Uribe Falls to Earth

A year ago this week, Colombia's President Álvaro Uribe was on top of the world. Employing a clever ruse, one of the country's elite army units miraculously (and bloodlessly) rescued 15 hostages who had been held in the jungle for years. The world applauded the operation's stealth and savvy - and the release of the rebels' top political hostage, French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt, as well as three U.S. defense contractors and 11 soldiers and police.

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Colombia, it seemed, was coming back from the edge, and the country was ecstatic. Two days after the July 2, 2008, hostage rescue, a Gallup poll of Colombians (those with telephones in the four largest cities, at least) put Uribe's approval rating at a remarkable 86 percent. Already, the cattle rancher and conservative president had been well regarded among Colombians for battlefield gains against the 45-year-old Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) insurgency, a drug-money-fueled leftist force that systematically targets civilians for murder and kidnapping. Uribe oversaw a military buildup that reduced the guerrillas' size by half and limited its range of operations. He negotiated the demobilization of tens of thousands of pro-government paramilitary militias, reducing -- though not eliminating -- those groups' murderous activity.

But what goes up must come down, and Uribe's luck has certainly done so in recent months. By early May 2009, Gallup put Uribe's approval rating at 71 - still pretty good, but its lowest in two years. A plurality of Colombians told the pollster that the country was on the "wrong track." There are bigger problems at work here than a normal come-down: Uribe's spectacular progress in security and economic matters has slowed, and scandals have taken their place in the news.

Economic decline is the most straightforward concern. With a relatively low foreign debt, Colombia is better cushioned than its neighbors, but the global economic crisis has still dealt the country a blow. Demand for its exports, especially manufactured goods to the United States, has plummeted. Prices of commodities, particularly Colombia's oil, coal, and minerals, have fallen. The country's urban unemployment rate has returned to double digits after a few years of prosperity, with an additional 30 percent of the workforce underemployed and toiling in the informal sector.

Just as the economy has begun to sputter, the security situation -- Uribe's strongest suit - also seems to have stopped improving. The FARC, under new command since March 2008, appear to be regrouping in rural areas. The group's founding leader, Manuel Marulanda, died of natural causes in late March 2008, and was replaced by Alfonso Cano, a former professor who joined the FARC in 1968. Since then, with the exception of the July 2008 hostage rescue and a battlefield victory south of Bogotá in March 2008, the military hasn't dealt any further blows to the guerrillas' leadership. FARC's ambushes, attacks, and operations aimed at local government leaders are becoming more frequent.

Murder rates have increased since 2008 in all of Colombia's major cities, especially Medellín. Here, the it's not the now mostly-rural FARC that is to blame, but drug gangs. What's happening is a sort of turf war to gain territory opened up when 15 of the top paramilitary leaders involved in trafficking were extradited to the United States in the first half of May 2008. "New" paramilitary groups, most of them more accurately described as the armed wings of drug-trafficking organizations, are sprouting up and growing quickly to fill the vacuum.

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