MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

OAS observers praise Colombian Sunday election “non-violence”

Juan Manuel Santos received the support from Conservatives

The OAS mission of electoral observers confirmed that none of its members found evidence of vote peddling in Colombia’s Sunday presidential election and underlined the quiet and non violent atmosphere during the whole process.

“None of our 85 observers witnessed any vote peddling or received claims to that effect, nor did they observe any tergiversation of the electoral process”, said Chilean born Enrique Correa head of the Organization of American States observers’ delegation.

Sunday’s elections “were the quietest of the last four decades in Colombia basically because of a notorious and evident reduction in acts of violence compared to what happened in 2002”, added Correa.

“Although we had to move some ballot boxes because of threats, the security progress has been incredible which contributed to an election with very few problems”.

Meanwhile former Defence minister Juan Manuel Santos favoured to win the Colombian presidency in the June 20 runoff continued to boost his support.

Santos, a scion of an elite family, had a 25-point lead over former Bogotá Mayor Antanas Mockus in a first round vote on Sunday but was around 3 percentage points short of winning outright.

Conservative party leader Fernando Araujo said a majority of the party's lawmakers decided to back Santos on the grounds he represents continuity of President Alvaro Uribe government. Candidate Noemi Sanin on Sunday got 6% of the vote compared to Santos' 47%.

Uribe is still popular after two terms dominated by the war against drug-trafficking rebels and his pro-business approach that attracted foreign investment, especially in oil and mining.

Uribe's U Party, headed by Santos, is the strongest bloc in the Congress and was allied with the Conservatives during his eight years in office.

Santos is also likely to receive support from the Cambio Radical party, whose candidate German Vargas Lleras came third with just over 10% of the votes.

Mockus, who got an unexpectedly low 21%, on Tuesday said he was not seeking the support of other parties for the second round. Instead, he said, he will focus reducing abstention which reached 51% on Sunday.

“The only alliance I will do is an alliance with the people,” the Green Party candidate.