Opposition Leader Favored as Colombians Vote Today

Voters today will elect a new president of Colombia, one of Latin America’s most stable democracies, and opposition Liberal Party candidate Virgilio Barco Vargas is the overwhelming favorite to win.

A peaceful vote is expected, but more than 100,000 soldiers and national police have been assigned to guard polling places in cities and towns in this mountainous country against the threat of attacks by left-wing guerrillas.

About 8 million of Colombia’s 12.5 million eligible voters are expected to cast ballots, including several hundred thousand living overseas, mainly in the United States, who can vote at Colombian consulates.

Barco, 65, is an engineer educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, an international economist, and a public administrator with 40 years of political experience. He has unified the Liberal Party, which has been Colombia’s leading reform party during this century.

Since the late 1950s, when a military regime here was displaced by a civilian coalition of the Liberal and Conservative parties, the Liberals have won four of the seven elections for president. But they lost the last one in 1982, when the Liberals split and Belisario Betancur, a Conservative, scored an upset victory.

Conservative Opponent

Barco is opposed in this election by Alvaro Gomez, an orthodox conservative, a lawyer and newspaper publisher. He is a son of Laureano Gomez, a former Conservative president, whose name is identified with repressive violence during a virtual civil war that left an estimated 100,000 dead in Colombia between 1946 and 1953.

Pre-election polls show Barco winning 55% to 60% of the vote, with all sectors of the Liberal Party and many independents lining up behind his candidacy.

A third candidate is Jaime Pardo, a Marxist lawyer, backed by the Colombian Communist Party and Marxist guerrillas of the so-called Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, who accepted an amnesty under Betancur’s “national pacification” plan. Pardo is expected to win about 5% of the vote.

The only violent opposition to the democratic choice of a new president comes from small guerrilla groups, mainly the so-called M-19 movement and the National Liberation Army. They rejected Betancur’s offer of amnesty and have continued battling military patrols in rural areas and in the slums of Cali, the main city in the rich Cauca River Valley. Both groups have ties to Cuba.

Fear of violence is prevalent in Colombia not only because of ultra-left guerrillas, but because of the powerful drug traffickers and criminals who kidnap and extract ransom from wealthy Colombians. Some Colombians have been forced to leave the country, and many farmers have abandoned dangerous rural areas.

Public confidence in law enforcement is low. Military and police have been accused by human rights groups and official investigating commissions of killing prisoners and causing the disappearance of civilians alleged to be linked to guerrilla activities.

During the campaign, Barco said that if he is elected, he will take personal charge of the security problem, which he called a major national issue. Betancur delegated the problem to a so-called “national peace commission” of politicians, lawyers and Roman Catholic bishops. This approach managed to win over the Moscow-line Communist Party guerrillas but did not solve the wider security problem.

Barco is believed to have much stronger support from the military high command than Betancur enjoys, but he has ruled out a “military” solution to the guerrilla problem. He is expected to put greater emphasis on social development and jobs in rural areas where guerrillas are active.

Barco has been minister of public works and minister of agriculture in previous Liberal governments. He was director at the World Bank for Colombia, Brazil, Dominican Republic and the Philippines from 1969 to 1974.