MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Strong handed Uribe re-elected with landslide

President Alvaro Uribe, a key United States ally in Latin America, swept Sunday to a landslide re-election in Colombia rewarded by voters for turning around the security threat in a country bloodied by years of conflict and crime.

Uribe who became the first Colombian president to be re-elected for two consecutive mandates in the country's recent history, gained 62% of the vote followed by centre left Alternative Democratic Pole candidate Carlos Gaviria with 22.1% and Liberal Horacio Serpa, 11.8%.

However abstention among the 27 million Colombians registered to vote was in the range of 60%, ten points above the country's historic electoral participation.

"What we have to do at this time is recognize the victory of President Uribe," Gaviria, a former judge, told local radio at his campaign headquarters Sunday night.

The unexpected showing of Gaviria helped to consolidate the left centre as the main opposition force in Colombia, while Serpa's defeat confirmed the end of the country's historic bipartisan system

President Uribe's victory will come as a relief for Washington after a string of election victories by leftists in Latin America and with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez leading a campaign to counter U.S. free-market ideas with socialist reforms.

The election was the most peaceful vote in years in a country where thousands are killed each year in a now four-decade-old armed conflict. Troops patrolled the streets of the capital Bogota, high in the Andes mountains and across the nation of 41 million people but no major guerrilla attacks were reported.

Contrary to the other candidates who favour negotiations, Uribe's success has been a crackdown on right-wing militias and the leftist FARC rebels who use Colombia's cocaine trade to sustain their insurgency.

Voters praised Uribe for bringing greater security to the cities, although armed groups still hold sway in much of the countryside. They also welcomed being able to lead more normal lives in Bogota and other cities after years in which kidnappings, car bombs and assassinations had been frequent.

In a break with past practice, the FARC urged people to vote, apparently calculating that a campaign of violence on election day would play into Uribe's hands. The army reported just a few incidents.

President Uribe campaigned saying he needs another four years to finish the job ("the snake is still alive"), but advanced he will offer the 17,000-strong FARC -- the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia -- peace talks although "they must first lay down their arms".

However critics say Uribe must pay more attention to the plight of the poor who make up around half of Colombia's population. Colombia's economy grew a brisk 5.3% last year and foreign investment picked up, but Uribe's opponents are calling for more social spending.

Actually this is the argument from armed groups to justify their several decades armed uprising which has left thousands killed. But insurgency is financed by Colombian traffickers which are the main suppliers of cocaine and heroin to drug-users in the United States. Washington has pumped more military aid into Colombia than any other country outside the Middle East in the past four years

President Uribe, 53, is a lawyer and landowner from north Colombia, educated in Harvard whose father was killed by FARC in 1983 during a failed kidnapping attempt. In 2002 Uribe won with over 50% of the vote avoiding a runoff and in 2004 he pushed through Congress the re-election constitutional amendment.