Colombia President Santos to Face Zuluaga in Runoff Vote
Colombia President Santos to Face Zuluaga in Runoff Vote
The rise of Colombia’s presidential candidate Óscar Iván Zuluaga shows a real skepticism in the population over the ongoing peace process, comments COA’s Eric Farnsworth.
BOGOTÁ, Colombia—Óscar Iván Zuluaga, a conservative candidate closely allied with former President Álvaro Uribe, won the most votes in the first round of Sunday's presidential election with a campaign that criticized President Juan Manuel Santos's efforts to negotiate peace with Marxist guerrillas.
Mr. Zuluaga took 29.3% of the vote, or more than 3.7 million votes, to the president's 25.6%, or 3.3 million, the country's electoral authorities said, with nearly 100% of the votes counted. Mr. Zuluaga didn't capture the 50% needed to win outright, but he and Mr. Santos emerged from a field of five candidates and will go head-to-head in a second round on June 15....
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The FARC hasn't commented directly on Mr. Zuluaga's proposals, but the group's commanders are critical of the conservative candidate and have been accused in the past of plotting to kill Mr. Uribe. The group, while far weaker than it was a decade ago, still has 9,000 fighters, the government said, and is capable of delivering blistering attacks on police outposts and ambushes of army patrols.
Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the policy group Council of the Americas in Washington, said that Mr. Santos's peace process has given the country its best shot at peace since a ragtag group of radical farmers formed the FARC.
"Santos was clearly banking on more progress with the peace accord going into the campaign, and the rise of Zuluaga shows a real skepticism about the process in the population," said Mr. Farnsworth. "Many Colombians are wary. They want peace, but it is a matter of what happens to the FARC afterward....."
