Colombian Elections: Unforgettable candidates
By Manuel Rueda, Editorial Director
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Colombians will go to the polls on March 14th to choose Senators and Representatives for the lower house of Congress.
Unfortunately one of the country´s most hard-hitting and analytical political magazines, Cambio, has been shut down a few weeks before the election by its owners at El Tiempo and the Spanish multi-national Editorial Planeta.
The owners say Cambio was generating too many economic losses, while the magazine´s editorial team argues that their outfit was shut down because over the past six months, it had successfully unveiled several government corruption scandals, as Editorial Planeta vies to obtain a concession from the government to run a private TV channel in Colombia.
Cambio has revealed how government agricultural subsidies went to the rich and how Colombian security agents from the DAS routinely spied on opposition politicians and independent journalists.
As I browsed the archives of the recently shut-down magazine, I came across an article on Colombia´s most “unforgettable” political candidates.
The Cambio list includes the following characters:
- Ediberto Vargas, a candidate from the State of Casanare who ran for the Yopal city council on behalf of the “machista” movement in 2002. Vargas became famous for a campaign slogan that said “two women are better than one”, but upon losing the race he complained against election authorities for accepting womens´ votes, arguing that they were more numerous than men and this put his movement at a disadvantage. After his short lived incursion in city politics, Vargas finished his second book on macho philosophy which he called, “Of horses and women”. The first book, called “Rescuing Machismo” sold out.
- Doctor Goyeneche, a man who worked as a security guard at the Universidad Nacional, ran for the Presidency several times between 1958 and 1970. Goyeneche had ambitious projects like “paving” the mighty Magdalena River in order to improve the transportation of people and goods from the Caribeean Coast to Bogota and vice-versa. “The river already has water and sand,” he famously said. “All you need is to add some cement.”
- The Bullfighter candidate: Rodolfo Rincon, a former bullfighter whose artistic name is El Tunjo, has run for the Presidency and for Mayor of Bogota. He has shown up in his bullfighting costume at public events and his “original” proposals include making separate roads for the horse-trolleys that pick up garbage in Bogota and installing helicopter propellers on cars which would be used in “emergency situations” in order to avoid traffic jams.
- The “don´t vote for me” candidate: Augusto Guillermo Lora was a presidential candidate in 2002 who asked his voters not to vote for him. The retired army Colonel attempted to convince voters to show up and leave their ballots blank as a way of protesting the corrupt practices of the political establishment. His campaign team, which only had six members, thought that the “blank” vote was the only “democratic” way to “change the political regime”.
Unbelievable? But Colombia, after all, is a country where everything is possible.
For my next political post I will come up with my own list of the most extravagant, absurd, and surprising candidates competing in the March 14th Congressional elections. With more than 2,400 candidates competing for 268 seats, I think there will be plenty to choose from.
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