Third with 10 percent was German Vargas of Cambio Radical, which along with Santos’s National Unity party is a member of Uribe’s governing coalition. The main opposition candidate, Gustavo Petro of the leftist Polo Democratico Alternativo, had 9 percent. Five other candidates shared the remaining votes.
Although generally peaceful, yesterday was marked by nearly two dozen firefights with leftist rebels that claimed the lives of at least three soldiers, a reminder that Colombia’s half century-old conflict is far from resolved.
Santos, a 58-year-old a Cabinet minister in three administrations, was in a statistical dead heat in preelection polls with Mockus, a son of Lithuanian immigrants running on the Green Party slate.
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 in 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 the vote but did not order people to stay off the roads, as it has done in some more isolated provinces during elections.
Santos, a first cousin of the outgoing vice president, billed himself as a continuation of Uribe’s hugely popular US-backed military buildup, which 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 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.
