Former Uribe defense minister takes early lead in Colombian presidential election

Uribe torchbearer takes lead in Colombia vote

BOGOTA, Colombia — A former defense minister promising to build on President Alvaro Uribe’s security gains took an early but convincing lead Sunday in Colombia’s presidential elections.

With 42 percent of the votes counted, Juan Manuel Santos had 46 percent against 22 percent for Antanas Mockus, a maverick outsider pledging clean government.

Santos was even winning in Bogota, seen as Mockus’ stronghold, with 40 percent of the vote to 27 percent for capital’s former two-time mayor.

If no candidate in the field of nine wins a simple majority on Sunday, the two top vote-getters will meet in a June 20 runoff.

Third with 10 percent was German Vargas of Cambio Radical, which along with Santos’ National Unity party belongs to Uribe’s governing coalition.

The main opposition candidate, Gustavo Petro of the leftist Polo Democratico Alternativo, had nine percent support. Five other candidates shared the remaining votes.

Santos, a 58-year-old a Cabinet minister in three administrations, had been in a statistical dead heat in pre-election polls with Mockus, the son of Lithuanian immigrants and a former two-time Bogota mayor running on the Green Party slate.

Although generally peaceful, Sunday was marked by nearly two dozen firefights with leftist rebels that claimed the lives of at least three soldiers, a potent reminder that Colombia’s half century-old conflict is far from resolved.

Combat was reported in at least seven regions, most of rural coca-growing centers in the south and west but also in Guajira state in the northeast, where one of the soldiers was killed. All three combat deaths were blamed by the government on the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces, or FARC.

The guerrillas had called on Colombians to boycott Sunday’s vote but did not order people to stay off the roads, as it has done in the past in some more isolated provinces during elections.

Santos, a first cousin of the outgoing vice president, billed himself as a continuation of Uribe’s hugely popular U.S.-backed military buildup, which sharply curtailed kidnappings and murders though the homicide rate rose last year to 39.3 per 100,000 from 34.3 in 2008.

As defense minister from 2006-2009, he helped knock the wind out of the FARC, Latin America’s last remaining major rebel army, which authorities say now numbers less than 9,000 thanks to massive desertions. Santos is a University of Kansas graduate whose family long ran El Tiempo, Colombia’s leading newspaper.

Mockus, also 58, is a mathematician, philosopher and former National University rector who says he’ll also be tough on the FARC. And though careful not to criticize Uribe, he has expressed dismay at the battery of scandals that have plagued the outgoing president, such as domestic spying, extrajudicial killings by soldiers, and the awarding of agricultural subsidies to political cronies. Mockus also advocates raising taxes, which Santos opposes.

In Bogota, Cecilia de Gaitan, 75, said she cast her ballot for Mockus hoping he might begin to rid Colombia of its endemic corruption.

“It won’t be easy but you have to vote with hope,” she said. She had voted for Uribe in the past two elections but called his second term “disastrous” and said she considers Santos “capable, but more of the same.”

Mockus distinguished himself not by focusing directly on the scandals plaguing Uribe but instead with a simple message: Only through education and respect for the law will Colombians find true security.

His colorful, pedagogical style, featuring political rallies that were like a cross between a civics lectures and a revival meeting, catapulted him from fringe status into a contender in three short months. Online, he the biggest number of Facebook and Twitter fans.

A victory for Mockus would make him the world’s first Green Party president. It also could improve relations with Colombia’s left-leaning neighbors: Mockus says he would not have permitted the cross-border raid into Ecuador in March 2008 that killed a top FARC commander and soured relations with Colombia’s southern neighbor as well as Venezuela.

But many voters didn’t think Mockus had what it takes to manage a country at war with cocaine-trafficking criminal bands.

“He has no strength. We need someone with weight in the presidency,” said David Lewinski, 37, a health-care supply business owner. “He surely is the most honorable of all (the candidates), but you don’t run a government on utopian ideas.”

Lewinski saie he voted for Vargas but said he’d opt for Santos in a runoff. He said he would have voted again for Uribe, who was barred by a court from running for a third consecutive term.

Petro helped expose ties between Uribe allies in Congress and far-right paramilitary militias. Some of those allies are now serving up to nine years in prison.

Sunday’s ballot testifies to the splintering of Colombia’s political landscape during the Uribe era. Before his 2002 election, the Liberals and Conservatives dominated the country’s politics.

Mockus’ quirky past has been both a boon and a liability, depending on the voter. As university rector, he once mooned an auditorium full of unruly students. While Bogota mayor, he dispatched mimes into the streets to shame traffic scofflaws.

Santos followed a more traditional script, promising “Jobs, jobs and more jobs.”

He has also sought to distance himself from the problems plaguing Uribe’s administration.

Santos, as defense minister, fired 27 officers when prosecutor accused soldiers of killing more than 1,000 civilians. Critics say he bears some responsibility, but Santos contends it was he who put an end to the abuses.

In an unrelated scandal, Uribe advisers allegedly ordered illegal spying by the DAS domestic security agency on judges, journalists and human rights workers. There have been no suggestions that Santos was in any way involved.