BOGOTA —
Colombia’s election stations opened for voting
Sunday in a presidential race filled with uncertainty, as ex-guerrilla Gustavo
Petro and millionaire businessman Rodolfo Hernandez vie for power in a country
saddled with widespread poverty, violence, and other woes.
اضافة اعلان
Abstention is expected to be high as voters face a
stark choice between electing their first ever left-wing president or plumping
for a maverick outsider dubbed the Colombian Donald Trump.
In Bogota, outgoing
President Ivan Duque opened
voting for Colombia’s 39 million voters at 8am.
Polls will close at 4pm, with early results expected
a couple of hours after that.
Hernandez was amongst the early voters in the
northern city of Bucaramanga, where he was mayor from 2016 to 2019.
“What we have now in the country are questions,
uncertainties,” Patricia Ines Munoz, an expert at the Pontifical Javerian
University, told AFP.
It has been a tense campaign, with death threats
against several candidates ahead of the first round last month, when Colombia’s
traditional conservative and liberal powers were dealt a chastening defeat.
“These are the tightest elections in the country’s
recent history,” said the Sunday edition of the El Tiempo daily.
There are fears a tight result could spark
post-election violence and 320,000 police and military have been deployed to
ensure security.
The successor to
unpopular conservative
Duque will have to deal with a country in crisis,
reeling from the coronavirus pandemic, recession, a spike in drug-trafficking
related violence and deep-rooted anger at the political establishment.
Almost 40 percent of the country lives in poverty
while 11 percent are unemployed.
That anger spilled over into mass anti-government
protests in April 2021 that were controversially met by a heavy-handed response
from the security forces.
Opinion polls in the lead up to the election have
been inconclusive, although abstention is expected to be 45 percent with up to
another five percent undecided.
“I feel very bewildered,” Camila Araque, a
29-year-old lawyer in Bogota, told AFP. “I don’t like either of the two options
as president.”
‘Understandable hysteria’
Michael Shifter, from the
Inter-American Dialogue think tank, says voters “are trying to figure out who
is the lesser of two evils.”
Petro comfortably topped the first round of voting
with 40 percent, 12 points ahead of Hernandez.
But Petro’s past as a radical leftist urban
guerrilla in the 1980s — during which time he spent two years in prison on arms
charges — has left many Colombians fearful.
He has been in politics since his M-19 group made peace
with the state in 1990 and formed a political party.
“The worry comes from the experience of leftist
governments in the region,” said Munoz, “not just among citizens but also the
business and economic sectors.”
Some believe the former mayor of Bogota would turn
Colombia into another authoritarian populist socialist state like neighboring
Venezuela.
“It borders on hysteria,” said Shifter, but “it’s
understandable because ... more than any other Latin American country, the
Venezuela tragedy and nightmare has impacted Colombia,” creating a “terror”
that they are next.
Petro, 62, says the country needs social justice to
build peace after a six-decade multifaceted conflict involving leftist rebels,
the state, right-wing paramilitaries, and drug cartels.
“That is to say less poverty, less hunger, less
inequality, more rights. If you don’t do this, the violence proliferates,” he
told Caracol Radio on Friday.
Petro, who is popular with many young people, named
environmentalist feminist Francia Marquez, 40, as his running mate.
‘Dialogue and agreements needed’
Just a few months ago,
Hernandez was a virtual unknown outside of Bucaramanga.
But his unconventional policies and a series of
gaffes, not least when he seemingly mistook
Adolf Hitler for Albert Einstein in
a radio interview, have caught attention.
Although he also named a woman, academic Mirelen
Castillo, 53, as his running mate, he recently said a woman’s place was in the
home.
But it is his lack of political experience or a
program that worries many.
“As a businessman he’s used to resolving conflicts
in a direct and quick way, but the exercise of governance requires dialogue,
agreements, long meetings to find common ground,” said Munoz.
That is something he will have to do if elected,
given he has almost no representation in congress.
“I’m direct, I speak the truth, I don’t calculate
the consequences,” he told Caracol TV on Friday.
What has attracted voters to Hernandez has been his
anti-corruption stance — although he faces a graft investigation of his own
from his mayorship.
“Between theft, luxury, and waste, a billion a week
disappears, we will put an end to that from day one,” he vowed.
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