Violence

This map attempts to visualise the risks of violence in the 2010 elections. In "my" department, Córdoba, it was calculated that there was a medium-to-extreme risk of violence in 17 of 28 municipalities; with extreme risk in 6 of these.

Click on the map for a larger version.

You may want to compare these risks with another map mentioned on this blog, visualising risks of anomalies and irregularities. Frankly, I ought to have written: fraud.

Risk code: yellow=medium, orange=high, red=extreme.

The two maps show much overlap, i.e. to a large extent fraud and violence coexist.

The maps are results of research coordinated by MOE, the Misión de Observación Electoral. MOE is one of the organisations that also monitor the elections on Sunday 14 March with hundreds of observers, including many international observers from about 10 countries. I am one of them.

Also the Organization of American States (OAS) will be present with more than 100 observers. There is a big difference in the attitudes of these two organisations. The diplomats from OAS talk about Colombia's 200 years of "maintaining sound institutionalism". Almost funny, if it were not tragical hypocrisy.

The authorities are counting on 151.378 police and military to keep elections safe. It certainly is a big operation: 10.114 localities with 75.941 voting points (tables). These impressive figures from the national police command may frighten anyone from violent interventions in the formal voting process. There is still a possibility though, that guerilla groups from FARC or possibly ELN would attempt spectacular attacks – just to prove that they exist, that they have the force to break through these heavy security measures.

The real and quite omnipresent violence risk, however, is less dramatic for the outsider. It is represented by the many paramilitary and criminal gangs - thousands of armed, locally recognised young men who spread terror, to make people vote in a specific way, or to make them abstain. This terror is not so visible, and of course is not visible to the many military and police. It takes place before and after elections, in the villages and barrios, where observers from OAS never appear.