Santos Wins Colombia Runoff Election

[General Mung Beans]

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/06 ... &ref=world

Santos Wins Colombia Runoff Election
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: June 20, 2010

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Filed at 6:17 p.m. ET

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- Juan Manuel Santos, who as defense minister oversaw a major weakening of leftist rebels, won Sunday's presidential runoff in a rout of an eccentric outsider.

The victory for Santos, a veteran of three governments from a Colombian political dynasty running in his first election, was a ringing endorsement of outgoing conservative President Alvaro Uribe, whose security policies he helped craft.

With 85 percent of polling stations reporting, Santos had 69 percent of the vote against 27 percent for former two-time Bogota Mayor Antanas Mockus, who ran an anti-corruption campaign that many Colombians considered naive if well-intentioned.

More than 3 percent of voters tendered protest ballots, indicating dissatisfaction with both candidates.

Mockus had catapulted into early contention in opinion polls but stumbled with a series of gaffes that had Colombians questioning his abilities. In the May 30 first round, Santos fell just shy of the simple majority needed for victory.

Violence marred Sunday's vote as seven police officers and three soldiers were killed in separate attacks blamed on leftist rebels.

The police were killed when a roadside bomb ripped apart their truck on a routine patrol in Colombia's northeast, authorities said, while the soldiers died in an ambush on an army patrol carrying election material to a town in the eastern plains. Defense Minister Gabriel Silva blamed the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, for the ambush and the smaller National Liberation Army was believed responsible for the bombing.

Independent electoral observers said rebels burned ballots and disturbed voting in isolated municipalities in eight of Colomia's 32 states.

Voter turnout was down an estimated 11 percent from the May 30 vote amid heavy rains across much of the country and the distraction of World Cup football, Colombia's National Electoral Council reported.

The persistence of the rebel threat was a central issue in the campaign to succeed Uribe, who was barred from running for a third term.

Santos' margin of victory was superior to the 62 percent garnered by Uribe in his 2006 re-election.

''Security. Security,'' said Bogota clothing factory owner Humberto Botero, 52, explaining his vote for Santos. ''He's a statesman. He's someone who knows the country, who knows how to surround himself with talent.''

Santos, a 58-year-old economist who served previous Colombian administrations as finance and foreign commerce minister, won the endorsement of most of the country's political establishment after the first round.

He promises to build on Uribe's security gains, but he also tried to broaden his appeal by vowing to help the poor 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.

Mockus' clean-government campaign was a steamrolling sensation three months ago and those who voted for him Sunday praised his refreshing honesty and promise to rid Colombia of the endemic corruption that he says is at the root of its half-century-old civil conflict.

''He seems to me a peaceful man,'' said Elsa Torres, a 66-year-old homemaker who voted in Bogota before heavy downpours discouraged voting. ''As he says, he's on the side of culture and education. Those things are important for me because they are what we lack at the moment.''

Mockus, a former university rector, finished second in the first round far behind Santos with 21 percent of the vote. His campaign led many Colombians to question his ability to manage the military and foreign relations of a country still mired in a half-century-old conflict with guerrillas.

At one point, he suggested Colombia dissolve its military, and then backtracked. He also suggested he would have no choice but to extradite Uribe if an Ecuadorean court convicted him of wrongdoing in a 2008 cross-border raid. In fact, presidents can deny extradition requests.

The mathematician and philosopher also alienated voters by promising a tax increase.

''Mockus simply isn't of the stature to be president and manage a country as complex as Colombia,'' said Diego Munoz, a 36-year-old street vendor who voted for Santos.

Santos, a University of Kansas graduate, is a Colombian political blue blood despite making his first run for elected office. He is a great-nephew of a president whose family long ran the country's leading newspaper, El Tiempo.

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

As Uribe's defense minister in 2006-09, he helped knock the wind out of the FARC, Latin America's last remaining rebel army.

Two members of the FARC's seven-man ruling secretariat were killed during his tenure, and he 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.

He also clashed often with leftist Presidents Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Rafael Correa of Ecuador.

Last month, a judge in Ecuador ordered Santos' 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 said it wouldn't prevent him from visiting Ecuador as president if invited. Further, Santos said he would invite Chavez and the Venezuelan leader's leftist allies to his Aug. 7 inauguration if he won the presidency.

''I want good relations with all our neighbors,'' Santos said.

First of all, I'm glad Santos won. Secondly I must note that this election is rather similar to the 1988 US Presidential election in many aspects.

[Edward Yee]

In the sense of Mondale = Mockus?

[K. A. Pital]

Colombia is a fucking nightmare of a nation and choosing between it's "politicians" is like choosing which kind of shit to eat - horseshit or bullshit. I guess, however, for such a god-forsaken place that's the only option left.

"Promises to rid nation X of endemic corruption" are the slogans of everyone and his dog. How is that shithead any different? How is Colombia's government, which is infiltrated with narcodealers on such an extent that probably only Afghanistan is worse, any better than the thugs it fights against? *laughs sadly*

There's little evidence if any that this guy is any better than those before him, or those who'll come after.

[scythewielder]

Colombia is indeed a fucking mess, make no mistake, but I suppose it's worth commenting and going into a bit of a rant here. My apologies in advance if this ends up being more annoying or pretentious than intended.

The way I see it...Colombia isn't quite as god-forsaken as Afghanistan, mostly by virtue of the fact it's not as hopelessly backward if we go by the Human Development Index and similar indicators, but that's precisely part of what makes the country's predicament so utterly depressing.

At its core, I believe Colombia's main problems are essentially the same as those that have plagued most of Latin America throughout its history: a ton of corruption, massive underdevelopment, political exclusion and social inequality (which still largely persist within the region despite the recent set of relatively progressive administrations in certain nations). In the best case scenario, that makes for a whole lot of mediocrity with occasional spurts of progress and more than a few missed opportunities. In the worst case, that's fodder for plenty of justified moral outrage both internally and externally (there's more than enough blame to go around, considering how the U.S. has historically intervened in regional affairs).

What makes Colombia "special" is that these problems have "just" been exacerbated by the far too prolonged war against the insurgency (which should have been "won" or "lost" ages ago, one way or another, instead of degenerating into a literal orgy of carnage whose true extent isn't acknowledged by either side's apologists) and the rise of the drug trade (plus the greed, brutality and idiocy of the drug war that soon followed).

At the same time, however, although I can't help but make this sound cynical...it's not all forced displacement, extrajudicial killings, kidnappings or murders of unionists. For all the death and impunity, there are some arguable bright spots (I don't know if I feel like doing justice to them though, responding to any source inquiries aside).

Several indicators of violence are down. Bogotá itself has had several part progressive and part enlightened local administrations in recent years, including that of Mockus himself, which have improved living conditions for some of the poor and the population at large (plus the last two mayors have come from the closest thing to a left/center-left party available). On the national level, Uribe hasn't been able to get away with quite as much shit as he would have liked to, including but not limited to his attempted reelection and his spirited "defense" of many corrupt associates, a number of which are under investigation or already in jail. Contrary to what some might expect and much to that thug's ire, there's at least a visible shred of judicial independence and a partial separation of powers at work in the midst of a lot of dangers.

Needless to say, the above can be rather tragicomic yet also fairly intriguing as a subject of further study. Not a pretty sight though, to put it lightly, and there's surely a lot more to say about any given issue. It's also frustrating.

None of these problems are going to go away anytime soon, which certainly goes hand in hand with Stas Bush's outlook. It'll take decades (or, who knows, a century or two) for any lasting change to take root and it's always likely that things may need to get far worse before they can truly start getting better.

That said, let's focus on the current situation, as mundane as it might seem...Santos is a scumbag, no doubt, but I think he's less of one than Uribe in a couple of respects. He's an oligarch alright and politicians aren't exactly known for fulfilling their promises (almost by definition, one might add), but he doesn't come from the same "reactionary landowner with a vendetta" background that made Uribe so much of a right-wing version of Chavez in terms of his authoritarian government style and slandering of the opposition. Santos is comparatively sophisticated and doesn't appear to have such a short temper, which might seem an entirely superficial affair but it could give the opposition some breathing room (both literally and figuratively, I must stress, being all too aware of what that implies). Politically speaking, he's demonstrably Machiavellian but also fairly pragmatic. Still, whether or not he actually achieves at least a fraction of what he claims his aims are remains to be seen...and how he'll try to handle both ongoing and upcoming scandals should be interesting to see, if not necessarily experience.

[MKSheppard]

Good. Now the defeat of FARC is all but assured.

[General Mung Beans]

In the sense of Mondale = Mockus?

Dukakis actually.

[CJvR]

Good. Now the defeat of FARC is all but assured.

Oh I don't know about that. Like the mighty cockroach guerillas with income are not easy to exterminate. I expect the narco-guerillas to fight on for a long time yet, not so much for the revolution but for narco-$$$.

[Edward Yee]

In the sense of Mondale = Mockus?

Dukakis actually.

I'm hoping he didn't have an "Abrams photo op" moment? Sounded like a relatively straight shooter to me, albeit all I saw of him was one WSJ article.