Colombia's Potential Future President Antanas Mockus has Biggest Challenge: 5 Million Displaced Colombians [VIDEO]

Colombia elects today a new president. It's very likely that the Green Party's candidate Antanas Mockus will be elected in a second vote, defeating today's front runner, right-wing politician Juan Manuel Santos, a close ally of the current president Alvaro Uribe.

Update: Juan Manuel Santos has won today's vote. AlJazeera reports:

Colombia's former defence minister, Juan Manuel Santos, has easily won the first round of the country's presidential election, but without the majority needed to avoid a June run-off with rival Antanas Mockus.

Santos, the anointed successor of Alvaro Uribe, the outgoing president, led with 46 per cent of the votes, while Mockus, a former Bogota mayor, had 21 per cent with almost all polling stations reporting, electoral authorities said on Sunday.

Alvaro Uribe is accused of keeping strong ties with the drug cartels and right-wing paramilitary groups.


Antanas Mockus [Photo by El Espectador] is a scholar, son of Ucranian Lithuanian immigrants, former president of Colombia's National University and mayor of the capitol city Bogota, his political style is very inclusive, unusual and effective. His work transformed radically the city of Bogota.

However wins this election will have to face a horrendous crisis that most media in the U.S. don't even talk about: there are about 5 million displaced people in Colombia, the second worst humanitarian crisis in the world after Sudan.

Most of the displaced people are farmers, Indigenous and Afro descendant communities, women and poor people, who are forced by violence to leave their lands in order to benefit powerful corporations and drug mafias with ties to the Uribe government.

Why the U.S. media don't talk about this? Maybe because this horrendous displacement is being supported by the Pentagon with billions of dollars in military assistance. Last week, a group of activists met in Washington, DC, to protest this crisis in front of the White House. This is a video I made of the event:

What can the United States do in order to stop Colombia's crisis. According to the non profit human rights group Witness For Peace:

• Co-sponsor House Resolution 1224, which supports the rights of displaced Afro-Colombians, indigenous people, and women.

• End aid to the Colombian military, which has proven complicit in much of the displacement. Use the funds instead to address the vast needs of Colombia's nearly 5 million displaced people.

• Cancel fumigation and forced eradication programs that have pushed thousands of farmers from their lands without reducing coca production. Replace these programs with greater investment in drug prevention and rehabilitation programs that reduce demand for drugs here at home.

• Create opportunities for small-scale farmers, and abandon plans for the Colombia free trade agreement that would likely force them out of farming and into the ranks of the displaced.

• Promote a negotiated end to the conflict, not an ill-fated military solution. Please withhold funds for the U.S. Southern Command until the agreement that established a U.S. military presence on at least seven Colombian military bases is annulled."
  

If you want to learn more about this crisis, please visit the Witness For Peace website, and learn what you can do to stop it. Contact your Congress member and demand immediate action to stop Colombia's humanitarian crisis now by passing the HR-1224 resolution.

Rev. Ricardo Esquivia of the Evangelical Council of Churches of Colombia explains the crisis:

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