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Assassination fears don't slow down candidate Garzon's campaign seen unifying Colombian left Karl Penhaul, Chronicle Foreign Service Wednesday, May 22, 2002 ©2002 San Francisco Chronicle
URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi? file=/chronicle/archive/2002/05/22/ MN171425.DTL
Bogota, Colombia -- Every Monday, Eloisa Garzon travels to a city cemetery to place white roses on two tombs, run her gnarled fingers over rosary beads and kneel to mutter a quiet prayer. The graves are the final resting places of two assassinated leftist presidential candidates.
Garzon is the mother of Luis Eduardo "Lucho" Garzon, the only leftist candidate in this Sunday's presidential elections. He and his running mate -- Vera Grabe, a former guerrilla for the now-defunct M-19 movement -- represent the recently formed Democratic Pole, a broad-based movement of leftist and grassroots groups that has become the nation's third-largest political force, according to one recent poll.
Garzon, the 51-year-old former president of Colombia's largest union confederation, is running a distant third in the presidential race, with around 8 percent of the vote. Ultraconservative Alvaro Uribe, an independent, holds a commanding lead with about 49 percent.
But Garzon's candidacy is seen as a major step to rebuilding Colombia's democratic left as a counterweight to the 150-year rule by the traditional Liberal and Conservative parties.
"This is much more important than it seems at first sight," said Vicente Torrijos, a prominent Bogota political analyst. "Uribe represents the traditional, bourgeois faction. Lucho Garzon represents the other great emerging (political) bloc."
In the past 20 years, more than 3,500 leftist politicians have been slain by outlaw right-wing paramilitary forces and rogue members of the military who perceive all leftists as natural allies of Colombia's powerful guerrilla forces. Analysts say those killings have provided steady fuel for the armed revolution, which is now in its 38th year.
Eloisa Garzon is well aware of the dangers facing her son and is a firm believer in the protective powers of "the holy spirits of purgatory." As a result, she asks the "souls" of slain candidates Carlos Pizarro and Jaime Pardo Leal to protect her only child.
"I put flowers on Carlos Pizarro's tomb and tell him he was such a good man who died such a bad death," she said. "I ask him to protect my Luis Eduardo."
Pizarro, the charismatic leader of M-19, was machine-gunned on a crowded jetliner in 1990 shortly after he and his comrades laid down their arms and he ran for president. Jaime Pardo Leal, a founder of the Communist Party, was ambushed on a road 50 miles west of Bogota in 1987.
Most of the assassinated leftist politicians were members of the Patriotic Union (UP), a nearly defunct party that formed the political arm of the nation's largest rebel army, the Marxist-inspired Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
Garzon, who has worked as a caddie at a posh country club and as a baggage handler, is well aware of the danger he faces. But he has been receiving death threats ever since his days as union boss.
"I've got formaldehyde in my veins," he said, declining to speculate about the most recent threats. "It's the best perfume in Colombia."
Garzon hardly leaves his security to his mother's prayers.
The 11th-floor Bogota apartment that he shares with his mother is equipped with a steel door and closed-circuit TV cameras. The windows are built to withstand a blast from a rocket-propelled grenade. Garzon travels in an armor- plated truck followed by heavily armed bodyguards.
Outgoing President Andres Pastrana held stop-start negotiations with rebel warlords for three years before the peace process collapsed in February. Uribe's popularity has skyrocketed since then because of his promise to boost military spending to crush the FARC.
Garzon, who has frequently spoken out against FARC war atrocities, favors restarting the peace talks. His campaign slogan is "Let's Reconcile."
He places the blame for the civil war on the state for annihilating the UP and killing leftist leaders. FARC commanders frequently point to the UP experience as proof that armed struggle is the only option left to the poor.
"The state's extermination of the democratic left has fueled the rise of the guerrillas," said Garzon after a recent rally.
Garzon must also struggle with in-fighting among the democratic left. Its fragmented parties have squabbled incessantly over everything from ideology and tactics to implications of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
"The left here has been like a broken mirror; everybody distrusts everybody else," said Garzon. "But fortunately we have been able to build confidence."
Among those throwing their weight behind his campaign are the small but vociferous Communist Party, once close political allies of the FARC, indigenous senators, a former constitutional court judge and a group of independent lawmakers.
The legislators include Antonio Navarro, a former ideologue of the M-19 and the man who became a presidential candidate in 1990 after Pizarro's murder, drawing 13 percent of the vote.
Some analysts, however, suggest that any reunification of the left will fade after May 26. The biggest hurdle to a lasting alliance, some analysts say,
is Navarro, who notched up one of the highest vote tallies in the March ballot for the Senate.
"Navarro is a political animal," said a leftist critic, who asked not to be named. "He only thinks about himself and how he can advance his own career."
But others disagree, arguing that the Democratic Pole will go on to become a political force and the champion of the poor.
"This marks the emergence of an active social democratic force in Colombia, " said Steven Dudley, the author of an upcoming book on the Colombian left. "This force is not going to wait for FARC to finish (the war) before acting."
Indeed, Garzon's campaign started out with less than 1 percent support but has risen exponentially to almost 8 percent thanks to his insistence on the need to eradicate poverty and social inequality as a first step to eliminating the war's root causes.
But at his closing campaign rally Saturday, a candle-lit vigil in a downtown Bogota park, there was little sign that he is the candidate of Colombia's poor majority -- now estimated to total more than 60 percent of the nation's 40 million inhabitants, according to the World Bank. Most supporters appeared to be middle class.
Voter abstention traditionally exceeds 50 percent in Colombia. Fraud is rife, with ballot rigging and vote buying common tactics used by the traditional and wealthier liberal and conservative parties.
"The poor aren't discussing politics," Garzon said. "The poor are very skeptical. They don't vote."
But Garzon hopes to capture enough votes to inspire Colombians to sort out their differences peacefully:
"I'm one of the ones that believes there may be a space for us in the political system," he said. "I'm indulging in political utopia."
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