Colombia Interest Groups
A barrio on the outskirts of Neiva, Huila Department
Courtesy United States Agency for International Development
Historically, the Roman Catholic Church and the armed
forces
have played an important role in Colombia's political
system.
Numerous Colombianists, such as Jonathan Hartlyn, have
observed
that the most powerful interest group in the 1980s was a
small,
informal elite composed of business, political, religious,
and some
military leaders. Some have argued that these power
brokers
effectively usurped power from Congress and the president
by making
the decisions--sometimes at informal meetings held in
private
homes--about what policies or laws should be implemented
prior to
final action by the legislature.
Observers have contended that the two main parties and
the two
most powerful interest groups--the armed forces and the
Roman
Catholic Church--traditionally have co-opted emerging
sectors of
Colombian society, thereby limiting the development and
influence
of other potential interest groups. For example, the Roman
Catholic
Church and the political parties created the two major
labor unions
at a time when labor was beginning to develop strength.
They also
established government-sponsored community action programs
when the
lower classes were beginning to develop some political
awareness.
The government also contained increasingly militant
workers,
peasants, and students through co-optation and
intimidation.
Economic groups, such as associations of farmers and
industrialists, began to proliferate and become highly
visible in
the 1960s and 1970s, but their influence in decision
making in the
1980s remained clear.
In the 1980s, the Medellín Cartel's kingpins were
increasingly
competing with the influence of the traditional interest
groups
through bribery and assassination of government officials.
In
addition, the cartel was using assassination to intimidate
one
legitimate interest group, the news media. Former
President
Betancur described the cartel's underground empire as "an
organization stronger than the state." With estimated
revenues of
US$8 billion in 1987, the cartel was a power unto itself.
It
demonstrated its financial power when, at a meeting with
Colombian
government officials in Panama in 1984, its chiefs offered
to pay
off Colombia's national debt and terminate their
involvement in the
drug trade. The traffickers demanded in exchange that the
Colombian
government refuse to extradite them to the United States
and permit
them to invest their profits, deposited in foreign banks,
in
Colombian enterprises. The government, political elites,
and public
categorically rejected this offer.
As justice minister in late 1985, Enrique Parejo stated
that
"There is not a single Colombian institution that has not
been
affected in some way . . . by the illegal activities of
the drug
traffic." Colombian officials released drug boss Jorge
Luis Ochoa
Vásquez from prison twice during the 1986-88 period. The
second
time Ochoa was arrested, in November 1987, the cartel
threatened to
"eliminate Colombian political leaders one by one" if he
were
extradited to the United States under a 1984 request.
Thirty-nine
days later, he was released from Bogotá's La Picota
Prison. In late
January 1988, the cartel assassinated Attorney General
Mauro, who
had begun investigating the Ochoa release, during a visit
to
Medellín.
Until the mid-1980s, the influence of Colombia's
cocaine
billionaires and marijuana millionaires extended from high
society
in Bogotá to many cities and towns, where they were often
popular
figures in certain neighborhoods for providing jobs and
financing
soccer teams, athletic facilities, public housing
projects, and
disaster relief efforts. The public began to regard the
drug lords
negatively, however, after Lara Bonilla was assassinated
in 1984
and after the problem of cocaine addiction in Colombia
became
widespread in the mid-1980s
(see Drugs and Society
, ch.
2). The
results of the March 1988 mayoral elections--in which two
strongly
antidrug candidates, Pastrana and Juan Gómez Martínez,
were elected
as mayors of Bogotá and Medellín, respectively--reflected
a growing
antidrug sentiment among Colombians. Their elections
prompted the
military, in subsequent weeks, to mount numerous
aggressive raids
on suspected strongholds of cartel kingpins, including
Pablo
Escobar Gavíria and Gonzalo Rodríguez.
Data as of December 1988
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