In Colombia presidential vote, maverick outsider vies with Uribe disciple

Uribe torchbearer vs. outsider in Colombia vote

BOGOTA, Colombia — A former defense minister pledging to build on Alvaro Uribe’s security gains and a maverick outsider whose campaign was a civics lesson on ending a culture of corruption were the favored candidates in Sunday’s presidential election.

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 lead a field of nine candidates and if none wins a simple majority the two top vote-getters will meet in a June 20 runoff.

Santos, 58, bills himself as a continuation of President Uribe’s hugely popular U.S-backed security campaign against leftist rebels that has sharply curtailed kidnapping and murder rates.

A child of privilege and University of Kansas graduate whose family long ran El Tiempo, Colombia’s leading newspaper, Santos promises Colombians they’ll be able to sleep peacefully at night.

As defense minister from 2006-2009, Santos helped knock the wind out of the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, Latin America’s last remaining major rebel army.

Mockus, also 58, is a mathematician, philosopher and former National University rector who says he’ll also be tough on the FARC. He has been careful not to criticize Uribe, though he has expressed dismay at the battery of scandals — domestic spying, extra-judicial killings by soldiers, alleged favoritism in fat government contracts — that have plagued the outgoing administration.

Among Bogotanos voting on a bright clear morning was Cecilia de Gaitain, 75, who said she cast her ballot for Mockus hoping that he might begin to rid Colombia of corruption.

“It won’t be easy but you have to vote with hope,” she said. Santos “is capable, but he’s more of the same and unfortunately the last four years of Uribe, for whom I voted twice, were disastrous and left evident a lot of corruption.”

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

His pedagogical methods and colorful campaign — including online where he leads in Facebook endorsements with 703,630 — catapulted him from fringe status into a statistical dead with Santos in three short months.

He also advocates raising taxes, which Santos opposes.

Mockus, meanwhile, could improve relations with Colombia’s leftist-led neighbors. He 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. A judge in Ecuador ordered Santos’ arrest for authorizing the mission.

A victory for Mockus would make him the world’s first Green Party president — though his emphasis is more on clean government than clean environment.

The other candidates include two from the governing coalition of Uribe, who was barred by a February court ruling from seeking a third consecutive term: Former Foreign Minister Noemi Sanin of the Conservative Party and ex-Sen. German Vargas Lleras of Cambio Radical.

The main opposition candidate is Gustavo Petro of the leftist Polo Democratico, who as a crusading senator helped expose ties between Uribe allies in Congress and far-right paramilitary militias for which lawmakers have received up to nine years in prison.

Sanin and Petro have been running third and fourth in pre-election polls, with Rafael Pardo, an early 1990s defense minister, representing the Liberal Party, farther back with Vargas.

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.

Opponents say Mockus is ill-prepared to manage a country at war and many point to his antics as a lack of seriousness. He lost his job as university rector for mooning an auditorium full of unruly students. After first winning Bogota’s mayor’s office in 1995, he got married in a cage full of tigers and dispatched mimes to shame traffic scofflaws.

At his rallies, Mockus stressed the sanctity of public coffers, the virtues of paying taxes. He directly addresses drug traffickers: The easy money isn’t worth an abbreviated life.

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

He has also sought to distance himself from the scandals that threaten Uribe’s legacy. In the most serious, prosecutors say soldiers killed more than 1,000 civilians during Uribe’s tenure. Santos was defense minister when that scandal broke and cashiered 27 officers. Critics say he bears some responsibility; Santos said it was he who put an end to the abuses.

In another 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, overseeing military intelligence, was in any way involved.