Carlos Gaviria Díaz

Carlos Gaviria Díaz, born May 8, 1937 in Sopetrán, Antioquia, is a Colombian lawyer, former Constitutional Court magistrate, and an active politician.

On May 28, 2006, Gaviria achieved the largest vote ever for a leftist party in Colombia, with more than 2,600,000 votes (22.04% of the vote). On August 1, 2006, Gaviria was chosen as president of the Alternative Democratic Pole (PDA). [http://www.polodemocratico.net/article.php3?id_article=1436] He intends for his party to become the leading opposition force during President Álvaro Uribe's second term in office.

Biography

Education

Gaviria has a Doctorate in Law and Political Science from the University of Antioquia and attended classes at Harvard University as a special student in the area of jurisprudence, constitutional law, and political theory. He was dean and teacher of the Law Faculty of the University of Antioquia. One of his former students was his current political antagonist, President Álvaro Uribe.

Political career

During the 1990s he became president of Colombia's Constitutional Court. In 2002, he was elected senator, representing the leftist political formation, the Social and Political Front, after achieving the fifth-highest voting result in the elections.

He ran for the presidency of Colombia for the 2006–2010 term, as the candidate of the Alternative Democratic Pole, after winning the bloc nomination over Antonio Navarro.

Polls in late April 2006 placed Gaviria in second place after incumbent President Álvaro Uribe, leaving behind the Liberal Party's Horacio Serpa, who is running for president for the third consecutive time. He lost to President Uribe in the May 2006 election by a margin of 62% to 22%.

Political Proposals

One of his main political proposals is to attempt to change Colombia's socio-economic model which, he believes, exemplifies some of the worst characteristics of capitalism at a global and local level. By doing this, Gaviria intends to reduce the gap between the rich and poor.

Gaviria and many of his supporters argue that this gap has increased over the past decade and continues to grow, in part due to the economic policies of President Álvaro Uribe's current administration. He disagrees with measures intended to make local and foreign investment more attractive at the cost of reducing benefits for the working class, while simultaneously increasing indirect taxes on the poor and reducing income taxes for the wealthy. He calls himself a liberal, but proposes to control and regulate every single aspect of the economy.

Gaviria is also a strong defender of Colombia's 1991 Constitution, in principle, but believes that it is necessary to fully apply its chapters on human, ethnic and political rights, while at the same time restoring some of the controls that he considers the government and the state should have over the nation's economy and society.