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The President and the Courts: Uribe’s Attacks on Colombia’s Highest Judicial Institutions

  • In a far-fetched move, Uribe accuses a Supreme Court Justice of bribing a paramilitary leader to implicate the President in a murder scandal
  • This is the latest incident in the tumultuous "parapolitics" scandal surrounding Uribe's antagonistic relationship with the courts
  • Even though Uribe's charges threaten judicial independence, his attacks invite no recrimination from Washington, contrasting with the U.S.' past condemnation of Hugo Chavez's putative interventions in the Venezuelan high courts
  • Uribe's stand could jeopardize his high-powered campaign for further financing of Plan Colombia and advancing the free trade agreement, which awaits a tough ratification battle in the U.S. Congress

As Colombia's corruption scandal continues to heat up, Colombian President Álvaro Uribe has turned his anger on a longstanding nemesis: the country's Supreme Court. In his most recent sortie against the Court, Uribe released a statement on October 8 accusing Supreme Court Judge Iván Velásquez of offering "benefits" to jailed right-wing paramilitary leader José Orlando Moncada Zapata (alias Tasmania), if, in exchange, Tasmania would testify that he had been involved in a murder plot with the President. On October 4 and 5, Tasmania testified in court that Uribe had been involved in a plot to kill another paramilitary leader, Alcides de Jesús Durango. Almost immediately, Uribe released a statement declaring that before the incarcerated paramilitary leader delivered this testimony, the President had received a letter from him claiming that he had been bribed by Velásquez to make this accusation against the Colombian President.

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Delegative Democracy: The Case of Colombia

In 1994, Guillermo O'Donnell, one of Latin America's most prominent political scientists, identified a "new species" of democracy that was now present throughout most of Latin America, and labeled this phenomenon "delegative democracy," a type that is neither representative nor institutionalized. The basic premise of a delegative democracy is that once an individual is elected president he/she is "thereby entitled to govern as he or she sees fit." Power falls into the hands of a single person, but, unlike authoritarianism, the leader is still held accountable at the ballot box by the electorate. O'Donnell has used his theory to accurately describe variants of democracies in countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru. Colombia, though, didn't seem to comfortably fit the delegative democratic model. However, since Alvaro Uribe, a Liberal Party dissident rose to power in 2002, Colombia's democracy has increasingly become more delegative, and thus less representative. The populace, tired of decades of corruption and complacency under an ineffectual bipartisan model, chose a leader who is the epitome of the presumptive delegative democratic model: a highly individualistic, paternalistic figure who sits above all other institutions as "the embodiment of the nation."

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