The Colombian presidential election of 2014 proved to be a landmark in the country’s recent history: the first major political defeat sustained by uribismo since the beginning of the new century. The hard-right champion Álvaro Uribe Vélez had swept to victory in 2002 and was comfortably re-elected four years later. After Colombia’s constitutional court blocked Uribe’s attempt to stand for a third term in office, his anointed successor Juan Manuel Santos chalked up another triumph for the Uribe camp in 2010. But Santos and Uribe would part ways acrimoniously over the question of peace talks with the farc guerrillas, leading the former president to endorse Óscar Iván Zuluaga in the 2014 poll. Zuluaga emerged victorious in the first round of the presidential elections, but was defeated by Santos in the subsequent run-off with support from a hastily-improvised coalition of forces spanning the political ground from left to centre-right. Uribe’s first electoral setback has ensured that talks between Santos and the farc leadership will continue, keeping alive the possibility of a negotiated settlement to end a conflict that has endured for half a century and claimed over 200,000 lives.

When Uribe first took the reins in 2002, after winning an absolute majority in the first round, he did so in a country with a record of conservative hegemony unparalleled in Latin America: no left-wing, or even populist candidate had ever been elected to the Colombian presidency. This oligarchic stranglehold was both cause and consequence of Colombia’s infamously violent history, ranging from the civil wars of the 19th century, to La Violencia of the 1940s and 50s, to the drug conflicts and paramilitary terror of recent decades.footnote¹ Uribe’s triumph nonetheless constituted a notable shift within this political culture, marking the end of a Conservative–Liberal dyarchy that had lasted for more than a century. Uribe, a renegade Liberal, stood for election as the candidate of his own ‘Colombia First’ alliance. The 1990s had seen an explosion of new political brands as the traditional parties lost popular legitimacy. On taking office, however, Uribe found that the fragmentation which had enabled him to win the presidency was an obstacle to effective governance: he changed the electoral laws to impose stricter party discipline and minimum thresholds for representation, and welded his own congressional supporters into the Social Party of National Unity—better known simply as the ‘Party of the U’. The Liberals and Conservatives also rowed in behind Uribe, as did another right-wing splinter group, Radical Change; parliamentary opposition came from the centrist Greens and the left-wing Alternative Democratic Pole.

The central plank of Uribe’s programme was a new approach to counter-insurgency, breaking decisively with the abortive peace negotiations of his predecessor Andrés Pastrana. Promising to wage total war on the farc and eln guerrillas, Uribe made extensive use of the military aid supplied by Washington under the terms of Plan Colombia. The brainchild of Clinton administration officials—its first draft was in English rather than Spanish—Plan Colombia was ostensibly geared towards the elimination of drug trafficking, but its real target was the guerrilla insurgency which had grown dramatically since the early 90s. Colombia became the largest recipient of us military aid outside the Middle East over the following decade. This deluge of cash, weapons and training from the Pentagon allowed the Colombian army to deploy more soldiers in the field, with a higher ratio of professionals to conscripts, and to improve its weaponry and intelligence-gathering capabilities. Between 1998 and 2002, the size of the armed forces had already grown by 60 per cent, to 132,000, and would reach 283,000 by the end of Uribe’s presidency.footnote² Many of the territorial gains made by the guerrillas over the previous decade were rolled back: the number of municipalities in which they operated shrank from 377 in 2002 to 142 in 2010. Over 12,000 farc members were killed by state forces between 2002 and 2009, with another 12,000-plus captured and more than 17,000 demobilized.footnote³

It had become easier for the Colombian state to strike back against the farc, because of what Forrest Hylton identified in 2003 as ‘the fundamental paradox of an increasing political delegitimation accompanied by startling organizational growth’.footnote⁴ The farc had expanded its military presence from 17 fronts in 1978 to 105 by 1994, making use of the income deriving from a tax on coca production and various forms of extortion: its annual income in the 90s was estimated to be $500m. Much of this territorial expansion, however, was not based on any deep political roots comparable to those put down in traditional guerrilla strongholds where the farc had been the only real authority for decades. The guerrillas were often seen by the local population in these new conflict zones as another armed actor bringing trouble in their wake, and the farc’s claim to be the ‘army of the people’ commanded little popular assent. The very practices that generated most income for the farc and eln war chests were also those most likely to alienate the insurgents from the civilian population.

Uribe’s iron fist for the guerrillas was accompanied by an open hand for the right-wing paramilitaries who had been responsible for the majority of human rights abuses in the 1990s, leaving a bloody trail of massacres and assassinations in their wake. Under the leadership of the Castaño brothers, Carlos and Fidel, regional paramilitary groups had been grouped into a national movement, the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (auc). The auc endorsed Uribe’s candidacy in 2002, with Carlos Castaño describing the new president as ‘the man closest to our philosophy’. Uribe rewarded this strand of his coalition with the Orwellian ‘Justice and Peace Law’, offering amnesty to the paramilitary chiefs in return for light prison sentences and a ‘demobilization’ that was honoured far more in the breach than the observance. Former us ambassador Myles Frechette described it as ‘a law that couldn’t be better designed to give the criminals a way out’.footnote⁵ The auc was stood down, but many far-right death squads reorganized themselves under new labels—‘Black Eagles’, ‘Rastrojos’, etc.—and continued their long-established practices. Amnesty International’s 2010 Colombia report exposed the sham character of Uribe’s deal with the auc leadership:

Paramilitary groups continued to operate in many parts of the country, sometimes in collusion with sectors of the security forces. Their continued activities belied government claims that all paramilitaries had laid down their arms following a government-sponsored demobilization programme that began in 2003 . . . the tactics employed by these groups to terrorize the civilian population, including death threats and massacres, reflected those used by paramilitary groups prior to demobilization.footnote⁶

Uribe and his allies made a habit of branding their domestic opponents as ‘terrorist sympathizers’: the verbal equivalent of pinning a target sign to someone’s back. Colombia remained the most dangerous country in the world for trade union members. The brunt of state and paramilitary violence was borne, as ever, by the marginalized rural population and the urban poor. One of Uribe’s principal achievements was to shift the burden of the conflict away from the urban middle and upper classes, most notably by reducing the number of kidnappings tenfold, from 3,572 in 2000 to 305 in 2011.footnote⁷ Another boost to his popularity came from the economic growth registered by Colombia after it emerged from the deep recession of the late 90s. Annual gdp growth rose from 4.6 per cent in 2003 to 5.7 per cent in 2005 and 8.2 per cent in 2007, while unemployment fell from 14.1 per cent in 2003 to 11.2 per cent in 2007.footnote⁸ Much of this growth was driven by the mining and hydrocarbon sectors, which accounted for almost two-fifths of total exports in 2007; oil was the largest single export earner, followed by coal.footnote⁹ Uribe was re-elected in the first round of the 2006 presidential election, defeating his nearest challenger Carlos Gaviria Díaz of the Alternative Democratic Pole by a wide margin—although 55 per cent of eligible voters stayed at home on polling day: Uribe was supported by just over a quarter of the total electorate.footnote¹⁰ So far as the Anglophone media was concerned, all was for the best in Bogotá: in a 2007 Guardian supplement on Colombia’s ‘changing landscape’, the paper’s Latin America correspondent informed its readers that ‘the president has delivered to the cities what his war-weary people craved—security, and with it the chance of a better life . . . the hope is that Colombia is escaping its blood-soaked history, and it is intoxicating.’footnote¹¹ The Economist hailed ‘that rarest of beasts: a democratic, pro-Western president winning an anti-terrorist war’, and chided the begrudgers who ‘make much of the fact that trade unionists are murdered in Colombia’ for failing to see the bigger picture.footnote¹²