Columbia Presidential Election: Not ‘Too Close to Call’

The just-completed Colombian presidential election took place in two stages.
The first round took place on May 30. There were multiple candidates. Since
nobody received an outright majority, the top two vote-getters (Juan Manuel
Santos at 47 percent and Antanas Monckus at 22 percent) succeeded to the recent
run-off ballot, where Santos won by greater than a two-to-one margin.
The voters’ lopsided verdict has huge significance. The victorious Santos is
closely identified with outgoing President Alvaro Uribe, having served as his
defense minister.

Uribe leaves office immensely popular. He and his team (including Santos)
restored a sense of security to everyday life. They regained control of huge
swaths of Colombian territory where narco-traffickers, judge-murdering
kidnappers, and leftist ideologues terrorizing villages in the name of "social
justice" had dominated.

Many Colombians wanted Uribe to serve a third term, and Uribe himself was
willing to do so. However, Colombia’s supreme court ruled that the
constitutional provision limiting a president to two terms is absolute. Uribe
accepted this ruling, demonstrating his respect for the rule of law.

Hopefully, Santos’ clear-cut victory will be accepted by all Colombians and
non-Colombians of good will (i.e., all people who aren’t diehard believers in
leftist dictatorships). Razor-thin margins of victory can be very unsettling.
That was certainly the case in the Colombian presidential election 40 years
ago.

I happened to be living in Bogota, Colombia’s capital, then. The establishment
choice in 1970 was the Conservative Party’s Misael Pastrana Borrero. Back then,
the Liberal and Conservative Parties had an arrangement whereby they would take
turns holding single four-year presidential terms.

This arrangement almost blew up in 1970. One of the other three candidates on
the ballot was General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, who had ruled Colombia
dictatorially and corruptly in the mid-1950s, before finally being driven from
office by popular unrest. Rumors were that Rojas was semi-senile and that the
real power was his ambitious daughter Maria, a former senator, who (according
to the story told to this young American visitor) allegedly had ordered her
bodyguards to open fire on a crowd of spectators at a bullfight for having
jeered her.

The early radio broadcasts of the 1970 election returns surprisingly reported
Rojas holding a slight lead over Pastrana. The small lead persisted throughout
the day. Suddenly, in the early evening, radio and TV broadcasts ceased. A
curfew of 7 p.m. was imposed for the next several days. I can recall my
youthful foolishness tempting me to break the curfew and spend a night or two
(or more?) in a Colombian jail. What a story that would make, right? But having
just recently been stupid enough to tempt fate in beautiful Medellin, I
actually had enough sense not to take another unnecessary risk.

The next morning, the headline of El Tiempo, Colombia’s dominant newspaper,
termed the race "too close to call." On the second day, Pastrana was said to
have a minuscule lead. On the third, the lead had grown, and on the fourth or
fifth day, as I recall, Pastrana was officially declared the winner.

Large crowds of Colombians erupted in protest in Bogota. Still painfully short
of wisdom, I passed through a couple of these crowds, listening to accusations
about CIA involvement and anti-American sentiments. Even though I stood out
like a sore thumb (I’m about a head taller than Colombian men and my complexion
much fairer), the good people of Bogota left me unmolested, reserving their
anger for our government instead of taking it out on a naïve American college
kid.

Was the 1970 election stolen? If it wasn’t, it appeared like it was. Was
Pastrana’s victory the lesser of two evils? Who knows? A Rojas regime built on
a personality cult of father and daughter could have set back Colombian
progress by decades. But the revolutionary movements and subsequent guerrilla
civil war that arose out of the ashes of the 1970 election also held progress
back considerably.

Today, though, having seen how little in the way of peace, justice, and
prosperity the rebels have to offer them, the majority of Colombians clearly
have shown a preference for their constitutional government.

May the Colombian people’s hopes for peaceful progress be fulfilled, and may
President Santos provide wise leadership for the good people of Colombia. And
will the Democrats in Washington please finally consummate the free-trade
agreement with our vibrantly democratic South American ally?

— Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson is an adjunct faculty member, economist, and
contributing scholar with [2]The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City
College.

[3]www.VisAndVals.org