Andrés Pastrana
Andrés Pastrana was president of Colombia from 1998 to 2002, the television newsreader and son of the president Misael Pastrana of 1970-74, who had been kidnapped by Escobar's men in January 1988 while running for mayor of Bogotá and freed a week later, who lost the election of 1994 to Samper and then released the tapes that showed the Cali cartel had paid for Samper's campaign. He won in 1998 on the promise of peace with the FARC. He met their leader Manuel Marulanda in the jungle before his inauguration. He ceded them a demilitarised zone the size of Switzerland around San Vicente del Caguán in November 1998. He negotiated for three years while they used it to hold hostages, grow coca and train, until in February 2002, after they hijacked an airliner to kidnap a senator, he ended the talks and sent the army in. The other half of the policy was Plan Colombia, agreed with Clinton in 2000, which brought nine billion dollars of mostly military aid over the decade, the helicopters, the fumigation of the coca fields and the retrained army that Uribe then used. He was born in Bogotá in 1954, studied law at the Javeriana and at Harvard, founded the news programme that made him a face in every home. He was the capital's first elected mayor in 1988, the year of his kidnapping, and a senator from 1991. The economy in his term had its worst year since the 1930s, a contraction of four per cent in 1999 with the collapse of the mortgage system and the earthquake at Armenia, and unemployment reached twenty per cent. The paramilitaries of the AUC grew to fifteen thousand men in the same years and the massacres were at their peak. The Caguán's empty chair, at the opening ceremony of January 1999 that Marulanda did not attend, was the image of his presidency. The country elected Uribe in 2002 to do the opposite. He was Colombia's ambassador in Washington in 2005-06, and has spent the years since attacking the peace agreement of 2016 as the surrender he had refused to make.
- Lived: 1954 CE – ?
- Nationality: Colombian
- Roles: president, journalist, politician
