal after scandal. An M-19 senator and former ambassador to Austria is being investigated for meeting with a man accused of embezzling millions of dollars from the government; a mayor with connections to the movement has been accused of inciting the murder of a journalist, and an M-19 co-director of Colombia’s national bank has been removed from his post for possession of marijuana.

Critics claim that the once-idealistic and revolutionary movement has sullied itself.

“M-19 has to demonstrate that it is not simply taking advantage of power, because there are sectors of the movement which have committed that mistake and handed out favors to friends,” said Bernardo Gutierrez, an M-19 senator and former commander of the Maoist National Liberation Army who recently broke with the movement.

Navarro admits problems in leadership but adds: “We have expanded to the left and the right, but by and large M-19 is social democratic, as it has always been, representing democracy, social justice and national independence--the ideals of Bolivar.”

To attract a wider following, Navarro recently resigned from the presidency of M-19 and launched a broad-based, grass-roots campaign based on a four-point platform of greater democracy, social justice, peace and environmental protection.

His plans include increasing the education budget, universalizing basic health care, with special emphasis on the poor, and reversing many of the policies of President Cesar Gaviria’s economic liberalization program by renewing subsidies and raising tariffs.

And many intellectuals consider Navarro the only one of the three candidates who can make peace with 6,000 still-active guerrillas from the National Revolutionary Army and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

Navarro is the person most likely to choose M-19 candidates for congressional elections, and any Navarro government would certainly include ministers from M-19. A strong electoral performance could include spoils for its members.

But a bad Navarro loss would be disastrous. Many people are already disillusioned with the movement’s lack of coherent message, and more could desert.

“M-19 is a movement that revolves around Navarro,” said one observer.

That means, he said, that if the standard-bearer goes down next year, supporters of the former guerrilla movement may begin to jump ship for alliances within the Liberal and Conservative parties.

Biography

Name: Jose Antonio Navarro Wolff

Title: Presidential candidate.

Age: 45

Personal: Born in Colombia to provincial middle-class parents. Helped form M-19 guerrilla group.. Received engineering degree at Valle University in Cali, Colombia. Did post-graduate work at London School of Economics and Loughboro University in England. Separated from wife, who lives with their son, 14.

Quote: Quote: “We have expanded to the left and the right, but by and large M-19 is social democratic, as it has always been, representing . . . the ideals of Bolivar.”