Alvaro Uribe is on a roll. When he was sworn in as Colombia's 43rd president in August 2002, Uribe inherited an economy in full recession and stalled peace talks with the country's largest guerrilla army. By nearly all accounts Uribe has turned the country around: Colombia's notoriously high kidnapping and murder rates are dropping, an aggressive U.S.-backed drug-eradication program has significantly lowered annual coca-leaf production and the economy is set to grow by a healthy 4 percent this year. A poll published earlier this month gave Uribe a 71 percent approval rating, but he has only two years left in his four-year term and the Constitution prohibits the president, a right-winger, from seeking re-election. Uribe and his supporters in the National Congress are pushing a constitutional amendment to change that. "In our country we have short presidential terms, and that means we think only in the short term," says Sen. Claudia Blum. "If a president is doing a good job and fulfilling his campaign promises, the people should have the right to decide whether he should continue."
Millions of Colombians are inclined to agree, and Uribe may get his wish by the year end. The proposed amendment that would allow the 51-year-old president to run again in 2006 cleared a key legislative hurdle last week and is expected to pass in both chambers of Congress later this year. But if the recent experience of some Latin American countries is any guide, Colombian legislators may want to think twice about changing the Constitution to accommodate Uribe's ambitions. Three South American countries have done just that at the behest of a sitting president over the past 10 years, and the results have ranged from the merely bad to the downright disastrous. Argentina and Peru became veritable cesspools of corruption after Carlos Menem and Alberto Fujimori got the green light to seek and win second presidential terms in the mid-1990s. Venezuela's Hugo Chavez has steered an ever-more authoritarian course as president since his re-election in 2000. "[Re-election] is a bad idea in general in these countries," says Mexican political analyst Luis Rubio. "In countries where institutions are weak and the rule of law is tenuous, someone who gets re-elected winds up having too much power."
Latin America's traditional aversion to re-election is unique. A British prime minister can stand for re-election as many times as his fellow citizens see fit. Sixteen of the 43 U.S. presidents have won election to a second term in office. From Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe to Jose Eduardo dos Santos in Angola to Daniel arap Moi in Kenya, Africans have chosen many leaders who fought against colonial rule in the 1960s and 1970s only to wind up as perennial fixtures on the presidential throne. But until fairly recently, nearly every Spanish-speaking country in the Americas had a constitutional ban on the re-election of an incumbent. That distinctive feature is rooted in the region's historical experience. Re-election got a bad name from dictators like Porfirio Diaz, a highly decorated general who ruled Mexico with an --iron fist for more than 30 years and made sure his periodic re-election to a fresh term as president went off without a hitch. The Mexican revolution of 1910-17 that toppled Diaz was sparked by a demand to abolish re-election, and to this day government documents in Mexico still bear the revolutionary slogan, "Effective Suffrage, No Re-election."
Colombians agree with that logic. Their country's ban on re-election also dates back to the early years of the 20th century, when Gen. Rafael Reyes was elected president and proceeded to close down the National Congress and rule by decree until he was driven from office in 1909. Under the country's current Constitution, a president can never run for the office again after his four-year term. Uribe and his allies in Congress argue that a single term is insufficient to address the host of social and economic ills plaguing Colombia, including guerrilla insurgencies, a 60 percent poverty rate and drug trafficking. Some veteran Colombia watchers share that view. "All things being equal, altering the rules on re-election to benefit an incumbent is full of risks," says Michael Shifter of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue think tank. "But it's much more defensible in Colombia because Uribe has been able to show some leadership and bring the country together at a time of national crisis."
The re-election issue has already claimed some casualties inside Colombia. One was a scorpion that a flamboyant pro-Uribe senator brought into the upper chamber during a floor debate last May. During a physical confrontation between the senator and an anti-re-election legislator, the scorpion escaped from its plastic container, only to be stomped to death by a policeman. The other casualty was the personal reputation for probity and transparency that Uribe built up during the first 18 months of his presidency. In his single-minded pursuit of the proposed constitutional change, Uribe has resorted to old-fashioned pork-barrel politics and even nepotism to line up the votes he needs in the national legislature. One opponent of the amendment abruptly changed her mind after a closed-door meeting with Uribe that ended with his pledge to funnel more government revenues into her congressional district. Critics of the government charge that dozens of relatives of other congressmen have been named to cushy diplomatic posts as part of Uribe's arm-twisting offensive. "We have a president who is also a candidate, who has control over the public treasury and vast influence over the media, which cannot survive without government advertising," says opposition Congressman Gustavo Petro.
Some of Uribe's supporters, for their part, point to Mexico's record. Mexico long ago took re-election phobia to its logical extreme by preventing even senators and congressmen from running for a second term. As a result, these lame-duck legislators have no accountability to voters and little incentive to acquire expertise and lawmaking skills during their somewhat brief tenures in Congress. Many are calling for political reforms that would overturn that ban while leaving in place the restriction limiting presidents to a single six-year term. And for all the tales of rampant malfeasance and excessive concentration of power seen in Argentina and Peru during the late 1990s, some analysts cite the relatively scandal-free second term of former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso as a positive example for re-election advocates. "Second terms are important because they allow voters to re-evaluate an administration," says Christopher Garman of the Sao Paulo-based consulting firm Tendencias Consultoria Integrada. "A second term also gives politicians a stimulus to be more publicly accountable."
Some Colombians openly wonder how level the political playing field will be in two years' time if Uribe is allowed to stand for another term. "Buoyed by his enormous popularity, Uribe says, 'I want to be re-elected and I'm going to change the rules so that can happen,' " says Enrique Santos Calderon, the codirector of the country's leading newspaper El Tiempo and a cousin of Uribe's vice president. "I think that's dangerous and unsound." Colombians need only look at the fates of two ex-presidents who took their countries down the same road where Uribe wants to go. Both Menem and Fujimori are spending their golden years in disgraced exile as fugitives from justice in their native Argentina and Peru. Until Latin America develops stronger institutional checks on executive power, the risks of re-election may exceed the rewards.
WITH STEVEN AMBRUS IN BOGOTA AND MIKE KEPP IN RIO DE JANEIRO