Patience, Truth and a Bit of Magic Made Him President

BOGOTA, Colombia —  Politicians, like athletes, can change quickly from hero to goat. But few have been transformed in the reverse as thoroughly as Andres Pastrana, who will be inaugurated today as the next president of Colombia.

Four years ago, Pastrana was so unpopular that a group of Colombians who spotted him changing planes in Miami booed him. That incident came a few weeks after his first, unsuccessful bid for the presidency, during which Pastrana offered evidence that his opponent had received millions of dollars in campaign donations from drug traffickers.

Pastrana’s revelations embarrassed Colombians, who labeled him a tattletale and traitor.

Further investigation bolstered his evidence--taped telephone conversations--with canceled checks and confessions from top campaign officials. The resulting political scandal is still unraveling, with the arrests of more than a dozen members of Congress and a Cabinet minister.

Last month, outgoing President Ernesto Samper acknowledged that his 1994 campaign had received $6 million in drug money, although he denied having known about the contributions. But by that time, Pastrana had already been vindicated: In June, voters chose him over Samper’s handpicked successor.

Even before taking office, Pastrana has met with President Clinton and the two major Marxist rebel groups fighting in Colombia in Latin America’s longest guerrilla war.

That’s a departure from his predecessor: The United States revoked Samper’s visa because of the drug allegations, and the insurgents refused to negotiate with Samper because they considered his government illegitimate. In the last days of Samper’s term, in fact, the rebels launched widespread attacks--with a death toll topping 100 as of Wednesday--in an apparent “farewell” gesture.

The meetings give Pastrana, a Conservative Party member, a good start on fulfilling his campaign promises of making peace and improving relations with the United States.

He also pledged to revive the economy, starting with a cut in the sales tax.

“The truth always triumphs,” longtime Pastrana friend and aide Mauricio Suarez said. “That is the beauty of this story.”

But others who know Pastrana well, along with his detractors, say there is more to the story that tells a lot about the character of the president-elect, who turns 44 later this month.

Friends and opponents agree that Pastrana’s character was strengthened between his two campaigns, a time that political reporter Cesar Mauricio Velasquez calls “his years in the desert.”

“He is consistent, persistent and orderly,” Velasquez said. “He knows how to set priorities. And he learned those things after losing to Ernesto Samper.”

Juan Guillermo Angel, a former senator who vigorously defended Samper against Pastrana’s accusations, acknowledged that “Mr. Pastrana has matured a lot. . . . He is better qualified to govern than he was four years ago.”

Nevertheless, Pastrana risked the election--a close call decided by a difference of 3 percentage points--because of a grudge against Noemi Sanin, a member of his own Conservative Party who had deserted to run an independent campaign. Even after she was eliminated in the first round, Pastrana did not call off their longtime feud and enlist Sanin in his “Great Alliance for Change,” his campaign slogan.

That shows one of Pastrana’s most crippling defects, said Roberto Posada, columnist for the respected newspaper El Tiempo: “He is proud, and for that reason he holds grudges.”

His pride also led to inflating the resume handed out at campaign headquarters that claims a master’s degree from Harvard, which university officials said is actually a certificate for a semester of courses in 1991.

Posada added another perceived flaw: “He is a little bit jolly for a country with so many problems that needs a leader who is more aged, more of a veteran.”

But Pastrana’s supporters argue that his sense of humor and love of jokes got him through the bad times--first, through his term as Bogota’s first elected mayor, from 1988 to ‘90, when the late drug lord Pablo Escobar was regularly bombing public buildings and city landmarks to protest extradition; and then, through the 1994 election defeat.

They say that his charm--his love of jokes, magic tricks and music--is what persuades others to follow him. Pastrana’s friends laugh tolerantly about how compulsive the president-elect is, even when enjoying himself.

“He invites you over to hear music, and he only plays about two minutes of each record,” Suarez said. “He spends hours just listening to the parts he likes of each record.”

And everyone soon knows when Pastrana has learned to perform a new illusion.

“He loves magic tricks, and when he learns a new one, he shows everyone, sometimes three times each,” Suarez said.

The latest trick Pastrana has pulled off--becoming the embodiment of hope in a country plagued by 80% of the world’s cocaine production along with a prolonged guerrilla war and miserable human rights record--looks a lot like magic.

But those closest to him insist that they are not surprised. He learned his way around politics early and has long been able to take a calculated risk and turn it to his advantage, they said.

Pastrana is the second of four children of the late President Misael Pastrana.

“He was always interested in politics,” said his older brother, Juan Carlos. “Even as a small child, he loved to travel with our father to events like inaugurations and military parades. He loved uniforms. He would dress up for plays as [Simon] Bolivar,” the liberator of South America.

The atmosphere at home was politically charged--the children’s maternal grandfather was an unsuccessful presidential candidate--although politics was seldom overtly discussed, recalled Juan Carlos Pastrana. As a fast-rising political star, their father was often away from home, and the Pastrana children grew up independent, he said.

“It wasn’t ‘My Three Sons,’ ” he said, referring to a television show popular during that era. “Each of us had his own personality and his own friends. We are a family, not a herd.”

Most of Andres Pastrana’s friends were classmates from the San Carlos School, run by Benedictine priests from North Dakota.

From fourth to 12th grade, Pastrana attended the English-language boys school at a low-slung, California-style campus surrounded by athletic fields, a luxury in crowded Bogota.

The priests emphasized social consciousness and solid morality, recalled Jaime Ruiz, a former classmate and close Pastrana advisor.

“There was always the vision of what Colombia was: a country with huge social differences, a developing country, a violent country,” he recalled.

Pastrana stood out among the 60 boys in his class, although not for any special skills, Ruiz recalled.

“He was on the soccer team but was not the best player,” he said. “Without being one of the best students, he never failed a grade. What he did have was personal warmth. He had a lot of friends and no enemies.”

Pastrana also had precocious political acumen.

In senior-year civics, the teacher told the class to organize into political parties. When Pastrana saw two big parties emerging, he organized four other classmates into a third party.

“We said we were the great minority,” Ruiz remembered. “We were five out of 60, but we made the difference between the two parties, and we got to elect who was going to run the government in class. We got pretty good ministries.”

During the last two years of high school, Pastrana’s father was president. The teenager did not have bodyguards, but he did have a chauffeur to drive him from the downtown presidential palace to school in the northern part of the capital. Classmates who missed the bus often called him for a ride, Ruiz said.

The senior Pastrana’s presidential term coincided with his son’s emergence as a public figure. In 1973, his first year as an undergraduate law student at Our Lady of the Rosary College in Bogota, Pastrana organized Colombia’s first walkathon, a fund-raiser to benefit young burn victims.

Many children in Bogota are burned by gas from stoves, like camp stoves, that poor people use in their homes. Burn treatment often requires long hospital stays, and charity hospitals did not have enough beds for all the victims.

Pastrana was especially sympathetic to the problem because his father was burned as a child when a plane at an air show crashed near him, Juan Carlos Pastrana said. But organizing such an Americanized fund-raiser as a walkathon was a huge risk.

“Traditionally, Bogota has been a very cold city where there are not citywide events,” Suarez recalled. “Everyone wondered what would happen. How many people would walk?”

The night before the event, Suarez stayed over at the presidential palace, a few blocks from where the walkathon would start.

About 4:30 a.m., he and Pastrana went down to the starting point, where athletes were warming up.

“By 8:30, there were people everywhere you looked,” Suarez recalled. “Bogota had never seen so many people walking.”

The walkathon raised enough money for a new children’s burn-treatment wing at one charity hospital.

“It was the first time he realized that he could do big things,” Suarez said.

After getting his law degree, Pastrana alternated between politics and journalism, serving on the Bogota City Council and then anchoring a television newscast. He became known for interviewing international figures whom Colombian television had previously not tried to contact, most notably Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, who was in hiding at the time.

Then came the difficult years in City Hall and a term in the Senate. Supporters from that era remember Pastrana as a tough taskmaster.

“When he sets his mind to something, he really pushes,” Ruiz said. “He’s asking you every day, ‘What did you do with this?’ ”

Despite his impatience to get projects finished, Pastrana also knows how to be patient when necessary, said Velasquez, the political reporter. It is a skill that proved indispensable during the past four years and may also serve him well as president.

“He won,” Velasquez said, “because he knows how to bide his time.”