Guerrillas Show Power of Fear in Colombia Vote

With bombings, abductions and the election eve killing of a priest, Colombia’s two main guerrilla groups violently enforced their boycott of local and state elections Sunday.

The government was humiliated as citizens in a large swath of rebel-controlled countryside largely ignored President Ernesto Samper’s televised plea Friday that Colombians vote en masse in a symbolic referendum for peace. While figures were not immediately available, indications were that turnout was well below the usual 40%. Election results are expected today.

In the run-up to the elections, more than 2,000 candidates were bullied into withdrawing through kidnappings and death threats--backed up with the killings of at least 40 candidates who had refused to pull out. Terrified candidates withdrew in about one in four of this country’s 1,072 municipalities.

Analysts said they feared that the elections could leave Colombia’s democratic tradition in its worst shape in years as military officials are appointed temporarily in towns where elections could not take place.

But as the leftist insurgents showed their power by disrupting the elections, they may have undercut international support for their movements, already questioned because of their main sources of financing: kidnapping, extortion and “taxes” on cocaine and heroin production.

International condemnation of the rebels’ election boycott increased after two Organization of American States election observers were kidnapped by guerrillas late last week and a priest was killed Saturday night in a rebel attack.

“Despite what [rebel] representatives have told us about their willingness to respect international norms, so far their words have not become deeds,” Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director of Human Rights Watch/Americas, said in a statement demanding the immediate release of the observers.

And in the most critical report yet on the guerrillas’ human rights abuses, the U.S. think tank Washington Office on Latin America charged Sunday: “Colombia’s two main guerrilla groups--Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN)--are also responsible for a litany of abuses, including the arbitrary or selective killing of civilians.” The report also berated the government and the country’s illegal private armies.

Abuses increased during the four months of terror that began when the FARC announced it would join the ELN in the election boycott; in a two-day period last week, 11 people were killed in a wave of bombings and assassinations.

Although the guerrillas control large regions of the countryside, they are not a serious threat in Colombia’s major cities. Thus, the election boycott was enforced in a broad geographic region--about 40% of the country--but affected a relatively small portion of the population.

Still, affected areas included towns tellingly near Bogota, the capital. Voting was canceled in Nazareth, a hamlet of 100 in the county of Sumapaz, which borders Bogota and has been controlled by the guerrillas for decades.

Nearby Venicia, just 66 miles from the capital, drew only one voter from a population of 5,000. All the candidates had withdrawn. The single vote sat at the bottom of a transparent urn as voting officials played dominoes. None of them planned to vote.

All shops were shut and only soldiers stood in the streets of San Vicente del Caguan--a city of 35,000 in the Amazon state of Caqueta, where the FARC controls nearly every village and town except the state capital.

“You can’t talk of an expression of the popular will here,” said one terrified resident who refused to be identified. “There has been incredible pressure to prevent elections.”

Gunmen firing on potential voters forced five towns to suspend elections in the state of Narino on the Ecuadorean border. In the neighboring state of Putumayo, two youths rode a motorbike through Puerto Caicedo, a town of 2,000, Sunday morning handing out fliers that forbade locals to vote or take their cars out.

“None of the electoral officials turned up,” Bairahelen Cordoba, secretary to the registrar in Puerto Caicedo, said with a nervous giggle. “And nor did any of the voters!”

In many areas of Colombia, brutal violence had already made the elections virtually meaningless. In the northwest, where right-wing private armies control arms and drug smuggling, fierce fighting with the guerrillas has emptied towns of all their inhabitants. The towns, however, are still officially registered as election sites.

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Although the armed forces were on maximum alert across the country--with troop carriers cruising rural roads and machine-gun-toting police and soldiers standing in tense vigilance at polling booths--the government’s lack of authority was painfully obvious in huge areas of the country.

“The democratic system here is very, very weak,” Nabor Alfonso Villa, the mayor of Belmira, north of Medellin, said in a telephone interview. The government has not kept its promise of protecting the electorate, he said, and even where there is protection during elections, reprisals come afterward.

Even among Colombians who voted, cynicism was rampant. “‘The country has never been in such bad shape as now in terms of violence and drug trafficking,” Luis Moreno, the 48-year-old owner of a fleet of commercial vehicles, said as he voted in Bogota’s historic 16th century Plaza Bolivar. “It won’t change until we have a new president and international help.”

Analysts say the growing disintegration of the country is due in part to the tens of millions of dollars the guerrillas and paramilitary groups earn annually from kidnapping and from protecting drug traffickers’ plantations and airstrips.

But they also fault the scandal-plagued government of Samper, whose 1994 election campaign has been the target of persistent accusations that it was financed in part by drug money.

“Colombia’s traditional parties are completely collapsing under the weight of their ill repute,” said Eduardo Pizarro, a political analyst at the National University.

Special correspondent Ambrus reported from Bogota and Times staff writer Darling from San Salvador. Special correspondents David Aquila Lawrence in Venicia, Karl Penhaul in Bogota and Victoria Burnett in Nazareth contributed to this report.