HE NASTINESS OF THE US election is nothing compared with Colombia's local and regional elections last week. In many rural towns, villagers voted with guns pointing at their heads.
Gilberto Toro, president of Colombia's Federation of Municipalities, declared that the electoral process could not be considered normal. He said the guerrillas and the paramilitaries killed 21 candidates for mayor and city councils, manipulated candidates in 600 of Colombia's 1,089 townships, kidnapped more than 100 candidates, and threatened hundreds of others. Some 300 candidates quit out of fear.
Many candidates modified their platforms, according to violent ''suggestions'' from either leftist guerrillas or the right-wing paramilitaries. Are votes that were pressured by guns valid? To what extent were the elections in many municipalities legitimate? Is there any guarantee that the elected mayors will be able to exercise power with autonomy?
''When you have a rifle pointing at your head, you have to agree with whatever the aggressor says,'' said Toro.
In an effort to avoid more killings this year, Toro visited Manuel Marurlanda, leader of Colombia's main guerrilla group, known by its Spanish-language acronym, FARC. He also visited Carlos Castano, leader of the paramilitary forces. The guerrilla leader said he could not guarantee the lives of the mayors, but the paramilitary chief said he would respect their lives. ''Nevertheless, after that meeting, the paramilitaries killed the other three candidates for mayor,'' Toro said. Since January 1998, 24 Colombian mayors have been killed.
Much of the post-electoral analyses has focused on the results in big cities. But the dramatic situation that rural Colombia is confronting cannot be ignored.
The rural inhabitants are tired of being manipulated. Some have said they feel trapped in the conflict. Some are trying to protest in a peaceful way: In San Vicente del Caguan, the capital of the FARC safe-haven zone (a 42,000-square-kilometer area from which the military withdrew two years ago as a concession to enable peace talks to start), a majority voted for Nestor Leon Ramirez, an independent, and not for Josue Duran, who admitted having the ''backing and credibility of the FARC.''
A spokesman from the FARC dismissed charges that the guerrrillas intimidated voters and candidates. However, he confirmed that no community project in the areas they control can be conducted without their blessing and that they capture ''corrupt'' politicians and apply the FARC's ''anticorruption ''laws.
Since 1997, the paramilitary leader Castano recognized that he supported specific candidates for mayor and that the people in the region under his control had to vote for them. Now there is a new scandal because Castano kidnapped seven congressmen.
Colombia needs to integrate the complex challenges at the local level into national decision-making.
However, President Andres Pastrana ''has not even accepted to have a meeting with the Federation of Colombian Mayors in order to listen and discuss the many dramatic problems of the country's municipalities,'' according to Toro.
In addition to integrating efforts toward defending a democratic system that is extremely fragile and under attack, Colombia also needs a more structured and balanced US policy. Although President Clinton insists in calling it a ''package for peace,'' the $1.3 billion US aid package approved this year provided 60 combat helicopters and military training. Only $238 million was assigned to the so-called social component.
The United States has a key co-responsibility in what is going on in Colombia because all the factions are being fueled by drug money that comes mainly from US drug addicts.
This week a new US president will be elected. Either Al Gore or George W. Bush will have to evaluate the failure of US drug policy: After spending billions of dollars, the flow of drugs has not been reduced.
The next president must address the control of drug trafficking from a more structural, coherent, multinational perspective. Colombia is depending on it.
Maria Cristina Caballero, editor of investigations at the Colombian news magazine Semana, is a Mason Fellow at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
