Colombian drawing fire for efforts to free hostages (story on Senator Piedad Cordoba)

[Judi Lynn]

Colombian drawing fire for efforts to free hostages
mcclatchy-tribune

March 30, 2008

BOGOTA, Colombia

Sen. Piedad Cordoba emerged from the Senate chamber on a recent night, clutching her side.

"My stomach hurts," she told an aide. "It's all this stress."

No wonder. Ten bodyguards accompany her around Colombia after a series of death threats. People on the street insult her, and she must wait in a secure place for other passengers to board an airplane before she gets on, after a verbal altercation at Bogota's airport in January.

A kidnap victim herself who has long worked on behalf of Colombia's dispossessed, Cordoba has been in the headlines over the past three months for her work to secure the freedom of six hostages held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a Marxist guerrilla group known as the FARC.

But most Colombians believe that in doing so, she has become too cozy with the FARC and Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chavez. Both are almost universally disliked in Colombia.

"She's Chavez's alter ego," said Sen. Jorge Visbal, a political foe.

So while many analysts expect Cordoba to run for president in 2010 with Chavez's support, pollster Juan Lemoine discounts her odds.

"She has less than a 5 percent chance of winning," Lemoine said.

Cordoba soldiers on.

"They've always tried to shut me up," Cordoba told The Miami Herald during several interviews that started in Bogota and ended in Caracas. "I'm against the Establishment. Many people on the left don't want to rock the Establishment and not be invited to cocktail parties. Nobody invites me. The only list I'm on is of those to be killed."

Cordoba said she has already survived eight attempts on her life. One killed two of her police guards, while another maimed her driver.

And that was before she sought the controversial and high-profile role of trying to free hostages held for years by the FARC, while Colombian President Alvaro Uribe waged an unrelenting war against the FARC, backed with U.S. aid.

Cordoba joined with Chavez, and they won Uribe's reluctant support to try to get the FARC to free hostages. The guerrillas unilaterally released two in January and four more in February.

"Without her efforts and the mediation of Chavez, we wouldn't be free today," former Sen. Luis Eladio Perez, freed in February, told The Miami Herald. "When Colombia had forgotten the Colombians in the jungle, she was fighting on our behalf. Whether or not you like her ideas, she is someone the country needs. She's not doing this to win votes."

Results from a Gallup poll this month showed Cordoba had a disapproval rating of 69 percent in the country's four biggest cities, up from 32 percent late last year.

"A lot of people don't understand why she was speaking badly of Colombia and Uribe in Venezuela," said Carlos Santos, a Bogota taxi driver. "It's like talking badly about your family with strangers."

Indeed, Cordoba openly embraces Chavez and doesn't mince words when asked about Uribe, who enjoyed an astounding 84 percent approval rating in the March poll, while Chavez had an equally astonishing 90 percent disapproval rating.

"Chavez is a humanitarian," Cordoba said. "I'm a Chavista."

As for Uribe, "he is a war-monger," Cordoba said. "Colombia is a mafia state, and Uribe is the boss."

Ironically, Uribe and Cordoba both hail from Medellin in the central Colombia state of Antioquia. But the similarities end there.

He is a conservative and the scion of a land-owning family. FARC guerrillas killed his father in 1983.

Cordoba is an avowed socialist whose father was black and her mother white. Both of her parents were teachers. She was the second of 10 children.

Cordoba, 53, said she was one of only three blacks among the 300 students at her law school. She was a student activist then and worked afterward with political activists on behalf of blacks, women, gays and the poor in general.

She raised four children, got divorced and was elected to the House of Representatives in 1992 and the Senate two years later. Senators are elected nationwide.

In 1999, right-wing paramilitaries kidnapped her, but public appeals secured her freedom 16 days later. She took a leave from the Senate and fled to Montreal, where she went to work for the United Nations. She returned to Colombia two years later and was re-elected to the 102-member Senate.

Cordoba moved easily among the powerful in a Senate ante-chamber recently. Sitting at a corner table, she accepted hugs and kisses from colleagues. "She is a brave woman," Sen. Luis Fernando Velasco said, after greeting Cordoba. "She says what she thinks, even though this might hurt her politically. People have started to view her as an enemy of the state. That isn't fair."

Cordoba said the public ire has taken its toll.

"This work is very exhausting," she said on the terrace of the Gran Melia Hotel in Caracas where the Chavez government puts her up. "The Colombian government has sold the media on the idea that I'm very dangerous. It hurts me."

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation/bal-te.colombia30mar30,0,3819626.story?track=rss

[Judi Lynn]

1. Adding photos of Senator Cordoba:

See anyone you recognize? Senator Piedad Cordoba
with Congresspeeps Nancy Pelosi and Jim McGovern.

[AlphaCentauri]

2. B* media doctrine working at its best

demonizing people of good faith celebrating murderer.

[magbana]

3. Glad you posted this article on Sen. Cordoba

If this is not an indictment of the total political and social fabric of Colombia, I don't know what is.

[Judi Lynn]

5. It's damned ugly learning she has had two body guards murdered, and a driver shot,

by people who were trying to get to Piedad Cordoba due to her leftist identity.

How more people don't recognize that ASSASSINATION is a little worse than mere "human rights violations" is unforgivable.

[Judi Lynn]

4. "A Lawmaker Whose Nation Dislikes Her Friends"

(Simon Romero has been a relentless corporate media mouthpiece in true Judith Miller fashion, focused on Latin America, and anti-leftist leaders, pro-Bush's Uribe)

A Lawmaker Whose Nation Dislikes Her Friends



Scott Dalton for The New York Times
“I suppose I’m somewhat unique. But Colombia will just have to get used to me because I’m not going away.” Piedad Córdoba

By SIMON ROMERO
Published: March 1, 2008

~Like Mr. Uribe, Ms. Córdoba is a lawyer; both are from Antioquia, the economically vibrant province that has Medellín as its capital. But the similarities end there, with Ms. Córdoba emerging as one of the most outspoken critics of Mr. Uribe, the scion of a powerful landholding family.

Ms. Córdoba said her propensity to speak out originated during her childhood in Medellín as the daughter of a black man and a white woman, both teachers.

“My family and I were considered extraterrestrials,” she said. “I understand what it’s like to be different, which is why I defend homosexuals, women, blacks, anyone I can.”

While at college in Medellín, Ms. Córdoba said she was attracted to the theater and revolutionary ideas, but she avoided the guerrilla groups gaining momentum at the time, defining herself as a pacifist. Later, she got her start in politics as the private secretary of a former mayor of Medellín, William Jaramillo Gómez, emerging as his protégée.

YET while Ms. Córdoba has won recognition for supporting Colombia’s minorities, her warm ties with the country’s leftist guerrillas go too far for many Colombians, even if they privately acknowledge she may be one of the only people who can win the release of the FARC’s captives.

Ernesto Samper, the former Colombian president, said he got a sense of the emotions Ms. Córdoba elicits when he recently entered a barber shop in Bogotá where two women were arguing about politics. One of the women hated Ms. Córdoba, Mr. Samper said, while the other one loved her.

“It’s a mistake to think her political career is over,” Mr. Samper said in a telephone interview.

And so Ms. Córdoba presses ahead with this new phase, which has her spending about as much time in Caracas, in the corridors of Mr. Chávez’s palace and the Meliá, as she does in Bogotá. Asked about comments in Colombia that she should simply stay in Venezuela, Ms. Córdoba flashed a smile and said she had no plan to do so.

“It’s not surprising,” she said, laughing. “In Colombia, with my face, my turban, my words, I’m Public Enemy No. 1.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/world/americas/01cordoba.html?_r=1&em&ex=1204520400&en=bb9dc23c9398bec8&ei=5087%0A&oref=slogin