HIDDEN PAST OF EXTREMIST PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE

Colombian presidential candidate Alvaro Uribe Velz accused of having had ties with important narcotics traffickers. The DEA is now investigating one of the most important members of Uribe's campaign team

(By Alfredo Castro, ANNCOL Colombia) In mid-February a column in Colombia's second largest newspaper, El Espectador, accused extreme right-wing presidential candidate Alvaro Uribe Velez of having had a close relationship with the now extinct Medellin drug cartel. In particular it is alleged that during his time as mayor of Medellin, Uribe was connected with the famous drug lord Pablo Escobar.

Although Uribe is almost open in his support for the AUC paramilitary organisation that, according to the United Nations and other sources, is possibly the largest narcotics trafficking organisation in Colombia today, he has been much more defensive about his possible relationship to the Medellin cartel. However, a book by investigative reporter Fabio Castillo, 'Los Jinetes de la Cocaína", also confirms certain events in Uribe's past that indicate that Fernando Garavito's newspaper column was closer to the truth than Uribe would like people to believe.

Garavito based his allegations on four main pieces of evidence that Uribe has been desperate to hide from the public in the run-up to the May presidential elections - for which he is leading the polls.

Firstly, is Uribe's record as mayor of Medellin in the early 1980s when the city was known as "The Sanctuary" due to the complete protection that the traffickers enjoyed from the city administration. At this time Uribe was involved in at least two city projects in which Pablo Escobar himself was also deeply involved: One, the construction of a neighbourhood for poor people known as 'Medellin sin Tugurios' ('Medellin without Slums') and, the other, a civic program that aimed to plant thousands of trees in the city.

Pablo Escobar financed both projects in an attempt to improve his public image and Uribe publicly supported both efforts. Indeed, Uribe even opened the new neighbourhood when it was completed despite the fact that most of the positive press coverage actually went to Escobar.

Secondly, Garavito pointed out that during the time that Uribe was director of Colombia's Civil Aeronautics agency (1980-1982) numerous pilot licenses were handed over to the Medellin drug cartel - allowing their pilots to fly huge quantities of cocaine out of Colombia and towards or into the United States. Indeed Uribe was allegedly sacked as director for this misdemeanour.

Thirdly was Uribe's performance as a senator between 1986 and 1994 when he consistently supported legislation that the drug cartels supported and consistently opposed that which they opposed. The best example of this, and the one the both Garavito and Castillo gave, was Uribe's vehement opposition to a plan before the Colombian Congress to hold a public referendum on whether or not to allow the courts to extradite drug traffickers to the United States - a plan that the cartels were violently opposed to and which Uribe, using his position as senator, did his best to sabotage.

The fourth piece of evidence that Garavito mentioned in his article was that Uribe came from a drug trafficking family himself, thus he would have been brought up in an environment where, presumably, it would have been considered acceptable, if kept out of sight, to be involved in such a business.

Although Uribe himself predictably insists that his family were never involved in the business the fact that at one point the US government was attempting to extradite his father, Alberto Uribe Sierra, for narcotics trafficking, seems to contradict this.

But that Uribe's father was a well-known trafficker in the department of Antioquia before his death in 1983 is, on its own, not sufficient evidence to judge his son on. Yet this fact combined with the other three does seem to point the finger firmly at the possibility that Alvaro Uribe Velez has at least in the past been deeply entwined with the criminal world of the Colombian drug cartels.

Furthermore, The DEA has been interested for some years in Pedro Juan Moreno Villa one of the most important members of Uribe's campaign team and a personnel friend of the candidate. One of his companies, G.M.P. Productos Químicos S.A., has been accused of illegally attaining and selling precursor chemicals, used in the production of cocaine, to paramilitary groups in Uraba and Cordoba. The DEA in San Francisco have also confiscated chemical shipments bound for his company for this reason.

The issue of course is whether or not he will ever be punished for his involvement. Perhaps have the ranch that his father bought with drugs money, and which he later inherited, confiscated? And unfortunately, as with so many other members of the Colombian elite who have criminal histories related to involvement in the death squads, illegal arms dealing, or drug dealing, the answer is almost certainly no. In Colombia the rich protect each other - it is the normal people that suffer.