Latinnews Archive
Latin American Weekly Report - 25 March 1977
Colombia: all in the family
A long-running business scandal involving members of the President's family is providing the pretext for a clearer alignment of political forces.
In his opening address to the special session of congress at the beginning of the month, President Alfonso Lopez Michelsen asked a house committee to investigate the purchase of a 40,000 hectare property in the Llanos Oreintales, in which his son, Juan Manuel Lopez Caballero, had a substantial stake. The President made it clear he expected the committee to absolve his son of any impropriety in the acquisition of this estate; he pointed out that the purchase had been made by a syndicate of more than 100 people, including Juan Manuel, and that, in any case, it had been completed before he became President (August 1974). Moreover, he said, no member of the then presidential candidate's family had obtained a loan from a government-owned bank for the purpose of buying a stake in the La Libertad estate. He went on to assert that the attorney-general's office had already carried out an investigation into the business dealings of one of his sons, which should be made available to the parliamentary committee, and that the so-called carretera alterna del Llano, from the capital of Meta department, Villavicencio, built during the Pastrana and Lleras administrations (1966-74), went nowhere near the property.
This unexpected and apparently rather trivial request from the President, at a time when such transcendentally important themes as electoral and constitutional reform were under discussion, was his way of replying to a veiled but persistent newspaper campaign concerning the business activities of the President's family, which had considerable political implications. Hacienda La Libertad first became a political issue in September 1975, as the result of an article in the Conservative daily La Republica by senator Bertha Hernandez de Ospina, the wife of the late Conservative leader, Mariano Ospina Perez (LA IX, 37). The latter disowned his wife's allegations at the time, following a protest from Lopez Michelsen. Even so, the political repercussions of this incident were far-reaching, with several Conservative ministers offering their resignations, and a wide gulf opening between the government and the Ospina-Pastrana faction of the Conservative party.
The whole issue then slept until late last year, when the controversial Liberal senator, Jose Ignacio Vives Echavarria, was appointed ambassador to Cuba. It was widely rumoured at the time that Vives had some kind of hold over Lopez on account of the La Libertad affair. Vives's suplente in the senate, Jaime Serrano Reyes, had guaranteed a loan from the Banco Cafetero (the centre of the Fedecafe empire) to Juan Manuel Lopez Caballero. According to the Bogota weekly Alternativa, Serrana appointed Vives his legal representative to recover this debt, and the latter chose to take the matter straight to Lopez senior. The President, anxious to avoid a scandal in congress, bought Vives off with the Cuban appointment.
The revival of the matter in recent weeks by the llerista newspaper El Espectador is clearly being seen as weapon in the bitter internecine struggle in the Liberal party over the presidential nomination of the 1978 elections. On 15 February El Espectador made a front page story out of a note from its correspondent in Villavicencio on an alleged 'invasion' of La Libertad by 70 campesino families, and their immediate eviction by troops, at the personal request of Juan Manuel Lopez. The President's claim that there was no colono problem on La Libertad was made to look even more dubious by a statement from the campesinos' national organisation, ANUC, which presented evidence to the congressional investigating committee that the police had been used to terrorise colonos and neighbouring campesinos since at least July 1974, when 25 families were evicted from the estate and several of them imprisoned. The latest in a long list of outrages came, according to ANUC, at the end of January this year, when agents of the DAS Rural (security police) destroyed the houses and fences of four colono families, and then robbed them; on the previous day, policemem stationed in the estate itself had allegedly raped three campesinas.
All this was grist to the mill of the llerista and pastranista press, which has set out to refute all the President's claims concerning the La Libertad case. El Espectador and the pastranista magazine Guion published almost simultaneously, in mid- March, the legal documentation on the La Libertad purchase. It turned out that the property belonged to Sociedad Hato Lulu Ltda which, contrary to the President's assertion, was owned by only nine people. Juan Manuel Lopez Caballero was the main shareholder, with 49 per cent of the stock, and his brother Felipe, the President's private secretary, held five per cent. The company was formed on 4 September 1974, after Lopez Michelsen became President. The publications also gave details of the new company's easy access to credit, which enabled it to obtain interest-free loans and then repay them in a matter of days. Ex-President Misael Pastrana Borrero has also gone out of his way to suggest that the route chosen for the Llanos road was no coincidence.
The congressional committee was due to travel to La Libertad last week to see for itself. It is also to take evidence from the newspapers which have published details of the case, including the El Tiempo columnist, Klim, who is the President's brother-in-law, Lucas Caballero.
The opposition press campaign, which seems to foreshadow some kind of electoral alliance between ex-Presidents Carlos Lleras Restrepo and Pastrana Borrero, has predictably brought government demands for controls on the press to a new pitch of stridency, and the President mentioned such a possibility in his inaugural speech to congress. These proposals have been backed up by Alvaro Gomez Hurtado from the pages of El Siglo, in which the leader of the other Conservative faction has suggested that what the country needs is a 'real' state of siege.
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