Columbia:Opposition win parliamentary election

The Liberal Party has won the parliamentary election in Columbia while Liberal Party dissident, the hard-line Alvaro Uribe, looks set to win the forthcoming presidential election in May.

The Liberal party has repeated its electoral triumph of 1998, when it won the parliamentary elections, only to see the conservative candidate, Andres Pestrana, win the presidential election two months later. This time the scenario is set to be different, with Alvaro Uribe hard-line rhetoric inflaming the political scene.

Uribe intends to take the war to FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia, a faction which fights for social and political justice in Columbia but which has been forced to take up arms to guarantee its own survival.

Branded as drugs traffickers and terrorists, neither of which is true, the government parties in Bogota try to tarnish the image of FARC, which had been in a process of peace negotiations for three years with the government, before it became clear that Pestrana, instigated by the USA, had decided to attack FARC positions.

Pravda.Ru knew three days in advance that this attack was forthcoming. FARC kidnapped a senator and a candidate for the presidential election to use as bargaining chips for the release of its members, held by the government forces.

Uribe’s supporters in Columbia’s main cities won massive popular support. Senators German Vargas Lleras and Luis Alfredo Ramos had the second and third highest numbers of votes in the country. Parliamentary candidates Gina Parodi in Bogota, Jaime Ernesto Cabral in Cali and William Meza in Medellin all Uribe supporters, received a high number of votes.

An interesting development in these elections was the popular support shown for two members of Via Alterna, a movement led by senator-elect Antonio Navarro Wolff, formerly leader of the guerrilla group M-19, proving that there is a political space outside the two traditional parties: Liberals and Conservatives.

FARC, which controls the southern and eastern third of the country, broke off three years of negotiations on 20th February after the Colombian Armed Forces systematically violated the truce they had signed.

Armed conflict is the order of the day, another market for the USA to sell its arms in and to intrude into the internal affairs of a sovereign state.

Marcia MIRANDA PRAVDA.Ru BRAZIL