March 11, 2002 Issue # 18

Narco News '02
By Al Giordano

Ruling Parties Lose the Senate and the House

When Colombian voters went to the polls yesterday to elect a new Congress, they massively rejected the candidates of the traditional ruling two-party system of the Conservative and Liberal parties.

The results also strongly suggested a rejection of the U.S.-imposed strategy of "frontal war" upon the Colombian rebels.

This is a story, so far, untold by the U.S. press.

President Andres Pastrana -- the U.S. government's delivery man for the $2 billion dollar military intervention known as "Plan Colombia" -- saw his Conservatve party shrink to just 21 members of the 175 member House of Representatives, and to just 13 seats in the 100 member Senate.

The Liberal Party -- the other side of the oligarchy's political coin -- lost it's near-majority in the Senate (losing 19 of its seats, thus cutting its bloc from 48 to 29 senators) -- and suffered a loss of 31 seats in the House -- from 84 members previously to just 53 in the new
Congress.

Smaller independent parties gained, collectively, an absolute majority in both Houses: 101 of the 175 seats in the House of Representatives, and 58 of 100 seats in the Senate.

With the exception of the European press agency EFE, the coverage by the U.S. and Colombian press has been dreadful. Nobody seems to want to report a story that, at its heart, reveals big trouble for Plan Colombia.

Associated Press "reporter" Jared Kotler -- taken to task last week by Narco News for his false and invented report of the assassination of Senator Martha Daniels -- seemed to have written his story before election day and filed it last night. "Colombians ignored threats of rebel violence" to go to the polls, was Kotler's lead. He failed to note the 62 percent abstention rate in yesterday's election. AP's Kotler described voters as "fed up with the FARC," and even repeated is boldfaced lie of last week referring to "a Senator slain last week by suspected FARC rebels." (Not even Colombia's notoriously anti-rebel press, nor Colombian
prosecutors, have repeated this fiction -- denied by the FARC rebels, who do take credit for their bellicose actions -- since the nation's top prosecutor revealed last week that the investigation could be leading toward "common criminals" and not a political act.)

But Kotler continues taking dictation from the U.S. Embassy's propaganda
machine instead of doing his job. For any authentic journalist would have
noted the big news of yesterday's vote: the largest vote-getters in the
country were two former members of the M-19 armed guerrilla movement, both
of whom favor a negotiated peace settlement over the Washington
orchestrated bloodbath backed by Pastrana.

Heading the votation in the Senate was former guerrilla Antonio Navarro.
In the lower House, his colleague and ally of two decades, Gustavo Petro,
won the day. Both are leaders of the independent political movement called
Via Alterna, or Alternate Path.

"A new hypothesis about the electoral success of Via Alterna," reported
the online daily El Espectador this morning in a reference to Navarro and
Petro's ticket-topping triumph, "is the rejection, by a large part of the
population, of the idea of a 'frontal war' against subversion which the
electorate identifies with the political figure of (presidential
candidate) Alvaro Uribe."

The chief of Pastrana's Conservative Party, Carlos Holguin, resigned last
night in disgrace after his party's drubbing at the polls.

The only foreign news agency to report the results accurately was the
Spain-based news agency EFE, which led its story with these words:
"Colombia's two traditional political parties, the Liberals and the ruling
Conservatives, both lost seats" in the Senate and the House.

Colombia's new Congress will take office on July 20th.

Yesterday's elections in Latin America's oldest democracy were a defeat for Plan Colombia and the oligarchy's two-party system.

Again, we ask: Where Is The Press?