BOGOTA —
Colombians headed to the polls Sunday in a first round of presidential
elections, with a leftist poised for victory for the first time in the
country’s troubled history.
اضافة اعلان
The vote takes
place in a tense atmosphere, a year after a brutal security crackdown on street
protests fueled by deepening socioeconomic woes.
Polls opened at
8:00am (1pm GMT) for eight hours of voting.
Just under 39
million of Colombia’s 50 million people are eligible to cast their ballot,
though the recent abstention rate has been high, at around 50 percent.
Opinion polls
show that many Colombians are pinning their hopes on Gustavo Petro, an
ex-guerrilla and former mayor of Bogota, to address poverty, rural violence,
urban crime, and endemic corruption.
Petro, 62, is
hoping to avoid a June 19 run-off against 47-year-old Federico Gutierrez, a
former mayor of second
city Medellin who represents an alliance of right-wing
parties.
To do so, Petro
would need to garner more than 50 percent of first-round votes cast.
About 300,000
armed police and soldiers were deployed to keep the peace at 12,000 polling
stations countrywide, under the watchful eye of observers from the Organization
of American States and the EU.
Colombia ‘needs
change’
Ivan Duque — who beat Petro in a runoff election in 2018 — is leaving
with record disapproval numbers. Colombian presidents serve only one four-year
term.
Around 40
percent of Colombians today live in poverty, and the country has one of the
highest levels of income inequality in the world, according to the World Bank.
The economy was
hard hit by the
coronavirus pandemic, and one in six city dwellers is
unemployed.
The Duque
government’s image was not helped by its internationally denounced response to
weeks of anti-poverty protests last year that saw dozens of civilians killed.
“Colombia needs
change,” office cleaner Petrona Guzman, 43, told AFP on the eve of the vote, in
which she will make her mark for Petro.
“The rich have
priority over us, the middle class. It has always been like that. The majority
of people are lost.”
Petro, in his
third presidential race, has promised to address poverty and to make Colombia’s
economy more environmentally friendly, including by phasing out crude oil
exploration.
Gutierrez’s
focus has been on a “strong state” response to crime in the world’s biggest
cocaine producer.
A key voter
concern is a flare-up of rural violence, despite a 2016 peace agreement that
officially ended a near six-decade civil conflict.
Areas abandoned
by the now-defunct
FARC guerrilla group became battlegrounds for control of
drug and illegal mining resources between other armed groups, with civilians in
the crossfire.
Petro, a former
member of the M-19 urban rebel group that laid down arms in 1990, has vowed to
pursue peace talks with the last remaining guerrilla group, the ELN, which were
suspended under Duque.
Crime is a
problem in the cities too, where residents complain of a rise in robberies they
blame in large part on an influx of nearly 2 million migrants from neighboring
Venezuela.
Change
On Friday, Petro told voters the country had a choice “either to keep
things as they are in Colombia, or change,” leaving behind “corruption,
violence, and hunger.”
In the same TV
debate, Gutierrez agreed change was needed “but this change must happen safely
... without putting at risk families, homes, ... jobs.”
In a country
marked by a deep-rooted fear of the political left — associated with guerrilla
groups that sowed decades of misery — the pushback against Petro has been
fierce, with rivals seeking to paint him as a radical, Hugo Chavez-style
populist.
In with an
outsider chance in third place, according to opinion polls, is 77-year-old
anti-corruption candidate Rodolfo Hernandez.
Three other
candidates, each with support in the single-digits, complete the picture.
The campaign has
been marred by suspicions of fraud following counting irregularities reported
in a primary voting round in March, and Petro on Friday expressed fresh
concerns about the software used by
Colombia’s vote count body.
Petro and
Gutierrez have both received death threats, as has the leftist’s running mate
Francia Marquez, who could become Colombia’s first ever black woman
vice-president.
Five presidential
candidates were assassinated by opponents, drug traffickers or paramilitary
groups in Colombia in the 20th century.
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