Bogota – Colombia is holding a presidential election Sunday in which the incumbent could easily coast to victory.
Six candidates are running for the presidency, but the latest polls ahead of the election showed President Alvaro Uribe garnering up to 60 percent of the vote, well over the 50 percent he needs to take victory without a runoff.
In second place, with about 20 percent of voter support, was Sen. Carlos Gaviria, who is seeking the presidency on the ticket of the leftist Alternative Democratic Pole, or PDA.
Coming in third was former minister Horacio Serpa of the Colombian Liberal Party, or PLC.
The polls will close at 4:00 p.m. (2100 GMT), with the release of results expected to begin at 7:30 p.m. (2430 GMT), officials said.
More than 320,000 members of the security and intelligence services have been deployed across Colombia to maintain order during the elections.
Colombian National Police commander Gen. Jorge Daniel Castro said no major incidents were reported as voting got underway Sunday.
“As expected, the (election) documents reached the municipalities without a problem,” Castro said.
The only problem reported was a bus abandoned on a highway in the southern province of Tolima, between the towns of Alpujarra and Dolores, near a place known as Larada, some 185 kilometers (about 115 miles) southwest of Bogota, Castro said.
“It’s a bus blocking the road, and we’re there, along with the army, checking things out and probably deactivating a bomb,” Castro said, adding that the incident was “a minor thing on a secondary highway.”
Several incidents of violence were reported at the start of the weekend.
Four fighters belonging to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, guerrilla group were killed Friday in a jungle area of the southern province of Caqueta.
Also on Friday, three women were wounded when a car bomb exploded outside a brothel in the town of Puerto Gaitan, in eastern Meta province. Police blamed the attack on the FARC.
On Saturday, three Colombian marines and a FARC guerrilla were killed in fighting in a mountainous area of northern Bolivar province.
Uribe, a staunch U.S. ally in a region increasingly devoid of them, has exercised a new style of government during his first term characterized by, among other things, a resolute determination called strong by his admirers and arrogant by his detractors.
The 53-year-old lawyer, who won the 2002 presidential election with the campaign slogan “firm hand, big heart” and a 100-point program centered on bolstering security in the war-torn nation, recognized early in his administration that four years would not be enough to achieve all of his objectives.
He and his allies, therefore, proposed a constitutional amendment allowing for immediate presidential re-election. Congress passed the measure and it was later ratified by the Constitutional Court, clearing the way for Uribe to become the first Colombian president to be democratically elected to two successive terms in office.
Uribe’s critics acknowledge that the president has restored consumer and investor confidence and ratcheted up the pressure on insurgents waging a four-decade-old Marxist revolution, but they say the “big heart” portion of his program has not been evident in his economic policies, which they consider regressive.
The president’s opponents say, for example, that his traditional trade and tax policies have benefited private and foreign investors over workers and that privatizations carried out under his administration have pleased the IMF but hurt national industries.
His support for a free-trade agreement with the United States has also come under fire from some sectors.
Born in 1952 in the northwestern province of Antioquia, Uribe earned a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard University and was later a senior associate member at Oxford University on a British Council scholarship.
Slight of build and studious and conservative in appearance and dress, Uribe is an avid horseman, devoted yoga practitioner and meditator. He is also known as a fiery orator when it comes to defending his ideas.
His life has been indelibly marked by the death of his father, a wealthy landowner and cattle rancher who was killed by FARC guerrillas during a 1983 kidnapping attempt.
Having survived several attempts on his life himself by the insurgent group, Colombia’s largest, Uribe currently has no choice but to be surrounded at all times by some 50 bodyguards.
Uribe was mayor of Medellin – Colombia’s second city and the country’s industrial hub – as a member of the Liberal Party and later served two terms as a senator and as governor of Antioquia under that party’s banner.
Alleged links between Uribe and the AUC paramilitary federation have continued to dog the president during his first term.
Recently, a former high-ranking intelligence official, who is on trial for eliminating from the agency’s archives the records of several Colombians whose extradition has been requested by Washington, alleged that there had been cooperation between the DAS secret police and the right-wing militias.
The one-time DAS director claimed that the agency’s ex-chief, Jorge Noguera, facilitated the killing of opposition figures by rightist militias and engineered electoral fraud in 2002 on behalf of paramilitary-backed congressional candidates who were also supporters of Uribe.
Uribe, for his part, has denied any links to the rightist paramilitaries and has challenged those who accuse him of such ties to prove the allegations.
Critics have also accused the Uribe administration of carrying out an overly generous peace process with the AUC, more than 30,000 of whose members have laid down their arms over the past few years.
If no candidate wins an absolute majority on Sunday, the top two vote getters would meet in a runoff on June 18.
