Testimony: how group on US terror list helped Uribe win Colombia's 2002 elections

[Judi Lynn]

by Adriaan Alsema March 5, 2021

Colombia’s former President Alvaro Uribe became president in 2002 with the help of a paramilitary group the US government had designated a foreign terrorist organization, according to a former member.

A Medellin Court ordered to investigate the Bloque Metro’s use of terrorism to help Uribe become president in 2011 already, but has been stonewalled by the prosecution for a decade.

In fact, the prosecution denied the group allegedly founded by Uribe in 1996 even existed for years, according to the court.

In a testimony that came to light last year, a former member of Bloque Metro told a prosecutor in detail how the paramilitary group terrorized people into voting for Uribe in the presidential election organized and monitored by the father of President Ivan Duque.

More:
https://colombiareports.com/testimony-how-group-on-us-terror-list-helped-uribe-win-colombias-2002-elections/

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Related article posted at DU years ago:


COLOMBIA: "Mark Him on the Ballot – The One Wearing Glasses"
By Constanza Vieira

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, May 8 2008 (IPS) - "With Uribe, we thought: this is the guy who is going to change the country," the 41-year-old fisherwoman told IPS.

That is why her fishing and farming village of 800 people in the central Colombian region of Magdalena Medio decided overwhelmingly to vote for current President Álvaro Uribe in the 2002 presidential elections, when he first ran.
The woman agreed to talk to IPS on the condition that she be asked neither her name (we will call her "L.&quot nor the name of her village.

. . .

When the rightwing president’s first four-year term came to an end in 2006, most of the villagers decided again to vote for him, reasoning that he just needed more time to reduce poverty.

The odd thing was that in both the 2002 and 2006 elections, despite the fact that the villagers had already decided to vote for Uribe, the far-right paramilitaries, who had committed a number of murders since 1998, when they appeared in the region that was previously dominated by the leftwing guerrillas, pressured the local residents to vote for Uribe anyway.
The paramilitaries did not kill people to pressure the rest to vote for Uribe, as they did in other communities, but merely used "threats," said L.

"If you don't vote for Uribe, you know what the consequences will be," the villagers were told ominously.

And on election day, they breathed down voters’ necks: "This is the candidate you’re going to vote for. You’re going to put your mark by this one. The one wearing glasses," they would say, pointing to Uribe’s photo on the ballot, L. recalled.

"One (of the paramilitaries) was on the precinct board, another one was standing next to the table, and another was a little way off, all of them watching to see if you voted for Uribe," she added, referring to the less than subtle way that the death squads commanded by drug traffickers and allies of the army ensured that L.’s village voted en masse for the current president in both elections.

. . .

"‘Parapolitics’ is the seizure of power in Colombia by a convergence of alliances and interests of the regional and national political elites, drug traffickers, and armed force," Claudia López, one of the authors of a report titled "Parapolitics: The Route of Paramilitary Expansion and Political Accords", told a packed auditorium at the Bogotá International Book Fair.

She was announcing the release of the third edition of the report, produced by the Bogotá think tank Corporación Nuevo Arco Iris.

The death squads have warned that orders have been issued to kill several of the report’s authors.

López’s monitoring of local and regional election outcomes in Colombia from 1994 to the present points to suspiciously abrupt shifts in voting patterns in entire regions after the paramilitaries gained control in those areas.

More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/2008/05/colombia-quotmark-him-on-the-ballot-the-one-wearing-glassesquot/