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http://www.wsj.com/articles/leftist-partys-exiles-return-for-colombia-vote-1445688003 Leftist Party’s Exiles Return for Colombia Vote Party’s return a windfall of government peace talks with Marxist guerrillas By Juan Forero Oct. 24, 2015 8:00 a.m. ET 8 COMMENTS VALLEDUPAR, Colombia—In 1989, after hundreds of her political comrades had been assassinated, Imelda Daza left this city in northeast Colombia for exile in Sweden. Gunmen from a right-wing paramilitary movement had effectively wiped out her party, the leftist party Patriotic Union, in a campaign to eliminate what it said was a front for Marxist rebels. Now, Ms. Daza has returned to run for governor in this parched, largely rural state, testing the bounds of a political opening in a more peaceful era. Her party, which disappeared from ballots in 2002, will contend for votes on Sunday as Colombians go to the polls to elect mayors, governors, and members of town councils and state assemblies. Polls show that the 900 candidates the party is fielding will win only a smattering of seats. But their return is seen as an encouraging windfall of government peace talks with Marxist guerrillas, which many Colombians hope will end a tradition of political violence that had stigmatized leftist politicians. “Physically I left, but my spirit never abandoned my roots,” said Ms. Daza, a stout, gray-haired 67-year-old who has been a whirlwind of activity since her return from Sweden in July. “I’m from here, and I’m here to exercise my rights.” The Patriotic Union was formed in the mid-1980s by the Marxist rebel group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, as it sought to disarm and needed a vehicle to win power at the ballot box. Its success was immediate: Party members, many of whom had never been guerrillas but had joined to advance its leftist ideology, secured posts in Congress and a range of local offices. But by the early 1990s, illegal antiguerrilla militias, sometimes working with renegade military officers, had killed more than 1,000 party politicians, including two presidential candidates and eight congressmen. “The point of killing great numbers of people of a political affiliation was to destroy a political party,” said Steven Dudley, author of “Walking Ghosts,” a book on the Patriotic Union. “And those who wanted to destroy a political party achieved their goal.” The slayings prompted many FARC fighters who had joined the party to take up arms again, convinced that their political goals could only be achieved through armed insurrection. With the country descending into violence, and most of the party’s leaders dead or exiled, the Patriotic Union in 2002 lost the legal voter threshold required by law to operate as a party. A judge in 2013, though, ruled in favor of the Patriotic Union’s right to field candidates, a decision supported by President Juan Manuel Santos’s government. Encouraged by government peace talks with FARC rebels, former party members who had disappeared from public view or who had exiled themselves in Europe returned to campaign for office. “It’s very significant that they’re back,” said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a policy group in Washington. “The fact that these candidates feel secure enough to campaign and run for office shows that the country has made progress.” The party has little money for its campaigns, nor are its candidates well known. The Patriotic Union uses offices at the Communist Party headquarters in Bogotá, where bookshelves contain tracts from Lenin and Engels and pictures of Argentine guerrilla icon Ernesto “Che” Guevara hang from the walls. Aida Avella, 65, who returned in 2013 from a 17-year exile in Switzerland after surviving an attack with a rocket-propelled grenade, said she now feels that “it’s not hard to forgive but what you cannot do is forget.” “Many of our comrades were shot dead—in their offices, in their homes and in the street,” said Ms. Avella, the Patriotic Union’s president and a candidate for Bogotá’s city council. She said something fundamental had changed in Colombia and there is a new tolerance, which the party wants to test. “It’s a great thing to sit down and use politics to try to resolve the country’s problems,” she said. On the campaign trail in Cesar state, Ms. Daza, an economist who describes herself as “socialist and anticapitalist,” reminded voters at rallies that seven small-town council members and a state assemblyman from the Patriotic Union were all killed in this region in the 1980s. “The only one who survived was me,” she said. In Valledupar, a city known for its accordion-laced music and 100-degree days, Ms. Daza said her plan is to “vindicate our members, the people who died characterized as terrorists and guerrillas.” Traveling with six bodyguards provided by the state, Ms. Daza has visited parched towns to talk about water rights. She has stopped at universities to promise free tuition and has railed against foreign mining companies. She said it will be an uphill battle to win the governorship. But Ms. Daza said she feels the party will benefit by simply running and getting its message heard, steps she says are vital to building a stronger movement. “For us, this has generated conditions to do politics,” she said of the new political environment. “They can’t call us terrorists or guerrillas for doing politics. We’ll be opposition politicians. We will liberate ourselves from the stigma.” _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
