In Colombia presidential vote, maverick outsider vies with Uribe disciple

Uribe torchbearer vs. outsider in Colombia vote

BOGOTA, Colombia — An ex-defense minister promising to build on President Alvaro Uribe’s security gains and a maverick outsider pledging clean government were favored Sunday as Colombians voted for a new leader.

Although generally peaceful, Sunday was marked by some 17 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.

Juan Manuel Santos, a Cabinet minister in three administrations and grandnephew of a president, was in a statistical dead heat in pre-election polls with Antanas Mockus, the son of Lithuanian immigrants and a former two-time Bogota mayor running on the Green Party slate.

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

Voting was on the whole and orderly, though independent election observers reported isolated cases of vote-buying.

Combat was reported in at least seven regions, most of them 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, 58, a first cousin of the outgoing vice president, bills himself as a continuation of Uribe’s hugely popular U.S.-backed military buildup that has 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 don’t believe Mockus has 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 was voting for another candidate from Uribe’s conservative governing coalition, ex-Sen. German Vargas Lleras of Cambio Radical, 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.

The main opposition candidate is Gustavo Petro of the leftist Polo Democratico Alternativo, who as a senator 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.

Petro has been running fourth in pre-election polls, behind former Foreign Minister Noemi Sanin of the Uribe-allied Conservative Party. Trailing them in the race is Liberal Party candidate Rafael Pardo, a defense minister in the early 1990s.

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.

He also promoted fiscal austerity, fought cronyism and encouraged civic-mindedness. At his presidential campaign rallies, Mockus stressed the sanctity of public coffers and the virtues of paying taxes.

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 the prosecutors 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.