Ex-Minister Wins Election in Colombia
CARACAS, Venezuela — Colombian voters on Sunday overwhelmingly elected as their new president an American-educated former defense minister who oversaw a forceful counterinsurgency against the country’s rebel groups.Juan Manuel Santos took 69 percent of the vote in the second and final round of elections, against 27.5 percent for his rival, a former Bogotá mayor, Antanas Mockus, Colombian electoral officials said Sunday night.
While Mr. Santos obtained a decisive majority, voting was marked by high levels of abstention and the killing by guerrillas over the weekend of at least 10 members of Colombia’s security forces, a reminder that the country’s four-decade war against leftist rebels is far from over.
The victory for Mr. Santos, an economist, points to continuity in Colombia’s ties with the United States, which provides the country with hundreds of millions of dollars in security aid each year. Mr. Santos, like the outgoing president, Álvaro Uribe, has said he wants to preserve Colombia’s position as Washington’s leading Latin American ally.
In a recent interview in Bogotá, Mr. Santos said he wanted Colombia to adopt a more active advisory role with the United States in hemispheric security issues, especially in combating the drug trade. Colombia has had some success recently in weakening cocaine cartels and reducing acreage where coca, the plant used to make cocaine, is grown.
“We would like to stop being a simple country that begs for help every year and sit down at the same level and say we can help you, for example with what is happening with drugs in Central America or the Caribbean,” said Mr. Santos, 58. “I would hope that this motto of being a strategic ally could really become a reality.”
Mr. Santos’s ambitions of cultivating close ties with Washington make him something of an outlier in a region that is witnessing a steady erosion of American influence as China enhances its profile in the hemisphere and Brazil, Latin America’s rising power, expands its political and economic reach.
He will face the immediate challenge of trying to repair Colombia’s relations with Venezuela, a task complicated by the haven enjoyed in Venezuelan territory by Colombia’s two main rebel groups, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and the National Liberation Army, or E.L.N.
Mr. Santos, who studied at Harvard and the University of Kansas, has also frequently traded barbs with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, who has sharply reduced his country’s imports from Colombia.
Mr. Santos faces another challenge in neighboring Ecuador, where leftist officials still fume over a 2008 raid in Ecuadorean territory by Colombian forces that killed Raúl Reyes, a senior FARC commander, and others. At the time, Mr. Santos was Colombia’s defense minister.
A judge in Ecuador recently issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Santos over the raid, a move Mr. Santos described as “completely illogical and against every aspect of international law.”
While Mr. Santos must grapple with the animosity toward him in both Ecuador and Venezuela, his orchestration of crushing blows against the guerrillas, including the raid in Ecuador, and his identification as the political heir of Mr. Uribe, clearly worked in his favor among voters.
“I went for Santos because we cannot lose what’s been accomplished under Uribe,” said Aleida Sierra, 27, a clothing saleswoman who voted Sunday in Bogotá.
Still, Mr. Santos’s mandate will differ substantially from that of Mr. Uribe, who served two terms as president and won plaudits for inroads against the insurgencies and the stabilization of the economy in Colombia, which still has exceedingly high levels of poverty and inequality.
“For Santos, the social and economic agenda has to be a top priority,” said Michael Shifter, the president of the policy study group Inter-American Dialogue. “Nearly half the population lives in poverty, and Colombia has the region’s highest unemployment level. His overwhelming support in rural strongholds can be interpreted as a demand for more jobs and better social welfare policies.”
Dissatisfaction over Colombia’s social inequalities and resilient corruption during Mr. Uribe’s government had buoyed the candidacy of Mr. Mockus, the former Bogotá mayor, until a series of gaffes derailed his chances. Mr. Mockus, a soft-spoken intellectual and the son of Lithuanian immigrants, still ran one of the most innovative campaigns in recent Latin American history, using social-media outlets, like Facebook and Twitter, to champion an anticorruption platform and unconventional ideas like raising taxes.
But at times he seemed vague and indecisive, as when he proposed Costa Rica, a small country without an army, as an example for Colombia to follow, despite the fact that it is one of Latin America’s most militaristic countries. Mr. Mockus later reversed himself.
His Green Party also captured the imagination of idealists with pro-education posters that showed, for example, a pencil plugging the barrel of a gun. For others, however, Mr. Mockus, who acknowledged in interviews being hard to define ideologically, ultimately seemed a bit naïve.
Alfredo Molano, a columnist for the newspaper El Espectador and one of Colombia’s top social commentators, said he initially liked Mr. Mockus’s honesty and fresh approach, but in the end could not vote for either him or Mr. Santos, the embodiment of Colombia’s conservative political establishment.
For the political opposition to Mr. Santos, Mr. Molano said, “These will be hard years.”
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