Leaders tied to paramilitaries back candidates

On the surface, the Democratic Colombia political party couldn't be in a worse position for today's local and regional elections.

The party's leader, Mario Uribe, a cousin of President Álvaro Uribe, resigned from the Senate to face charges that he collaborated with paramilitary death squads. Two other former senators are in jail, including one accused of planning an assault in which 16 peasants were killed with rocks and machetes.

In all, the party's entire four-man bloc in Congress has been purged, casualties of a yearlong scandal that has linked 42 lawmakers with paramilitary groups.

But that hasn't stopped Democratic Colombia, which has close ties to President Uribe. The party and four others whose leaders are either under arrest or under investigation for alleged links to the illegal groups are fielding 26,455 candidates in today's elections.

Electoral monitoring organizations say those candidates, a third of the total, are expected to win as many as eight of 32 governorships, perhaps a quarter of the mayoral seats, and hundreds of other posts - ensuring that leaders tied to paramilitary groups retain national influence.

"They need to maintain real power in politics, and the way to maintain it is in the provinces," said Alejandra Barrios, director of the Electoral Observation Mission, a monitoring group that is closely tracking campaigns. "What they're trying to do is maintain the local political power that they first got in 2000 by building a relationship with paramilitary groups."

Election-related violence has raged in advance of the elections. Twenty candidates have been assassinated in the past two months, almost all of them in attacks carried out by leftist rebels against allies of President Uribe, officials said. Fear is expected to keep many voters away from the polls.

Although they are jailed, politicians such as Álvaro Araújo, a former senator from a powerful political family, and Dieb Maloof, the head of Colombia Viva, are actively supporting candidacies nationwide, according to monitoring groups and political analysts.

Mario Uribe recently said that his party remains healthy, with more than 5,000 candidates. And the political hopefuls have hardly denied maintaining ties with the tarnished lawmakers.

Jorge Carlos Barraza, running for governor in Sucre, acknowledged maintaining ties with Álvaro García, a powerful former senator who has been accused of orchestrating killings. "I've visited Alvaro and the other politicians from Sucre who are in jail, but not to look for help, but because they're my friends," Barraza said.

Some lawmakers in Congress, among them allies of President Uribe, supported legislation that would have hobbled or dismantled parties whose leaders were found to have ties to illegal armed groups. But the proposals failed in Congress, with members of the parties tainted by paramilitaries vigorously opposing them.

"Really, there was no political will to resolve the problem by approving those bills," said Elisabeth Ungar, a political scholar at the University of Los Andes in Bogotá who directs Visible Congress, a group monitoring the legislature.

Powerful paramilitary groups once spread terror and controlled cocaine-trafficking corridors across Colombia in their effort to erode support for Marxist rebels. With their disarmament in 2006, evidence began to surface showing how perhaps a third of Congress conspired with paramilitary commanders to smuggle cocaine, embezzle regional government funds, and liquidate opponents.

Most of the implicated lawmakers were members of a bloc that was loyal to the president, a stalwart ally of the Bush administration, and approved a law that permitted him to run for reelection last year.

Diógenes Rosero, director of a group in Barranquilla that is observing the elections, said many of the candidates of the "para-parties" have little political experience or name recognition.

"These parties will ask for payback after the elections," he said. "They'll say, 'We helped you get in, now you need to give us contracts, now you need to help us.'