MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Santos calls for unity and promises to improve relations with neighbors

Juan Manuel Santos celebrates at the victory rally

As anticipated Colombia’s Juan Manuel Santos won on Sunday the country’s presidential runoff by a landslide, persuading voters with a pledge to continue Alvaro Uribe’s policies, the most popular leader of the country in the last five decades.

With virtually all polling stations reporting results, Santos had 69% to 28% for the Green Party’s Antanas Mockus. Santos will take office August 7 from Uribe, who brought record growth to Colombia and has the FARC guerrillas on the run after eight years in office. When Uribe first took office in 2002 almost 30% of Colombia was “free” territory under control of the Marxist oriented, drug-financed FARC guerrillas.
 

As has been traditional in Colombian turnout was low (below 50%) accentuated as voters expecting Santos to coast to victory stayed home to watch the World Cup soccer tournament. Santos, who won 47% in the first round on May 30, has capitalized on Uribe’s sustained 63/67% popularity while pledging to 2.5 million create jobs.
In his victory speech, Santos made a strong call for national unity and promised to improve relations with its neighbours, Ecuador and Venezuela. Santos also praised his predecessor Alvaro Uribe, for whose Social National Unity Party he ran. Even after eight years in office, Uribe approval ratings remain as high as 65%, and Santos said he was keen to build on his success.

“This is your triumph, too, President Uribe,” he said. “We'll build on the progress you achieved over the past eight years. Thanks to the security we've created, we can now focus on creating jobs, fighting poverty and providing opportunities for all Colombians” promised Santos.
However he also added that the country's main rebel group, Farc, that their “time had run out”. Santos said there would not be “the slightest chance of negotiations” with the rebels and demanded they unilaterally release the hostages they hold.

But Mr Santos also reached out to his defeated rival, Antanas Mockus, saying that if in the heat of the campaign some blows had been traded, now was the time to heal those wounds. He said the time had come for national unity and invited all Colombians, not only those who had supported him, to “fly the banner for a united, educated and just Colombia”.

Mockus, a former Bogotá mayor who garnered 21% of the vote on May 30, had pledged to improve the education system and eliminate corruption associated with Uribe’s administration. However after congratulating Santos for victory, in his speech to militants Mockus said the Green party would support “the good things” of the Santos administration and condemn the “bad things”, moved by three main principles, the constitution is sacred; the peoples’ resources (government revenue) is sacred and illegality is indignant.

Colombia’s security forces were deployed at polling stations to guard against violence by the FARC, (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), Latinamerica’s biggest and oldest insurgency. The campaign was considered the safest in four decades, but on Sunday at least seven soldiers and ten insurgents were reported killed.

Turnout was lower than in the first round because of the World Cup, said Claudia Lopez, an analyst with the Electoral Observation Mission, a Bogota-based election monitoring group. In the biggest turnout since 1998, 49% of 30 million eligible voters cast ballots in the first round.
In March congressional elections pro-Uribe parties won 68 of 102 Senate seats, compared with 5 for the Green Party. The Liberal Party, which had been the biggest opposition bloc to Uribe government, split on whether to support Santos.

Santos is credited with delivering some of the biggest blows against the FARC while serving as defense minister from 2006 to 2008. These include the 2008 rescue of 15 hostages including French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt and three U.S. defense contractors. He also ordered the raid into Ecuador that killed the group’s second in command and de facto leader, Raul Reyes.

Santos has promised to boost tax revenue by bringing millions of informal workers into the system, close by 2014 a budget gap equal to 3.6% of GDP and achieve annual growth of 6% within two years. His main campaign slogan was “jobs, jobs, jobs”, promising to create 2.5 million jobs during his four years’ mandate.

Colombia’s economy is recovering slower than its neighbors from the global financial crisis. The IMF in May forecast South America’s fifth-largest economy to grow 2.2% this year, the lowest in the region after Venezuela, which is in recession.

The diplomatic crisis between the governments of Venezuela and Colombia is certainly to undermine bilateral trade activity this year. According to Daniel Montealegre, the chair of the Venezuelan-Colombian Economic Integration Chamber (Cavecol) board, trade between the two countries in 2010 will not exceed 2 billion US dollars down from a normal 6 to 7 billion USD.

“Trade has shown a downward trend since last year due to the freezing of commercial relations with Colombia” said the business leader during the 40th Annual Meeting of the Venezuelan Council of Trade and Services (Consecomercio), which is held in the Venezuelan state of Mérida.

But in spite of having been probably the most efficient of President Uribe’s ministers and promising to follow the tough line of “democratic security”, Santos has sent other messages. His Vice president, Angelino Garzón is a respected trade union leader with a long political career which should be crucial in ensuring his jobs’ promise plus iron the way for the pending free trade agreement with the US stalled, in Congress for years because Democrats are highly critical of Colombia’s labour legislation, practices and killings of union leaders.

Besides Santos, whose family belongs to the Colombian elite (they have been linked to politics for a century, including one president, tens of members of congress, several ministers and magistrates and owners of the country’s main newspaper) by taking Garzón are opening to grass root Colombians, traditionally apathetic and fearful of several decades of rotating presidencies among Conservatives and Liberals, which was dismounted by Uribe in 2002 with his iron hand policy and the constitutional reform which opened the way for his re-election in 2006.

According to Colombian political analysts, Uribe’s eight years and his successor Santos will shadow traditional bi-polar (Conservative-Liberals) politics with a strong unity, populist political force. Mockus on the other hand under the Green party banner has consolidated the 25/30% of the so called “intelligent” vote: urban, educated Colombians who insist on the full exercise of the rule of the law, an end to political cronyism and nepotism, and greater transparency to combat corruption.

Santos is an economist and journalist who has been linked to politics from early age. He holds degrees from Kansas University, Harvard and London School of Economics.
Juan Manuel Santos celebrates at the victory rally