In historic landslide, US-educated former defense chief elected Colombia’s new president

Ex-defense chief easily wins Colombia’s presidency

BOGOTA, Colombia — A 58-year-old U.S.-educated economist who dealt withering blows to leftist rebels as defense minister has won Colombia’s presidency by the largest margin in modern history.

Juan Manuel Santos got 69 percent of the vote in Sunday’s runoff in a ringing endorsement of his promise to continue the U.S.-backed security policies of outgoing conservative President Alvaro Uribe that he helped craft.

Former two-time Bogota Mayor Antanas Mockus, a maverick outsider running a clean-government campaign as the Green Party’s candidate, finished with 28 percent in an election marked by low turnout.

Surrounded by his wife and three children during a victory speech to 10,000 supporters in a Bogota coliseum, Santos lionized the man whose defense ministry he ran in 2006-2009,

“If we have come so far it’s because we have been standing on the shoulders of giants,” said Santos, the grandnephew of a president from one of Colombia’s most influential families. “This is also your triumph, President Uribe.”

More than 3 percent of voters tendered protest ballots Sunday, indicating dissatisfaction with the conservative political establishment that Santos represents — nearly all the losers of the May 30 first round endorsed him — and Mockus’ refusal to stand in opposition to it.

Mockus ran an anti-corruption campaign that many Colombians considered naive if well-intentioned.

But after catapulting into contention early in the presidential campaign he stumbled with a series of gaffes that had Colombians questioning his ability to run a country still embroiled in a half-century-old conflict.

Violence marred Sunday’s vote as a roadside bomb killed seven police officers and three soldiers died in an ambush. Officials blamed the ambush on the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the country’s largest rebel band, and the bombing was blamed on a smaller insurgent group.

Santos, a former naval cadet, paid tribute to those losses in his victory speech and said there would be no peace dialogue with rebels as long as they continue to engage in kidnapping and drug trafficking.

“Time is up for the FARC,” he said.

As defense minister, Santos helped knock the wind out of the FARC. Two members of its seven-man ruling secretariat were killed during his tenure and FARC desertions soared. He also oversaw the bloodless 2008 ruse that rescued former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, three U.S. military contractors and 11 others from long captivity with the rebels.

The persistence of the rebel threat was a central issue in the campaign.

But Santos also promised to reduce unemployment and fight poverty in a nation notorious for income inequality where more than two in five of its 44 million people live on less than $2 a day and more than 2 million have been displaced by violence.

“Creating jobs will be the great obsession of this government,” Santos said in his victory speech. The former three-time Cabinet minister promised a government of national unity and invited Mockus to help him close whatever wounds the campaign might have opened.

In conceding, Mockus told supporters the election marked the consolidation in Colombia of “a new, independent political force, the Green Party,” which he promised would “support the good and oppose the bad” in Santos’ government.

But incipient Greens are anything but a cohesive national political movement. They won their first seats in Congress in March legislative elections. They will have five members in the 102-seat Senate that takes office July 20, a body that will be dominated by Santos’ allies.

Santos, a one-time journalist whose family long ran the country’s leading newspaper, El Tiempo, takes office Aug. 7.

Mockus’ clean-government campaign resonated strongly in the aftermath of a series of scandals that tainted Uribe’s legacy, including the presidency’s use of the DAS intelligence agency to spy on judges, journalists and human rights workers and, separately, more than 1,000 extra-judicial killings that prompted Santos to fire 27 officers in late 2008.

Those who voted for Mockus, a former university rector and son of Lithuanian immigrants, praised his refreshing integrity and emphasis on urging Colombians to respect life, law and public property.

But Mockus led many to question his ability to manage the military and foreign relations. At one point, he suggested Colombia dissolve its military, then backtracked.

He also suggested he would have no choice but to extradite Uribe if an Ecuadorean court convicted him in a 2008 cross-border raid on a FARC base. In fact, Colombia’s presidents can deny extradition requests.

Mockus, a mathematician and philosopher, also alienated voters by promising a tax increase. And rather than courting the left-wing vote, he said he didn’t want it.

Cynthia Arnson, director of Latin American studies at the Woodrow Wilson center in Washington, said Mockus “made some honest statements that constituted political suicide.”

Santos, a University of Kansas graduate who did postgraduate work at Harvard and the London School of Economics, benefited from Colombia’s well-oiled political machinery.

That may have included a windfall from a government welfare payment program called Accion Social that grew under Uribe from 320,000 recipient families to 2.2 million.

Santos said Sunday night that he would continue and expand on such programs. He is a great-nephew of Eduardo Santos, who as Liberal Party president in 1938-42 promoted labor and land reforms that were later overturned.

As defense minister, Santos clashed often with leftist Presidents Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Rafael Correa of Ecuador.

Last month, a judge in Ecuador ordered his arrest for authorizing the 2008 cross-border raid on a FARC base inside Colombia’s southern neighbor that killed the rebel group’s No. 2 commander, Raul Reyes.

Santos called the arrest warrant absurd because the Colombian state — not he individually — carried out the raid.

He told The Associated Press in a pre-election interview he planned to invite Chavez and the Venezuelan leader’s leftist allies to his inauguration.

“I want good relations with all our neighbors,” he said.

Associated Press writers Cesar Garcia, Carlos Gonzalez, Vivian Sequera and Nancy Lopez contributed to this report.