Gusilcan.Unapologetic

¿Puede el Procurador destituir congresistas?

2011-03-02T12:43:00.004-05:00

¿Puede el Procurador General de la Nación destituir congresistas? Se puede decir de todo acerca del Procurador Alejandro Ordóñez menos que ha no trabaja duro y con dedicación. Hasta los que no estamos de acuerdo con sus marcado énfasis en la religión católica le reconocemos el esmero que pone en su labor.

Hasta ahora, quizás la más conocida de las decisiones tomadas por Ordóñez fue la de destituir a la ex-senadora Piedad Córdoba por vínculos con las Farc, sancionándola a no poder ejercer cargos públicos por 18 años. Cuando destituyeron a Córdoba, la ex-senadora y su defensa trajeron un argumento válido a la mesa. Según ellos, Ordóñez se había abrogado las funciones exclusivas del Consejo de Estado, que por Constitución es el único que puede acabar con la investidura de los congresistas. Sin embargo, ese argumento no llevó muy lejos a la defensa de Córdoba, y la semana pasada el Procurador sancionó por segunda vez a un congresista, esta vez por cargos de corrupción (Germán Olano, por el Carrusel de la Contratación en Bogotá). Ahora, Ordóñez ha llamado a audiencia pública al también congresista Iván Moreno, hermano del alcalde de Bogotá Samuel Moreno, por su aparente implicación en el mismo Carrusel. Es posible que Ordóñez, por tercera vez, termine destituyendo a un congresista.

Ahora bien, ¿de dónde sale el poder del Procurador para destituir a los miembros de la rama legislativa nacional? ¿Existe en la Constitución un artículo que le otorgue al Procurador la facultad de remover del cargo a los representantes y senadores elegidos por el pueblo de Colombia?

Es posible.

El Artículo 278 le da al Procurador la facultad de "desvincular del cargo... al funcionario público que infrin[ja] de manera manifiesta la Constitución o la ley." Así pues, parece que la facultad del Procurador con respecto a los congresistas depende de la definición de funcionario público.

El Título V, Capítulo II de la Constitución habla "De la Función Pública." El Artículo 123 dice: "son servidores públicos los miembros de las corporaciones públicas, los empleados y trabajadores del Estado y de sus entidades descentralizadas territorialmente y por servicios."

Esto nos lleva a preguntarnos si el Senado, la Cámara y las comisiones son corporaciones públicas o no.

Frecuentemente los congresistas hablan de estas instituciones como "la corporación," y de hecho, así parece referirse a ellas la Constitución en el Art. 145, hablando del quórum: Artículo 145. "El Congreso pleno, las Cámaras y sus comisiones sólo podrán tomar[] [decisiones] con la asistencia de la mayoría de los integrantes de la respectiva corporación..."

Así pues, el hilo lógico conductor parece llevarnos al siguiente silogismo. 1) El Procurador puede destituir funcionarios públicos (Art. 278), 2) Los funcionarios públicos son los miembros de las corporaciones públicas (Art. 123), 3) el Senado, la Cámara y sus comisiones son corporaciones públicas (ver Art. 145). Por lo tanto, los miembros del Senado y Cámara (i.e., congresistas) son funcionarios públicos. Ergo, el Procurador puede destituir congresistas.

Parece un argumento bastante fácil.

Sin embargo, aquí es donde entra la defensa de Piedad Córdoba (señora, que sabrán, no es de mis afectos). El Artículo 184 establece que la "pérdida de investidura de Congresistas será decretada por el Consejo de Estado de acuerdo con la ley." Es por esto que la ex-senadora interpuso un recurso (horriblemente llamado "súplica" en jerga legal) ante el Consejo de Estado para tumbar la decisión del Procurador. Vale decir que el texto de ese artículo parece ser muy claro en que el decreto de pérdida de investidura de los congresistas es competencia del Consejo de Estado.

Cuando Córdoba radicó su "súplica," el Presidente del Consejo de Estado sólo atinó a decir que mientras el magistrado encargado llegaba a su decisión, Córdoba debía separarse del congreso. Es decir, la decisión de la Procuraduría se mantiene hasta que el Consejo de Estado decida tumbarla. Ese proceso podría tomar dos años, así que sólo sería hasta finales de 2012 que se tendría una sentencia del Consejo de Estado explicando si el Procurador puede o no puede destituir congresistas. Por ahora, parece que seguirá haciéndolo.

Addendum: Si el Consejo de Estado falla en contra del Procurador, lo más probable es que Córdoba deba recibir remuneración económica por su destitución contra derecho. Además, quizás se pondría en entredicho la sanción por 18 años, si es que el Consejo de Estado también falla que el Procurador no tiene facultades para sancionar congresistas de esa manera. Así pues, Córdoba podría volver a ejercer cargos públicos después de 2012 bajo ese escenario. Igual para el señor Olano y los otros congresistas que sean destituidos por el Procurador.

Correlación entre Salario Mínimo y Desempleo en Colombia 1990-2007

2011-02-16T18:59:00.005-05:00

Hace tiempo que no escribo. He estado bastante ocupado y dejé de lado el blog por unos meses. Hoy decidí subir esta nueva entrada, porque creo que encontré algo interesante.

Estoy convencido de que una de las razones de las altas tasas de desempleo en Colombia es el monto del salario mínimo. El salario mínimo, además de todas las regulaciones atadas a él (pagos de cesantías, salud, parafiscales, subsidio de transporte, pensión, etc.), hacen que el costo del trabajo formal en Colombia sea excesivamente alto para que la economía pueda generar suficientes puestos de trabajo para todos. Pueden ver aquí otro artículo mío al respecto.

Para hacerle un test a esta hipótesis (apoyada además por muchos economistas colombianos) decidí buscar datos sobre el salario mínimo legal en el país desde 1990 y compararlos con las tasas de desempleo para buscar correlacion entre los dos. No tomé los datos netos sobre salario mínimo. Para tener en cuenta el tamaño de la economía, miré además el ingreso per cápita en Colombia desde 1990 y dividí para saber qué tan grande era el salario mínimo en relación al PIB per cápita en cada uno de esos años (salario mínimo / PIB per cápita).

Esta tabla muestra los datos que obtuve. Las fuentes son el Banco de la República (PIB pc y desempleo) y el Ministerio de Protección Social (salario mínimo). Sólo obtuve datos hasta 2007.

La siguiente gráfica muestra la correlación entre las dos variables "Salario Mínimo / PIB pc" y "Desempleo"

La gráfica muestra tasas más altas de desempleo en los años en los que el salario mínimo fue mayor en relación al ingreso per cápita, mostrando coherencia con la hipótesis que expliqué anteriormente. El R^2 de 0.65 muestra que hay una correlación bastante alta entre las dos variables (1 es igual a correlación perfecta).

Esta gráfica tiene las siguientes limitaciones: 1) correlación no significa causalidad. Dos eventos pueden estar correlacionados entre sí sin tener ningún tipo de conexión causa-efecto. Debido a que Colombia experimentó altas tasas de desempleo a finales de los 90 y comienzos de siglo (debido a una grave crisis económica) la correlación entre salarios mínimos más altos con respecto al ingreso medio y el desempleo puede ser pura coincidencia. 2) el tamaño de la muestra es muy pequeño para sacar conclusiones sólidas. 18 puntos no son suficientes. 3) la correlación puede ser explicada a la inversa, es decir que serían las tasas de desempleo las que terminarían explicando mayores salarios mínimos, lo cual es perfectamente posible. El gobierno pudo haber decidido incrementar el salario mínimo agresivamente en épocas de crisis económica para estimular la demanda, y 4) esta correlación no tiene en cuenta los efectos que el tiempo tiene sobre los datos, sino que los trata como puntos independientes. Sin duda, una regresión más sofisticada sería una herramienta mucho mejor para poner a prueba la relación entre estas variables.

A pesar de estas limitaciones, se puede afirmar que, por lo menos, los datos entre 1990 y 2007 no están en contra de la hipótesis de que salarios mínimos más altos han afectado negativamente la tasa de empleo en Colombia. Al contrario, este análisis superficial parece corroborar esa intuición. Obviamente, si la correlación fuera a la inversa (menores salarios mínimos igual a mayor desempleo), la hipótesis tendría que ser revisada.

Under Santos, there will be no honeymoon with Venezuela

2010-07-06T12:08:00.001-05:00

Recently, an act of collective delusion, or collective wishful thinking, rather, has been taking place in Colombia. Ever since Juan Manuel Santos was elected president, media pundits and politicians have been talking about the hope of improving relations with Venezuela.

Headlines here and there announce a series of “positive messages” from the government of Hugo Chavez to Colombia, emphasizing that the Venezuelan autocrat promises “sincerity and respect”toward Mr. Santos’ administration. Mr. Chavez even wished the president-elect “success in the exercise of his new responsibility”, and agreed to “shake his hand” if it came to that.

The most optimistic have interpreted these words as good omens for relations between the two countries. The appointment of the competent Maria Angela Holguin to the Ministry of Foreign Relations has also lifted the hopes of those who want to see the quarrels with Venezuela as something of the past. Ms. Holguin, who was ambassador to Venezuela under President Uribe, is seen as someone who could play an important role in fixing the diplomatic channel with that country. Perhaps, with some help, Mr. Chavez is willing to leave all the past grudges behind and to start anew with Colombia.

Of course, all that is humbug. Every time I read another article insinuating that there could be reconciliation between the two countries, I laugh on the inside. Why on earth would anyone think that President Chavez and President Santos could have a frictionless relationship? Not so long ago, Mr. Chavez called Mr. Santos a “threat to the region”, warning that his election “could lead to war” with Colombia. The Venezuelan leader has also pointed out that “there will not be trade [with Colombia] if Santos is president”. But the disgust is mutual. It suffices to say that in 2004, Mr. Santos wrote an article for Revista Diners, in which he referred to the Venezuelan president as a man “with social resentments” and maintained that Venezuelan “democracy has been kidnapped by Hugo Chavez.” Mr. Santos finished his article by stating that “the Bolivarian deliria of Chavez represent a serious danger for Colombia.”

So why, all of a sudden, are there people saying that the two countries can mend their relationship? Has Mr. Chavez out of the blue become the statesman he has never been, one who can respect the leaders and the policies of other nations regardless of their ideology? Has President-elect Santos forgotten that the Venezuelan autocrat is a man who has helped Colombian terrorists and who would gladly do anything in his power to further their communist cause? Needless to say, the answer to both questions is "no." Nothing has changed, the two men still cannot stand each other, and the relationship between Colombia and Venezuela will continue to be as bad as it has been in the past year.

To believe otherwise is simply naïve. President Chavez will continue to further his Bolivarian revolution at home and abroad. This goes directly against the plans that President-elect Santos has for Colombia, a country that he intends to keep on the same track that President Uribe placed it on. Furthermore, there is the question of trade between the two nations. Nobody in Bogota will consider that relations have improved until there is a normalization of commerce, which means that President Chavez would have to lift his blockade against Colombian imports entering Venezuela. But Mr. Chavez has no reason to alter those trade restrictions, which he imposed as a response to the military agreement between Colombia and the United States.

So, those who believe that things can improve now that President Uribe is leaving power are wrong. And the reason is a very simple one. Their argument rests on the assumption that the problem in the bilateral relationship was somehow Mr. Uribe’s doing. Without him, President Santos can activate a restart button à la Obama and the tensions along the border will diminish. Needless to say, this is completely off base, because the problem in the relationship is not to be found on the Colombian side of the border, but in Caracas. Hugo Chavez is the problem. His expansionary plans for the Bolivarian revolution mean that, for as long as he remains president of Venezuela, there will be trouble between the two nations, for Colombia will always be an obstacle to his strategy.

For our own good, let us not delude ourselves. The respectful ("kind" is too strong a word) gestures that have been coming out of Caracas are nothing but a prelude for what we are already used to. The accusations and the threats will follow again soon - Mr. Chavez knows no other language. As I am sure that the president-elect is aware of this, I trust him to keep the country alert and ready for when the problems with our neighbor strike again.

Santos’ massive coalition

2010-07-06T12:05:00.005-05:00

In just a week, Juan Manuel Santos has been able to build a political coalition of a size not seen since the time of the National Front (1958-1974). After Mr. Santos’ historic victory in the election, almost all of Colombia’s political class has flocked to the president-elect’s side. All of a sudden, everyone wants to be a part of Mr. Santos’ coalition, sparking fears that the new president may be able to rule “unopposed”, as Semana put it this week. Instead of a green wave, Colombia is in the midst of an orange tsunami. After their defeat, I heard many Antanas Mockus supporters say they would change their nationality and that Colombia is made of manure (they used another word), but in spite of their disagreement, it seems that the country has warmed to the idea of the Santos presidency.

Right now, with the memory of victory still fresh, everyone in the huge Santos coalition is smiling with complacency. The two main "Uribista" parties, Partido de la U and the Conservatives, received strong popular support in the congressional elections. After opposing President Alvaro Uribe’s re-election, a weakened Cambio Radical seems poised to return to the executive branch by receiving control over some ministry. Partido de Unidad Nacional (PIN), formed mostly by relatives and friends of para-politicians, will no doubt support Mr. Santos’ government, even if the president has ignored them thus far.

But the fact that the current Uribista parties will support President Santos surprises nobody. What was deliciously unexpected was that a sizeable part of Alvaro Uribe’s opposition in Congress also joined Mr. Santos’ national unity coalition. And in just seven days, the force of the president-elect’s victory has divided and weakened the already feeble opposition parties. Most Liberals in Congress have expressed their support for the Santos presidency. Only those on the left of the party, such as Piedad Cordoba, have refused to enter such a pact. It seems that after eight years of being in opposition, the Liberals realized that if they did not court Mr. Santos, they could become even more politically irrelevant.

And the surprises did not end there. In a very interesting move, the meaning of which I am still pondering, Gustavo Petro, the presidential candidate for the Polo Democratico Alternativo (PDA), decided to pay a visit to Mr. Santos. Mr. Petro wanted to talk to the president-elect about water regulations, land redistribution for internally displaced people, and reparations for the victims of the internal conflict. Straight away, the PDA directives reacted angrily, maintaining that Mr. Petro’s decision was a personal initiative unrelated to party policy. PDA director Clara Lopez gave several radio interviews saying that the party leaders had unanimously decided to oppose the Santos’ presidency in Congress.

The PDA’s ever-present lack of unity started to show even more after it became clear that the center-right would continue to rule Colombia. Some think that Mr. Petro is testing Mr. Santos’ claim that his government will be one of national unity in which everyone is welcome (although Mr. Petro has stated that he will not support the new administration). But there is another possible explanation. Mr. Petro is much smarter than most in his party, and he finds himself less to the left than many of them. Perhaps he feels that the current leaders of the PDA, who were appointed and not elected to their positions, are taking the party down the wrong road. The PDA’s weak performance in the Congressional elections, in which they obtained a mere 848,000 votes, seems to confirm that. In contrast, Mr. Petro obtained 1.4 million votes as a presidential candidate. Maybe he believes that the party will have a better future under his care, and he is trying to show some independence from its directives.

And what about the Greens? With only eight seats in Congress, the Green Party will have no major role whatsoever in the legislative life of Colombia until 2014. After losing the election, Mr. Mockus said that his party would decide to support or oppose government initiatives on a case-by-case basis. He also rejected the possibility of taking a position in Mr. Santos’ cabinet, before anybody offered him one. If the Green Party wants to remain alive in politics, their best alternative is to run for the mayoralty of Bogota, which they could probably win. Enrique Peñalosa, a one-time mayor who lost in the last election, could perform well in 2011. After the disaster of Samuel Moreno, Bogotans remember Mr. Peñalosa’s administration with fondness.

It looks like President Santos will have an easy time in Congress for the next four years. With control over 80% of Congress, and a divided opposition, the new president has a fantastic opportunity to make the changes that the country needs. Of course, the downside is that with such a firm grip on the legislature, the executive could exert almost unchecked power over the polity, deforming Colombia’s republican structure. But I trust Mr. Santos, and I am sure that after his presidency, the nation will be safer, fairer, and more prosperous than it is today. Indeed, for a country as divided as Colombia, this national unity pact is nothing less than a political blessing.

The real big question is whether the pact will hold, whether Mr. Santos’ big tent can fit so many people. Without a doubt, it can’t. The first signs appeared this week after the Conservatives blocked Simon Gaviria’s bid for the presidency of the House of Representatives. The Conservatives, the second largest party in the country, argued that the position ought to go to one of their own, and not to Mr. Gaviria, who hails from the Liberal Party.

Can Mr. Santos keep so many parties happy all of the time? If he gives too much attention to the small parties, he could anger the large ones, where his political base lies. Instead, if he is perceived as working only with La U and the Conservatives, the smaller parties could feel ignored and denounce "national unity" as a lie. The good news for Mr. Santos is that even if he only plays to the needs of the large parties, he can still have his way in Congress. This, of course, is also good news for the country, because God knows that, on top of all its problems, the last thing Colombia needs is a divided government.

IOU: The Uribe administration and future budget expenditures

2010-07-06T12:03:00.001-05:00

With the presidential election at our doorstep, there has been much talk about the inheritance that the Uribe administration is leaving to the next president. If you read any Colombian newspaper now, you would think that the word ‘scandal’ summarizes this inheritance perfectly. The DAS wiretapping case is getting uglier, as more truths are revealed, and the possibility that the espionage was ordered from within the presidential palace materializes. Sabas Pretelt de la Vega, a former Minister of Interior, has been called to trial for bribing a congresswoman into voting in favor of President Uribe’s first reelection. The Supreme Court started a preliminary investigation into an alleged fraud in the congressional election last March.

Oh, it is going to be an interesting next few months. But there is something else that the new government will inherit from the Uribe administration. And so will the government after that one, and the next, and the one after that… The Uribe presidency wants to make sure that nobody in the next decade or two forgets who was living at Casa de Nariño at the beginning of the century. The inheritance I am talking about is the 26.4 trillion pesos (US$13.6 billion) that will have to be spent between 2011 and 2027 in different infrastructure projects. The Uribe administration signed a number of concessions for the following fifteen years, which means that the next four governments will be paying the bill.

Those who dislike President Uribe see this as a never-ending curse. They won’t even be able to get rid entirely of their nemesis for another decade and a half. They are infuriated that this government they despise has promised money to some big corporations when they won’t even be in power anymore. For others, this goes against the very concept of democracy, and they argue that the current government has no right to “tie the hands” of future administrations in budgetary matters. Paraphrasing a friend of mine, who is not too fond of Mr. Uribe, the appearance this all gives is that the next president will not be able to do much given these financial commitments.

Of course, all that is nonsense, and a gross exaggeration, to say the least. Defending the Uribe administration has fallen out of fashion, but I am going to do a little bit of that in the following lines. You have to be very gullible to believe that a mere 26.4 trillion pesos in the next fifteen years will leave future governments with no room for maneuver. All that money, spent until 2027, gives an average of 1.76 trillion per year, which is about 1.1 percent of the 2010 budget of the central government. Knowing that, I am pretty confident that whoever wins the presidency has little to fear from these financial commitments.

Those who disagree will point out that 5 billion are due next year already. In 2011, the new government will have to spend about a fifth of its investment budget (which amounts to 25 trillion pesos, more or less) in commitments taken by the Uribe administration. Let me point out that the new government will still have plenty of command over the other four fifths of the investment budget. Moreover, there is something that the Uribe critics do not want to bring up. The infrastructure projects that the Uribe administration authorized are very important for the Colombia’s development. The bulk of those 26.4 trillion will not be spent on petty things, but on 6,600 kilometers of highways and roads, a metro system for Bogota, and public transportation projects for smaller cities like Sincelejo, Montería and Valledupar.

In Colombia, infrastructure projects like those take decades to be planned and executed, if they are ever carried out. Bogotans have been promised a metro system for more than thirty years now. By committing to these future expenditures, the Uribe administration is giving a green light to these projects, providing them with the financial foundation that they need. If the government had been unable to commit those resources, by 2027 Colombia would remain as infrastructure-starved as it is today.

But the critics will also point out that what the Uribe administration has only been seeking political goodwill by spending money that will never be theirs. That is fiscally irresponsible and morally reprehensible, from their point of view. Just let me say two things about that. Years from now, when all those highways and the metro system are finished, it will be the incumbent administration of the time who will take all the credit. Nobody is going to remember that it was the Uribe presidency that started those projects. And if somebody remembers, the incumbent politicians are going to make sure that they forget about it totally with those heartfelt speeches they will give during the inauguration ceremonies. The politicians of the future will get the credit for the political will that the Uribe administration has shown by signing on to these projects.

Now, let me say something about the supposed fiscal irresponsibility in all this. The part of the story that the critics are not telling is that economic activity (and hence, government revenue) would increase as a consequence of these projects. More and better roads, and cities with well-developed transportation systems will help Colombians buy and sell, produce and deliver goods faster. Those projects will grease the rusty cogs of the country’s economy. Am I the only one who has the crazy idea that tax revenue could actually go up as a result of better infrastructure? Plus, all those construction projects will create jobs –and I bet that future governments will not be complaining about those workers not being part of the unemployment statistics.

Decades from now, when Bogota has a metro system, and when those narrow roads that link Colombia’s cities are a thing of the past, few will recall that it was the Uribe administration who first decided to commit to their construction. By then, others will have taken the credit. For now, the Uribe government only gets the attacks.

Mockus (still) does not have a real plan for his government

2010-07-06T12:00:00.002-05:00

The first round of the Colombian presidential election is very near, and the green wave of Antanas Mockus has taken the country by surprise. Mr. Mockus’ surge in the opinion polls, from 3% in February to 38% in late April, was in nobody’s calculations. My column of March 29, when I wrote that “Juan Manuel Santos seems poised to become Colombia’s next president” is now as dated as those hideous LCD watch/calculators of the 80s.

Even I have been seduced by the green wave. It is everywhere. All my friends on Facebook and my followers on Twitter seem to be part of it. All of a sudden, Mr. Mockus has become this man who will fix Colombia’s broken politics, who will end corruption, who will bring a “culture of legality” (as he likes to say) to a nation where crime and murder are the daily bread of the masses. I can’t help thinking that with his shaman-like sunflower necklace Mr. Mockus looks like a messenger of peace who has come to heal a wounded nation.

“Yes!” I thought to myself “Maybe voting for Mr. Mockus is the right thing to do”. After all, the man is very likeable, and most people remember him as a good mayor of Bogota. Also, his days of eccentricity, when he mooned students and threw glasses of water on fellow politicians, are long gone. Perhaps what the country needs is a political outsider, someone who is not embroiled in the old way of politics, who is not part of the good ol’ boys club. In addition Mr. Mockus’ mantra that “life is sacred”, repeated by his thousands of followers, has fallen upon Colombians as an epiphany. In a nation where too many people die senselessly every year, where murders and massacres have been so common that they do not make it to the headlines anymore, Mr. Mockus’ mantra is the equivalent of a painful wake-up call. For one moment, I believed that Antanas Mockus should become Colombia’s next president. For one second, I realized that his message of legality and decency was what the country needed to finally exit decades of poverty and bloodshed. For one moment, I embraced the green wave and became part of it.

Just for one moment. Before all that green frenzy was able to take full possession of my being, the public policy student in me fought back. What are Mr. Mockus’ campaign proposals? Does he have a plan for when he is in government? Is there any substance behind his rhetoric of “democratic legality” and “social transformation”? I went to his campaign website, and clicked on the “Government Proposal” tab, thinking I would surely find Mr. Mockus’ messianic plan there. I was wrong. I found nothing but empty words, catchy slogans, good intentions, and vague phrases. “We look for a society based on trust among people and in government institutions, on equality, equity, and the full exercise of rights” is a prime example. Another perfect one is: “To incorporate in [our] culture the enjoyment of a job well done and of productivity”. One of my personal favorites reads: “To promote the construction and the fulfillment of agreements about the main regional and national problems”

Of course that we are all for equality and trust! I also love it when I am productive and I do a good job. Needless to say, I would like all national and regional problems to be solved through agreement. But those are not campaign proposals! Those are not a list of public policies that a Mockus administration would implement! Apparently, the green wave was nothing but a sea of void campaign promises and mission statements worthy of a beauty pageant. I was disappointed.

Given that the campaign website had nothing close to a government plan, I went on Facebook and Twitter to address the Mockus supporters. Perhaps they knew what their candidate was proposing. I was wrong again. None of my Twitter followers was able to outline three concrete proposals by Mr. Mockus. I even published on my Facebook profile that I would give US$100 to anyone who could find five such proposals online. I did not lose my money, but I managed to upset a good friend of mine as well as my brother-in-law, two ardent Mockus believers.

The days went by and I just kept thinking that it was unbelievable that no one had noticed Mr. Mockus’ lack of substance. His website was there for all to see, but nobody seemed to be paying attention. And then, finally, La Silla Vacía published an article on the issue. The article compared Mr. Mockus’ anemic proposals with Germán Vargas Lleras’ 21 documents on different subjects (the economy, housing, poverty alleviation, sports, etc.), Gustavo Petro’s 30-page long government plan, and Juan Manuel Santos’ 109 “initiatives” for his presidency. Mr. Mockus’ campaign staff said that they were preparing a document with some concrete proposals, drafted by a number of experts.

Last Friday, the document was finally uploaded to the campaign website. It is 28 pages long, and it is divided in fifteen different sections that deal with a wide variety of topics (the environment, rural development, international relations, etc). Although it definitely has somewhat more concrete campaign proposals than before, the document is still full of worthless verbosity and vagueness. Two examples are “[w]e will defend the separation of powers” and “[w]e will develop programs to formalize the right to own land.” Any idea of how much these programs will cost? Is there even an outline of how those programs are supposed to work? I was surprised to find no information about that in the document. When I worked for the Vargas Lleras campaign we not only estimated the full cost of the proposals we drafted, but we also specified the source of those funds (new taxes, oil royalties, diminished spending in other areas). I am sure that if I were to present Mr. Mockus’ document in one of my public policy classes at Princeton, it wouldn’t get a grade higher than a C.

All this makes me very uneasy. The man who could conceivably become president in August has no real plan for his government. Is he going to improvise once he is in power? Mr. Mockus is a smart man. For the sake of Colombia, I hope he puts all his intelligence to work and drafts a much better document –because this one does not do.

A Sisyphean task: A look at Colombia’s 2009 coca production data

2010-07-06T11:59:00.002-05:00

ast week, the Colombian government released information showing that in 2009 Colombia had around 68,000 hectares of coca production. That is the lowest level since 1996, and it represents a 16% decrease from 2008 levels. Of course, such news was received with great pleasure by many politicians and public officials in Bogota. Colombia’s war on drugs is producing good results, and the downward trend of coca production that started at the beginning of this century has continued. Perhaps, some could say, after all these years, the day will come when Colombia eradicates illegal drug production.

And the truth is that Colombia may well be the only country in the world that has made substantial progress in the war on drugs in the past decade. Despite all their flaws, Plan Colombia and other US aid to the country have helped bring Colombia back from the semi-anarchy of the late '90s. Since Plan Colombia was first implemented, there has been a 58% reduction in coca production. By 2008, cocaine production had decreased 38% from its peak in the year 2000, and the latest data suggests it may have declined even further in 2009. This is proof that President Uribe’s hardline "democratic security" policy has brought unprecedented control by the state of remote areas of the country. The FARC and other drug-funded groups have lost big money as the programs of aerial and manual fumigation of coca plants have prevented the production of hundreds of tons of cocaine.

But although I welcome these 2009 coca production numbers, I do not want to get my hopes up or celebrate for too long. The 68,000 hectares of coca are more than enough to leave drug traffickers awash with cash to keep causing trouble, as those of us who lived in Colombia in 1996 know full well. Although the Colombian government has done a superb job against drug production, I cannot help but wonder when all this will stop. The government spends a fantastic amount of money fighting drug cartels, eradicating coca plants and destroying cocaine production labs hidden in the immense Colombian jungles. More taxpayers’ money is spent every year patrolling the country's skies, the seas and rivers, looking for packages of cocaine hidden in some truck, camouflaged in a cargo of flowers, or escaping quietly in a mini-submarine owned by a drug lord.

In order to start having some success in Colombia’s war on drugs, the government had little choice but to expand the defense budget to unprecedented levels, something I discussed in a previous column. And there are no signs that this will end anytime soon. Every year since 2000 the Colombian government has increased the number of coca hectares it eradicates. In 2000, the government eradicated 61,000 hectares of coca; in 2008 that number was about 229,000. That is a good thing, some might say, as it shows that the government is making greater efforts against drugs. But the reality is somewhat more complex. What lies behind these numbers is that in its fight against drugs the Colombian government has found a problem of diminishing returns. For example, in 2003, in order to achieve a reduction in coca production of 16,000 hectares, the government had to eradicate 137,000 hectares of coca; in 2008, the government’s record-breaking eradication left the country with a mere 13,000 fewer hectares of coca than in 2007. That is about 100,000 more eradicated hectares for a decline in production that is 3,000 hectares smaller.

Why could this be? If the government has become better at controlling the national territory, if the FARC has been severely weakened in the recent years, if about 700 drug lords have been extradited to the United States under the Uribe administration, if more money has been devoted to the military than ever before, why is the war against drugs becoming more difficult? Well, there are several plausible explanations. The most obvious one is that drug producers have been learning how to avoid the effects of fumigation. Some coca growers quickly rinse their plants with water after the airplanes hired by the government have sprayed the herbicides on their fields. This can prevent the herbicide (known as glyphosate) from damaging the plants. Coca farmers have also learned to camouflage their crop (planting it in the middle of other crops, or putting plants further away from each other), making identification more difficult from the air, or by satellite.

A third reason for the decreased efficiency of the government's efforts is that drug eradication leads traffickers to move their fields elsewhere, and to overproduce. This phenomenon repeats itself year after year. In 2008, the UN found that there had been strong decreases in coca cultivation in the departments of Arauca, Vichada, Meta, Putumayo and Antioquia, coupled with strong increases in Nariño, Cauca, Santander and Cordoba. Furthermore, as drug traffickers know that at least some of their crops may be destroyed by the government, they cultivate extra plants in order to compensate for their lost production. Paradoxically, then, eradication creates incentives to produce more coca, not less, thus establishing the need for even more aggressive eradication efforts by the government.

So, I look at the coca production numbers released this week and sigh. I ask myself how much more money the Colombian taxpayer will spend in the war against cocaine. I am almost certain that the impressive results of 2009 were the product of another record-breaking year of coca eradication. And if the government wants to continue with that trend, it seems that in 2010 there will be the need for even more fumigation. But even this offers no guarantee of diminishing production. Nobody should forget that coca production rebounded in 2005 and again in 2007 in spite of increased eradication efforts in both years. So let us rejoice, but keep it real at the same time. Drug trafficking is a monster with many heads. And frankly the Colombian government does not have enough hands to deal with all of them at once.

The enemy within: An ugly dossier of espionage is revealed

2010-07-06T11:55:00.001-05:00

While I was an exchange student at L’Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, otherwise known as Sciences Po, I took a class called "Intelligence Agencies in Democratic Societies." My professor was an interesting fellow, very knowledgeable about the inner workings of the American CIA, the British MI6, and the French Renseignements Generaux (RG), among other agencies. To be honest, I did not pay much attention in class throughout the semester, partly because I ended up in that course by some mistake of Science Po’s scheduling software. However, an event in Colombia last week reminded me of some of the things I learned in that class and I would like to start take this column from there.

On one of our first sessions in that class, I had to give an oral presentation about the following question: Is espionage a trans-historical phenomenon? (L’espionnage est-il un phenomene transhistorique ?). In other words, is espionage (euphemistically called "intelligence" in modern times) an element inherent to human civilization? Soon after I started my research, some ancient voices spoke to me with a very clear answer.

Sun Tzu, a Chinese military strategist who lived around the year 500 BC and author of the classic "The Art of War," wrote the following words: “Whether the object be to crush an army, to storm a city, or to assassinate an individual, it is always necessary to begin by finding out the names of the attendants, the aides-de-camp, and door-keepers and sentries of the general in command. Our spies must be commissioned to ascertain these.” Sun Tzu kept talking to me with that soft and reptile-like voice of his: “Hence it is that which none in the whole army are more intimate relations to be maintained than with spies. None should be more liberally rewarded. In no other business should greater secrecy be preserved.”

Besides Sun Tzu, I found other men of ancient times who also used spies to weaken their enemies. The Book of Deuteronomy (1:22) tells of how Moses decided to use espionage against the people of Canaan: "Let us send men ahead to spy out the land for us and bring back a report…” On his side, Kautilya (born circa 350 BC), a strategist and an advisor to an Indian emperor, wrote in his treatise on statecraft, "The Arthashastra," that a piece of information brought by spy could not be trusted until there was confirmation from two other independent sources. The Pharaoh Ramses II is also said to have defeated the Hittites thanks to his network of counterespionage, which realized that two seemingly repentant Hittite soldiers were actually giving false information to the Egyptians on purpose.

So yes, espionage is as old as human civilization. It is a weapon of war - and perhaps the only one that can be used during peacetime. It involves secrecy and deceit. By definition, there can be no such thing as "clean" or "decent" espionage. It is a dirty game of lies, fabrications and backstabbing. And that is precisely the reason why "intelligence" and "legal" usually do not mix well together in modern Western societies. How can you wiretap someone’s telephone in order to prevent them from committing a crime, without violating their right to privacy and the presumption of innocence? How strong should the indication that someone is a threat to others be in order for the state to be allowed to trigger its espionage machinery against him? If getting a warrant from a judge is a requirement for conducting "legal" spying on somebody, could that judicial procedure alert that person who, in turn, could act to hide all his wrongdoings? There are no easy answers to these questions.

All this rambling about espionage is part of this column for a reason. Last week, the Office of Colombia’s Prosecutor General made public a series of documents that had been taken from the Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS), one of the country’s intelligence agencies. The information that those documents contain is truly hair-raising. For a long time, Colombia has known that DAS had wiretapped the telephones of some magistrates of the Supreme Court, of politicians in opposition, of certain journalists who were critical of the government, and even of certain officials who work directly for the President. However, what the Office of the Prosecutor General published this week is even worse. According to a witness in the investigation, DAS eavesdropped on some of the private meetings of the Supreme Court, when the magistrates were discussing topics like the President’s possible re-election or the extradition of drug offenders to the US. According to the witness, DAS had been doing that in order to give that information to government officials, something that still has to be proven.

And if listening secretly to the discussions of the Supreme Court does not look bad enough to you, read this. Some of the documents show that DAS orchestrated a wide-ranging campaign to discredit opposition politicians and create them legal trouble. The documents have titles like “Political War” and they outline the objectives of several DAS operations. Those documents clearly say things like: “Piedad Cordoba [a senator from the Liberal Party]: Create links with the AUC … Horacio Serpa Uribe [current governor of the Santander department]: Create links with ELN … Gustavo Petro [current presidential candidate for the Polo Democratico]: Generate links with FARC.” Other DAS documents explicitly pinpoint some NGOs (for instance, Redepaz), international organizations (such as the European Human Rights Commission and the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights), and a law firm (CCAJAR) as targets of “sabotage” and “discrediting.” The document that describes the actions that will be taken against CCAJAR reads: “Create links between CCAJAR and ELN … ACTION: Exchanging a message with an ELN commander, which will be found during a raid." In other words, DAS planned to forge evidence to put the CCAJAR lawyers in jail.

If these documents are real, and there is reason to believe that they are, somebody has some serious explaining to do. DAS seems to have forgotten that we do not live in Sun Tzu or Kautilya’s times of sovereigns with unlimited power and no accountability. If Colombia wants to deserve the names of "democracy" and "free nation" (and not a "partly free" one, as the Freedom House has it), then all this illegal espionage must cease immediately. Perhaps nobody at DAS has been informed that Colombia is a republic of citizens, and not a tyranny of subjects. And citizens have rights. This situation is simply unacceptable, and I would like to see some heads roll. I am not keeping my hopes up, though.

If you have read my previous columns, you certainly know that I am one of those Colombians who are deeply thankful to President Uribe for all the good changes he has brought to Colombia. To be sure, I am the most uribista of all the columnists in Colombia Reports, and I have written in favor of the government’s actions many times. But not this time. The Supreme Court, opposition politicians, NGOs, international organizations - all these must be off-limits for the state’s intelligence apparatus. Unless there is clear and overwhelming indication that someone is associated with terrorists (and simply agreeing with them does not qualify as such), he cannot be spied on. And do not even get me started on the forgery of evidence. That is immoral, illegal, and disgusting.

As Juan Gossain, one of Colombia’s most influential journalists said recently in an excellent radio editorial, it is time we understand that the government and the state are not the same thing. The political enemies of the ruling administration are not the enemies of the state. On the contrary, they have the right and the duty to dissent and to argue against the government. To have an active opposition is the only road to democracy. The government has to win against them in the battlefield of ideas and policymaking, not through wiretapping and fabrications. The enemy within, it seems to me, is not the opposition or the Supreme Court, but a bunch of power hungry DAS agents and their self-righteous masters.

I hope that those who ordered these illegalities face justice and pay for their actions. Many questions are still unanswered, and given the incredibly slow pace of the Colombian judiciary, as well as the interests involved in this case, chances are that nothing will happen. I hope I am wrong. But if I learned something from that class in Paris is that states have used and abused their intelligence machineries since times immemorial. The challenge of democracy is to restrain these organizations that work mostly in secret, accountable to very few people. It remains to be seen whether Colombia’s fragile democracy is up to the task.

On human wrongs: Yair Klein and the European Court of Human Rights

2010-04-16T14:50:00.001-05:00

Yair Klein is a sinister man. A professional killer, expert in the use of brute force, he is the personification of an angry, dangerous bulldog. Born in 1948, Klein joined the Israeli Defense Forces, where he reached the rank of lieutenant colonel, and fought to defend his homeland in the Six Day War. In 1972, Klein was part of a team that rescued a number of hostages held in a Libyan plane in Tel Aviv’s airport. That action was carried out with such military precision that it took the Israelis just seven seconds to neutralize the hijackers. One year later he fought for Israel again in the Yom Kippur War. After leaving the IDF in 1983, Klein founded his own company of mercenaries, and ever since he has used his contacts in Israel and in the wider world to make juicy profits out of war in faraway nations.

Klein’s business interests led him to Colombia in the mid 1980s, when the country’s bloody war between the state and drug traffickers was starting to escalate. At that time he made contacts with people like Pablo Escobar and Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, the leaders of the Medellin Cartel. Klein provided them with weapons. A couple of weeks ago I was reading a book called "Cocaine Politics" by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, and I found Klein’s name mentioned on pages 76 and 77: “Klein became the center of another scandal involving a large shipment of Israeli arms to the Medellin cartel […] The weapons traveled via the Caribbean island of Antigua.” In 1989, when Escobar’s thugs blew up an Avianca airliner in midflight killing over 110 people, the Colombian authorities also saw Klein’s hand behind the terrorist attack. According to "Cocaine Politics," at the time, "Colombia’s top drug investigator, Gen. Miguel Maza Marquez, blamed Yair Klein […] : "He is the person who trained these people (the Medellin cartel) in the making of bombings and is responsible for this aggression."

Besides acting as weapons supplier and bomb maker-in-chief, Klein also trained dozens of the cartels’ paid assassins. He taught them how to shoot with accuracy, how to attack a moving vehicle, how to kill their target in seconds. Klein was instrumental in the creation of the first paramilitary groups that would later merge into the massive Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), the far-right terrorist group that had the FARC as its sworn enemy, and that wanted to "refound the homeland" by putting political allies in strategic positions in government. Fidel Castaño, a top paramilitary leader, was one of Klein’s apprentices.

In 1991, an Israeli court sentenced Klein for exporting weapons to Colombia illegally, and he had to pay a fine of about $13,000. Later in the '90s Klein left for Africa, where he profited from the blood diamond industry in war-torn Liberia and Sierra Leone. In one of his most famous transactions, Klein tried to exchange a military helicopter for access to a diamond mine in Sierra Leone. He ended up spending sixteen months in a Freetown jail, after he was found guilty of aiding the Revolutionary United Front, an actor in the Sierra Leone civil war that was notorious for mutilating the genitals of its victims, especially children.

In 2002, a court in the Colombian city of Manizales sentenced Klein for his training of paramilitary groups. Klein was tried in absentia (he was a fugitive at the time) in order to prevent the legal deadline from expiring, as the crimes had taken place almost twenty years before, the maximum time given by law to bring the case to trial. Klein’s debt to Colombian justice amounts to a little less than eleven years in jail and a fine of $5,500. In 2007, Caracol, a Colombian television network, broadcast an interview with Klein, in which he said that he did not regret his actions in the country. In fact, Klein said his best years were those he spent in Colombia, helping in the fight against the guerrillas. He even added that demobilizing the paramilitary groups was a mistake and that if the Colombian government allowed him to return to the country, he would get rid of the FARC in six months. Throughout the interview, Klein maintained that he first went to Colombia at the request of the national police. After that, the Colombian government used INTERPOL to have Klein captured, and Russian authorities caught him in April of 2007.

The fight that followed was over Klein’s extradition to Colombia. Klein’s lawyers took the case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), of which Russia is a member. The ECHR, based in Strasbourg, is Europe’s highest court on human rights issues, and its decisions are binding on all of its member states. As you may know, at the beginning of this month, the ECHR decided that Russia could not extradite Klein. The court’s judgment was that Klein would face "a danger of ill-treatment" if he were extradited to Colombia, given that "the evidence […] demonstrates that problems still persist in Colombia in connection with the ill-treatment of detainees." Furthermore, the ECHR took a comment by a former vice president of Colombia that Klein should "rot in jail" as an "indication that the person in question runs a serious risk of being subjected to ill-treatment while in detention." The court went as far as to insinuate that "the practice of torture" is some sort of standard procedure in Colombia’s fight against terrorism. It seems that the Russian authorities will attempt to appeal the decision.

With this ruling, the ECHR has done a disservice to its own name and to the noble cause it claims to defend. Klein is a criminal, and he deserves to pay for the crimes he committed in Colombia and against Colombians. No other country in the world will try him for those heinous acts, and now that a Colombian court is finally trying to administer justice, the ECHR blocks it all. The judges in that European court are either incredibly ignorant or stupidly naïve. They have brought shame upon themselves. But nothing is worse than their arrogance, their act of pure jurisprudential snobbery, claiming that Colombia’s judicial system is unreliable, biased and corrupt. What a typical show of Eurocentrist superiority. Lest we forget, at the time when half of today’s ECHR member states were either ruled by communist or pseudo-fascist dictatorships, Colombia was a liberal, democratic nation, where the rule of law was certainly much stronger than in places like Bulgaria, Hungary, Armenia, Spain and Portugal.

God knows that Colombia’s courts are far from perfect, but after reading the ECHR’s opinion on Klein’s extradition, my conclusion is that European justice is no better. Colombia, the territory in which some of Klein’s terrible crimes were committed, has the right to try him. But the ECHR ended up protecting a murderer, a horrendous mercenary who has spread terror and death in some of the planet’s most vulnerable countries. A sad day for Europe. A sad day for Colombia. A sad day for justice.

Juan Manuel Santos, the President in waiting

2010-04-07T22:39:00.001-05:00

Juan Manuel Santos seems poised to become Colombia’s next president. A number of opinion polls last week confirmed that he is the most popular candidate out there, and given President Uribe’s absence from the presidential race, Mr. Santos has received the people’s favor. Despite his lack of electoral experience (he has never been elected by the people for any position in government), Mr. Santos’ lead in the race looks very solid, and if there are no surprises along the way, he will have few things to worry about. Right now, Juan Manuel Santos is President in waiting.

There are a number of elements that will account for Mr. Santos’ easy victory, which I will discuss in the following paragraphs. One wonders how a candidate whose bid for the presidency started only a month ago, who spent a good portion of last year outside of Colombia, and who has no previous experience with political campaigns, has the lead in the most important election in the country. The answer lies in three important factors.

First, there is no other candidate who can honestly compete against Mr. Santos’ for the title of keeper of President Uribe’s legacy. There are no Andres Felipe Ariases in this race, and with Uribito (little Uribe, the nickname for the former Minister of Agriculture) out of the race, it is safe to assume that Mr. Santos has the blessing of President Uribe. Even if there are other candidates who sincerely want to preserve the work and the philosophy of the Alvaro Uribe government (namely Noemi Sanin and German Vargas Lleras), Mr. Santos remains the only true uribista on the ballot in the eyes of the electorate. That already gives him a huge advantage over the other candidates, whose burden is now to prove to the voters that they have enough uribista credentials, while those of Mr. Santos have never been put in doubt.

The second factor that explains Mr. Santos’ lead is a combination of two events that occurred within two weeks of each other: the Constitutional Court’s denial against the referendum for Mr. Uribe’s reelection, and the sweeping victory that the pro-government Partido de la U had in the Congressional election. The first of those events left hordes of uribistas disappointed and bitter. Many people had already taken a third Uribe candidacy for granted, and after the Court blocked the referendum, they started to look desperately for a new candidate to support. They were like victims of a shipwreck anxiously swimming to the nearest island, where Mr. Santos was patiently waiting, ready to allay their fears. Partido de la U getting 28 seats in the Senate on March 14 was the last confirmation that many uribista voters needed in order to support Mr. Santos, the party leader. To put it bluntly, the political defeat of Alvaro Uribe, forever banished from presidential politics by the Constitutional Court, represented a sweet moment for Mr. Santos, who saw the crown of uribismo fall automatically on his head.

The third factor behind Mr. Santos’ great electoral performance so far is his own reputation as a tough, experienced decision-maker. As he likes to repeat (and, as they say, it is not bragging if it is true), the Armed Forces had their greatest victories against FARC under his tenure. Few Colombians forget the overwhelming feeling of power and hope that came after operations Fenix and Jaque, which resulted in the death of Raul Reyes and the liberation of a dozen high profile FARC-held hostages. For a nation that had been in retreat for too long, hiding in fear of terrorism and death, and with so much pessimism having taken hold of the population for many years, Juan Manuel Santos represents a period of assertiveness and victory against terrorism. After President Uribe, Mr. Santos is perhaps the person most closely identified with the government’s policy of Democratic Security. And that gives him enough political capital to be the frontrunner in the presidential campaign.

So how confident should Mr. Santos be? The last opinion poll gives him a solid 36% of votes, followed by Noemi Sanin, who has a relatively weak 17%. Antanas Mockus and German Vargas are next in line with 9% and 8%, respectively. As of now, Mr. Santos’ passage to the runoff election is absolutely certain, a vote that he apparently would also be able to win (against Ms. Sanin, Mr. Santos would get 44% of the votes, while she would have 30%; a similar thing would occur in a Santos vs. Mockus, or Santos vs. Vargas scenarios). With about a 20% advantage against his nearest competitor, I bet Mr. Santos has been sleeping like a baby, free from campaign stress, and that he already sees himself as the 40th President of Colombia.

But politics is the realm of the unexpected, and it is a well-known fact that Murphy’s Law applies with greater rigor to politicians than to the rest of the human species. Mr. Santos cannot rest on his laurels, and although two months (what separates us from the election) seems like a very short time for drastic changes in electoral opinion, he had better keep his guard up. This election has already seen some big surprises (think of Sergio Fajardo’s descent into irrelevance and of Antanas Mockus’ newfound political stardom), and when you are in first place, the only other way you can go is down. Of course, I am not predicting Mr. Santos’ defeat, as all the odds point to the other direction. I am simply reminding Mr. Santos that he should watch his back, as the candidates running behind him will not let him take the presidency without a good fight.

Heriberto's final errand: An unforgivable crime

2010-04-06T16:06:00.001-05:00

El Charco is an impoverished riverside municipality of 30,000 in Nariño, a department in south-west Colombia. Many residents live in precarious houses made out of wood, cardboard and bricks, raised on stilts to keep them from flooding, and each house has a wooden ladder leading up to its entrance. In December 1979, a tsunami almost destroyed El Charco completely, leaving thousands drowned or living in the streets. But that was not the first time disaster had struck: in 1906 a tsunami devastated the town, in a frightening episode that residents, the "charquenses," still call "La Visita," or "the visit." One century later, the 2005 Colombian census found that about 80% of El Charco’s inhabitants lived in poverty. Suddenly, the name "One Hundred Years of Solitude" acquires a very real meaning.

El Charco also has a history of terrible violence, which, as often happens in Colombia, is linked to the cocaine industry. The Nariño department has, by far, more coca fields than any other place in the country, and El Charco is classified as one of Colombia’s top ten cocaine-producing municipalities. Its soil and its climate are perfect for growing coca, and its location, half an hour away from the Pacific Ocean, make El Charco ideal for shipping the drug overseas. The UN estimates that charquenses manufactured about 5,000 kilograms (11,000 pounds) of pure cocaine in 2008. Of course, there are a lot of thugs and kingpins trying to get hold of the fantastic profits that such a quantity of drugs can bring. In the streets of the United States, one kilogram of cocaine can be sold for an average of 120,000 dollars – you do the math. The result is that El Charco has become a very dangerous place, as several armed groups have tried to gain control of the region. The FARC’s 29th Front has a strong military presence there.

About two weeks ago, charquenses had an especially painful reminder that their town is engulfed in the most senseless of all drug wars. Heriberto Grueso was a 12-year-old boy who lived in El Charco, and who liked to help his mother with their meager expenses. After school (Heriberto was in third grade and he liked math very much), people from the town sent him on errands, which he performed in exchange for a little money. Being from a very poor family, Heriberto’s mother sometimes had no cash to pay for food, and I am sure that the young boy felt very proud that he could help her with the few pesos he got.

On March 25th, all that changed. That afternoon, someone with no heart, somebody who does not deserve to be called a human being, but a monster, sent Heriberto on an errand. The young boy was given a package that he was supposed to deliver, perhaps, somewhere close to the town’s police station. In exchange, he received COP1,000, or around $0.50. The package contained a bomb.

What occurred next is unclear. According to police officers at the station, Heriberto ran away when one of them wanted to see what was in the package he was holding. It is difficult to say what happened exactly, but the bomb exploded seconds later, killing Heriberto instantly. The explosion injured twelve other people, including three policemen. The bomb destroyed the boy’s body almost completely, and his mother was able to recognize his remains only because she recognized a childhood scar on what was left of his legs. The COP1,000 note was found inside Heriberto’s pocket, still intact. Ironically, Heriberto’s family had arrived to El Charco in order to escape from the violence in their more rural hometown. The government claims that FARC is to blame for the crime, but with so many insurgencies in the region, there is no real way of knowing.

I confess that I knew nothing about Heriberto’s story until tonight (Sunday). When I read the news in Semana, I started crying. The death of that young boy made no sense, it filled me with pain, and it was unacceptable. The worst part of the story is that such a horrible crime received very little attention inside Colombia. El Tiempo did not even print the story, and Yolanda Reyes was the only columnist in that newspaper to write an op-ed piece on the issue. As Ms. Reyes points out “in any other country [this story] would have caused commotion throughout society,” but not in Colombia. I take this as irrefutable proof that Colombian society is desensitized at the deepest level.

I had in mind very different topics for my column this week. The liberation of former FARC-held hostages Pablo Moncayo and Josue Calvo were on top of my list. Sergio Fajardo’s very likely alliance with Antanas Mockus also was column-material. But I think Heriberto deserves this one. Besides the love of his parents and his five siblings, Heriberto had very few things in life. He was terribly poor, and he had to live through much more violence than I could ever imagine. His short life came to a brutal end that no child deserves, and to know that his death will go unpunished makes this crime even more despicable. This is my tribute to him.

Sometimes we seem to forget about the children who become victims of Colombia’s drug war. Mutilated by landmines, recruited by armed insurgencies, used for cheap labor in cocaine producing laboratories, orphaned after their parents have been murdered - the list is too long to bear. Let us not forget about Heriberto’s senseless death. How many children like him will have to die before there is peace in Colombia? "Too many," I am afraid, is the answer to that question.

Madame President or the Eternal Candidate?: Noemi Sanin wins the Conservative Primary

2010-03-22T15:48:00.002-05:00

Noemí Sanín is one of the most resilient politicians in Colombia. The only woman who has ever had a shot at winning the presidency of the country, Ms. Sanín is a smart political player who knows how to reinvent herself. Even though she has spent a lot of time outside the country in recent years, Ms. Sanín has always managed to remain relevant in Colombian politics. Last year, when she returned to Colombia to run for president yet again, Ms. Sanín was able to create a storm that threatened to divide the Conservative Party. For somebody who had never been democratically elected for anything until last week, Ms. Sanín’s ability to stir popular support is truly remarkable. No doubt, she is a natural politician of outstanding capacity.

Ms. Sanín’s electoral abilities became evident again on Friday when she was declared the winner of the Conservative Party’s primary election. Colombia had been living in a state of democratic uncertainty for the entire week, after the National Registrar proved totally inept at counting the 2 million-odd votes cast on Sunday, March 14. Everybody knew that Ms. Sanín and Andrés Felipe Arias, a former Minister of Agriculture and a protégé of President Uribe, were the only two candidates in the Conservative primary that had any chances of winning. The two of them, however, were practically tied according to the Registrar’s initial reports.

This is how the process of counting the votes went. Mr. Arias was winning by a few thousand votes on the evening of March 14, but a majority of the ballots were still uncounted by then. Members of the Sanín camp complained to the Registrar due to the slow counting process, and when the morning of March 15 came, the official reports said that Ms. Sanín was ahead in the race by a few hundred votes. Mr. Arias smelled something fishy in the air and denounced that the Registrar had issued an unusually high number of reports after 4 am, insinuating that a possible fraud was in the making.

After that, President Uribe told his Press Secretary to issue a bizarre statement. The President requested the Inspector General to investigate whether the Registrar was drinking alcohol on Sunday, precisely when he was supposed to be overseeing the vote-counting process. Some people who had been at the Registrar’s headquarters that day said that they had been offered whisky there, even though an election law prohibited sales of liquor. The Registrar went to the media to defend himself, saying that he had not drank on Sunday, and that the government was just getting back at him for having opposed the President’s reelection referendum. Some pictures published by Semana seemed to confirm that in fact there was whisky at the registrar’s headquarters on Election Day.

In the meantime, the slow pace of the vote count was totally halted after a collapse of the software used to tabulate the results. It was Tuesday and Colombia still did not know who had won the Conservative primary or what the exact composition of the new Congress was going to be. The National Election Commission had sent envoys to verify the transparency of the vote count, but chaos broke loose at the Registrar’s headquarters after some delegates from political parties used violence to make a point. The delegates were protesting against the paralysis in the vote count, and they suspected that the Registrar was not conducting the process in a clean manner.

The results of the election were finally made public on Friday, after security was increased at the Registrar’s headquarters and a new IT company fixed the problems with the software. Ms. Sanín had won against Mr. Arias by little more than 30,000 votes –indeed, it had been a very tight race. Mr. Arias was quick in conceding his defeat, although in his speech he did not explicitly say that he would support Ms. Sanín’s campaign. On her side, a triumphant Noemí appeared in front of a group of her supporters to thank them for their votes. She pledged to keep the Conservative Party united, sending a signal to Mr. Arias’ voters that she did not intend to alienate them after her victory.

Since that day, a few media outlets have been too quick to overstate Ms. Sanín’s possibilities of making it to the runoff election. Ms. Sanín is now the natural leader of the Conservative Party, which remains the country’s second largest political force. Her chances in the presidential election are excellent, considering that she will have the powerful Conservative machinery behind her and that in recent weeks she has had lots of exposure in the media. No doubt, Ms. Sanín is one of Colombia’s most well-known politicians and she is starting her campaign as the official Conservative candidate from a position of strength.

But none of that means that she will make it to the second round of the presidential election. Of course, she could. However, I can’t help but notice that in the last opinion poll, issued at the beginning of this month, showed that Ms. Sanín had a mere 5% of the votes. Of course, a lot has changed since then, as now there is a new elected Congress and she has become the official candidate of her party. Yet, I can’t see how Ms. Sanín could more than double her voter intention (which is what she has to do in order to get to the runoff election) in such a short time.

Also, some observers have insinuated that Ms. Sanín can already count with the two million votes of the people who participated in the Conservative primary. I disagree. A lot of Mr. Arias’ sympathizers will be disenchanted, and after the bitter fight before the primary between him and Ms. Sanín, it is unlikely that they will warm up to her anytime soon. Also, Mr. Arias represents the wing of the Conservative Party that remains totally faithful to President Uribe, something Ms. Sanín is definitely not. Therefore, it is very possible that a good portion of the million voters who supported Mr. Arias for the primary end up voting for Juan Manuel Santos in May. The conclusion is that Ms. Sanín still has a tough time ahead of her if she wants to keep her party together, and to make it to the second round of the election.

But let’s not underestimate her. In 1998, when she first ran for president, Ms. Sanín got a solid 2.8 million votes, although that was not enough to get her to the second round. Four years later, however, her presidential aspirations were crushed by a widely popular Álvaro Uribe, who did not even need a runoff election to win the presidency. Today, eight years after that, she has proven that she is still capable of getting the voters to support her. She’s a phenomenal candidate and I believe that the election will be much more interesting with her on board than with Mr. Arias, who is a replica of President Uribe but twenty years younger.

The election is still an open game, and I can’t wait for new opinion polls to come out, which will make things a lot clearer. If Ms. Sanín succeeds, she will make history as Colombia’s first woman president, but if she fails, she will inevitably be branded as ‘the eternal candidate’. Too bad for her, Ms. Sanín will not have much time to celebrate her victory in the primary, for she knows she still has a great deal of work to do.

Uribeland, after all

2010-03-15T21:53:00.002-05:00

There has been so much talk about elections in Colombia for such a long time, that the fact the country has finally had one seems, well, rather strange.

For months, people have been speculating about who the next president will be, what will happen to the uribista parties now that Uribe has to go, who will win the Conservative Party's primary election, whether independent candidates could get a surprise avalanche of votes, etc. Now, one day after Colombia’s congressional elections, the answers to these and many other questions seem very clear. Finally, the political landscape has started to gain definition.

And the conclusion to be drawn from Sunday’s election is that Colombian politics is dominated by the center-right. The big winners of the congressional election were the Conservative Party and the government’s Partido de la U, now led by former Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos. Colombian voters rewarded the two main parties in President Uribe’s coalition with 24 seats in the Senate for the Conservatives and 27 for La U. This means that the two parties added together could form a majority in the upper house of Congress. The Liberal Party, in opposition, came in third place, winning 18 seats. This proves once again that the Liberals are the strongest, most important force in Colombia’s center-left.

In contrast, things were not so good for the Polo Democratico Alternativo (PDA) and Cambio Radical. The PDA got a mere eight Senate seats, down from the ten it obtained in the 2006 election, which demonstrates that Colombians are not really interested in the socialist ideas put forward by that party. Moreover, Bogota is the traditional stronghold of the PDA, but the disastrous administration of Samuel Moreno, a PDA member, may have led many disenchanted voters in the capital to support other parties.

The defeat was even more painful for Cambio Radical, the center-right party led by German Vargas Lleras. Cambio obtained a spectacular fifteen seats in the Senate in 2006 (just three fewer than the Liberals), and the party decided to join the uribista coalition in Congress, thus giving the President a solid majority in the legislature. On Sunday, however, the party obtained only eight Senate seats. The reason behind this fall was that a number of prominent members of Cambio Radical decided to change parties and join La U, taking their votes with them. Mr. Vargas Lleras’ absence from the ballot, as he is no longer running for Congress but for the presidency, may have hurt his party’s chances as well.

But the election also brought other surprises, some good, and some bad. On the good side, there was success for the newly founded Green Party, led by Antanas Mockus, Enrique Peñalosa and Luis Eduardo (“Lucho”) Garzon, three former mayors of Bogota. The Greens, who were also holding their primary election for the presidency, won four seats in the Senate, which will make them a small but loud force in Congress for the next four years. Also, Mr. Mockus was elected over Peñalosa and Garzon as the party's official presidential candidate. Although it is unlikely that he will even make it to the runoff election, it is a great relief to see that honest, decent politicians can build a party out of nothing and get support from the voters without the need to bribe or intimidate them. Good for the Greens.

The unpleasant surprise came from the Partido de Integracion Nacional (PIN). Early in the congressional race, the PIN became infamous because a good number of its candidates were relatives of politicians involved in the parapolitics scandal. The PIN, founded only last November, obtained eight seats in the Senate on Sunday, making it a force to be reckoned with. Of course, there is nothing illegal in running for Congress if your aunt, father, niece, grandmother, cousin or whoever else in your family was a thug. Who cares if my _______ (fill in the blank) was an ally of the same paramilitary groups that killed people by the dozen and terrorized large parts of the country - I am not legally responsible for that. However, the victory of the PIN sends the awful message that the parapoliticians are not entirely a thing of the past. Their successors will have a voice in Congress, and that is quite simply an embarrassment for Colombia. I am still waiting for someone to give me a satisfactory explanation of how the PIN was able to obtain over 780,000 votes, and to be honest, I fear the worst.

The other sad story of the day (although a different kind of sad) came from Sergio Fajardo, the former mayor of Medellin. His movement Compromiso Ciudadano obtained only one seat in the Senate, and its number of votes may be so few that it could actually lose its legal status as a political organization. Mr Fajardo’s performance was the big disappointment of the day, and this defeat puts his presidential ambitions into question. Some people who tweeted from Compromiso Ciudadano’s headquarters yesterday described the atmosphere as somber and heavy. I also read a (probably apocryphal) tweet that said that his daughter had asked Mr. Fajardo not to run for president, after seeing the awful results that his movement obtained in the elections. I believe this puts an end to the Fajardo enigma, as the voters have realized that his campaign and his entire movement have very little substance.

But perhaps the most important part of Sunday’s election had nothing to do with Congress, but with the Conservative Party's primary elections. Noemi Sanin and Andres Felipe Arias were neck-and-neck for the entire evening, and for some reason (Ms. Sanin’s campaign suspects something fishy) the vote count happened extremely slowly. At the time of writing (2 AM), Mr. Arias had over 517,500 votes, while Ms. Sanin has over 514,500. The problem is that those numbers came from only 46% of polling stations, so 54% of the votes were still waiting to be counted. The election was too close to call, and Ms. Sanin’s campaign complained that the votes from Bogota, Antioquia, and Valle del Cauca were not being counted fast enough. With the two candidates so close to each other in the final count, it is difficult to predict what will happen. Nonetheless, regardless of who is declared the official winner, I am confident that the loser will put up a fight afterwards - and it could get nasty.

The main conclusion to be drawn from this election is this: the candidates and the parties that supported President Uribe have prevailed, while those who stood against or who failed to show loyalty to the administration have suffered bitter defeats. The votes of the citizens have shown that all those opinion polls were not lying about the president’s popularity, and those who thought that the end of uribismo would begin after the Constitutional Court’s “big no” to the referendum were wrong. Colombia, after all, is still Uribeland, and Sunday’s election shows that the balance of political power in the country has shifted decidedly to the right. The Colombian left, after all, is still irrelevant, and that will be the state of affairs for the next four years. We will see how the presidential election unfolds after what happened on Sunday, but I think Colombia should be getting ready for a landslide victory of uribismo. After eight years, it seems, Colombia still can’t get enough of it.

The day the Uribe referendum died

2010-03-01T12:07:00.001-05:00

Last Friday, Colombia was paralyzed. Everyone was listening to the radio, or watching the news on TV, waiting for the Constitutional Court's decision on the referendum. Here at Princeton, I spent the entire day sitting in front of my laptop, listening to online radio stations and following the hundreds of tweets on the issue.

Staff from La Silla Vacia, an online news magazine, were twittering from inside the Palace of Justice, describing what the atmosphere there was like, and giving updates on the situation. There were rumors that the court had decided to postpone the final vote for Monday, some said that the vote was split 4-4, and that one judge was undecided, while others insisted that the court was firmly against the referendum (7-2, 8-1). Hundreds of miles away from Colombia, I didn’t know what to believe, so I chose a wait-and-see approach.

I had been waiting since 11 AM, and six hours later the decision still had not come out. I was nervous, but I also wanted to take a break from all that, and I thought about doing something else. My roommate and I decided to watch an episode of “Damages”, a legal drama with Glenn Close, and for a while my brain stopped thinking about the referendum. However (unlucky me!), when I opened my Twitter after that, I read that some news outlets had already leaked the decision: the Constitutional Court had voted 7-2 against the referendum, and President Uribe would be unable to run for a third term. Period.

And so the exhausting wait was over. Years of uncertainty about a third term for President Uribe had come to an end. Mauricio Gonzalez Cuervo, the president of the Constitutional Court, finally appeared in front of the dozens of journalists that had gathered in the Palace of Justice, and read the decision. When judge Gonzalez said the word “inexequible” (i.e., that may not be done or executed, unconstitutional) in reference to the referendum, the people in the auditorium clapped and shouted with joy. Many more had gathered outside the Palace of Justice, and they started dancing and singing once the decision became official. The nation was relieved. The constitution and the republic had been saved.

On Friday, President Uribe had followed his schedule as if it were any other day. In the afternoon, the president was having a meeting about healthcare in a hotel in Barranquilla. When the court’s decision was made public, Mr. Uribe’s press secretary approached the President and whispered in his ear. The president’s expression barely changed and he carried on with the meeting. Later, at 7 PM, Mr. Uribe addressed the country from that same auditorium, and with just a few notes before him, he gave a heartfelt speech saying that he would comply with the court’s decision. “The rule of law (or Rechtsstaat, Estado de Derecho) demands that all citizens submit themselves to the law, but especially the ruler (gobernante)” the president said. “I am inspired, dear countrymen, by one feeling: the only feeling I harbor is a feeling of love for Colombia, that feeling I was born with… I wish that in the years I have left to live I may feel more love for Colombia every day.”

At that moment, I felt very proud of my country. The Constitutional Court had given a remarkable proof of institutional independence and President Uribe had shown once again that he is a true democrat, a statesman in every sense of the word. In 2007, when Venezuelans voted against a referendum that would have erased all limits on presidential reelections, President Hugo Chavez simply chose to ask them again. Mr. Chavez finally got his way in February 2009, so he may be able to continue with his destruction of Venezuela’s economy for decades to come. Last year in Honduras, President Manuel Zelaya wanted to have a “consultative poll” to ask the people whether they wanted a new constitution that would allow for presidential reelection. After the Supreme Court declared this poll illegal, President Zelaya said he would carry on with it in any case. Days later, Mr. Zelaya was overthrown by the Armed Forces, and well, we all know the rest of the story. Now he is somewhere in Santo Domingo enjoying his life as an unemployed politician.

None of that happened in Colombia. There was a popular petition for a referendum, Congress made some changes and later approved it, the President signed it, and the Constitutional Court finally said it couldn’t be done. That, dear reader, are checks and balances in action. My mother was so surprised when I told her the news that she simply asked: “So, is this it? Is the decision final?” I understood how she could be confused about the importance of the Court’s decision. The country’s political establishment had spent so much energy on this referendum business that it was hard to believe that nine judges had the power to block it. But so says our constitution, and the respect for those fundamental rules is what makes the Colombian polity work.

But now that is over, and Colombia needs to look to the future. With the referendum out of the way, the presidential campaign will finally begin in earnest. Although Juan Manuel Santos is leading in the polls, his lead is so small that it would be foolish to call the election in his favor. The Conservative Party’s primary election will take place in less than two weeks, and its result will have profound implications for the general election, due May 30. Will the President’s coalition act as a unified force without Mr. Uribe? With the Uribista votes split among Juan Manuel Santos, Andres Felipe Arias, Noemi Sanin and German Vargas Lleras, there is a chance that a non-Uribista (Petro, Pardo) can make it to the run-off election. There is also the Sergio Fajardo enigma, as the former mayor of Medellin has a good chance of performing well in the election.

Will President Uribe anoint a successor? If he does, will it be Mr. Arias or Mr. Santos? Will the voters follow the president’s endorsement? These and many other questions still remain. Only now will many Colombians start considering the proposals of the presidential candidates, and I cannot wait for the debates to start. Colombia is fortunate to have so many smart and dedicated candidates to choose from, and for sure this will be a very interesting election. I encourage my fellow countrymen to vote for someone who has Mr. Uribe’s backbone and vision (you know who I will be voting for), so that Colombia can continue to benefit from the good policies of his administration.

On Friday, the Constitutional Court defended the republic and put an end to President Uribe’s attempt to remain in office for four more years. I applaud their decision. What cannot be forgotten, however, is that Colombia “cannot change direction [and] cannot have a change of guard”, in Mr. Uribe’s words. The country certainly does not want to return to the mess of the pre-Uribe years. And so Colombia will have to elect someone who protects and improves the legacy of Alvaro Uribe once he leaves the presidency.

Colombia: Drug addicts and Recreational Users by age group

2010-02-22T10:40:00.005-05:00

Click to enlarge

If you read my latest blog post you are aware that Colombia has about 540,000 drug consumers. Of those, about half (297,000) are drug addicts. This graph I made shows the percentage of total drug consumers (yellow) as well as drug addicts (orange) as a portion of consumers. The white line also shows the average prevalence of drug consumption across all age cohorts.

Drug consumption is much more prevalent among young people, especially those aged between 18 and 24. Also, it is clear that people aged between 12 and 34 have higher-than-average drug use prevalence. The older the person, the smaller the chance that he or she is a drug consumer or an addict. Colombians who are 35 or older have a lower-than-average drug use prevalence.

As the graph shows drug addicts as a portion of drug consumers, this means that the observable part of the yellow graph is actually showing you the proportion of "recreational" drug users (i.e., those who do drugs occasionally and just for fun). It is interesting to see that as you go up the age ladder, the number of recreational users diminishes significantly, which means that it is mostly the young who do drugs on occasion. The partying and the search for new experiences surely lead more young people to try drugs. Older people are much less prone to using drugs recreationally, so that prevalence in ages 45 and up is mostly taken up by drug addicts alone.

The question is how will this picture change in the future? If those aged 18-24 are drug addicts today, it is likely that in 10 or 20 years they continue to be addicted (those who live to tell the tale). Therefore, this means that in the future, drug use prevalence among people ages 35 and up could be much higher than it is today. Unless some serious efforts are made in drug demand reduction and rehabilitation for current drug addicts, we may be looking at a much more bleak picture in a decade or two.

The source of this data is the Estudio Nacional de Consumo de Sustancias Psicoactivas

Colombia, the drug consumer

2010-02-22T10:33:00.004-05:00

Sadly, Colombia is infamous for its drug exporting industry. Colombian stories of blood, death and displacement related to illegal narcotrafficking have no parallel in the Western Hemisphere. Recently, I read an article in Nexos, a Mexican magazine, in which the author vehemently denied that a “Colombianization” of Mexico has taken place. The Mexican drug war, the article argued, has not reached the horrendous levels of violence seen in Colombia. After reading that, I shuddered, furious. That happens every time I see the name of Colombia turned into a noun used to describe a situation of corruption, terrorism and conflict over drugs. Colombia surely has a painful (but hopeful) history, but it hurts too much when other people take my country as the anti-example, as the black sheep, as if they pointed and said “Thank God we are not like them!”

Indeed, it is tough to be the world’s top cocaine producer. But today I will not write about Plan Colombia, the eradication of drugs, FARC, cocaine seizures worldwide or Colombian drug mules being jailed abroad. Instead, I want to write about one side of the Colombian drug business that hardly gets any attention outside my country. And given that most Colombia Reports readers live outside Colombia, I thought it would be both interesting and educational for those of you who bear with me until the end of this column.

Today I will write about drug consumption inside Colombia. I am sure that many of you wonder what drug consumption patterns are in a country that produces over 500 tons of pure cocaine every year. Does everyone get high all the time? Are drugs out of control in Colombia? Are they part of normal daily life, like coffee, for example? With this column, I intend to destroy some preconceptions you may have about this issue and draw attention to some telling statistics that even many Colombians are not aware of.

There are a number of reports on drug consumption in Colombia. The government has taken interest in the issue, and the minister of social welfare has named a “coordinator for the reduction of the consumption of psychoactive substances.” In 2008, several government agencies and ministries joined forces to create a comprehensive national study on drug consumption in Colombia, which based on a survey of over 29,000 people across the nation between the ages of 12 and 65.

The study outlines the dimensions and social characteristics of drug consumption in the country. The results show that 9.1% of Colombians have used illegal drugs at least once in their life, while 2.7% said they had done so in the past year (2007-2008, following the study). This means that there are 541,000-odd Colombians who had consumed illegal drugs recently. For those of you knowledgeable in statistics, the 95% confidence interval for total number of Colombian drug consumers was 468,000 to 614,000. Marijuana is the preferred drug by Colombians (2.3% of them smoke it), followed by cocaine (0.72% of Colombians sniff it).

Of these half a million Colombians who are drug consumers, the national study found that 55% (297,000) were drug addicts. This means that every year there are around 270,000 Colombians who are recreational drug users. These are those who do drugs occasionally, and just for fun. Perhaps unsurprisingly, men and young people are overrepresented among drug consumers: while the percentage of women who use drugs is a mere 1.2%, around 4.5% of men consume marijuana, cocaine, crack, heroine, or a number of other substances. People aged between 18-24 are the age group in which drug use is more prevalent: around 6% of them do drugs. In contrast, only 3.8% of those aged between 25-34 years-old are drug consumers, while that number is a mere 1.04% for those in the 35-44 age cohort.

The study also found some differences in drug consumption according to social class and geographical location inside Colombia. The upper middle class (estrato 4, for those familiar with the Colombian system) has a higher prevalence of drug use than any other social class. Around 4.2% of those in the upper middle class do drugs, compared with 2.4% in the lower classes (estratos 1 and 2), 2.8% in the lower middle class (estrato 3), and 2.9% in the upper classes (estratos 5 and 6). I guess my dad is mistaken when he tells me that the wealthy do more drugs than anybody else. And now that I think of it, it is really a mystery to me why there are so many more drug users in the upper middle class than in the other classes.

Regional differences in consumption patterns are also very interesting: Medellin has more drug consumers as a percentage of the population than any other Colombian city. By far. 6.3% of those living in Medellin do drugs, while the number is 4.9% for those living in Cali and 2.9% for Bogotans. This difference is so large that it means that with less than half the population, Medellin has about the same number of drug users than the capital city. In number of drug addicts, Medellin surpasses Bogota by around 20,000. No doubt, its place at the heart of a big part of Colombia’s drug industry is at the root of Medellin’s drug consumption problems. The departments where drug use is the least prevalent are Huila (0.06%), Norte de Santander (0.38%), and Boyaca (0.59%).

The main conclusions you should take from these numbers is that Colombia is not the drug consumer haven that some might think. Colombia’s annual prevalence rate of cocaine use (0.7%) is much lower than in the US (2.8%), Canada (2.3%), Spain (3.0%) and some Latin American countries like Argentina (2.7%) or Chile (1.3% - for these numbers read the UN’s World Drug Report). Yet, the situation in Colombia’s big cities, especially Medellin, demands swift government action. Perhaps we could talk about the “Americanization” or “Spanization” of drug consumption patterns in Colombian cities. This is very worrying. Drug consumers are at greater risk of suffering from depression, anxiety, panic disorders, respiratory illnesses, and some heart conditions. A 2008 study among Colombian patients found that there is a statistically significant difference in the rates of these illnesses between drug consumers and non-consumers, underscoring the relation between drugs and disease.

The government should put some serious money into campaigns for drug demand reduction now. In 2006, the budget for this purpose was a mere US$19 million. Whoever the “coordinator for the reduction of the consumption of psychoactive substances” is, he has a lot of work to do.

This article appeared first in Colombiareports.com

Is your government overtaxing you? Find out here

2010-02-19T01:12:00.005-05:00

Oh, taxes. We cannot avoid them. And the fact is that the wealthier your country is, chances are that your government's revenue as a portion of GDP is higher, too. In other words, taxes in wealthy nations take up a larger part of the economy than in poorer nations. I gathered data on budget revenue as a % of GDP, and GDP per capita (using purchase power parity) for sixty countries using the Economist Intelligence Unit's database.

I made a scatter plot showing the relation between GDP per capita (average personal income per year) and budget revenue across these sixty nations. [The graph uses the logarithm (base 10) of GDP per capita, so the relation between the two variables is not linear, as shown in the graph but logarithmic]. Here is the graph:

Click to enlarge

So it is fact that in wealthier countries, on average, governments get a larger part of the economy in tax revenue. You can see how the data points at high levels of GDP per capita get more distant from the white trendline, which means that our logarithmic model may not be the best way to explain the relation between our two variables. This approach no doubt has limitations.

Nonetheless, I used the equation from our graph to estimate what budget revenue should be in each of these 60 nations according to their income levels. I then calculated the difference between the "estimated" budget revenue and the actual budget revenue according to the EIU.

A difference greater than zero, therefore, means that the government of that country receives a disproportionate portion of GDP in revenue, considering that nation's income level. I presume this means that in those countries, people are overtaxed. A difference that is less than zero (negative), means that that the government takes a smaller part of the economy in revenue than what its income levels predict. I presume this means that in those countries taxes are disproportionately low vis-a-vis other nations, or that there is a good amount of tax evasion.

The table below shows the differences between "estimated" and actual budget revenue across these sixty nations.

Find your nation and see whether your government is over or undertaxing you.

Click to enlarge

The truce in Medellin will not last long

2010-02-15T09:56:00.003-05:00

How do you deal with drug gangs? The film City of God tells the lives of a group of drug dealers in a favela of Rio de Janeiro. The different gangs, vying for control of the drug market, start a horrendous war that fills the streets with dead bodies and blood. Men and women, young and old, and even children are shot in broad daylight, with the police nowhere to be found except when they receive money from the gangs in exchange for letting the drug business continue. The violence increases and the poor inhabitants of the favela are abandoned to their fate. In time, some good, decent people decide to take matters in their own hands and they also become involved in the war. The government only intervenes, sending more police, after the media has exposed its inaction. In the end (spoiler warning) all the big drug dealers are killed, but a group of children take over their legacy and the problem continues.

The government’s clumsy attempt at striking a deal with Medellin’s criminal organizations reminded me of City of God. Indeed, I don’t see much of a difference between Rio’s favelas and the poor comunas of Medellin, and I feel their problems are very similar in kind. In the past seven years the Colombian government has been successful in its fight against guerrillas and other criminal organizations. Violence levels have decreased throughout the country, and the threat upon the lives and property of Colombians is smaller than ever before in the past twenty years. But something is going on in the cities, where homicides increased in 2009. The case of Medellin, where the number of murders was the highest since 2005, is particularly worrying.

But things have improved significantly this month, after a group of citizens, including representatives of the Catholic Church, secretly broke a deal with some of the gangs responsible for much of Medellin’s violence. There even were days with zero homicides, something Medellin had not seen in a very long time. The warring drug gangs have come to a truce and things appeared to be under control. The government had authorized the talks with the gangs in an attempt to reduce violence in Colombia’s second largest city.

Nonetheless, after the existence of the secret deals emerged, the government was put in a very awkward position. The criminal gangs involved in the deal are responsible for a long list of crimes, and any sort of agreement with them seems to fall outside of the law. Why is it that terrorist organizations like FARC get no possibility of an agreement with the government (and they shouldn’t), while these other criminal gangs (who also kill people and sell drugs) get a backroom deal? Furthermore, why was a commission with no government representatives allowed to negotiate with criminals?

The government backed down for a short while, after the negotiations with the gangs became public. Frank Pearl, the High Commissioner for Peace, said that the government would stop supporting the negotiations last Wednesday, but after a meeting with some Church representatives, he changed his position again. Some priests, Mr. Pearl said, would be allowed to conduct “pastoral dialogues” with the gangs, although no “peace talks” would take place. Go figure the difference between “peace talks” and “pastoral dialogues”. In the end, the result was virtually the same and the government authorized the Church to continue negotiating the truce. Whether the gangs will follow the agreement after the government’s flip-flopping is yet to be seen.

There are good and bad things about this whole affair. The good part is that violence has gone down. Whatever the commission is doing, it is working in the short term. Exhausted by their war, the drug gangs are finally talking and not shooting. The bad part of this deal is that it was carried out in secret. Jaime Jaramillo, a lawyer who was part of the negotiations commission said that “peace processes aren't done with a microphone in hand and a camera on your shoulder. And that's why we wanted to keep this process confidential." He is wrong. Secrecy and crime are never good companions. It is still unclear what the commissioners offered the drug gangs in exchange for the truce. Legal immunity? Lenient sentences? Money? Mr. Jaramillo ignores that negotiations of this kind must be carried out in public to preserve respect for the law. To have these talks in secret makes it look like the government and the commission have something to hide.

Another bad thing about these negotiations is that they put Colombia’s prison system to shame. One would suspect that the talks were carried out with the gang leaders in their comunas, with commission representatives sitting with them around a table in some place of Medellin. No. The talks took place inside some of Medellin’s jails, where many of these gang leaders are imprisoned. At some point the gang leaders requested that all of them be transferred to a jail in Itagüi to continue with the talks there. But knowing that some paramilitaries have used the jail in Itagüi as a center to coordinate their crimes, this request outraged the public. The point here is that the drug gangs are so powerful, and the prison system so porous, that the leaders continue to command their gangs from jail. They tell them to fight, the gangs fight; they tell them to stop fighting, they obey. Seriously, that prison system is a joke. I don’t understand why taxpayers’ money is being wasted in feeding and housing these criminals when they continue to kill and sell drugs from jail.

We will have to wait and see if the truce holds. My hunch is that it won’t, and sooner rather than later the drug leaders will return to their old ways. They always do. Even if the gang leaders are able to come up with some sort of agreement, even if they divide the city among them into zones of influence, at some point the violence will increase again. The story of the illegal drug business is one of short truces, backstabbing, lies and wars over a greater share of the market. Whatever the agreement is, at some point someone will be tempted to break it, unleashing a new wave of killings. If something becomes clear from City of God is that drug gang violence is a story without an end. It wouldn’t surprise me if, while they talk about peace and finding agreements, Medellin’s gang leaders are preparing their men for a new war behind everyone’s back.

This article appeared first in Colombiareports.com

Palabras del Pasado: Bolívar sobre la tiranía

2010-02-13T22:40:00.004-05:00

En el llamado Discurso de Angostura de 1819, El Libertador Simón Bolívar dijo estas sabias palabras que sientan muy bien para la política actual de las naciones que él ayudó a fundar.

"La continuación de la autoridad en un mismo individuo frecuentemente ha sido el término de los gobiernos democráticos. Las repetidas elecciones son esenciales en los sistemas populares, porque nada es tan peligroso como dejar permanecer largo tiempo en un mismo ciudadano el poder. El pueblo se acostumbra a obedecerle y él se acostumbra a mandarlo; de donde se origina la usurpación y la tiranía. Un justo celo es la garantía de la libertad republicana, y nuestros ciudadanos deben temer con sobrada justicia que el mismo magistrado, que los ha mandado mucho tiempo, los mande perpetuamente."

Seguramente esto no lo recuerda Hugo Chávez, quien insulta profundamente a Bolívar cada vez que se compara con él. También sería bueno que el Presidente de Colombia Álvaro Uribe recordara estas reflexiones del libertador y desistiera en su afán reeleccionista. Qué vigentes siguen estando estas palabras 191 años después de ser escritas.

El texto completo del discurso puede ser leído aquí

Europe: How the Left has no notion of fiscal responsibility

2010-02-10T11:06:00.006-05:00

As the rest of the world, Europe was hit by the economic crisis. Budget deficits ballooned as tax revenue decreased, and governments tried to save their economies with stimulus packages. The budget deficit problem (governments spending more money than what they get in revenue) is specially acute in countries like Greece, Spain, Ireland and the United Kingdom. In those nations, the budget deficit is over (or very close to) 10% of the size of their economies (measured by GDP).

A large budget deficit means that the government needs to borrow the extra money, raise taxes, cut spending, or a mixture of the three.

I made the following chart using Economist Intelligence Unit estimates for budget deficit in 2010 across 19 European nations. I then gathered information on the political ideology of the ruling political parties in those countries, dividing them into the categories of left, center, or right. Notice that these categories are not universal, but country-specific, so that a government in the "left" category is said to fall on the left of the political spectrum within its nation, and not within Europe as a whole. Therefore, for example, the British government is considered left wing, even if in other nations it would not be classified as such. If the government is a coalition of right and left wing parties, I decided it should fall on the center.

The graph shows the average budget deficit of all the countries in each of the three categories (with governments on the left, center, and the right of the political spectrum)

It seems that in Europe, even with the crisis, right-wing governments are still much more committed to fiscal responsibility than those on the center and certainly than those on the left. It seems that incumbent leftist parties in Europe will be under greater pressure to create new taxes and raise old ones, put on more debt, and cut expenditures aggressively. These measures, as the case of Greece shows, will be very unpopular. Perhaps Europeans will finally learn that out of control entitlements and public spending are usually a recipe for disaster.

The following is the data I used for the chart:

A Robledo la ley le importa un bledo

2010-02-09T12:30:00.006-05:00

Afiches como estos, del Senador Jorge Enrique Robledo del Polo Democrático, son ilegales según el Decreto 571 de 2009 que regula la publicidad política en Bogotá. Hace la denuncia el candidato a la Cámara Camilo De Guzmán en este video de YouTube.

Ante las denuncias, la campaña del Senador Robledo se defiende de manera patética en su página de Internet, alegando que les "quieren quitar la ciudad." La ley es la ley, y los congresistas como Robledo deberían dar ejemplo de su cumplimiento.

Parece que a Robledo le importan un bledo las regulaciones sobre publicidad electoral.

Gay Parenthood in Colombia

2010-02-09T12:00:00.003-05:00

In a great number of ways, my last two years of high school in Hong Kong were quite different from my years of schooling in Colombia. For one, my Hong Kong school was much more liberal, and so were my fellow students. I remember that one day our teachers had organized a discussion on gay marriage and gay rights, for the school held a great deal of debates on all sorts of issues. That day, the opening speaker was a fellow classmate who told us about growing up having two female parents. Her mothers, it happened, were a committed lesbian couple who had raised her and cared for her in the same way that a heterosexual couple would have. My classmate loved both her mothers, just as they loved her, and she was happy with the way her family was. Furthermore, she was straight.

I decided to start with this story because a few months ago a related and controversial event took place in Rionegro, Antioquia. A judge in that paisa municipality decided to grant custody of a girl to a committed lesbian couple. The child is the biological daughter of one of the women, and she has been raised by both of them since her birth, almost two years ago. Unsurprisingly, the case has opened the debate on adoptions and parental rights for same-sex couples.

Some could suspect that Colombia is an irrationally conservative place on issues like these, but they are wrong. There is a good number of NGOs and lawmakers openly trying to advance gay rights, and a 2007 decision by the Constitutional Court legalized same-sex civil unions. That is more than can be said of the great majority of American states, or of other Catholic but richer countries such as Ireland and Italy. Yet, that does not mean that social conservatives in Colombia have not been infuriated by this decision of the Rionegro judge. Monsignor Jose Cordoba, a spokesman for the Catholic Church, reiterated that their institution would not recognize families conformed by same-sex couples. Children raised in those families, Monsignor Cordoba said, “would not receive an adequate upbringing [and] will have problems with their sexual identity”.

On its side, the Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar (ICBF), a government agency charged with protecting the welfare of children and families, has decided to appeal the judge’s decision. ICBF director Elvira Forero claims that the decision violates the Colombian constitution as well as some legal statutes, in which adoption by same-sex couples is implicitly or explicitly forbidden. As a matter of fact, Article 42 of the Constitution states that the family, “the fundamental nucleus of society”, is established “by the free decision of a man and a woman to marry”. In addition, Ms. Forero claims that the Law of Infants and Adolescents does not allow gay couples to adopt.

These arguments have come under attack by gay rights advocates. Marcela Sanchez, from NGO Colombia Diversa, points out that the Colombian state recognizes and protects families that are headed by single parents, or those formed by siblings alone, something that goes in clear contradiction of the letter of the Constitution. Many Colombian families fall outside of the marriage-between-man-and-wife category presented in Article 42. Why should it be different for same-sex couples? Ms. Sanchez also maintains that nothing in the Law of Infants and Adolescents forbids adoption by gay couples. And she is right: article 68 of the Law states that the only requisites for adopting are 1) to be over 25 years old, 2) to be at least ten years older than the adoptive child, 3) “mental, physical, moral, and social competence”. More importantly, that same article states that spouses and permanent partners (i.e., those who live under civil unions) may adopt.

As the Law of Infants and Adolescents was passed in 2006, one year before same-sex civil unions became legal, it is difficult to know whether the drafters of the law were in favor of adoption by gay couples. The same thing could be said about the drafters of the 1991 Constitution, but I think that their definition of family makes it obvious that same-sex couples was a ‘no’ for them. Yet, another thing is even clearer: the Rionegro judge’s decision did not go against Colombian law or the Constitution. First, in spite of Article 42, marriage between man and wife has never been a necessary prerequisite for recognizing a group of individuals as a family. Second, the woman who was granted parental rights over her partner’s child fulfilled all the criteria for adoption exposed in the Law of Infants and Adolescents. This is precisely why the ICBF is wrong in its interpretation of the law, which means they should lose the appeal.

But of course, this issue goes beyond what the law or the Constitution say. It is obvious that for all practical purposes, as a matter of mere fact, the lesbian couple and the child have always formed a family. And this remains true even if the Colombian government, the Congress, or all the judges in the world do not recognize it as such. The two mothers have loved and looked after their daughter just like it happens in any other family. It is both illogical and morally wrong to deny the girl her right to be under the legal protection of two parents, regardless of their gender, when the two of them are willing to share mutual custody.

As the story of my classmate in Hong Kong shows, growing up in a family headed by a gay couple is not the tragedy that social conservatives believe. Also, the fact that my classmate was not gay (and I would not have a problem if she had been) proves that children brought up by same-sex couples do not necessarily end up becoming gay themselves, contrary to what Monsignor Cordoba thinks. To be honest, it is rather ironic that a spokesman for the Catholic Church is concerned with children having “problems with their sexual identity”. See the plank in your own eye, I say.

One of the things I most appreciate about my experience in Hong Kong is that it opened my eyes to a whole new range of social realities I had not experienced in Colombia. To be honest, I was somewhat alarmed when I found out that my classmate had two mothers. Really? Was that possible? Could that work? But then I realized that if it worked for my friend, I had no valid reason to be against it. Very quickly I came to accept her reality and to embrace it. Soon after, the idea of same-sex couples raising children became so natural to me, that now I cannot remember why I was instinctively against that possibility in the first place. I am sure that Colombia will go through these same stages as it deals with this important issue. All the country needs is some time.

This article appeared first on colombiareports.com

Saving Colombia's imperfect healthcare system

2010-02-08T09:45:00.003-05:00

Colombia has been having its own healthcare debate. If you have been reading Colombia Reports, you will know that two weeks ago the Uribe administration issued a series of highly controversial decrees on reforming Colombia’s healthcare system. These new rules inflamed the ire of many Colombians and put the government in a very uncomfortable position, adding misery to President Uribe’s unlucky last couple of weeks.

The users of Colombia’s healthcare system are divided into two groups: those who pay for their healthcare plan with their own (and their employers’) money (the “contributivo” scheme), and those who get it subsidized with taxpayers’ pesos (the “subsidiado” scheme). According to the government, in 2009 there were 17.06 million Colombians registered with the contributivo scheme, while 24.3 million were in the subsidized plan. In addition, there is a list of medicines and medical treatments that all users of the healthcare system have access to. This list is called Plan Obligatorio de Salud (POS), the Obligatory Health Plan. In total, there are 63 public and private healthcare providers in Colombia.

Oftentimes, the users of the healthcare system are not satisfied with the treatment they receive. As the constitution lists the “right to healthcare” (derecho a la salud) as a fundamental right, every year a great number of patients sue their healthcare providers for refusing to cover certain treatments or medicines not included in the POS. The courts usually decide in favor of the patients, ordering that they be given the treatment they demand. Between 2006 and 2008, there were more than 346,400 such suits in the judicial system, with patients demanding some sort of surgery in 21% of the cases, and medicines 20% of the time.

The result has been an explosion in costs for the government and the private healthcare providers. Last December, nine of the fifteen largest healthcare providers said they were close to bankruptcy, and that unless the government came to their rescue, Colombia’s patients would have a lot more to complain about. Oscar Zuluaga, finance minister, estimated that the healthcare system needed around US$400 million to make the problem go away, but with the fiscal deficit already at a seven-year high, few doubted that drastic measures were necessary.

Enter the government’s decrees. The Uribe administration had Congress declare a “social emergency” over the healthcare crisis, thus allowing the executive to issue decrees on the issue without a vote in the legislature. Using this opportunity, the government raised sales taxes on tobacco, beer, and lottery tickets – by law, taxes on these three "unhealthy" things have funded much of Colombia’s health system for decades. Nobody complained about these new taxes except SABMiller’s top executives, owners of Colombia’s largest brewery. The company said the tax hike could mean job cuts and closing one of its production plants.

But that is not the decree that caused all the controversy. Colombians will continue to drink beer, smoke cigarettes and buy lottery tickets pa’ salir de pobres (to leave poverty behind). The real commotion was over the decree that orders patients to use loans, their savings, or money from their retirement plans to pay for treatments not included in POS. Another decree ruled that doctors who prescribed medicines or treatments that were not included in POS could pay fines of up to US$13,000. In other words, the decrees severely restricted the doctors’ professional judgment and autonomy.

I had never seen so many people criticize the government in unison and over the same issue. El Tiempo, Colombia’s leading newspaper, openly condemned the decrees, saying they were “regressive” and that they went against the “acquired rights of Colombians”. Semana, an influential magazine, also ran a series of articles criticizing the decisions. A group of students in Pereira booed Diego Palacio, the Minister of Social Welfare, calling him “murderer” while they sang around a fake coffin outside a room where he was giving a talk. On Saturday, a significant number of people took the streets to protest against the decrees, with a few thousand marching in Bogota, Cali, Medellín, and other cities. Their motto was: “health is a right, not a loan.”

The opposition used the public uproar in its advantage, with members of the Liberal Party and the Polo Democratico condemning the government. On Twitter, Senator Piedad Cordoba said that the decrees amount to a “massacre” of the healthcare system. Presidential candidate Gustavo Petro wrote an article, saying that “a true policy of death was written on the emergency decrees”. Instead, he proposes to create a “universal, free and public” healthcare system.

Wisely, the government backed down on some of its initiatives. This weekend, the US$13,000 fines for doctors were, rightly, removed from the decrees, and Mr. Uribe also said that only those in the upper classes would be required to pay with their own money for treatments and medicines not included in POS. The controversy is slowly dying away.

There can be no doubt that the whole affair was a huge overreaction. The Uribe administration was not trying to kill patients or to deprive Colombians of basic health services. Far from it. With the decrees, the government avoided the horrible tragedy that the bankruptcy of nine large healthcare providers would have created. No doubt, the decrees had some stupid articles in them, like the one levying fines on doctors, but the government listened to its critics and compromised on this issue. I can’t help thinking that out of the sixteen decrees the government issued, only two (no. 128 and no. 131) are the object of the controversy. The government did a poor public relations job explaining the decrees to the public, and let the opposition take control of the story. Now the administration is paying a political price for that mistake.

About the decree that makes citizens pay for treatments not included in POS, let me say two things: First, nobody really knows what the final list of treatments and medicines included in POS will look like. The government is supposed to issue the final list in June, so until then, nobody can be sure of what illnesses and therapies will be covered by POS. To yell that the government is condemning people to die is not only silly, but also premature. Second, to make people pay for some treatments may be the only way to stop the avalanche of lawsuits that damaged the system’s finances in the first place. Some judges have been all too willing to order needlessly expensive care for some patients. As the judges do not pay for those treatments with their own money, but with the taxpayers’, they do not see the need for austerity and cost efficiency. Their irresponsible largesse has put the entire healthcare system in jeopardy, and now Colombia is living with the consequences.

To Mr. Petro’s proposal to nationalize healthcare, I respond: no thanks. His plan is foolish and a real danger for the health of all Colombians. Perhaps socialized medicine works in many European countries, but in Colombia I would never put my health at the care of the state. Why? Between 2006 and 2008 the government’s healthcare provider (Instituto de Seguros Sociales) had way more lawsuits (97 for every 10,000 patients, see page 40) than any other private provider in the country (the second provider in that list had about 55 for every 10,000 patients). Just imagine what would happen if the healthcare of all Colombians was transferred to the public sector. I really do not see how Mr. Petro will win the presidency if he keeps making promises that will reduce the quality of life of Colombians. But of course, the Left does not realize this. Nor do they realize that the Uribe administration was bold enough to make the difficult decisions needed to save Colombia’s imperfect healthcare system.

This article appeared first in Colombiareports.com

Por qué reducir el salario mínimo es una muy buena idea

2010-02-04T00:24:00.003-05:00

Esta es una traducción que hice de una columna mía que apareció originalmente en Colombia Reports y que ahora fue publicada en El Certamen, una revista virtual sobre política, economía y cultura editada por Daniel Raisbeck

En Colombia, el final del año siempre marca el inicio de un evento interesante. No, no es la Navidad, y si pensaron que era el Día de los Inocentes también se equivocan. El interesante evento al cual me refiero, y que ocurre cada año de manera casi ritual, es el de las negociaciones del salario mínimo.

El evento sucede de la siguiente manera: Con el fin de definir el salario mínimo que regirá al año siguiente, algunos oficiales del gobierno, los líderes de los sindicatos de trabajadores, y los representantes de los empresarios se reúnen en el palacio presidencial. Los sindicalistas comienzan exigiendo un aumento del salario mínimo del 10%, más o menos algunos puntos porcentuales. A esto, los empresarios responden que las demandas de los trabajadores son simplemente irrealizables. Un aumento de 10% en costos laborales significaría que tendrían que despedir gente. Las negociaciones continúan por unos días sin que ninguna de las dos partes ceda en sus posturas. Sin consenso a la vista, el gobierno procede a fijar el nuevo salario mínimo por decreto, con un incremento que usualmente se acerca al que proponen los empresarios aunque algunos puntos por encima para guardar las apariencias.

El ritual se repite año con año, y rara vez hay excepciones. Una complicación extra que se suma a las negociaciones es que una sentencia de la Corte Constitucional exige que el incremento al salario mínimo nunca sea menor al de la inflación. Como en 2009 la recesión hizo bajar los precios, la inflación fue del 2,03%, la más baja en 54 años. Con esto en mente, los empresarios indicaban en diciembre que un aumento del salario mínimo de 3.5% era justo para 2010, mientras que los sindicalistas no se iban a contentar con un aumento menor a 8%. Los trabajadores sostienen que un aumento significativo del salario mínimo sobre la inflación estimularía la demanda agregada y ayudaría a restablecer el crecimiento económico. Los empresarios creen que ésa es una idea descabellada, afirmando que lo último que necesita la industria nacional es un aumento en su nómina, máxime cuando las relaciones comerciales con Venezuela siguen por el piso.

¿Qué hacer? ¿Quién tiene la razón? Sin duda, estas negociaciones son la mejor muestra de la guerra de clases. Pobres contra ricos. Los trabajadores menesterosos luchando contra los avaros capitalistas, exigiendo lo que por derecho les pertenece. Francamente, me molesta el corporativismo que exuda toda esta situación. Mi anhelo de una Colombia con una economía de libre mercado dista mucho de esta imagen del gobierno, los sindicatos y los empresarios, todos sentados en la misma mesa buscando una manera armoniosa de distribuir recursos.

Pero hay que trabajar con lo que se tiene, y el gobierno en todo caso terminó decretando un aumento salarial de 3,64% para 2010. Ésta fue una decisión razonable, pues un incremento mayor habría aumentado el número de desempleados y expandido la de por sí enorme economía informal. Sin embargo, el gobierno debería preocuparse también por disminuir el desempleo y la informalidad, y no simplemente por evitar su crecimiento. Y es precisamente por eso que se debe tomar una medida mucho más valiente y atrevida: crear una versión paralela, flexible y más barata del salario mínimo, totalmente diferente del rígido y costoso esquema actual.

¿Confundidos? Permítanme explicarme. En 2009, el salario mínimo mensual en Colombia fue de 496 mil pesos. Adicional a eso, los empleadores deben pagar a cada empleado un subsidio de transporte de 59.300 pesos. Ése es el dinero que los trabajadores reciben en efectivo mensualmente. Sin embargo, tras bambalinas los empleadores están obligados por ley a pagar 12% del salario para fondos de pensiones, 8.5% para salud, 10.4% para cesantías, 9% para los parafiscales del Bienestar Familiar, el SENA y las Cajas de Compensación, y la lista no termina allí. El resultado es que el costo mínimo por trabajador en Colombia en 2009 era de 872 mil pesos en total, a pesar de que el empleado sólo ve una fracción de esa suma.

Hay quienes piensan que no hay ningún problema con el hecho de que los empleadores deban pagar una suma tal por cada empleado. Sin embargo, la realidad es más compleja: en Colombia 4,5 millones de personas ganan el salario mínimo, pero hay otros 8 millones que tienen un ingreso menor. Estos 8 millones son las personas que trabajan en el sector informal de la economía, aquéllos sin contratos formales ni seguridad social. Al hacer que el trabajo de estas personas sea excesivamente costoso, el salario mínimo termina cerrándoles las puertas de la economía formal por decreto. Simplemente para los empleadores no es rentable gastar 872 mil pesos en algunos empleados, especialmente en un país con abundante mano de obra no calificada como Colombia. Al incrementar el precio del trabajo, el salario mínimo termina beneficiando a aquéllos que lo reciben, pero a costa del resto de los trabajadores que se quedan sin empleo por motivo del oneroso valor que el gobierno le pone a sus habilidades.

Pero antes de que me llamen esnob por decir que un salario de 872 mil pesos es muy alto, lean esto: Colombia tiene el salario mínimo más costoso en comparación con su ingreso per cápita, como aparece en la gráfica. Esto significa que es relativamente más caro contratar trabajadores en Colombia que en los demás países de Suramérica. A buen entendedor pocas palabras, no es coincidencia que Colombia tenga la tasa de desempleo más alta de la región. Tomen otro ejemplo: si en los Estados Unidos el ratio de salario mínimo a ingreso per cápita fuera igual al de Colombia, un trabajador estadounidense ganaría un salario mínimo de 2.500 dólares mensuales, y no los 1.392 que en realidad devenga (trabajando 8 horas al día, 6 días a la semana por los 7.25 dólares/hora que ordena el gobierno federal). Sin duda, el salario mínimo en Colombia es excesivamente alto para el tamaño de su economía.

Es verdad que 872 mil pesos por mes son insuficientes para tener ‘una vida digna’ en Colombia –en eso concuerdo con los sindicatos. Pero aumentar el salario mínimo a niveles incluso más altos sólo producirá más desempleo y pondrá más gente en oficios informales peor pagados. Si la pobreza pudiera erradicarse simplemente ordenando que las empresas pagaran salarios más altos, créanme que esto del desarrollo económico no tendría ninguna ciencia, y que todas las naciones del mundo ya lo habrían hecho. Así que lo que el gobierno colombiano debe hacer ahora es sacar cientos de miles de la informalidad, creando un salario mínimo especial más bajo. Es probable que un sueldo así no sea mucho, pero ciertamente será mejor que los 10 mil pesos diarios que muchos colombianos ganan –y ésos no son los más pobres. Al liberalizar el mercado laboral y flexibilizar el salario mínimo, aparecerán nuevos trabajos formales para la mano de obra pobre no calificada. Con el tiempo, la tasa de desempleo descenderá a niveles suramericanos normales (que todavía son terriblemente altos).

De cualquier modo, es poco probable que alguien considere esta opción en futuras negociaciones del salario mínimo. El ritual cada año seguirá como hasta ahora, y desafortunadamente, también lo hará el desempleo.

The Candidates on Twitter and Facebook

2010-02-03T19:50:00.003-05:00

All of the candidates for the Colombian presidency have opened accounts on Facebook and Twitter. These charts show how many fans/followers each candidate has on the two sites. Could this be a good indicator of election results?

Memo to the government: Prudence is not equivalent to inaction

2010-01-31T23:20:00.002-05:00

Last Wednesday, at around 9.30 in the morning, a military helicopter from Venezuela entered Colombian airspace. For around 20 minutes, the Venezuelans flew over the city of Arauca and a Colombian military compound. The helicopter later returned to Venezuelan territory.

This violation of Colombian airspace by military aircraft of a foreign power was read differently in different quarters. Immediately after the episode, the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a communiqué describing and condemning the incident. The Ministry sent a formal note of protest to the Venezuelan government demanding an explanation.

The response from the Chavez autocracy came swiftly and as expected. Nicolás Maduro, a former bus driver turned Venezuelan Foreign Affairs Minister, presented the incident as nothing but fabrications of the Colombian government. “In Colombia that information has been used [with the purpose of launching] a dirty, brutal campaign of hatred against the people of Venezuela and the President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, to incite feelings of despise against our country” Mr. Maduro said.

Of course, nobody really believes Mr. Maduro’s baloney. After all, his job requires him to be a professional liar who shows no regard for the truth when he appears on TV. On his side, Gabriel Silva, the Colombian Defense Minister, delivered his own opinion on the incident, saying it was “not an accidental violation” of Colombian airspace. From Davos, Switzerland, where he was attending the World Economic Forum, President Alvaro Uribe quickly corrected Mr. Silva’s position: “The Colombian government has interpreted [the incident] as an error and we don’t want to think otherwise.”

Long story short, the helicopter entered Colombia and then left, the Foreign Minister condemns the incident, the Venezuelans deny it, the Minister of Defense says it was a deliberate action, and the President calls it a mistake. Please, can we find something on which there is some agreement? In fact, we can. Everyone agrees that the Colombian Armed Forces never responded in any manner whatsoever to the incursion by the Venezuelan helicopter (even Mr. Maduro, who by denying the whole thing leaves out any possibility of a Colombian response).

The Colombian government’s position is that caution advised against any immediate response to the violation of airspace. In its communiqué after the incident, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared: “Assuming a prudent attitude, the Colombian Armed Forces did not react to this unacceptable event.” In his statement, Mr. Silva said that the Colombian military “kept maximum calmness (serenity) in order to prevent [the incident] from becoming a provocation.”

Really? I am confused by these declarations from the Colombian government. Military aircraft from a foreign and potentially hostile power enters Colombian airspace without permission, stays there for 20 full minutes, flies over the capital of a Colombian department and over a military base, and the Armed Forces do nothing? And that is somehow equivalent to ‘prudence’? Of course, I am not saying that the Colombian military should have shot down the Venezuelan helicopter (my idiocy does not go that far), but there are protocols that ought to be followed when airspace violations occur.

I found myself agreeing with Senator Gustavo Petro (of all people!) on this, who said that Colombian Air Force“should have put airplanes in our airspace and established communications with the aircraft, in order to make it land or escort it towards Venezuelan territory.” He is right. That is the sort of response I would have expected from the Colombian military, and that (or worse), is the way Venezuela would have reacted if a Colombian helicopter would have invaded their airspace.

By doing nothing, the Colombian military have set a terrible precedent. Even if the Venezuelan helicopter entered the country by mistake (and I doubt it), the Colombian reaction tells the Chavez autocracy that future similar actions will go unpunished. If Colombia wants to prevent a war with Venezuela (which is definitely within the realm of possibility), if Bogota wants to deter Caracas from attacking, the Uribe administration needs to show strength and resolve. That, unfortunately, was lacking on Wednesday. Furthermore, the government should for once put its act together. Every time the President and his Ministers say different things, it gives the image of improvised, disorganized policymaking.

As Mr. Petro said via twitter, “one must act prudently, but one must act”. With the helicopter incident, the Colombian government shows it is confusing prudence with passivity and inaction, a terrible mistake in International Relations. It is true that Colombia must avoid falling into Chavez’s many provocations, but at some point Colombia will have to start flexing its muscles. Regardless of the intentions of the pilots of that helicopter, or of the people who sent them to Colombia (some could think Chavez did it in order to move attention away from the many problems he faced at home last week), airspace sovereignty is not negotiable. I hope the government knows better the next time this happens–and trust me, there will be a next time.

This article appeared first in Colombia Reports

Venezuela and Colombia in 11 graphs. A comparison.

2010-01-29T23:34:00.010-05:00

These are a series of charts comparing Colombia and Venezuela according to different economic indicators. I have made some comments below each one of them.

Venezuela's GDP per capita has increased much faster than Colombia's in the past eleven years. However, this is probably due to the sharp rise in the price of oil in recent years, as oil accounts for over a third of the Venezuelan economy. When Hugo Chavez came to power, oil was $9 a barrel; today that price is $72. Oil reached a peak of $147 a barrel in July of 2008.

No doubt, Venezuela's economy has been much more volatile than Colombia's. Years of high growth rates are invariably followed by economic recessions. Colombia on the other hand, left its 1999 crisis and remained in positive ground for almost a decade, although in 2008 and 2009 the economy received a big blow due to the world recession.
Inflation has been much higher in Venezuela than in Colombia in the past eleven years. Out of control government spending and price controls have really taken a toll on the purchase power of ordinary Venezuelans. In contrast, Colombian inflation has been kept under control.
This is where you may think that we are all nuts. Wasn't Venezuela the socialist country out of the two? How come the Colombian government's expenditure is larger as a portion of GDP? Yes, as a portion of the economy, the Colombian government is considerably larger than Venezuela's. However, note that while the government expenditure in Colombia tends downwards, in Venezuela it has increased considerably, from 20 to 26% of the economy since 1999.
Both the Venezuelan and the Colombian government have been unable to balance their budgets. The two of them still spend more than they earn. In any case, Venezuela's 8% budget deficit in 2009 still doubles Colombia's 4%. The Uribe administration is much more fiscally responsible than the Chavez autocracy.

Again, the price of Venezuelan exports has gone through the roof due to the price of oil. Notice how the graph peaks in 2008 and then falls markedly in 2009. Colombian exports were also hit by the world recession and Chavez's economic blockade against Colombia in 2009.
Total Factor Productivity Growth is the percentage of economic growth that is unexplained by increases of capital and labor. It seems that overall, Colombia's TFPG has been rising more consistently than Venezuela's, which keeps going up and down.
Here the Chavistas beat the Uribistas at first glance. Unemployment in Venezuela is 2.5% lower than in Colombia, while in 2003 Venezuela had 4% more unemployment. It seems that in Venezuela's case, lower unemployment has been traded for higher inflation. Hard to say which one is worse.
This graph speaks for itself. Venezuela's Inward Direct Investment has all but collapsed. People are taking money out of the country as Chavez keeps scaring investors away. Colombia's direct investment, in contrast, has soared. Perhaps some money is being sent there from scared investors in Venezuela?
Venezuela's industry has all but stagnated. Industrial output has grown about 13% in a period of ten years. In contrast, Colombia's industrial output has increased 32% in that same period.

Both governments have been able to lower the size of their debts relative to the size of their economies. Although Chavez, with lots of petrodollars in the bank, has been capable of doing it at a faster rate.

These graphs were made using the Economist Intelligence Unit's Data Tool.

National Bias and Impartiality at the International Court of Justice - Part Two

2010-01-28T10:40:00.003-05:00

This is the second part of my paper on national bias in the International Court of Justice. If you haven't read part one, go here.

CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF NATIONAL PREFERENCES IN THE ICJ

It has been widely shown that judges in the ICJ have a strong national bias. But what can explain this behavior? Although it may be partly true, simply saying that the judges favor their nations because they are patriotic is an unsatisfactory answer. Moreover, what is the impact that this voting behavior has on the independence of the Court? Some could easily jump to the conclusion that the national bias destroys all impartiality in the ICJ, but, as this section shows, the reality is much more complex.

The reasons that explain the voting behavior of national judges may be psychological, academic, institutional, economic or ideological. Let us begin with the first two categories: it is understandable that ICJ judges have “strong emotional ties with their countries”, as Posner and Figueiredo put it (Posner & Figueiredo 2004, 11). After all, ICJ judges usually have served as politicians, attorneys, diplomats, public administrators, magistrates, etc. in their nations before joining the Court.[1] Their reputations as respected, well-connected people have the consequence that judges could be afraid of getting bad press in their home countries if they vote against them. Public opinion may count in their calculations. In addition, it is natural that ICJ judges have greater knowledge of the legal system and practices of their home countries. In other words, they are much more used to the way justice is made and understood in their nations. It is difficult to put aside all these experiences and emotional ties, especially when the national interests of one’s own country are at stake. These psychological and academic constraints could explain the national bias in the Court to some extent.

Nonetheless, the previous section of this paper shows that judges in the ECHR do not have the same national bias that ICJ judges have. Why is this? There has to be something specific in the way the ICJ operates (i.e., in its institutional characteristics) that explains this behavior. The first of these institutional reasons is the fact that judges are rarely (in fact, never) dismissed by their fellow judges. Obtaining the unanimity (fourteen votes) needed to dismiss one judge is a costly process, and it is easy to see that the existing two and three-judge voting blocs in the Court, as described by Hensley, make this process virtually impossible. Therefore, ICJ judges know that they can repeatedly vote in favor of their nation without fear of being dismissed by their fellow judges.

The second institutional explanation for the national bias in the ICJ is, in a way, the opposite of the previous one. The other Members of the Court may be unable to affect a judge’s position, but there is someone else who has power over the judge’s job: her national government. During the judge election process, it is national governments who choose their candidates and who lobby other UN members for their votes in the General Assembly and the Security Council. Judges could lose reelection support from their governments if they vote consistently against their contentions. Thus, if a judge wants to retain his position, it is in her interest to favor her State when it appears before the Court. No fear of dismissal if they vote for their country, and fear of losing reelection if they do not, helps explain the national bias, too.

What happens with ad hoc judges? They are not running for reelection, and once elected they stay in office for the entire duration of the case. Then, why is it that they vote for their national governments with astounding frequency? A national government is able to elect ad hoc judges at its discretion, and after the dispute has reached the Court. As a consequence, governments usually choose judges who have a formed opinion in the case and who will favor their contentions once on the bench (Kuijer 1997, 51). This ex post capacity of national governments to choose ad hoc judges guarantees that these judges will be biased almost by default. This also helps explain why ad hoc judges show a greater national bias than regular ICJ judges.

The economic reasons, of national bias are related to the points made in the paragraph above. Although the ICJ judges obtain their annual salary from the Court’s coffers (and not their government’s), judges are not at risk of losing their wage if they displease their government (ICJ, 2006b). However, when they vote, judges may be thinking about their financial stability after leaving the ICJ. A government can punish a ‘disloyal’ judge by deciding to give her no other public positions when their tenure ends (Posner & Figueiredo 2004, 11). Posner and Figueiredo logically conclude that “these considerations are likely to weigh even more heavily in the calculations from authoritarian states” where control of the economy remains largely in the hands of the State (Posner & Figueiredo 2004, 11).

Finally, there are some ideological explanations as well. As it was mentioned, judges usually vote for countries that have political systems and levels of wealth similar to those of their own states. This could stem from a belief that some sorts of government and economic organization are better than others (e.g., democracies vs. dictatorships, capitalism vs. planned economies). Also, judges from poor countries may be more open to the belief that poor nations deserve retribution from richer States (e.g., for past colonial practices, trade policies, etc.), while judges from developed countries may think the contrary. These beliefs, if ingrained in the judges’ minds, may have a bearing in the way they vote. Given their profound convictions, judges could be ideologically predisposed to favor their own nations and other countries with similar characteristics.

All the reasons shown above sound rather cynical. Are ICJ judges so guided by their patriotic, personal, and material considerations that they are unable to look at the cases with at least some objectivity? What about the ideals of international law and justice to which they have dedicated a good part of their careers? Actually, there is a final explanation of national bias (which is not discussed in depth in any of the works cited here) that takes this last issue into consideration: ICJ judges may decide to vote in favor of their nations in order to preserve their country’s commitment to the Court and to international justice. If a government comes to believe that its point of view is rarely represented on the Court’s bench, this could reduce its willingness to comply with the judgments of the ICJ and lead it to stop seeing the Court as a tribunal where its contentions will be treated fairly. This is something that national judges may take into account, especially if their nation has shown some opposition to the ICJ in the past. Thus, national judges could see themselves as the keepers of the Court’s credibility before their government’s eyes, understanding that to vote against their country could undermine the job of the ICJ.

This leads us to the consequences of national bias at the ICJ. Many criticize this behavior by arguing that it puts into question the impartiality of the Court. Yet, the previous paragraph points to a different logic. The national bias may be “a political necessity” for the ICJ to work, given that it may increase confidence in and compliance with the Court’s decisions (Kuijer 1997, 51-52). If there was no guarantee that the position of all litigant parties would be represented on the bench, national governments could be less willing to trust the ICJ (Kuijer 1997, 56). In this case, a court of sovereign States where territorial, economic and other important national interests are discussed sounds like the one place where one should be allowed as a judge in one’s own cause. As some have argued, allowing permanent and ad hoc national judges to sit in the Court is a political concession that helps the cause of international law.

Nonetheless, the above does not solve the issue of the Court’s impartiality. Regardless of its ‘political necessity’, the national bias could still represent a danger for the objectivity of the ICJ. This point of view, however, does not hold in practice. Allowing national judges to sit in the Court does not diminish the ICJ’s impartiality or change the outcome of the cases. There are two main reasons why this occurs: First, in a normal case with two litigants there are maximum two national judges on the bench (one for each party). If these national judges vote in favor of their own countries, as it occurs 90 percent of the times, their votes will cancel out, having no bearing on the final outcome, as all rulings are made by majority decision (Posner & Figueiredo 2004, 12). Second, it is fact that the vast majority of cases at the ICJ are decided by large majorities of ten or more judges. In almost all cases, there are few dissenters, and so, there are almost no close votes in the Court. Out of the 140-odd cases on which the ICJ has issued judgments since 1949 there are only two (Liberia v. South Africa and Ethiopia v. South Africa, both on 1966) that were decided in an 8-7 split vote. This means that the votes of national judges are almost never decisive in swinging a decision one way or the other, as the outcome would have been exactly the same as if they had not been sitting in the Court.

CONCLUSION

There is a large body of evidence showing that judges at the ICJ tend to favor their home states and states with similar characteristics to their own. The statistical work of scholars and the opinions written by the judges are proof of this national bias. As their position in the Court and their future financial stability inter alia depend on the support of their national governments, it is logical that ICJ judges favor the contentions of their own States. Nonetheless, judges may also support their nations as a way to uphold the credibility of the Court and of its judgments.

Although some claim that this national bias hinders the Court’s credibility, this is not the case. Statistically, the votes of national judges are irrelevant for the decisions of the ICJ, as they almost never alter the outcome of the cases. Furthermore, as the votes of the two opposing national judges usually cancel each other out, there is no ground for the argument that the national bias has an impact on the Court’s decisions. Therefore, although ICJ judges are certainly one-sided regarding their own countries, the Court as a whole remains impartial and largely unaffected by the existence of the national bias.

For these reasons, changing the Court’s structure in order to prevent national judges from participating in the cases would be both unnecessary and potentially harmful. It would be unnecessary because keeping national judges out of the procedures would not alter the outcome of the vast majority of cases. And it would be potentially harmful because it can diminish both the credibility of the ICJ and the compliance with its decisions among sovereign States.

As many nations turn to the ICJ in order to solve disputes that could also be dealt with through other less preferable means (war being the most destructive), maintaining the credibility of the Court is a task of utmost importance. All changes that could damage the trust that sovereign States have put in the ICJ should be left aside. There can be little doubt that getting rid of regular and ad hoc national judges would be one of these unwelcome changes.

WORKS CITED

Government of Malaysia. (2004, March 25). Memorial of Malaysia. Retrieved January 12, 2010, from International Court of Justice: http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/130/14139.pdf

Government of Nicaragua. (1984, April 9). Application Instituting Procedures . Retrieved January 13, 2010, from International Court of Justice: http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/70/9615.pdf

Government of Singapore. (2004, March 25). Memorial of Singapore. Retrieved January 12, 2010, from International Court of Justice: http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/130/14133.pdf

Government of the United States. (1984, August 17). Counter-memorial of the United States. Retrieved January 12, 2010, from International Court of Justice: http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/70/9627.pdf

Hensley, T. R. (1978). Bloc Voting on the International Court of Justice. The Journal of Conflict Resolution , 22 (1), 39-58.

International Court of Justice. (2006a). How The Court Works. Retrieved January 6, 2010, from The International Court of Justice: http://www.icj-cij.org/court/index.php?p1=1&p2=6

International Court of Justice. (2006b). Members of the Court. Retrieved January 6, 2010, from The International Court of Justice: http://www.icj-cij.org/court/index.php?p1=1&p2=2

International Court of Justice. (1978, July 1). Rules of Court. Retrieved January 6, 2010, from International Court of Justice - Basic Documents: http://www.icj-cij.org/documents/index.php?p1=4&p2=3&p3=0

International Court of Justice. (1945, June 26). Statute of the International Court of Justice. Retrieved January 6, 2010, from The International Court of Justice: http://www.icj-cij.org/documents/index.php?p1=4&p2=2&p3=0

International Court of Justice. (1986, June 27). Summary of Judgment of June 27, 1986. Retrieved January 12, 2010, from International Court of Justice: http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/70/6505.pdf

International Court of Justice. (2008, May 23). Summary of the Judgment of 23 May 2008. Retrieved January 12, 2010, from International Court of Justice: http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/130/14506.pdf

International Court of Justice. (2006c). The Court. Retrieved January 12, 2010, from International Court of Justice: http://www.icj-cij.org/court/index.php?p1=1

Kuijer, M. (1997). Voting Behaviour and National Bias in the European Court of Human Rights and the International Court of Justice. Leiden Journal of International Law , 10 (1), 49-67.

Madison, J. (1787, November 22). The Federalist No. 10. Retrieved January 6, 2010, from Constitution.org: http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa10.htm

Posner, E. A., & Figueiredo, M. D. (2004, December). Is the International Court Biased? Chicago John M. Olin Law & Economics Papers .

Schwebel, S. (1986, June 27). Dissenting Opinion of Judge Schwebel. Retrieved January 12, 2010, from International Court of Justice: http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/70/6501.pdf

Suh, I. R. (1968). Voting Behavior of National Judges in International Courts. The American Journal of International Law , 63 (2), 224-236.

[1] The biographies of the current judges in the ICJ may be found at: http://www.icj-cij.org/court/index.php?p1=1&p2=2&p3=1

National Bias and Impartiality at the International Court of Justice - Part One

2010-01-28T10:26:00.004-05:00

Recently, I had to write a paper for a class called Judicial Politics. In my paper I decided to study the national bias existing in the International Court of Justice. A large body of empirical evidence shows that ICJ judges usually vote in favor of their country of origin when it appears before the Court. Moreover, there is evidence of bloc-voting and other biases inside the Court, which has led several observers to question the ICJ's impartiality. In my paper I analyze the impact that the existence of the 'national bias' has on the impartiality and the credibility of the Court.

I will post the paper in two different entries, given its extension. Here is the first part:

The fifteen regular judges that serve in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) have the important task of solving disputes among sovereign States. Those who believe that the differences between US Supreme Court justices are sharp, could change their minds after looking at the composition of the ICJ: these judges come from a variety of academic backgrounds, speak different languages, are knowledgeable in distinct legal systems, and have different nationalities. However, even if the membership of the ICJ is supposed to represent the “main forms of civilization and of the principal legal systems of the world” all of its judges express a deep commitment to International Law (International Court of Justice, 1945, Art. 9). Every time a new judge joins the ICJ, she is required to make the following declaration before her colleagues: “I solemnly declare that I will perform my duties and exercise my powers as judge honourably, faithfully, impartially and conscientiously” (ICJ, 1978, Art. 4, emphasis added).

Nonetheless, some observers have put into question the impartiality of the ICJ due to the way in which the Court operates. Think about James Madison’s words in Federalist No. 10 that “[n]o man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity” (Madison, 1787). However, in every case before the ICJ, each country that is a party to the dispute is allowed to have one judge from that nationality sitting on the bench (ICJ 1945, Art. 31). If there is no judge from the nationality of one of the parties among the fifteen regular judges, that country is allowed to name an ad hoc judge who will sit in the Court for the duration of the case (ICJ 1945, Art. 31).

Several questions arise from this particular way in which the ICJ proceeds: 1) Do judges vote according to their national preferences? 2) What are some possible explanations for this behavior? 3) If judges are biased, is this something that hinders the Court’s ability to produce fair and impartial rulings? 4) Are there structural or procedural changes the Court could undergo in order to solve current problems? This paper aims to answer these questions by looking at past scholarship on the subject and presenting original work that examines the behavior of national judges in the ICJ. This analysis is divided in four sections. The first one offers general background on the procedure and the composition of the Court. The second section examines the scholarly evidence regarding ICJ voting patterns and the preferences of judges, and looks as primary sources, such as the opinions of judges in cases involving their own nations. The third section explores the reasons behind the voting patterns shown by ICJ judges as well as the impact of this behavior on the Court’s impartiality. A final section concludes.

BACKGROUNDER: the International Court of Justice

Founded in 1945, the International Court of Justice is the most important judicial organ of the United Nations, whose main purpose is “to settle, in accordance with international law, legal disputes submitted to it by States” (ICJ 2006c). All UN members are parties to the ICJ’s statute, which means that virtually every nation has the right to submit cases to the Court (ICJ 2006a). However, the ICJ will consider itself capable of ruling on a dispute only if the States involved mutually consent to it, or if the case concerns a treaty containing a provision that stipulates that disputes over the application of the treaty would be referred to the Court (ICJ 2006a). Type of cases that the ICJ has heard in the past, include disputes over land and maritime delimitation, the legality of the use of force, issues of sovereignty, nuclear tests, etc.[1]

As it was mentioned above, there are two types of judges sitting in the ICJ: regular judges and ad hoc judges. The fifteen regular judges serve terms of nine years with one possible consecutive reelection. Articles 1 to 15 of the 1945 Statute of the Court outline the judge election process. Regular judges are selected from a list of candidates nominated by the national groups of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, another UN judicial organ of lesser importance where all UN members are represented.[2] All nominees ought to be persons who are knowledgeable of international law, or who hold the qualifications to accede to the highest judicial offices in their home countries, according to Article 1 of the Court’s statute. The UN Secretary General gathers this list of nominees and presents it to the General Assembly and the Security Council, who proceed independently from one another during the election. In order to be elected to the Court, a candidate will have to obtain an absolute majority in both the General Assembly and the Security Council.

The selection process for regular ICJ judges ensures that all the “principal regions of the globe” are represented in the Court at all times (ICJ 2006b). At present, two judgeships are reserved for countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, five for Western Europe and its offshoots –including the US, Canada, Australia, etc. –three for Africa and Asia each, and two for Eastern Europe (ICJ 2006b).

The process for selecting ad hoc judges has fewer participants and bureaucratic restrictions. A party to a dispute without representation among the regular judges is generally free to name an ad hoc judge at its discretion (ICJ 1978, Art. 35). The only requirement for ad hoc judges is that they too must be prominent jurists in their nations, preferably those presented by the governments as candidates for a regular seat in the ICJ. Once a decision on the name of the ad hoc judge has been reached, the party must notify the Court, and if the opposing party and the Court itself present no objections, the judge joins the bench with the same rights and privileges of regular judges for the duration of the case (ICJ 1978, Art. 7). This relatively easy, constrain-free selection process contrasts with that of the regular judges, which is influenced by the politics of the General Assembly and the Security Council.

Another important point regards the impeachment of judges in the ICJ. Once a judge has joined the Court, removing her from the position is difficult to achieve, as she may only be dismissed by “the unanimous opinion of the other members (i.e., judges)” (ICJ 1945, Art. 8). To date, no ICJ judge has ever been dismissed.[3] Thus, in practice, the only reasons why an ICJ judge leaves the bench are resignation, losing reelection, the end of two consecutive terms, and death.

Finally, in deciding cases, the ICJ works very much as any other high tribunal of justice. The Court accepts both oral and written evidence, and after the hearings are closed, the judges of the Court withdraw to deliberate in private (ICJ 1945, Art. 52 & 54). When a majority of the judges support the ICJ’s decision, it becomes a binding ruling for the parties, and a majority opinion is written (ICJ 1945, Art. 55 & 59). The judges who vote against the majority may write dissenting opinions (ICJ 1945, Art. 57).

National Preferences in the International Court of Justice

The individuals who serve as judges of the ICJ are leading experts in their field and presumably they have great respect for the ideas of justice and fairness –after all, they have dedicated their lives to studying and interpreting the law. Accordingly, one expects their judicial decisions to be unbiased, which means that for a number of similar cases, their rulings should be similar, regardless of the parties involved. In other words, most people would agree that the decisions of these international judges should only be guided by the facts of the case, and not by the identity of the parties in the dispute.

Nevertheless, there is a great body of evidence that points to a very different direction. As a matter of fact, judges in the ICJ usually favor the position of their own governments when these appear before the Court –they have a national bias. This behavior has been documented and discussed by scholars at least since 1968, when Professor Il Ro Suh of Baker University, using a data set of 203 ICJ votes, calculated that judges vote for their government’s position about 82 percent of the time (Suh 1968, 228). When studying them separately, Suh found that regular judges vote in favor of their States 70 percent of the times, while ad hoc judges do so in 91 percent of the cases (Suh 1968, 230). Furthermore, Suh found that in 5.5 percent of the times when regular judges voted in favor of their government’s position, they did so as only dissenters, while ad hoc judges showed this behavior in 19 percent of those votes (Suh 1968, 228).

These statistics are telling. Both regular and ad hoc judges recurrently vote in favor of their own countries, even against the opinion of the rest of the members of the Court. Suh demonstrates that, in general, judges do not act independently of national interests.

Nevertheless, although Suh’s points are illuminating, his dataset has the shortcoming that it was taken four decades ago. In that time, the world order has changed significantly, globalization has taken hold, and NGOs and other non-State actors have come to the forefront of world politics, challenging the supremacy of the State in international relations. Could it, then, be possible that Suh’s findings are outdated and that national biases in the ICJ are much weaker now? Consider that in the two decades since 1990 more cases were taken to the Court (72 in total) than in the forty-two years between 1947 and 1989 (71 cases). Perhaps this increase in the Court’s docket indicates greater trust in international justice, product of a decline in national bias within the ICJ.

Again, however, the evidence points in a different direction. In a 2004 paper, Eric A. Posner and Miguel de Figueiredo built their own dataset using much more recent information on votes by ICJ judges. According to their results, all ICJ judges voted for their home countries in 88.9 percent of the proceedings (Posner & Figueiredo 2004, 18). Again, ad hoc judges show a national bias more frequently than regular judges (90.5 percent of the times vs. 83.3 percent, respectively). Posner and Figueiredo’s results are consistent with those found by Suh thirty five years before. Time has not diminished the incidence of national bias in the Court; if anything, the frequency of this behavior has increased about 13 percent among regular judges!

Posner and Figueiredo also found evidence that ICJ judges have other biases besides that for their own state. In their study of 1358 proceedings at the ICJ, they concluded that ICJ judges favor states whose level of economic development is similar to that of their own states (Posner & Figueiredo 2004, 21). If the GDP of a country is very close to that of the judge’s nation, there is a probability of around 80% that she will vote in favor of that country. If the GDP of the judge’s nation and that of the litigant differ widely, that probability goes down to 20%. Furthermore, judges also favor States with similar political systems to their own, so that judges who come from democracies tend to vote against nondemocracies, and vice versa (Posner & Figueiredo 2004, 22).

Although none of these preferences are as strong as the national bias, they do indicate the existence of an important phenomenon that is useful for the discussion at hand: bloc voting at the ICJ. The results summarized in the previous paragraph suggest that judges coming from wealthy democracies would vote similarly, forming one camp, whereas judges from poorer nondemocracies would form another clear bloc.

In 1978, Thomas Hensley from the Kent State University in Ohio found some evidence on this, and wrote that votes in the ICJ “reveal several two- and three-judge blocs” (Hensley 1978, 39). Studying the permanent members of the Court of 1972, Hensley found that the two Communist judges (from the Soviet Union and Poland) had high levels of agreement across a number of ICJ rulings (Hensley 1978, 46). Furthermore, the five judges from NATO (from Belgium, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States) usually voted in a similar way, too. Perhaps these “clear differences between Western and Communist justices”, as Hensley puts it, are unsurprising given that the Cold War was taking place at the time (Hensley 1978, 48). However, the fact that ICJ judges form blocs according to international alliances and similarities in political and economic systems should give pause for thought. The evidence that ICJ judges are not entirely objective, given that they tend to favor their own countries and their allies, keeps piling up.

Looking at all the evidence mentioned above, one may think that national bias is something to be expected from all tribunals formed by judges from different countries. Perhaps there is nothing special about the ICJ in that respect. However, Martin Kuijer from the University of Leiden found that this is not necessarily the case, and that the national bias in the ICJ is particularly sharper than in other international Courts. Kuijer compared voting behavior at the ICJ with that at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), a Strasbourg-based tribunal that monitors respect to human rights in its 47 member States.[4] Comparing the ICJ and the ECHR is convenient because the two Courts use ad hoc judges (Kuijer 1997, 50).

Kuijer’s comparison does not show ICJ judges in a good light: judges in the ECHR voted against their government’s position in 61.6 percent of the 375 cases he studied (Kuijer 1997, 58). That is an enormous difference with the 10 percent of the cases in which ICJ judges vote in opposition to their national governments. Nevertheless, when taking ECHR ad hoc judges alone, the national bias increases significantly, as it occurs in the ICJ: Kuijer’s data says that these judges voted in favor of their own governments 60.9% of the cases in the European court (Kuijer 1997, 60). In any case, this number is not even close to the frequency with which ICJ ad hoc judges support the causes of their own States. Furthermore, judges in the ICJ are much more ready than ECHR judges to dissent from the majority of the Court and favor their home countries. While ECHR judges favored their States against the majority of the Court in just 11.2 percent of the votes, ICJ judges behaved that way 43 percent of the time, according to Kuijer’s data (Kuijer 1997, 58-63).

The studies by Suh, Posner and Figueiredo, Hensley, and Kuijer leave little doubt that the judges of the ICJ exhibit a particularly strong case of national bias. The next section of this paper explores some of the reasons why this behavior occurs. But first, let us examine a couple of specific examples of national bias in the ICJ, using both the majority and the dissenting opinions of the judges.

Case study 1: Nicaragua v. United States of America, 1984-1986

In 1984, the Sandinista-run government of Nicaragua filed a suit against the United States in the International Court of Justice. The Nicaraguans maintained that the US Government had trained a group “of more than 10,000 mercenaries”, known as contras, along their border with neighboring countries, and that these armed groups were “direct[ing] attacks against human and economic targets inside Nicaragua” (Government of Nicaragua, 2). On its side, the United States argued that the dispute was “not within the jurisdiction of the Court” because Nicaragua had not provided proof of its ratification of the Court’s Statute (US Counter-memorial 1984, 4). Furthermore, the US maintained that its actions were justified by “the inherent rights to individual and collective self-defense guaranteed to any such other State by Article 51 of the [United Nations] Charter” (US Counter-memorial 1984, 133)

Two years later, the ICJ issued a judgment containing sixteen operative clauses on which the Court voted separately (ICJ 1986). Most of the clauses condemned the US for its training of the contras. Clause two, for instance, rejected the American justification of collective self-defense and ruled that the United States “had acted, against the Republic of Nicaragua, in breach of its obligation under customary international law not to intervene in the affairs of another state” (ICJ 1986, 161). In a textbook example of national preferences at the ICJ, Judge Stephen Schwebel of the United States voted against this plus other eleven clauses of the judgment. Judge Schwebel even voted as only dissenter against three of the clauses (nos. 7, 14 and 15), two of which ruled that the United States was “under an obligation to make reparation to the Republic of Nicaragua for all injury caused” (ICJ 1986, 162).

In his dissenting opinion, Judge Schwebel repeated some of the same arguments that had been put forward by the representatives of the United States before the Court. He took his country’s position and defended it from the bench. In his dissenting opinion, the judge wrote again that Nicaragua could not act before the ICJ because it had not ratified the Court’s statute (Scwhebel, 560). Furthermore, Schwebel argued that the United States “acted lawfully” in its support of the contras, as it was reacting “in collective self-defense” in support of Nicaragua’s neighboring countries, which had previously been attacked by Nicaragua. (ICJ 1986, 168). Providing an example of bloc-voting, two other judges also voted against the opinion of the Court: Sir Robert Jennings of the United Kingdom, and Shigeru Oda of Japan.

Case study 2: Malaysia/Singapore 2003-2008

On July 2003, the Governments of Malaysia and Singapore notified the ICJ that they had entered an agreement by which they requested the Court to determine whether three groups of islands (Pedra Branca/Pulau Batu Puteh, Middle Rocks and South Ledge) belonged to one country or the other. As neither State had a national judge sitting in the Court, both Singapore and Malaysia elected ad hoc judges for this case (ICJ 2008, 1).

Predictably, in the written proceedings of the case, both countries claimed to have sovereignty over all three islands. Malaysia argued that its claim over Pedra Branca/Pulau Batu Puteh was much older than Singapore’s 1980 claim, and that the islands lie significantly closer to the Malaysian mainland (Government of Malaysia 2003, 3). In the following pages of its Memorial to the Court, Malaysia made similar claims about the other two islands. On its side, Singapore argued that Pedra Branca/Pulau Batu Puteh was part of its territory since the 1840s, and that Malaysia had “purported to include Pedra Branca within Malaysia’s territorial waters” since 1979 (Government of Singapore 2003, 1).

In a three-clause decision, the Court decided that sovereignty over Pedra Branca/Pulau Batu Puteh belonged to Singapore, and that sovereignty over Middle Rocks belonged to Malaysia (ICJ 2008, 13). South Ledge would belong to the State in the territorial waters of which it is located, leaving the matter to interpretation. Following a national bias, the Malaysian ad hoc judge Dugard voted against the first clause, while the Singaporean ad hoc judge Sreenivasa Rao voted against the second clause as only dissenter (ICJ 2008, 13). None of the two judges dissented on the third clause. This case illustrates how ad hoc judges vote for/against clauses depending on whether or not they benefit their national governments.

[1] A complete list of cases heard by the ICJ since 1947 may be found at http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/index.php?p1=3&p2=3

[2] More information on the Permanent Court of Arbitration and their national groups is available at: http://www.pca-cpa.org/showpage.asp?pag_id=363

[3] A list of all judges who have served in the Court since 1946 may be found at: http://www.icj-cij.org/court/index.php?p1=1&p2=2&p3=2. Judges who do not finish their full term usually resign or die in office.

[4] For more information on the European Court of Human Rights, visit: http://www.echr.coe.int/echr/Homepage_EN

The Price of Colombia's Drug War

2010-01-25T11:55:00.004-05:00

What is the price-tag of Colombia’s drug war? I started writing my senior thesis at Princeton with that question in mind. Every knowledgeable observer of Colombia is aware that the country’s fight against drugs has been costly in terms of human lives, resources, and lost productivity. Too many people have died in the violence that surrounds the world of cocaine, and too much government money has had to be allocated for the defense of the nation. With both drug lords and insurgencies turned narco-terrorists, the Colombian state had no choice but to fight back with determination.

However, imagine for a moment that it hadn’t had to be that way. Imagine a peaceful Colombia, free of cocaine, free of Pablo Escobars, Carlos Castaños and Manuel Marulandas (the beauty of that thought is so painful that it makes me want to stop fantasizing). Imagine, for example, that due to some mystery of fate, Colombia’s soil had proven totally incapable of growing marijuana and coca plants. Or, even better, imagine that the easy-money culture that comes with drug trafficking had never taken hold of the Colombian people. Just for one second, imagine…

Even if you would rather stay in fantasy land (I don’t blame you), we must now come back to reality. And reality is not nice. For decades now, Colombia has been a main battleground of the international war on drugs. The world’s top cocaine producer, Colombians have fought bravely and tirelessly to reduce drug production. There is no other country that has seen more of its citizens die in the battle against cocaine: since 1990 there have been 450,000 homicides in Colombia; in Mexico, another front of the war on drugs but with more than double the number of inhabitants, homicides in that same period amount to 220,000. For sure, cocaine has made Colombia bleed.

But the costs of the drug war go well beyond the number of casualties. The tragedy of the many Colombians who have been internally displaced since the 1980s has no parallel in the Western Hemisphere. Between 2.5 and 4 million people (there is debate over the exact number) have escaped their hometowns in the search for safety. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of forest acres have been cut down to grow coca and build camps for the production of cocaine. For every cultivated hectare (2.5 acres) of coca, around three hectares of forest are destroyed –and just last year the UN found 81,000 hectares of coca inside the country. It will take time for Colombians to realize the depth of the environmental impact that drug production has had on the country.

No doubt, the drug war has had terrible effects on the economy. By-products of the war, the destruction of infrastructure and physical capital has made the economy less prosperous, diminishing its prospects for growth. Although the size of the drug economy is not overwhelming (it fell from 4% and 1.6% of GDP between 2000 and 2007), drug lords have enough resources to create bubbles and distort markets significantly. The office of the Comptroller General has called attention to the fact that drug traffickers have bought large extensions of land in rural areas, thus increasing inequality indexes and often contributing to the displacement of peasants. According to those estimates, about one million hectares were thought to be in the hands of drug traffickers and their associates, although other analysts claimed the figure was as high as 5 million hectares. For its adverse effect on inequality, this phenomenon has been characterized as “an agrarian counter-reform”.

All these are social, economic, human and environmental costs of the war against drugs, and the list is far from complete. To these, we must add the added cost that the government’s justified retaliation has on the taxpayers. The Colombian state was weakened, its military underfunded and overwhelmed, violence was out of control, and anarchy just around the corner. Without that steep rise in defense spending that the Uribe administration calls by the fancy name of ‘Democratic Security’, Colombia would not have survived. America, much more generous than Europe in these affairs, was willing to lend a hand and pay for at least some of its responsibility in the Colombian drug trade.

So the country survived and improved to a large degree, but that transformation came at a high price. In the past five years, annual defense spending has been equivalent to 5.3% of the economy (between 11 and 12 billion USD). In contrast, the average South American country spends the equivalent to 1.7% of GDP in its defense budget. Looking in the books, you will find that between 1988 and 1995 Colombia never spent more than 2.5% of GDP in defense, and the number in the late 1990s rose to a maximum of 3.3% of the economy.

It is not hard to conclude that if Colombia were the average South American country with no drug war to fight, the government would not need to spend such a large amount of public funds in defense. That means that if Colombia had around 20 (and not its current 36) homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, almost no coca plants to eradicate, no insurgencies, and no cocaine to export, the government could make budget savings amounting to 3.6% of GDP, or about 9 billion USD! I bet the government could erase the fiscal deficit with that.

If you want, take that number as a rough indicator of how much the Colombian taxpayers spend in their antidrug effort. Consider that once you also add all the other costs of the war on cocaine (taking care of the internally displaced, lost production due to violence, market distortions due to money laundering, vanished human and social capital, dead forests, etc.) that number will go up significantly (perhaps to 6 or 7% of the economy?).

As I continue writing my senior thesis, I will explore these issues thoroughly. There is no question that Colombia today is a better place to live than at any other point in the past twenty years. But that privilege is costing us money, and for as long as Colombia remains at the center of the war against drugs, the country will have to keep paying a high price for its security. Yet again, few things are expensive if they work, especially if you are talking about protecting life, liberty, and property. So, is there an alternative? Could the country do better if it rejected the prohibition paradigm and embraced legalization? These are complex questions that escape simple answers. For now, the war goes on. And its costs keep growing.

This column appeared first on Colombiareports.com

Ley de Garantías. El dilema del gobierno

2010-01-19T23:16:00.005-05:00

El Presidente no sabe si aplicar la ley de garantías o no. Esa es la ley que garantiza que todos los candidatos estén en igualdad de condiciones en una elección, y por tanto es la que dicta plazos de campaña, topes en los gastos, tiempo de aparición en los medios de comunicación, etc. La duda del Presidente se origina en que todavía no sabe si puede ser candidato a una segunda reelección o no.

Yo me pregunto, ¿cómo puede uno cumplir una ley hecha para los candidatos si uno todavía está excluido por ley de ser candidato? Hasta ahora la Constitución solamente permite una reelección consecutiva, por lo que Uribe bajo el marco constitucional actual no puede ser candidato, y por lo tanto la ley de garantías no le aplica.

Sin embargo, para nadie es un secreto de que existe una gran probabilidad de que el Presidente pueda ser reelegido. Si pasa el referendo que modifica la Constitución, Uribe se podrá presentar de nuevo como candidato. Por ende, existe la sensación de que el Presidente debería estar cumpliendo la ley de garantías desde ahora en caso de que su candidatura se materialice. Si no comienza a cumplir la ley ahora y el Presidente termina siendo candidato, los demás aspirantes se estarían enfrentando con él a unas reglas de juego incluso más desiguales que las que existen ahora.

Sin embargo, mirado desde la perspectiva del gobierno, si el Presidente declara su intención de respetar la ley de garantías, todos los sectores políticos interpretarían esa acción como la muestra patente de que Uribe sí quiere reelegirse. Eso alteraría el mapa electoral aun más y podría dejar al Presidente mal parado frente a la comunidad internacional. Hasta ahora el Presidente ha guardado la apariencia de que su reelección depende del pueblo, de que la iniciativa es ajena al gobierno y que emana sólo de los votantes. Si el Presidente asegura que seguirá la ley de garantías, esa ilusión se rompe y parecería que Uribe está haciendo fuerza por su propia reelección. Los estragos que eso tendría en la imagen del Presidente no se pueden descartar.

Así pues, ese es el debate. Mientras tanto, los demás candidatos se quejan con razón de que no existen garantías y de estan parados sobre un campo de juego desigual. Aquí está un video que muestra las reacciones de los candidatos sobre este tema. El único que dice que siente garantías es el vocero del gobierno-candidato ("el del Presidente" como dice su lema de campaña) Andrés Felipe Arias.

Arias se esfuerza por copiar a Uribe

2010-01-19T14:14:00.003-05:00

Este es un video del precandidato presidencial por el Partido Conservador Andrés Felipe Arias. Más que la falta de propuestas claras y concretas, lo que me asombra del video es cómo Arias se esfuerza por imitar los ademandes del Presidente Uribe. La voz, el movimiento de las manos y la dicción de Arias hacen patente su intento por emular al Presidente. Incluso el lema de la campaña "Arias, el del Presidente" raya en lo absurdo... Un político tan capaz e inteligente como Andrés Felipe Arias debería mostrar algo más de originalidad a la hora de hacer publicidad política. Quizás por eso está bajando en las encuestas.

¿Será que se está esforzando demasiado por parecerse a Uribe?

Juzguen ustedes.

What Twitter says of the Colombian presidential election

2010-01-18T00:13:00.004-05:00

Some say that 140 characters on twitter are worth more than a thousand pictures on facebook. Perhaps. Twitter has become an important vehicle for people to share news, ideas, thoughts, and feelings with others –it satisfies our demand for information. Frankly, I think it is a great way to stay up to date with the headlines, and to get in touch with people you don’t know in person, such as politicians.

Obsessed with the upcoming presidential election in Colombia as I am, the first thing I did after opening my Twitter account was follow all the presidential hopefuls I could think of. I found Juan Manuel Santos, Noemi Sanin, Andres Felipe Arias, Sergio Fajardo, Rafael Pardo, Gustavo Petro, German Vargas Lleras, Antanas Mockus, and Lucho Garzon. It is understandable if you are overwhelmed by the number of names or if you don’t know who some of these people are –as a matter of fact, many Colombians don’t know these politicians either. For instance, according to a poll last month, an incredible 25% of voters say they have no idea who Juan Manuel Santos is.

After I started following these nine presidential hopefuls, I realized something: if you try to predict the results of the election by looking at the number of Twitter followers each candidate has, you will fail miserably. There is no significant correlation (seriously, I even made a scatter plot to show it) between poll numbers and Twitter followers for these nine people. Former Medellin mayor Sergio Fajardo, who is third in the polls, has the most followers by far (5,972). In contrast, former Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos only has 1,059 followers, but he is leading in the polls. Also, former Bogota mayor Antanas Mockus gets a mere 2% in the presidential polls, but he has a strong 2,733 followers on Twitter.

Before you say I might have suffered brain damage for even thinking that Twitter followership could be correlated with voter intention, listen to this: Sebastian Piñera, the winner of Sunday’s presidential election in Chile has 40,772 followers versus the 4,249 of his defeated opponent Eduardo Frei. Another example: Barack Obama’s 3.1 million followers dwarf John McCain’s 1.7 million. After all, it is not totally illogical that election winners have more Twitter followers, as a greater number of them means that more people want to know what you are doing, thinking, and saying.

But let’s move beyond follower numbers and see what the presidential hopefuls are saying on Twitter. I discovered that the candidates’ tweets say a lot about the kind of campaign they are running and the message they are bringing to the voters. Let’s take a look.

Juan Manuel Santos has no tweets at all. His profile is totally empty, with only the pictures of some of his one thousand followers on the right-hand side. In other words, he has nothing to say, no message to the voters. That is totally explained by the fact that he still doesn’t know whether or not he is going to run for the presidency. Mr. Santos’ candidacy depends on Alvaro Uribe’s inability to run for a third term, which has not been established yet. As a consequence, Mr. Santos cannot go out there and start talking about the kind of president he wants to be, or what his proposals are, if he has any at all. Acting otherwise could bring him huge problems with his party (la U) and with the government, and some voters would perceive as disloyal to the President. His popularity could go down. So for now, it is best for Mr. Santos to stay quiet just like his Twitter profile shows.

Something similar occurs with former Agriculture Minister Andres Felipe Arias. Although Mr. Arias has written hundreds of tweets, they contain very few proposals. Most of what he writes are things like: “@mariacamilita thanks for saying hi, big hug for you” or “@Mundoluque @ximenota17 Congratulations, best of wishes. You are welcome anytime”. Even the proposals in his campaign website are surprisingly superficial and unspecific, with exaggerated and vague statements such as: “build the infrastructure that Colombia needs for the following 80 years.” As Mr. Arias has made it clear that he will not be a candidate if Mr. Uribe runs for a third term, why would he spend time drafting complex campaign proposals? Although his Twitter shows that he has been touring the country, it also shows that his campaign has little substance.

On their side, Noemi Sanin, Sergio Fajardo and German Vargas are running a different type of campaign, and their Twitter profiles prove it. These three candidates are determined to stay in the race regardless of Mr. Uribe’s reelection attempt, so they need to call the voters’ attention now. Their Twitter profiles are nicely designed and exclusively filled with campaign messages specifying the candidates’ schedules, or answering questions about politics or their proposals.

Ms. Sanin says things like: “We will fight with determination and courage against the terrorists, poverty and corruption! We will defend decency, ethics and equality”, while one good example of Mr. Vargas’ tweets is: “I have been saying it since September 2008. The insecurity in the cities is out of control.” On his side, Mr. Fajardo’s profile shows messages that underline the candidate’s status as a political outsider: “We know that we are fighting against bags full of money. While some give away money, we give away flyers and hope” or (this one is a slight exaggeration) “we are, by far, the country’s greatest political phenomenon and we have built all this ourselves!” The difference with Mr Santos’ and Mr Arias’ tweets is remarkable, because unlike them, Sanin, Vargas and Fajardo are running their political campaigns with the aim of winning the election.

Now, what about the opposition candidates? Liberal Party hopeful Rafael Pardo’s tweets make constant references to inequality (he is a social democrat), security issues (he was Minister of Defense back in the day), and some sports comments here and there (he loves soccer). His profile has a good feel to it, and his strong number of followers shows that he is gaining momentum in the race. However, I don’t think that his attitude (“I can have a better government than Uribe’s”, says one of his tweets) matches his very low chances of becoming president. Now, about Gustavo Petro, his Twitter has very few things to tell us, as it is almost empty. This is surprising for someone who could make it to the runoff election. If Mr. Petro wants to fire up his voters, I am sure some more tweets could help him.

It seems like the candidates have realized that Twitter is a great tool they can use to maximize their chances in the election. Never before did voters have such a fast, direct link to their politicians, so I am hoping that ordinary Colombians also use Twitter to question and test the candidates. And so, with voters and candidates before the keyboard, the campaign will continue unrolling. 140 characters at a time.

The can-do lawyer: the inspector general's shameless defense of the referendum

2010-01-14T23:19:00.002-05:00

Alejandro Ordoñez, Colombia’s inspector general, is an anti-gay, anti-abortion social conservative. That, we already knew. We also knew that he was very sympathetic to the government of President Alvaro Uribe: In May 2009, Mr. Ordoñez exonerated Health Minister Diego Palacio and former Interior and Justice Minister Sabas Pretelt of all charges in a case involving buying votes from a congresswoman in 2006. What we did not know, however, is that Mr. Ordoñez had the ability to twist and overlook crucial facts that he has demonstrated this week. In his eagerness to please the government, the inspector general has gone way out of line, showing that he is a man that cannot be trusted with the high office given to him.

As part of his duties as inspector general, Mr. Ordoñez this week issued an opinion on the constitutionality of the referendum that would allow President Uribe to run for a third term of the presidency. The inspector general’s opinion seems to be written by the promoters of the referendum themselves. In the 53-page document, Mr. Ordoñez totally shies away from objectivity, claiming that the “popular initiative [the referendum], being the manifestation of the people, maintains the character of a direct exercise of popular sovereignty” (page 5) and that it “is in agreement with the current constitutional order” (page 24).

In an episode of The West Wing, President Bartlett had a line suitable for this occasion: "Is it possible to be astonished and yet, at the same time, not surprised?" Of course we all expected the Inspector General to be in favor of the referendum. After all, he owes his job to the government. But did Mr. Ordoñez need to go to such great lengths in defending the referendum? Couldn’t he save a little face and show some objectivity in his opinion? The story of the referendum is one of inconsistencies, violations of the law, political warfare, lies and trickery. In his document, Mr. Ordoñez uses the minutiae of the law in order to wash all these things away and present the referendum as a clean, immaculate thing that it is not.

Let’s take a look. First, the inspector general states that the constitution allows the people “to substitute […] superior rules” via referenda. That is absolutely true: Colombians have the right to change the articles contained in their constitution by voting in a referendum. However, in 1991 the Constitution was drafted with a four-year long presidency in mind. The balance of power between the three branches of government was not created to resist a twelve-year presidency, and the whole design of the constitution could crumble under the weight of such a powerful executive branch. Colombia could then become what Fareed Zakaria has called an "illiberal democracy," ruled by a strongman elected by the people.

Some argue that perhaps Colombia would need a new constitution if there is going to be a president in power for twelve years. Yet Mr. Ordoñez dismisses this argument, claiming that the referendum does not imply “a change of sufficient importance to substitute the superior text [the constitution], but simply a quantitative modification regarding the figure of presidential reelection” (page 4). That is just a fancy way of saying what Mr. Uribe said many years ago, referring to his first reelection: it’s just a “little article” (articulito).

Note that in his document the inspector general does not explain why allowing a second presidential reelection does not imply a change to the constitution as a whole; he merely states it in intricate legal terms. In page 5 of his opinion, Mr. Ordoñez uses the argument that since the Constitutional Court believed that allowing one presidential reelection did not alter the design of the constitution, two will do no harm. He implies that, given that the referendum only promotes “reelection for one additional term,” in other words exactly what happened with the first reelection, there is basically no difference this time. That argument is hard to buy.

The inspector general moves on to evaluate the “vices of procedure” involving the referendum; in other words, the small and large illegal maneuvers that had to occur for the referendum to be where it is today. Let us remember what these are: first, the group of people who collected the signatures for the referendum received some donations that went beyond the limits set by the law. Second, once it reached Congress, the text of the referendum was changed by the lawmakers. Interpreted literally, the text signed by the people who were in favor of the referendum would have allowed Mr. Uribe to run for President in 2014; Congress changed it so that the President could run in 2010. Third, the House of Representatives voted on the proposal for the referendum during an “extra session” that did not fulfill the legal requirements for such an occasion.

Mr. Ordoñez dismisses each and every one of these vices with amazing economy and more legal obscurities. The illegal donations for the signature collection “do not have the reach to enervate the popular intention to reform the Political Constitution” according to him (page 13). Regarding the change of text made by Congress, Mr. Ordoñez writes: “´[t]he legislator [Congress] only clarified [precisó] the intention of the people without altering it” (page 23). One part of the document says that the will of the people must be respected because it is “sovereign”, but another part says that Congress needed to “clarify” that will. How convenient.

Finally, about the extra session in the House of Representatives, the inspector general argues that the whole thing was “constitutional” (page 31). Just like that. No biggie. It doesn’t matter that the decree calling for the extra session did not appear in the official gazette, as is required by law. It doesn’t matter that the decree calling for the extra session was drafted when Congress was not in recess, which also goes against the law. Mr. Ordoñez dismisses these arguments, or simply says that the critics have an “erroneous” understanding of the law (page 27).

I asked presidential candidate German Vargas Lleras via Twitter (follow me here) what he thought about Mr. Ordoñez’s opinion. Mr. Vargas wrote: “I respect the statement of the Inspector General, but the decision is at odds with the country’s judicial reality.” That, I am afraid, is an understatement. Can-do lawyer that he is, Mr. Ordoñez has written the most shameless defense to date of a referendum inundated with illegality. What a disgrace for a man who is supposed to “protect the observance of the Constitution and the Law”. Let us hope the Constitutional Court has greater self-respect than the inspector general.

This column appeared first in Colombia Reports

Colombia, not so bloody anymore

2010-01-07T16:45:00.004-05:00

Click to Enlarge

Even though there was a comeback by FARC in 2009, that year was the least violent one Colombia has had in around 25 years.

Colombia's homicide rate (homicides per 100,000 inhabitants) and the number of kidnappings declined in 2009, demonstrating that President Uribe's policy of Democratic Security is still producing good results. In contrast, Socialist Venezuela's murder rate and number of kidnappings double (and now, possibly triple) those of Colombia.

Although there were some increases in violence in Colombia's largest cities (Bogota, Cali, and the situation is specially worrisome in Medellin), overall, the country is a much safer place than it was at the beginning of last decade.

For 2010, the mayors of Colombia's main cities need to improve their police forces in order to reduce levels of violence there. If they are successful, 2010 could set a new record for low levels of violence in modern Colombia. That would be a good start for this new decade.

How to Win Colombia's Presidential Election

2010-01-04T15:32:00.006-05:00

All of them (one woman and six men) have started their campaigns in an environment of uncertainty: not knowing whether Mr. Uribe will be able to present himself as a candidate again makes things a lot more difficult for those aspiring to succeed him. But they cannot wait until the issues around the referendum are sorted out; if the candidates want to have at least a shot at winning the presidency, they have to start letting Colombians know what they are all about.

I no longer work for any of these campaigns (I volunteered for the Vargas camp last summer), but this column says what I would tell my candidate if I were a close adviser to one of them. How can one win the presidency of Colombia? Or, at least, how can one win a number of votes that one need not be ashamed of (say, second or third place)?

The answers to these questions are not that difficult. Colombians have spoken loud and clear about the kind of government they like, and about the policies and institutions they want for their country. So here, dear candidates, you will find some tips to guide you throughout your campaign.

First and foremost: do not make sharp criticisms of Alvaro Uribe. 70% of Colombians either revere him or have deep respect for him and the changes he has made in the country. To speak ill of the President (say, because he wants to remain in power) will backfire in the opinion polls, and the last thing you want is to upset somebody who is much more popular than you and has the media on his side. Whenever possible, praise the President for his success and present yourself as somebody who will build on his achievements.

Second, talk tough on Venezuela, do not speak about a rapprochement with Caracas, and vow to maintain a close alliance with the United States. According to Gallup, a statistical consultancy, 65% of Colombians have a favorable opinion of the U.S., which happens to be the same proportion of people who have an unfavorable opinion of Venezuela. Fewer things would hurt a candidate more than promising to meet with Hugo Chavez, which could be interpreted as an attempt to appease him. However, a candidate will always have to emphasize that diplomacy is the preferred way to deal with our neighbors.

Third piece of advice: show strong support for the armed forces and the police, for these are the only institutions in Colombia that are more popular than Mr. Uribe himself. 84% of Colombians have a favorable opinion of the armed forces, while 70% support the police. Even after the "false positives" scandal, which broke towards the end of 2008, the lowest level of popularity seen by the armed forces was an impressive 77%. Colombians understand that the soldiers and policemen that serve them so bravely are the true defenders of their safety and their democracy. Criticizing the armed forces or the police for perceived corruption or human rights violations would cost precious votes. One might add that 68% of Colombians believe that Mr. Uribe’s government respects human rights. Along the same lines, dear candidates, you need to assure the voters that you will keep fighting the guerrillas as fiercely as Mr. Uribe has: between 75 and 77% of Colombians approve of the way the government is handling the conflict with the FARC and the ELN.

So, the mantra is: do not propose many changes regarding international relations or the internal conflict, and stick with the Uribe administration on those issues. Instead, the candidates should focus on three main issues: unemployment, the fight against poverty, and corruption. On these three subjects, Colombians’ support for government policy is low, or declining. 72% of voters reject the government's handling of the issue of unemployment, 55% disapprove of the government's goals in poverty reduction and 45% think that the administration is not doing enough to fight corruption (up from 22% in August 2008). No doubt this is a consequence of the recession and of scandals such as that over the Agro Ingreso Seguro program.

Other things that a presidential candidate should show support for are 1) the free trade agreement with the U.S. (67% of Colombians support it), and 2) the extradition of drug lords and guerrillas (63% of voters approve of this). The candidates need to be more careful with issues such as the aerial fumigation of coca plants (only 53% support it), and the humanitarian exchange of FARC prisoners for hostages (an issue that divides the citizens as no other, with 45% supporting and 50% opposing it). In any case, a candidate will scare away fewer voters if she supports aerial fumigation and opposes the humanitarian exchange. A final tip: going to church would not hurt – 63% of Colombians have a positive image of the Catholic Church.

I cannot guarantee that following these very general suggestions will put a candidate in line for the presidency. However, I am sure that doing and saying the contrary of what is written above will spell disaster for any campaign. Colombians have repeatedly shown that they want a center-right president for 2010-2014, and knowing this, even the Polo Democratico Alternativo and the Partido Liberal have chosen candidates (Gustavo Petro and Rafael Pardo, respectively) who are not to the left of their constituencies, but rather to the center.

Perhaps some dislike my implicit assumption that a viable candidate for the Presidency will need to act according to what the opinion polls say. In fact, I dislike it, too. I have always thought of politicians as people that should lead rather than being led, least of all by the pollsters. Alas, I dare anybody to try to win a national election by ignoring the opinion polls.

Arias, Fajardo, Pardo, Petro, Sanín, Santos and Vargas. Those are the last names of the seven most important candidates in Colombia’s upcoming presidential election. If President Alvaro Uribe does not run for a third term, it seems that the names of all these seven candidates will appear on the ballot on Election Day. All of them (one woman and six men) have started campaigning in an environment of uncertainty: not knowing whether Mr. Uribe will be able to present himself as a candidate again, makes things a lot more difficult for those aspiring to succeed him. But in any case, they cannot wait until the issues around the referendum are sorted out; if the candidates want to have at least a shot at winning the presidency, they have to start letting Colombians know what they are all about.

This column appeared first in Colombia Reports

PS - Two things: The Economist seems to agree with me that Colombia's minimum wage is too high for the country's income levels, and that this hurts employment. See Not Yet The Promised Land. Second, El Tiempo's Mauricio Vargas also believes that President Uribe will be unable to run for a third term this May. Read his column here. (I will not comment on the coincidence that his column is called Predicciones para el 2010, similar to my last entry in this blog...).

Somewhat Serious Predictions for 2010

2009-12-29T22:38:00.001-05:00

Last night I saw Puerto Rican astrologer Walter Mercado on TV, making predictions for 2010 for all the twelve signs of the zodiac. I am a Sagittarius, so according to Mr. Mercado, 2010 will be “excellent for travel and sports (but I’ve always been terrible at sports!)” and I should “change and reinvent [my] life” (if you are interested to know what Mr. Mercado predicts for your sign, go here). After listening to that most vague prediction for the next 365 days of my existence, I started thinking that if Mr. Mercado can get away with that, I should definitely try to make my own predictions for Colombia in 2010.

So here you will find what I think will occur in Colombia next year. Most of my predictions are nothing but educated guesses, as I do not claim to possess any psychic powers whatsoever. Nonetheless, others are simple hunches dictated by my intuition. As you will have to wait for an entire year in order to know whether or not I was right (and by that time we will all have forgotten what I said), I think there is little risk in putting my predictions out there.

Let us start with the economy, perhaps the easiest part, as smarter people than me have already made their forecasts for next year. The government thinks that the economy will grow 2.5% next year. As their forecasts are oftentimes inflated, the situation in Venezuela is unlikely to change for the better, and there will be no expected structural changes to the economy in the foreseeable future, I predict growth will be lower than that. The IMF believes so, too, and they forecast that Colombia’s GDP will increase 1.3% next year. 2010 will open with an unemployment rate of around 13% in January, which will gradually go down throughout the year, but do not expect it to go below 11%. Inflation will also speed up from its historic low this year, reaching 4-5% in 2010.

Now, let us move to politics. I predict that President Alvaro Uribe will not be able to stand for reelection next year, as the referendum that is meant to change the Constitution will not pass. I believe that the Constitutional Court will decide that the proposal for a referendum is constitutional, and will leave the matter in the people’s hands. It will be the best solution for them not to lose face before the government and wash their hands of all responsibility. However, fewer than 7.5 million Colombians will vote on the referendum, and as a consequence Mr. Uribe will have to leave the Presidency on August 7, 2010. He will be remembered as one of the greatest heads of state ever to rule Colombia.

The Presidential election will move forward and there will be a need for a run-off election, which Juan Manuel Santos will win. The runner-up will be one of these three men: Polo Senator Gustavo Petro, former Medellin Mayor Sergio Fajardo, and former Minister of Agriculture Andres Felipe Arias. Mr. Petro has more chances than the other two, according to the latest polls. In Venezuela, Mr. Santos’ victory will be received as the victory of the far right, and the cold war between that country and Colombia will continue. As a consequence, Venezuela’s economic blockade against Colombia will remain in place and tensions along the border will increase. Nonetheless, there will be no war between the two countries in 2010, as President Chavez will be more concerned with Venezuela’s dismal economic performance and the political problems it will bring. Throughout 2010, the situation along the border will be one of high alert.

In the United States, Congress will finally ratify the Free Trade Agreement with Colombia, although that is likely to occur only in the second half of 2010. Nonetheless, the US government’s general attitude towards Colombia will remain somewhat cold, and the government in Bogota will slowly learn to rely less on its American ally. Aid for drug eradication will diminish next year (this we already know for a fact) and the Colombian government which is already running a budget deficit will have to find that money inside its own pockets.

So, these are my main predictions for 2010. Other minor ones include: the introduction of Colombia’s third private TV channel, more problems for the construction of Bogota’s metro system and the inevitable moment of reckoning that Colombia is not prepared for hosting the soccer U-20 World Cup in 2011.

Of course, time could prove me totally wrong. Perhaps Mr. Uribe will after all win the 2010 election (or maybe even Mr. Petro, who knows), perhaps there will be a war with Venezuela, and perhaps the US Congress will not vote on Colombia’s FTA. Whatever. Walter Mercado probably has been wrong dozens of times and he still has a good number of followers, so I hope the people who read this column (and I thank them dearly for having borne with me for the past seven months) forgive me if none of my predictions become true.

From my home in Bogota, I wish you all a very happy 2010.

There is No Alternative: Reaction Paper to 'The Take'

2009-12-22T00:18:00.003-05:00

Recently I had to write another reaction paper to the film 'The Take', a documentary written by Naomi Klein about "cooperatives" in Argentina during that country's economic crisis in the first few years of this decade. During that time, some workers took over abandoned factories and tried to run them on their own, oftentimes successfully. Here is the link to the documentary's website.

This is my reaction paper:

The movie The Take is exactly what can be expected from a film written by Naomi Klein. A fighter for all things anti-capitalist, Ms. Klein is a loud critic of economic freedom, trade, business-friendly policies, the IMF, and pretty much everything else that has to do with globalization. In her film she takes the particularly bad case of Argentina as proof that capitalism does not work for the poor, and that a viable alternative model is that of worker-led cooperatives as the ones shown in the movie.

Of course, Ms. Klein’s film is wrong. The Take is full of half-truths, biased preconceptions, misinformation and a good deal of emotional manipulation designed to misguide the viewer. Let us start with the man that the movie portrays as the personification of evil: Carlos Menem. Ms. Klein’s film alleges that Mr. Menem followed “el modelo” (the capitalist model) to the letter, bringing Argentina to the brink of economic collapse. Indeed, Argentina went from prosperity to chaos in just a few years. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, GDP per head (at PPP) went from USD 9,455 in 1998 to USD 8,003 in 2002 –in other words, in four years, the average Argentinean lost 15.3% of its income.That is a real economic tragedy.

But that tragedy occurred precisely because Mr. Menem did not follow the capitalist model to the letter. A series of economic mistakes, all of which violated capitalist orthodoxy, were what led the country to such a disastrous outcome. First, let us talk about pegging the Argentinean Peso to the US dollar, an irresponsible policy which made it impossible for the Argentines to adjust its balance of trade, leaving exporters vulnerable to rises in the US dollar and the subsequent loss in competitiveness for Argentine products abroad. But that was not Mr. Menem’s worst anti-capitalist mistake. The real problem was the huge budget deficit and the associated high levels of foreign debt that Argentina ran under Mr. Menem’s tenure. His government did not have any discipline regarding fiscal policy and continued handing out subsidies (as shown in the movie), contrary to the main tenets of the Washington Consensus. If Mr. Menem had not pegged his currency to the dollar, if he had cut spending to repay debt and not the other way around, if he had stopped giving subsidies to businesses (all of which are so-called neoliberal policies), Argentina would have certainly not fallen into the economic depths it saw between 1999 and 2002.

Yet, Ms. Klein does not tell you this. She preaches that it was capitalism what doomed the country to failure, keeping for herself the complex details that put her version in trouble. Instead, she chooses to take the example of the workers in the cooperatives as an anti-capitalist, anti-profit alternative to neoliberalism. Undeniably, it is really difficult not to agree with the plight of the workers. They are good, hardworking people who are simply trying to make a living by helping each other and making their factories spring back to life. They are the people who were affected by Menem’s recklessness and ill-advised economic policies. Now they simply want their jobs back.

Nonetheless, even if Ms. Klein and the workers themselves would like to pretend otherwise, the Argentine economy cannot survive on what is produced by the cooperatives. Their alternative is doomed to remain precisely that –an alternative to mainstream modes of production in which an investor is needed in order to set up a factory. Think about it: the workers were only able to take over the factory because it was there in the first place. The old capitalist interviewed in the film had put 90 million dollars of his money (probably with a few million courtesy of Mr. Menem) in that factory. Not in a hundred years would the workers on their own have been able to come up with such a large sum of money in order to set up their own cooperative. The cooperatives only work if there is something else for them to take, and to that extent they are really incapable of becoming a viable alternative for economic growth in Argentina or anywhere else. Of course, I am glad that the workers got what they demanded, but nobody should pretend that this is a real substitute for globalization. To be sure, as Margaret Thatcher liked to point out, there is no alternative.

The Land of the Impossible: Why Can't Colombia Get Things Done?

2009-12-22T00:03:00.005-05:00

Arriving at Bogota’s El Dorado International Airport is an interesting experience. We Colombians are always thrilled about getting home, so oftentimes people clap right after the airplane lands. After waiting for everybody to leave the plane, you find yourself in an overcrowded room where immigration agents check passports. The service is usually very speedy, which makes you wonder how strict the agents are about who gets into Colombia and who doesn’t.

After getting your passport stamped, you go to the somewhat more chaotic baggage claim room. The five or six conveyor belts are all filled with bags, and so is the floor. Airport workers must constantly take unclaimed bags off the conveyor belts just to make room for the bags of following flights. People move around frantically searching for their possessions in the midst of the confusion.

Once you find your bags, you move to the customs line, which is best defined as a messy mass of people coming from all sides, trying to get past one of the small doors where the customs agents are sitting. You show the agent your customs form, and if you are lucky, he won’t ask you to have your bags searched by the police standing on the other side of the room. Once you make it to the exit, you see the sea of people waiting for travelers, all pushing against the ugly metallic barriers placed there to contain them. You finally find your relatives among the many unfamiliar faces, and, even as you hug them, you reach the inescapable conclusion that Bogota urgently needs a new airport.

This truth has been evident to all Bogotans for a while now. In order to improve the situation, in August 2006 the national government ceded control of the airport to a private firm that is supposed to transform and expand it. That was more than three years ago, but in that time the airport has had only a minor overhaul. The main thrust of the project, which requires the construction of a huge building with two new terminals, decent rooms for immigration, customs and baggage claim, has been all but abandoned.

The biggest obstacle to the construction of the new airport has been the question of whether the current ugly gray terminal should be torn down or not. For some, the old building (it was built in the 50s) has an important historic value that makes it worth preserving. The issue went all the way to the Inspector General and the State Council, whose decisions confirmed that the old terminal may be demolished in order to make room for the new building. Finally, last month an agreement on those terms was signed by the private owners of the airport. With all the delay, it is estimated that Bogota should have its new airport by 2014, and not by 2012 as was originally planned.

The difficult birth of Bogota’s new airport is representative of how tough it is to complete large public works in Colombia. Two more examples serve to emphasize the point. First, let us talk about Colombia’s third private TV channel. For the past ten years, Colombian TV has been dominated by a duopoly formed by RCN and Caracol, and although a boom in cable TV has brought more competition to the market, ordinary Colombians have little choice on their television screens. The government started to discuss the opening of a third TV channel in late 2007, and, soon after, three private conglomerates expressed interest in the project.

A big debate followed about whether the ownership of the third TV channel should be determined through an auction or by other means. Constant changes in the technical requirements for the channel (whether its signal would be transmitted in Ultra High Frequency or Very High Frequency, for example) created further delays. In the meantime, both the Comptroller General and the Inspector General started asking questions about the transparency of the whole process, and recently two of the three conglomerates said they would not be bidding for the TV channel anymore. The government insists that the third TV channel can still be auctioned even if there is only one bidder in the race. The future of the project is uncertain. Ironically, browsing the website of El Tiempo, Colombia’s leading newspaper, I found an article published in February of 2008 titled “Third Channel will have to Wait until 2009”. It now seems it will have to wait until 2010, too.

Our second example of the Colombian inability to move forward with big projects is Bogota's metro system. Mayor Samuel Moreno won the election largely on his promise that he would finally build “el metro” for a city that craves it. After much skepticism from his opponents, the Mayor finally announced the route that the first line of the new metro system would follow. The mayoralty appointed a manager for all things related to the project, and they set up a nice webpage. It seemed like Mr. Moreno was finally achieving some progress, when Planeacion Nacional, the national government’s department for planning, said last week that there were some serious errors in the technical studies that Mr. Moreno’s administration had presented. Now, those errors will have to be addressed by the bureaucrats in charge of the project, and their correction could increase the cost of the metro system by tens of millions of dollars. Even without this problem, Bogota wasn't expected to have its metro until 2016. How much longer will we have to wait now?

So yes, I sometimes feel Colombia is the land of the impossible. Our leaders make us dream of fancy new airports with no overcrowding, of smart and refreshing new channels that will bring diversity to our dull TV screens, and of fast and modern trains that can take us from one place to another in no time. But these dreams and grand projects often become entangled in the strong and sticky nets of bureaucracy and the juridical mess. For some reason, everything takes forever, and the constant changes in the specifications of the projects and the contents of the law make it difficult for private companies to go about their business.

Everyone agrees that a new airport, a third TV channel, and Bogota’s metro system would be fantastic things for the country, and yet it seems impossible to make them happen. Is it due to excessive red tape?Corruption? Plain inefficiency? Private third parties trying to hinder the progress of their private competitors? All of the above? I honestly do not know the reason behind this lack of action, but whatever it is, I do not expect it to change any time soon. I guess that means I will have to stop complaining about El Dorado and simply try to enjoy the ride.

This article appeared first in Colombiareports.com

Why Lowering the Minimum Wage is a Good Idea

2009-12-15T01:22:00.001-05:00

In Colombia, the end of the year always marks the beginning of an interesting event. No, it is not Christmas. If you thought it was el día de los inocentes (equivalent to April Fools’ Day), which Colombians celebrate on December 28, you did not guess right either. The event I am referring to, which occurs every single year in an almost ritualistic fashion, is the minimum wage negotiation.

The event proceeds as follows: In order to define the minimum wage for the following year, government officials meet with members of Colombia’s labor unions and representatives of business groups, say, in the presidential palace. The leaders of the labor unions start by demanding a rise of 10% (plus or minus a few percentage points) to the minimum wage. To this, the business leaders respond that the workers’ demands are simply unfeasible. A 10% rise in labor costs would mean that they would have to lay off some people. The negotiations go on for a while and no side is willing to give up. With no consensus in sight, the government proceeds to set the new minimum wage by decree. The increase is usually closer to what the business leaders propose, although a few points higher just for the government to save face.

The ritual repeats itself on and on, and this year is no exception. The first disagreements between the parties in the negotiations have appeared already. An added complication to the description above is that the Constitutional Court ruled in 1999 that the increase to the minimum wage could never be below inflation. This year, the economic downturn has brought prices down in Colombia, so inflation is expected to be about 2.5%. With this in mind, the business leaders argue that an increase of 3.5% in the minimum wage is fair, whereas the workers will accept no less than 8%. The labor unions argue that increasing the wage above inflation will boost aggregate demand, which will help get the economy back on its feet, as the workers will have more money to spend. The businessmen reply that such a suggestion is nonsense, arguing that the last thing that industries need right now is a hike in their payrolls, especially considering the deterioration in commercial relations with Venezuela.

What to do? Who is right? Indeed, this is class warfare at its best. The poor against the rich. The needy workers fighting the greedy capitalists, demanding what is rightfully theirs. To be honest, the corporatism involved in the whole process makes me rather uncomfortable. The government sitting together with the unions and the businesses trying to find a harmonious way to allocate resources is definitely something very far from the free market economy I want Colombia to become.

But as we have to work with what we have, let us go for the second-best solution. The government should decree a rise for the minimum wage of no more than 4%. Anything else beyond that would increase unemployment and enlarge the already immense informal economy. However, as the government should be mainly concerned with reducing both unemployment and the informal economy (not merely with preventing their expansion), there is something much braver that the government must do: create a parallel, flexible, cheaper version of the minimum wage, totally different from today’s stiff and expensive scheme.

Confused? Let me elaborate. For 2009, Colombia’s minimum wage was about COP496,000 per month (US$247). In addition to that, employers must pay their employees a subsidy for transportation of 59,300 pesos (US$ 29). That is the money that the worker receives in cash every payday. Backstage, however, employers are required by law to pay 12% of the salary to the worker’s retirement fund, 8.5% for his healthcare, 10.4% towards a severance pay fund (known in Colombia as cesantía), 9% for other welfare benefits and funds that go to two state agencies (this pay is called cobros parafiscales), and the list goes on. As a result, one worker in Colombia ends up costing 872,000 pesos (US$ 435) in total, although the employee only sees a fraction of that sum.

If you think there is no problem with this, and that it is really okay for employers to pay this much for each one of their workers, think again. In Colombia around 4.5 million people earn the minimum wage, according to some calculations. Yet, the same estimates put the number of people who earn less than the minimum wage at 8 million! These are the people who work in the informal sector, those without formal contracts and social security. By making their labor too expensive by decree, the minimum wage has shut off millions of Colombians from the formal sector. It is simply not profitable for employers to spend COP872,000 a month on some workers, especially in a country where labor is as abundant as it is in Colombia. By increasing the price of labor, the minimum wage ends up benefitting the few who earn it, at the expense of the rest of the workers who are made unemployable due to the high price tag the government has put on their skills.

But before you call me a snob for saying that Colombia’s US$435-per-month minimum wage is high, listen to this: Colombia has South America’s most expensive minimum wage relative to its income per capita, as shown by the graph above. This means that it is relatively more expensive to hire people in Colombia than in any of the other South American nations. It is no coincidence that Colombia has South America’s highest unemployment rate. Take another example: if in the United States the ratio of minimum wage to income per head were equal to Colombia’s, minimum wage workers would earn about US$2,500 a month, and not the US$1392 they earn today (working 8 hours a day, 6 days a week for the US$7.25 an hour mandated by the federal government). So yes, the minimum wage in Colombia is too high for the size of the economy.

Indeed, US$435 per month is an insufficient amount of money to provide a good living – on that I agree with the labor unions. But increasing the minimum wage to ever higher levels is only going to produce more unemployment and put more people in lower paid informal jobs. Seriously, if poverty could be eradicated simply by ordering businesses to pay higher wages, there would be no mystery to economic development, and all nations would have done it already. So what the Colombian government must do now is to bring people from the informal economy into the formal sector by creating a special, lower minimum wage for them. Perhaps this new wage won’t be very high, but it will certainly be better than the US$5 a day that some Colombians earn (and they are not the poorest ones). By liberalizing the labor market and by making the minimum wage more flexible, new formal jobs for the poor and the unskilled will appear. In time, the unemployment rate will go down to normal South American levels (which are still terribly high).

Nonetheless, it is not very likely that anybody in the minimum wage negotiations considers this option in any way whatsoever. The ritual of the negotiations will carry on as usual. And unfortunately, so will unemployment.

This article appeared first in Colombiareports.com

A look at Latin America's human development

2009-12-07T18:39:00.003-05:00

For many, the Human Development Index (HDI) is a good measure for quality of life across nations. The United Nations Development Program uses the index to rank countries according to their level of 'human development', taking into account variables of income, life expectancy, literacy rates, and education enrollment. A country with high levels of income, high literacy rates, high life expectancy and high levels of education enrollment will accordingly have a high level of human development.

Calculating the HDI for any country is not difficult. The big picture is that you take the average of the three indexes (income, life expectancy and education), which have been standardized and transformed in values (usually) between 0 and 1. The Wikipedia article on the HDI explains in depth how it is done.

I looked for HDI data for 17 Latin American countries in 1980 and in 2007, in order to see how human development in these nations had evolved in these 27 years. The graph below shows the results:

The existence of three clearly defined groups becomes evident. The first one, composed by Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela have high levels of human development. Ecuador, Colombia, Peru and Brazil, the second group, have medium levels of human development. The third group, made up by El Salvador, Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Paraguay, has low levels of human development.

From this data it seems that human development is "sticky". In 2007, Latin American countries remained in the group where they started out in 1980. There was virtually no intergroup mobility, as there were no spectacular leaps (or disastrous declines) in human development levels across Latin America. The only exception to this is Paraguay, which in 1980 could arguably be classified in the 'medium' group, but that was at the head of the low HDI category in 2007.

About intragroup mobility, that's another story. Look at Chile, for example: Back in 1980, Chile had the lowest HDI of all the countries in the top group. Panama, Mexico, and Venezuela all had higher human development. Neighboring Argentina was way up there, too. Today, however, the tables have turned: Chile now has the highest HDI level of all these countries. Just look at the slope of Chile's line in the graph to take a grasp of how much that country has achieved in the past 27 years.

Another example of intragroup mobility is at the bottom of the graph, between Guatemala and Nicaragua. In 1980, the former had a considerably lower HDI than the latter (0.531 vs. 0.565). As a matter of fact, Guatemala back then had, by far, the lowest HDI of the sample. In 2007 things had changed: although Guatemala's performance still pales compared to the other countries in its group, Nicaragua has joined it at the bottom of the ranking.

Venezuela More Newsworthy than FARC: Eltiempo.com word count

2009-12-02T19:31:00.004-05:00

Click to enlarge

As I wrote in a previous entry, Colombia's interest in FARC is waning. In turn, Venezuela is catching the attention of Colombians, as talk about war against that country has intensified this year.

In order to show this, I looked at the number of articles that appeared in Eltiempo.com (El Tiempo is Colombia's leading newspaper) that contained the words 'FARC' and 'Venezuela', between the year 2000 and 2009. As El Tiempo has printed many more articles in recent years, I divided the number of articles containing the words 'FARC' and 'Venezuela' by the number of articles that contained the word 'país'(country), which I assumed to remain fairly constant throughout the years.

The graph below, then, shows the number articles containing these two words as a proportion of the articles containing the word 'país' in El Tiempo. The graph shows that Venezuela has become a more important topic of Colombian news than the FARC, which, in turn, has fallen outside of the news spotlight in 2009.

The graph also shows the number of articles containing the word 'paramilitares', proving that the paramilitary groups have always been featured less in El Tiempo than either FARC or Venezuela.

The FARC's Comeback

2009-11-19T16:56:00.002-05:00

Sometimes it is easy to forget that the FARC are still out there. President Hugo Chavez’s provocations have kept Colombians wondering whether the autocrat of Caracas will go to war against them any time soon. Moreover, the battle for the referendum that could maintain Alvaro Uribe in the presidency for another term became red-hot again, after a group of deputy judges claimed last week that the process of signature collection violated the legal limits on donations from the private sector. More importantly, the election of this year’s Miss Colombia airs Monday night from Cartagena.

With so much going on, the Western Hemisphere’s oldest guerrilla group seems to be getting little attention from the Colombian public. According to Gallup, a statistical consultancy, the proportion of Colombians who believe that insecurity and law enforcement (attacks by the FARC included) are the main problems in the country, was a mere 19% as of last June –that is down from 54% in January 2008. The same Gallup poll suggests that most Colombians (57%) are more concerned about the economy. A simple word count in the website of El Tiempo, Colombia’s leading newspaper, shows that the number of articles that included the word “FARC” has decreased significantly since last year: between January and November 2008, there were about 7,500 El Tiempo articles mentioning FARC; this year, that number is below 5,000.

So, the interest of Colombians in FARC is waning. Perhaps after last year’s resounding military victories against that group, the death of FARC commander Tirofijo, and the liberation of Ingrid Betancourt and other eleven hostages, Colombia is just resting on its laurels. Having noted that FARC were not invincible after all, and that the government and the Armed Forces could deliver on their promise of hitting them hard, it seems that the public stopped seeing FARC as a threat.

What a big mistake. The FARC remains Colombia’s greatest problem in homeland security, and this year they have proven that they are far from total defeat. Last week, a group of 200 FARC rebels attacked the municipality of Corinto, in the Cauca department. Reportedly, the guerrillas fired explosive devices against parts of the town while hiding in the surrounding mountains. During the raid, Corinto was left without phone communications and electricity. Fortunately, a group of Army soldiers responded quickly to the attack, pushing the rebels further into the mountains and away from the town. The Air Force soon after joined the fight against the guerrillas, thwarting the FARC’s plans. According to news reports, nine Army soldiers died in the battle, while up to thirty rebels were said to be killed.

This attack on Corinto is indicative of the FARC’s resilience and of its continued ability to create chaos. Unfortunately, this specific raid is also just the tip of the iceberg: According to Seguridad y Democracia, a think tank, the first six months of this year saw a 75% increase in the number of FARC attacks against army and police elements, compared to the first semester of 2008 (from 67 attacks to 117). Moreover, in the first half of 2009 there were 51% more army and police casualties in attacks by insurgents than in the same period of 2008 (from 57 casualties to 86). If last year it seemed that FARC was on its way to the grave, then this year they have come back alive and kicking.

The Armed Forces ought to step up their offensive against FARC immediately and decisively in order to prevent them from causing greater damage. President Uribe knows this, and he has ordered his generals to look into the situation. The departments of Cauca, Nariño, Putumayo, Meta, and Caquetá, all coca-growing regions, are where the FARC have directed most of their attacks in 2009. Of course, there is no doubt that their interest in the drug business is what leads FARC to operate in these regions. The situation in Caquetá is particularly worrying: from zero attacks in 2008, the department passed to 23 in the first six months of this year.

Alfredo Rangel, from Seguridad y Democracia, reckons that this increase in attacks by FARC does not necessarily mean that the guerrilla has recovered some of its previous strength. Instead, Mr. Rangel argues that even if the number of FARC attacks has grown, their scope and importance has diminished considerably. In his own words, actions by FARC are “significant in number, but not in their impact.” Is that completely true? I think that the increase in soldier and police casualties suggests otherwise: the FARC are killing more soldiers and policemen than before, and that definitely is a trend I am not comfortable with.

Another trend I am not comfortable with, and that needs to be reversed as soon as possible is the following: this year, the Armed Forces have started far fewer battles against insurgencies than in 2008. While in the first semester of 2008 the Armed Forces initiated 652 offensive actions against guerrillas and other armed groups, the first six months of 2009 saw a mere 261 such attacks on insurgents. That is, by far, the lowest number of battles initiated by the Armed Forces in the last eight years. Conclusion: for some reason the army is giving considerable breathing space to the FARC, and the result has been a rise in the number of attacks by this group. The Armed Forces took a break from the war, and now more soldiers and policemen are being killed. Why has the army significantly diminished the pressure against the FARC? Why is the army not attacking the rebels with the intensity of previous years, even in the face of increased FARC activities? I do not know the answers to these questions, but I smell something fishy.

I doubt that tonight, when they are watching the broadcast of Miss Colombia, my fellow countrymen will be thinking about the FARC’s comeback. But they should. We would be wrong in underestimating the FARC’s resilience and adaptability –after all, they have lived through eleven different Colombian presidents. That, however, is an even more important reason why we should hit them with everything we have got.

For some time now, government officials and army generals have claimed that the FARC’s end is just around the corner. With all due respect, that will simply not occur if we stop fighting them as we should.

This article appeared first on Colombiareports.com

Colombia-Venezuela Row in Newsy.com

2009-11-14T14:54:00.004-05:00

A video that summarizes news coverage of the tensions between Colombia and Venezuela. Courtesy of Newsy.com, "a multiperspective online video news site that monitors, synthesizes and presents the world's news coverage".

Thanks to Rosa from Newsy.com for showing me the video.

Colombia: Drugs and Homicides. A Timeline.

2009-11-12T18:57:00.004-05:00

Click to enlarge

For my senior thesis, I made this timeline showing Colombia's homicide rate since 1975 and annotating it with the description of different landmark events in the country's war against drugs and terrorism. Let us hope the homicide rate continues to decrease.