Colombia's presidential campaign

Safer, but still not safe

Despite the achievements of Álvaro Uribe’s security policy, his successor will have to tackle a new threat from organised criminal gangs

IN 2002 when Álvaro Uribe was first elected as Colombia’s president, many of his fellow-countrymen felt trapped in never-ending violence. On an average day one person was forcibly “disappeared”, eight people were kidnapped, 80 were murdered and more than 1,100 were forced to flee their homes. Army bases were being overrun by left-wing guerrillas, while right-wing paramilitaries massacred hundreds of villagers. With the economy weak as well, more than 2m Colombians had migrated to escape from a country that seemed to be becoming a failed state.

Today Colombia is back on its feet. In eight years in power Mr Uribe crippled the guerrillas of the FARC and the ELN, and demobilised tens of thousands of their paramilitary opponents. His “democratic security” policy has seen the government take control of territory that was in the grip of these illegal armies. Murders, kidnappings and other crimes have fallen sharply.

Perhaps the highest compliment to Mr Uribe, who will step down in August after two terms, is that these policies are almost taken for granted. In the campaign for next month’s presidential election, all the main candidates, across the political spectrum, have vowed to continue them, in broad outline. And Colombians no longer say that security is among their top worries: these are unemployment, poverty and health care, according to a poll last month for El Tiempo, a newspaper.

Perhaps they are too sanguine, for two reasons. First, the successes were not unblemished. As the security forces were expanded—by two-fifths between 2002 and 2009— so did the abuses attributed to them directly. Troops were rewarded with extra leave for killings of presumed rebels, and for preventing terrorist attacks or discovering the perpetrators. A few were overzealous. In half a dozen cases, soldiers were found to have planted bombs supposedly left by the FARC. In 2006 a bystander was killed and ten soldiers wounded when a bomb struck an army convoy in Bogotá, the capital. It was later revealed that a captain and a lieutenant had planted the explosives, which detonated by mistake.

According to the Colombian Commission of Jurists, an NGO that is highly critical of Mr Uribe, extrajudicial executions (ie, murders) of civilians by government forces nearly doubled between his first year in office and the year to June 2007, from 127 to 228. In 2008 local news media uncovered a macabre network that lured unemployed urban youths to the countryside with promises of jobs, only to kill them and pass them off as dead rebels. The government swiftly cashiered 27 senior army officers, including three generals, and rewrote the army’s rules of engagement. Cases of extrajudicial executions have fallen dramatically. But the damage to the army’s image was done.

The second reason for worry is that violence has increased again over the past year, though not to the levels of the past. The FARC, while severely weakened and mostly confined to remote areas close to Colombia’s borders, is still capable of damage. It appears to have been responsible for a car bomb on March 24th that killed nine people and wounded 56 in Buenaventura, a port on the Pacific coast.

Another threat involves new criminal gangs. These outfits, many led by former mid-level commanders of the paramilitaries, are mostly dedicated to the cocaine trade, from controlling coca crops to processing the paste and shipping the product. According to the National Police, they number some 4,000, in eight main gangs spread across 24 of Colombia’s 32 departments; human-rights groups say the number is bigger. Officials insist that these gangs are purely criminal and lack a political agenda. They compare them to similar groups which emerged in the aftermath of civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala.

Some human-rights activists fear that they are a new generation of paramilitaries. The gangs commit massacres and murders of civilians, and have “repeatedly targeted human-rights defenders, trade unionists [and] displaced persons,” according to a recent report by Human Rights Watch, a New York-based group. They have also been responsible for the continued eviction of civilians from rural areas they want to control.

Fighting among these groups has undermined progress in controlling violence. One weekend last month 16 people were gunned down in rural areas of Córdoba department, once the headquarters of the paramilitary federation. The gunmen and victims were all believed to be members of rival paramilitary “successor groups”. Three years ago Medellín, formerly Latin America’s murder capital, was a showcase for the success of the democratic-security policy. But last year the number of murders in the city more than doubled, returning to the level of 2003. Most of them take place in the poorer suburbs on the hillsides above the city centre. In response, the National Police are stepping up patrolling of city streets and neighbourhoods.

The new gangs appear to lack the ideological conviction of their forebears; indeed, they have sought alliances of convenience with the FARC and the ELN. But they remain better armed than ordinary criminals. The government has seized more than 6,000 Chinese-made rifles from them over the past two years.

They may not yet be a direct threat to national security. But whoever takes over from Mr Uribe will have to move swiftly to curb them. Juan Manuel Santos, his former defence minister, who leads the opinion polls, says that security policy needs to be adapted to new threats. He argues that just as special army units were trained to fight the FARC in the jungle, special police units are needed to combat crime in the cities. Noemí Sanín, the Conservative candidate, promises to create a ministry for citizen security. Antanas Mockus, a former mayor of Bogotá who has emerged as the leading candidate of the centre-left, says he would combat all illegal groups with the same energy as Mr Uribe showed against the FARC. Protecting Colombia’s turnaround will require vigilance and innovation.