(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
BOGOTA: It was the former Colombian LO leader Luis Eduardo Garzón, also known as "Lucho", who shook the oligarchy to the ground during the local elections on Sunday. The left-wing candidate Lucho received almost 800.000 votes, or about 47 percent, in the mayoral election in Colombia's capital Bogota. This is the highest number of votes any candidate has ever obtained in a Bogota mayoral election. Garzón's most important challenger, the neoliberal Juan Lozano, received just under 40 percent of the vote.
For the traditional right-wing side of the Liberal and Conservative Party, the election of municipal councils, mayors, county councils and governors was a huge defeat in the largest cities and the largest counties. Almost all the candidates who had been close to President Alvaro Uribe, who had defended Sunday's referendum on centralizing power and financial austerity, were at a loss.
The right side lost
Also in the county of Valle, where Colombia's third-largest city, Cali, suffered the right-wing defeat, and here was another former LO leader, Angelino Garzon, who became governor after wiping out the liberals and conservatives. 62 percent voted for Angelino Garzon, who was previously secretary general of CUT, Colombian LO, and who still has friendly ties to the Communist Party of which he was once a member. Against him, he had the son of the leader of the Conservative Party, as well as a liberal ex-minister from the Samper government. 400.000 votes separated Angelino Garzon and the other two candidates.
In Bogota, President Alvaro Uribe, the country's top businessman and the entire political elite of the Colombian two-party system of conservatives and liberals, had campaigned for Juan Lozano to win the election. But the liberal journalist suffered defeat for "Lucho".
Wide support
Until two years ago, "Lucho" was the leader of the national organization CUT in Colombia, and until 1999 he was also a member of the Communist Party that worked for his CUT candidacy. On May 26 last year, he ran in the presidential election for the Left Alliance Social and Political Front (FSP), and received 600.000 votes. In the parliamentary elections in March 2002, the FSP, along with independent left-wing candidates, including former members of the M19 guerrillas, received over one million votes. They formed a parliamentary group, the PDI, which this summer decided to launch "Lucho" as a candidate for the mayoral job in Bogota. Behind him was a broad collection of trade unions, the legal left and a flora of different social and popular movements.
Who's Lucho?
So who is “Colombia's Lula”, Luis Eduardo Garzón?
He was born in a farming village on the outskirts of Bogota, was abandoned by his father at birth, and experienced the shadows of life when he grew up with a mother who worked as a maid for the rich in Bogota.
"Lucho" knows what it's like to freeze and starve, an experience he shares with the over 60 percent of today's Bogota residents who have only two dollars or less to live on daily. Ten percent of them have only one dollar to eat their fill of. Now the people of Bogota have a mayor who knows their situation. The similarities are great with Brazilian President "Lula".
I first met “Lucho” in 1996, at CUT's office in Bogota. By then, the former CUT leader, Orlando Obregon, had been offered a cabinet post in the government of Ernesto Samper, and "Lucho", who was then general secretary, was proposed by most CUT unions as the new leader. But CUT's deputy leader Alejandro Pedraza, who was also the leader of the strong brewery union in Bavaria, and who, like Orlando Obregon, belonged to the Conservative party, believed that he himself should inherit the leadership position.
But while Pedraza wanted to "inherit" the leadership, "Lucho" showed his democratic mindset by proposing that members resolve the dispute in elections. This led to Pedraza withdrawing his candidacy, as he knew he would lose an election by a large majority. The following year, Pedraza was exposed for involvement in a major corruption case against the employer Bavaria, and was thus banned by its own members.
Country Club
At the age of ten, "Lucho" began working as a street vendor, church servant, carpenter and bag carrier at the "Country Club", the political and economic elite's private favorite club in northern Bogota.
Poverty, which followed him through his youth, gradually gave way after he had finished his studies at the evening high school and got a job as a bidder for the state oil company Ecopetrol. He combined his work with evening studies at the University of Libre, where he began his professional career which eventually led him to the position of deputy leader of one of Colombia's most combative unions, the pride of the USO oil workers. Six years later, he ended his professional career as a leader in CUT.
When he stood on election night on Sunday night and received the supporters' tribute, he also received congratulations from the mayoral candidates who have visited Bogota's "Country Club" many times – not as bag carriers, but in teams with their rich parents.
Fear of murder
The question everyone now worries about is whether "Lucho" can avoid being murdered. He has challenged the power elite in Colombia, and it is not to be played with. He knows this from personal experience, because as leader of the CUT he has buried hundreds of his closest comrades, all victims of the dirty war.
At the end of the election campaign, when opinion polls showed that Garzon had a great chance of winning, the threats and psychological attacks began to come. Bogota's new mayor was named a "covert agent of the guerrillas", a term used by the death squads to justify the killing of thousands of professional activists.
