Colombia Congress Halts Impeachment

Ignoring cries of whitewash and growing civic protest, Colombia’s Congress voted by nearly a 3-1 margin late Wednesday to halt impeachment proceedings against President Ernesto Samper.

Samper was accused of having accepted millions of dollars in drug money to finance his 1994 electoral campaign. For the second time in less than a year, the Congress, dominated by Samper’s Liberal Party, cleared him of those charges by a vote of 111 to 40.

But the fight does not appear to have ended. A coalition of business associations, retired military officers, civic groups and organized labor insisted that it will take any nonviolent actions needed to bring the president down.

“This is a very sad day for Colombia, a demonstration that the drug mafia has penetrated not only the presidency but also Congress,” said Hernan Echavarria, a former Cabinet minister and ambassador, who is leading thousands of business executives in a movement against Samper.

Ever since the president’s campaign treasurer, Santiago Medina, testified in July that Samper solicited more than $6 million from the Cali drug cartel, Colombians have watched with outrage as evidence accumulated that some of the nation’s top politicians are tied to drug trafficking.

Seven members of Congress and the attorney general have been jailed on drug-related charges. The most recent polls show that the majority of Colombians believe their president also is guilty, although he insists that narcotics funds flowed into the campaign “behind my back.”

Now, with the economy slumping and violence rising, citizens are publicly debating measures that range from withholding their taxes to organizing business shutdowns in an effort to force Samper to step down and end the system of corrupt politics that they say he represents.

Protest groups unite tens of thousands of Colombians, including former Marxist guerrillas and conservative business leaders. They are calling not only for the president’s resignation but also for legal and electoral reforms to keep drug money out of campaigns. One group parades around with a huge foam elephant, a symbol of the elephantine quantity of drug money that entered the president’s campaign.

Analysts say that if Samper remains in power, the government is likely to become increasingly paralyzed, unable to deal with the looming challenges of poverty and making peace with Marxist guerrillas.

Meanwhile, the younger brother of former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria was freed by a shadowy leftist group in return for safe passage to Cuba for eight of his captors, officials said.

Juan Carlos Gaviria, 37, had been held for 71 days, most of them in a tiny underground cell that received no natural light, police said. Television images showed a debilitated Gaviria being carried by police after his release near the western city of Pereira.

Gaviria’s captors had made various demands of the government, including that Samper step down and turn over his office to the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez.