Néstor A. Laso
Lawyer
Twenty-one years ago I began my relationship with Colombia, initially personal and later political, and during this time I have been no stranger to expressing my opinions in both the Spanish and Colombian media about what is happening in my adopted country.
Corruption, nepotism and the relationship between politics, business and drug trafficking are commonplace in Colombia. Corruption, for the moment alleged, has recently affected and questioned figures in the Colombian government, who, like the Archbishop of Bogotá, Pedro Rubiano, apparently said of the former president of that country, Ernesto Samper, that he had an elephant in the living room of his house and never saw it. According to the Colombian media, this simile apparently refers to the alleged electoral financing of his campaign by drug traffickers. However, in his defence, he argued that perhaps they did not notice the elephant, it just depends on where they were looking.
Without politics or drug trafficking, one would not understand some of the many economic fortunes that exist in that country, with the appearance of flourishing businesses.
It is suspicious to know that the average cost of a Colombian congressman’s election campaign, in many cases, is three billion pesos and the salaries to be received during the four years of the legislature are one thousand seven hundred million. According to this, they would not have enough to live on.
A coffee congressman earns 8,000 euros a month, while the minimum wage of 70% of the formal working population is just over 200 euros. That is forty times more. In Spain it is only six times more. My readers will be able to tell me whether what Colombian congressmen and women receive is worthy of a serious country that puts the interests of its citizens before those of its political representatives. Insulting salaries, in a country with high levels of poverty, which by extension are received by the country’s senior civil servants (high court magistrates, etc.), who by constitutional mandate cannot earn less than parliamentarians. All of them millionaires by decree at the expense of the suffering Colombian people and consented to by the current Duque government.
Colombian congressmen benefiting from all kinds of government-sponsored lucre, including the famous and nauseating “indicative quotas”. For the Spanish reader, these are the usual percentages of commissions established in favour of these parliamentarians for negotiating and obtaining investments from the State for governors or mayors’ offices, normally corresponding to their territorial origin. Many of them still have a sign in their territories indicating the forthcoming construction of a road, a bridge or aqueduct, etc., despite the fact that many years have gone by and the cattle track and its holes are still there, without the longed-for and already expensive road being built. A word to the wise is enough.
Curiously, the statistics of the DANE, the Colombian state agency, say that Colombia has an unemployment rate of only 13.7%, which is less than many advanced European countries.
Evidently this rate is not real, despite the fact that officially they try to assert it, hiding the evidence that labour informality, also according to the aforementioned statistical body, what in Spain we call the underground economy, is over 50% of the working-age population.
The Duque government, which clearly betrayed and instrumentalised the Uribista base for its electoral aspirations, forgetting later the acronym with which it was elected, allied itself and formed its executive with ‘santistas’, friends of the University or the IDB where it worked and with politicians who came to his government, who according to the Colombian press allegedly benefited family members or business clans with contracts worth billions. Another of the most high-profile cases is the expropriation of a Spanish company linked to Madrid’s Canal de Isabel II, which was then sold to local businessmen in an operation that, according to the Spanish media, was not very transparent.
Some of these politicians and businessmen, or both at the same time, including well-known businessmen or corrupt magistrates, even have or have had their entry visas withdrawn or are wanted for extradition by the United States, due to the questionable origin of their fortunes in many of these cases. Because the corrupt Colombian justice system, with the famous Cartel de la Toga at the forefront, deserves a separate study, given its high level of putrefaction at all levels. The cartel’s judicial rulings were traded like beans in a supermarket, with prevaricating sentences being sold for a million euros, according to the Colombian media.
The rotting embers of a society invaded by rampant drug trafficking, a stigma that has become endemic and unhealthy in these last remnants of Duque’s term in office.
Whether they are politicians of the right, centre or left, most of them are ill-advised to administer a country. There are exceptions, but few. Many of the members of the left-wing opposition, having never governed Colombia in its history, although some with sad experiences as local or departmental leaders, will want to replace those on the right, in order to gain access to privileges and not to improve the lives of the popular classes, but their own. The congressmen of that spectrum are the first ones who do not want to lower their salaries, or like Petro, the protégé of Pope Francis, living in large mansions or counting bags with bundles of banknotes. Nothing new. That is Colombian politics as usual. All of it with impudence.
It is well known that some of the current left-wing opponents live in big luxuries and mansions or counting wads of cash from bags.
The country and its underprivileged classes are mere instruments of their demagogic discourse. Recently, a well-known politician of the Colombian left said that he “did not go into politics to waste time”. You can analyse for yourselves what he meant by that expression.
The excessive pampering and affection of the PSOE and Unidas Podemos and the members of the Spanish government, led by Pedro Sánchez, for the Colombian left-wing leader Gustavo Petro, during his recent visit to Spain, is worrying. A visit to be renewed now in early February, with the papal visit included.
A clear interference of other governments in the Colombian government, a reflection of passive Colombian diplomacy. It is clear that the Colombian foreign service does not have the best people. Only the friends and personal political patronage of President Duque.
I am reminded of the good times and excessive complicity of Pablo Iglesias, Juan Carlos Monedero, etc. or Rodríguez Zapatero with Chavez and Maduro and of the genesis and ultimate motivation of their malevolent political project for Spain. Let us hope that Petrista Colombia, should the Colombian left come to govern, will not be the new “El Dorado” and golden retreat for some Spanish left-wing politicians, and I am not just saying this because of the Bogotá airport.
I am not discovering anything new if I say that the real cancer of Colombia is its corrupt politicians and civil servants, of almost all ideologies and political formations, many of them habitual in their flirtations with crime and nepotism.
But sadly, Colombia is still not a serious country and it will hardly be respected internationally, with so many politicians and businessmen ruling the public sphere in order to benefit themselves in the private sphere. In another column I will discuss the bad investment experiences of Spanish companies in Colombia. Local, departmental and national governments often promise international investors one thing and then do something very different, creating great legal uncertainty. All of this is compounded by rampant drug trafficking and insecurity, which is even on the rise and seems to be going unchecked.
Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to praise the good people of Colombia, of whom there are many and in large numbers, who unfortunately suffer greatly from the actions of disloyal politicians, abusers of the public purse and selfish people who do not deserve it.
The government of Iván Duque, his supporters and those who once convinced Álvaro Uribe to make a big mistake by appointing him as the successor to his banners, will have to answer to the history of Colombia, for having consented to the above and for being the architects of what is coming in 2022, which could place Colombia at the feet of Gustavo Petro’s left and, in the best of cases, of new parties or new leaders, alien to the legacy of Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who have already dislodged Uribism from their alliance.
All this despite the fact that this government has been warned by many, including this writer, that things were going badly and were not going in the right direction. See my open letter to Iván Duque in the prestigious Colombian digital political website Las2Orillas.co, dated 28 May 2020, at the halfway point of his mandate. “A soldier warned, does not die in war”, a popular Colombian saying. There is something wrong with Colombia that alienates those who love it most.
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