Election results

Yesterday was the presidential election here in Colombia. No one one a majority of the votes, so it will now go to a run-off vote June 20 between the two top vote-getters, Juan Manuel Santos and Antanas Mockus. Basically the incessant polls that came out every week or so before the elections made it seem like Mockus would get at least 35% of the popular vote, with Santos getting the same. But in the end Santos got like 46% to Mockus's 20-something percent. I don't know what went wrong with the pre-election polls, but my wife suggests that Colombia's rural machine politics likely had a lot to do with Santos's success. His Union party has a large amount of Senators and Representatives in the Congress, and a sizeable presence in local politics, so it's likely that the run-of-the-mill voter in much of Colombia was strongly encouraged by his local politicos to vote for Santos.

Anyway, Santos hasn't won the presidency yet, but in all likelihood he will, because the people that voted for the other two crypto-Nazi candidates will probably vote for him in the run-off election, which would give him more than 50% of the popular vote. Granted, there was only a 47% voter turnout in the whole country, so in this first round it seems that only 20% or so of the Colombian populace of voting age thought Santos was the best candidate, and I'm sure that at least half of these voters didn't put much thought into their vote, simply going with the candidate their local representatives suggested. But such is Colombia's democracy that a lukewarm support from less than a fifth of the populace is enough to give a guy control of the presidency.

This is really a shame, because Santos is a horrible candidate and a horrible person. Santos is the scion of one of Colombia's most wealthy and politically powerful families. He looks like an inbred, beady-eyed factory-farm pig that has had extensive facial surgery. Santos is the designated heir to Alvaro Uribe, Colombia's current crypto-fascist president, and even at Santos's almost-victory celebration last night, people were chanting Uribe's name. This makes sense, because Santos doesn't really have a platform other than his association with Uribe. In fact, I'm not aware of Santos's ever having done or said anything original or intelligent in his life. The only area in which he has shown real initiative and innovation is in human rights violations. He was the Minister of Defense during a period that saw Colombian army units kidnapping and killing civilians, in order to dress the corpses up as guerrilla fighters and claim promotions and prizes for the good "kill statistics" of the unit. Where Uribe combines a nominally cosmopolitan, urbane sense of governance with a brutal, monstrous tendency towards state and paramilitary terror, Santos is mainly versed only in the violent terror angle. As for his agrarian proposals, he recently claimed in an interview that every Colombian peasant should become Juan Valdez (the guy on the Colombian coffee logo). I don't know what the hell this means.

As a temporary resident and non-citizen, I am not legally allowed to participate in Colombia's politics. This is a real shame, because if I could I would go around trying to educate voters and convince them that it's not in their best interests to vote for murderous, wealthy oligarchs. What I can do is foment critical thought in the people I come across in my daily life and especially my work in rural areas. I believe that if people are thinking in a progressive, pro-people, pro-agrarian manner, they will never vote for such a horrid, mediocre criminal as Santos.