Drug Foe Heads for Victory in Colombia Vote

Cesar Gaviria, the candidate with the toughest position against Colombia’s violent cocaine traffickers, won Sunday’s presidential election, according to an exit poll and early unofficial tallies.

A radio network exit poll showed that nearly 50% of the voters interviewed cast ballots for Gaviria, more than double the percentage for his nearest rival in a field of 12 candidates.

Defying a bloody terrorist campaign by traffickers, Gaviria has vowed to fight them “without concessions” as a matter of principle. “We cannot renounce the defense of principles because of terrorist acts,” he said on the eve of the elections.

He predicted that he would get a popular mandate to press his hard-line policy. “I believe a vote near 50% is a sufficient mandate,” he said.

The nation’s chronic violence cast a shadow of tension over the elections. Guerrillas and “narco-terrorists” have been blamed in the killings of hundreds of Colombians during the campaign, including three presidential candidates.

Sunday morning, guerrillas of the National Liberation Army made several attacks in provincial areas. No deaths were reported, but rebels wounded five police officers in Santander department west of Bogota, radio stations reported.

Authorities canceled voting in at least three villages because guerrillas stole or burned ballots and other election documents.

Representing a new generation in the governing Liberal Party, Gaviria will succeed President Virgilio Barco Vargas in August. Barco was constitutionally barred from reelection.

Fragmentary and unofficial early returns compiled by national election authorities showed Gaviria with a wide lead and coincided with an exit poll by the nationwide Caracol radio network, which sampled 15,000 voters in 30 cities.

Of those questioned by Caracol, 49.9% said that they voted for Gaviria; 22.3% for Alvaro Gomez, leader of a Social Conservative Party splinter group; 12.9% for Antonio Navarro of the Patriotic Alliance M-19, a movement founded by former leftist guerrillas, and 12.6% for Rodrigo Lloreda, the Conservative Party candidate.

According to the exit poll, more than 90% of the voters also approved a ballot measure calling for a constitutional assembly that all four major candidates had said was needed to make governmental and judicial reforms.

Gaviria, 43, describes himself as a centrist. He has a degree in economics and served in Barco’s Cabinet as minister of finance and of government. He has been a member of the lower house of Congress.

Gomez, 71, a veteran Conservative legislator and diplomat, also ran unsuccessfully for president in 1974 and 1986.

Lloreda, 47, was a first-time presidential candidate. He has been a senator and a Cabinet member, serving as foreign minister from 1982 to 1984. He was ambassador to the United States from 1984 to 1986.

Navarro, 41, was a rebel leader until the M-19 guerrillas made peace with the government and became a political party in March. He has a degree in sanitary engineering.

More than 200,000 police and military troops patrolled the country and guarded 7,100 polling places during the day.

Turnout was heavy in many Bogota voting places. Even before the polls closed, Bogotanos began gathering in street rallies and parading along avenues in cars, waving their candidates’ banners, cheering and honking horns.

Turnout was lighter in Medellin, Colombia’s most violent city and home of the so-called Medellin cartel of cocaine traffickers. Medellin officials imposed curfews for the three nights before the elections after a series of bloody attacks, including a car-bomb explosion Thursday that killed nine people.

A frequent form of cartel terrorism, car bombs in three cities have killed a total of 37 people this month.

On Saturday, police in Bogota announced that they had seized more than a ton of dynamite and arrested six men accused of making Bogota bomb attacks for the cartel.

One of those arrested was an air force sergeant who worked at an air base where Barco’s presidential plane is based, police said. The report revived recurrent fears of narco-terrorist penetration in security agencies.

Another man arrested was identified as the brother of a man known as “Tyson,” who police say coordinates terrorist attacks for fugitive Pablo Escobar, Colombia’s most notorious drug lord. Authorities have accused Escobar of ordering numerous fatal bombings and the assassinations of the three presidential candidates.

On March 26, an assassin opened fire on a domestic airline flight to kill candidate Carlos Pizarro of the M-19. Bernardo Jaramillo, candidate of the leftist Patriotic Union, was killed March 22. Luis Carlos Galan, a Liberal presidential hopeful, was assassinated last Aug. 18.

Gaviria had been Galan’s campaign manager.

Gaviria is expected to govern with Liberal Party majorities in both houses of Congress, which was renewed in elections held in March.

Colombia, with 32 million people, has the second-largest population in South America after Brazil. Nearly 14 million were eligible to vote Sunday.

Colombian presidents have been elected by popular vote throughout this century except for a period of military dictatorship from 1953 to 1958. From 1958 to 1974, Conservatives and Liberals alternated in power under a “National Front” agreement between the two traditional parties.

COLOMBIA AT A GLANCE

Colombia, Population 32 million, is the fourth-largest country in South America with an area of 440,000 square miles. Its main exports are coffee, oil, coal, cotton, fresh-cut flowers, bananas, sugar and ferronickel. In 1989, inflation hit 27.5% and unemployment averaged 9.2%. Drug trafficking and violence have overshadowed Colombian politics since the August, 1989, assassination of leading presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan. His death spurred President Virgilio Barco Vargas to order a crackdown on powerful drug barons who had turned Colombia into the supplier of 80% of cocaine consumed in the United States. The drug barons launched a bloody campaign of bombings and assassinations in reretaliation, which had killed well over 300 people by mid-1990.