Sorry, Colombia isn't a fascist regime after all!

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Friday February 26, 2010 · 5:35 PM PST

2010/02/26 · 17:35

I know, it's always a bummer when your most cherished beliefs are debunked. One of those beliefs around Kosville is that Colombia under Alvaro Uribe is a fascist dictatorship. Why, I'm pretty sure that if you did a comment/diary search for Uribe, you'd find nothing but references to fascism, narco-paramilitarism, and the like. (Except for comments by me and by Shane Hensinger.)

In a stunning development (and by "stunning" I mean "widely rumored and leaked for a couple of weeks now"), Colombia's Constitutional Court has declared that Uribe will not be allowed to run for a third term via a referendum next month. The court found all sorts of procedural violations, and didn't even get to whether the idea of a third term violated the spirit of Colombia's democratic institutions.

More on Uribe's decision to tear up the constitution and bayonet the judges after the jump.

Oh, sorry, that was my Kossack brain talking. Back in Colombia, Uribe said the following:

Bienvenida siempre la participación, con acatamiento a la Constitución, a las normas legales y con sometimiento a las instituciones de derecho (...) competentes para hacer respetar la ley", afirmó Uribe.

"La participación de los ciudadanos no puede ser contraria a la Constitución", dijo Uribe, y añadió: "el Estado de opinión es una expresión del Estado de derecho, por lo tanto debe respetar la Ley y la Constitución".

You can run it through Google Translate, which will tell you that "Uribe ate his own socks qelhxfqyo," or you can let me do it:

"[Citizen] participation [i.e. the referendum] is always welcome, but respecting the Constitution, legal norms, and subject to the institutions that are competent to impose respect for the law," affirmed Uribe.

"Citizens' participation cannot be contrary to the Constitution," said Uribe, who added, "The rule of public opinion is an expression of the rule of law, and therefore the law and the Constitution must be respected."

Personally, I have a theory about all this. I think Uribe, who's nothing if not vain, wanted the referendum to be thrown out. I think he knew a third term would be far harder on him politically than the first two, with issues like health care reform (sound familiar?), and he wanted to go out in a way that demonstrated that he was still the public's first choice, and that he was a model democrat for obeying a court decision he hated.

But even if you assume that Uribe decided to obey the decision because he quizzed his generals and found that they wouldn't back him in a Fujimori-style "auto-coup," the fact is he's leaving on August 7. Just like Lula, two terms and gone. And just not like a certain someone next door.

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