By Alvaro Vargas Llosa
Certain political leaders, whatever their aspirations,
become overwhelmed by events they once thought they could master. Think of
Alexander Kerensky (cast aside by Russia’s October Revolution) or even Jimmy
Carter (reduced to political impotence by stagflation and Iran). Other leaders,
though, meet enormous challenges with a vision and a resolve that allow them to
shape events and guide the course of history—think of Winston Churchill
(defying Hitler), Margaret Thatcher (resurrecting Britain) or Helmut Kohl
(reunifying Germany). To this second group belongs Alvaro Uribe Vélez, the
president of Colombia from 2002 to 2010.
The country he inherited, upon
his election, was a perfect hell. Various paramilitary groups and Marxist
terrorist organizations, pre-eminent among them FARC (the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia), controlled half of the country’s territory, often aided by
Colombia’s left-wing neighbors, Venezuela and Ecuador. Every year, an average
of 28,000 Colombians were killed and 3,000 kidnapped, usually to coerce a ransom.
Drug traffickers generated $3 billion annually. Unemployment was close to 16%.
By the time Mr. Uribe left
office, the homicide rate had halved and kidnappings had dropped to a 10th of
what they once were. Most of the country had been cleared of terrorists, and
50,000 paramilitary troops had been demobilized. Under a more secure and
business-friendly environment, foreign investment had doubled and exports
tripled; economic growth was close to 7%. By lowering some taxes, introducing
more flexibility in the labor market and promoting trade, Mr. Uribe helped
trigger a boom that, by 2010, took the investment rate to 28% of gross domestic
product from 13%.
Mr. Uribe’s feat was
punctuated by daring moments, including the rescue of former presidential
candidate Ingrid Betancourt, three American contractors and several hostages in
2008, when an intelligence mission broke the enemy’s code of communications and
duped FARC into believing that the rescuers were humanitarian workers.
What is most interesting about
“No Lost Causes,” Mr. Uribe’s engaging memoir, isn’t so much the narrative of
his achievements but the insight he offers into his own character and the life
experiences that created it. (Mr. Uribe has recently been nominated to be a
director of News Corp., the owner of The Wall Street Journal.) The simplistic
interpretation is that Mr. Uribe sought to avenge the murder of his father,
killed by FARC in 1983. But his suffering wasn’t so strikingly dissimilar to
that of tens of thousands of other Colombians whose lives had been altered by
two decades of civil war (in the 1940s and 1950s) and decades of drug-related
violence and Marxist terrorism. Just after his father’s murder Mr. Uribe served
on a peace commission charged with exploring an end to the horror through
dialogue.
In fact, Colombian democracy
had tried Chamberlain-like appeasement several times; it was desperate for
Churchillian mettle. The people found it in this man. “Learning how to control
my emotions, and channel them for a constructive purpose,” Mr. Uribe writes,
“took a lifetime of experience for me.” He spent his presidency visiting
village after village to fight for the rebirth of civil society and imitating
the meticulous discipline with which his father had overseen every task on the
family’s farm.
Mr. Uribe tried to use
self-control in dealing with his left-wing neighbors, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez
and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa. He made overtures and prevented escalations that
might have led to all-out war. But he didn’t lose sight of the mission he
had—to respond to their protection of FARC. So he crossed their borders when he
had to, as in 2008, when Colombia bombed a FARC camp inside Ecuador, killing a
top commander and seizing a treasure trove of information.
Mr. Uribe was in some sense a
victim of his success—most notably with the demobilization of the
paramilitaries, who, like FARC, were drug traffickers. Thanks to a deal, in
2005 he brought more than 35,000 of them into the open. Since it was difficult
for these men to take jobs, some went back to crime. Some operated with
impunity from prison, as in the past. (Eventually Mr. Uribe extradited the 14
key leaders to the United States.)
The process of extracting
confessions was messy and revealed umbilical connections between paramilitaries
and the establishment. More than 20 mayors, governors and members of Congress
were convicted, as well as other politicians, including some former Uribe
collaborators. Mr. Uribe’s critics blamed the widespread corruption on him, but
he didn’t create the problem—he brought it to the surface and, yes, it looked
very ugly. That said, Mr. Uribe reacted slowly to reports of illegal espionage
and human-rights abuses in the struggle against FARC. “I believed that we could
regain control,” he writes, “over 100 percent of Colombia’s territory while
respecting human rights and extending the reach of democracy.” His sense of
purpose led him to be less obsessively vigilant about the means than the end.
A few months after his
inauguration in 2002, a FARC leader had said: “Uribe’s serious problem is that
he has only three years left and FARC has all the time in the world.”
Inevitably, a man with a messianic bent in the midst of a war found term limits
cumbersome. The constitution was amended to allow him a second term, and he won
re-election in 2006. In 2010, he let start a process that would have permitted
yet another re-election. In the end, the constitutional court prevented it. Mr.
Uribe admits it was “an error” not to halt the process himself.
A few weeks ago, Colombia’s
current president, Juan Manuel Santos, announced that he will start formal
peace negotiations with FARC. Nobody knows if they will end up like the many
frustrated attempts since the 1980s. Whatever happens, the terrorists have
never been closer to defeat, and Colombia is a country reborn—thanks to the
efforts of Mr. Uribe and his brave countrymen.
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