Lat/Am Daily » Juan Manuel Santos

Mockus: Smoked

Peter Krupa — Mon, 31 May 2010 02:34:06 +0000

The count is in for the first round of Colombia’s presidential election, and Mockus didn’t do nearly as well as his earlier popularity might have suggested. Incumbent party candidate Manuel Santos smoked him, hauling in 46% of the vote to Mockus’ 21%.

In order to win in a second round on June 20, Mockus will have to capture basically everyone who didn’t vote for either candidate, which is, to say the least, unlikely.

The take-away from the voting is either that electoral opinion polling in Colombia doesn’t work or that about 40% of Colombian voters changed their minds roughly three times over two months. Or that someone was buying votes.

Anyway, the analysts who warned that Mockus’ Green Party does not have the necessary infrastructure to win anything on a national level seem to have been right.

It’s certainly an accomplishment to make it to the second round, but unless something extraordinary happens, I have to think the well-oiled Partido de la U machinery is going to finish Mockus off next month.

Bringing on the nasty

Peter Krupa — Wed, 05 May 2010 04:00:22 +0000

But he looks so harmless.

Santos, the heir apparent to Uribe’s throne, is now in the fight of his life (that is, the only fight of his life, since he’s never run for public office before). So what does a former minister of defense do when he’s back on defense?

Go on offense, of course.

The Colombian media is reporting that Santos has brought into his campaign a character variously known as Rasputin, a master of “dirty war,” and someone who I’ll go ahead and characterize as the Karl Rove of Latin America.

Juan José “J.J.” Rendón is supposedly a master of the whisper campaign. A Venezuelan who worked for the opposition in 2004 during the recall referendum, he was involved in the latest presidential campaign of Honduras’ Porfirio Lobo, as well as other shenanigans in Mexico and the Dominican Republic. He’s also had business in Colombia, working on behalf of Uribe’s party and helping it take the legislature in 2006.

Apparently he plays dirty. Once he threatened to destroy the career of a rebel Colombian senator by linking him to prostitution. Another time he allegedly smeared a Mexican politician by spreading pamphlets claiming the man was a pederast.

He says he’s won all but two of the 22 campaigns he’s been involved in. From a 2007 Semana article:

Political circles accuse J.J. Rendón of having been behind the defamatory campaigns against former candidates for president Rafael Pardo Rueda (liberal) and Carlos Gaviria (Polo Democrático). He denies the reports and says that he’s always acted within the law. In an interview with María Isabel Rueda he said, “If it’s within the law, then I don’t have any misgivings.”

Spoken like a true sociopath. Really, though, the media reports seem a little overblown, as if we’re supposed to believe that in Latin American politics, you have to bring in an evil wizard from abroad to play dirty. More like an evil wizard you can throw under the bus if the plan backfires.

Anyway, the report in La Silla Vacia cites an unnamed source claiming that Jota Jota has been in Santos’ campaign for awhile now, which might explain the rumors that circulated about Mockus’ Parkinson’s before he admitted publicly to having the condition. I hope he’s watching his back.

Mockus running away with it

Peter Krupa — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 03:26:20 +0000

This is almost ridiculous. According to the latest polls, Mockus leads Santos 38% to 29%, and in a runoff he would absolutely dominate, with 50% to Santos’ 37%. I think it might be time for Chávez to start squabbling with someone else, and for the rest of us to start wondering what a Mockus presidency would actually look like.

Santos and Mockus tied

Peter Krupa — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 00:48:55 +0000

Folks, we have a race. According to the latest poll results, Santos and Mockus are technically tied for first place, polling with 35% and 34% of the vote. Also?

If the second round of the presidential election were between Santos and Mockus, the former mayor of Bogotá would win the election with 50%, over the former defense minister’s 44%.

And that’s from El Tiempo, which is owned by Santos’ family. Hot damn.

Mockus steps up

Peter Krupa — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 01:00:20 +0000

The race for president in Colombia just got interesting. The latest poll from the Centro Nacional de Consultoría gives the Mockus-Fajardo ticket 22% of the vote, slightly ahead of Conservative Party candidate Noemí Sanín, who has 20%. Uribe successor Santos is, of course, all by himself in first place, with 37%, but he still lacks the 50%-plus-one he needs to win in the first round.

This means we might see a run off between Santos and Mockus.

Who is this Mockus character? He’s easily one of the most unlikely figures in the history of democracy. The son of Lithuanian immigrants and the proud wearer of a crazy-looking Amish-style beard, Antanas Mockus is a mathematician who served as rector of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia until 1993, when he mooned a crowd of unruly students.

After the incident, he got pushed out as rector, ran for mayor of Bogota, and won in a landslide. He then proceeded to implement all sorts of edgy theories for reforming and cleaning up the city. They actually – amazingly – worked. Bogota in the 90s was a scary, dangerous, messy place. Bogota today is pretty damn nice.

Of course, you can never give full credit to a single person for doing something so complicated as cleaning up a crime-ridden city, but the consensus seems to be that Mockus the mathematician, the academic, the theoretician, did wonders for Bogota during his two terms as mayor.

He’s never made it far on the national level, however. Country folk usually have different concerns that city folk, and it’s doubtful that mimes would do much to stop the illegal armed groups that terrorize the countryside.

This time he might get further than he did in his 1998 bid for president. An alliance between Mockus and another centrist candidate brought about the current state of affairs, giving Mockus a fighting chance to at least make it to the big show.

Even if he gets there he’ll probably get trounced, as basically 57% of the vote is currently going for the right. Still, a kid can dream.

Santos in the lead

Peter Krupa — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 14:15:42 +0000

A survey sponsored by El Tiempo puts Juan Manuel Santos in the lead for Colombia’s May 30 presidential elections, with 34.1% of the vote. He’s followed up by Conservative candidate Noemí Sanín, with 21.7% of the vote.

As a candidate needs 50% plus one vote to win in the first round, the election will almost certainly be decided in a runoff, and that runoff will be between two candidates from the right. The survey finds that more Colombians have a positive opinion of Sanín than Santos, meaning she might give Uribe’s former defense minister a run for his money.

False positives documentary

Peter Krupa — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 14:21:06 +0000

Colombian journalist Felipe Zuleta has produced an excellent two-part documentary on the “False Positives” scandal that rocked Colombia in 2008. Basically, it turned out the army was taking poor youths from Bogota’s slums and killing them to pump up their supposed FARC body counts.

So, not so much false positives as murders.

Current presidential front-runner Juan Manuel Santos was defense minister at the time. Neither he nor any other higher-ups were held responsible. It’s possible (likely?) that the false positives incident was not an isolated one. The Council on Hemispheric Affairs has more. Many thanks to the Center for International Policy’s Colombia Program for adding the subtitles. (The original videos are available here.)

Part II:

The Magician

Peter Krupa — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:03:48 +0000

Nothing up his sleeve.

Here’s what Juan Manuel Santos doesn’t have: He’s never been elected to anything. He’s terrible at giving speeches. He didn’t join Uribe until relatively late in the game. So why is he the front-runner to succeed Uribe? What’s his secret?

La Silla Vacia has published a long, interesting essay to answer that question. In a nutshell, Santos is an excellent politician. He always manages to pick the winning side. He has a history of accomplishing tricky policy victories. He’s a technocrat and a pragmatist. He’s a team player.

In that sense, Santos is very different from Uribe: He builds teams, recognizes the importance of having highly expert lieutenants, and he sticks with them through good and bad.

Technocrats love Santos because he listens to them, but above all because he’s able to get things done.

Finally, if Santos hadn’t gone into politics, he would have been in line to take the reins of El Tiempo, one Colombia’s largest, most influential newspapers and a backer of Uribe. La Silla Vacia suggests that Santos’ media influence goes even further:

Beyond his family’s newspaper, because of his past as a journalist and because he moves in the same social circles, Santos is personal friends with Julio Sánchez Cristo, María Isabel Rueda and Felipe López (owner of La Semana) among other influential journalists. This means that his version of the facts carries significant weight in the news que le atañen. Santos is the magician of spin.

Thus far, the polls indicate that Santos would not win in the first round of a presidential vote. But since Uribe failed in his bid to run for a third term, Santos’ numbers have been rising. As La Silla Vacia put it, “People like to vote for the one they think will win.”