In Colombia’s presidential election Sunday, former Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos won 47% of the vote, more than twice as much as Green party candidate Antanas Mockus, who got 21%. The two candidates will be in a June 20 runoff, which it seems very likely Santos will win. Santos said his victory amounts to an endorsement of outgoing two-term President Alvaro Uribe, who has done an amazing job of diminishing the narcoterrorist FARC rebels who have plagued Colombia for decades. Pre-election polling, which under Colombian law ceased a week before the election, showed a close race between Santos and Mockus, who had been a popular mayor of Bogota. Michael Shifter, head of the Inter-American Dialogue, provides a plausible explanation: “My sense is that many Colombians were drawn to Mockus, his appealing message and what he represented, but in the end they were worried about a relative novice on security and foreign policy questions.”
Colombia is a more important country than most Americans realize. It is the second most populous country in South America, with 45 million people in 2008, after Brazil and well ahead of Argentina’s 40 million, and tied with Spain as the second most populous Spanish-speaking country, after Mexico. Many Spanish speakers regard Colombian Spanish as the purest form of the language. The U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, negotiated by the Bush administration with much consultation with Congress, has been denied approval by the Democratic Congress at the behest of labor unions, even though Colombian products currently enter the U.S. duty-free under the Caribbean Basin Initiative. A Santos victory on June 20 might provide Democratic congressional leaders an excuse to reconsider their opposition to the FTA, or so one can hope.
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