BOGOTA: Colombians choose a new president today in a landmark election, the first since a peace agreement with FARC rebels which conservative frontrunner Ivan Duque wants to overhaul.
Offering a starkly different choice to voters is Duque’s opponent, the leftist former mayor and ex-guerrilla Gustavo Petro, who supports the deal in what has come to resemble a referendum on the 2016 agreement. “We have a country without FARC, which is building peace,” President Juan Manuel Santos, who will step down in August, said ahead of the poll. His efforts to end the war with FARC brought him the Nobel Peace Prize, though he is leaving office with record unpopularity in a country of 49 million people.
The world’s leading producer of cocaine, the Latin American country continues to battle armed groups vying for control of lucrative narco-trafficking routes in areas FARC once dominated. Duque comfortably won the first round last month, having campaigned on a pledge to rewrite the agreement signed by Santos. Vehemently opposed to the peace deal, 41-year-old Duque says he would revise it in order to sentence guerrilla leaders guilty of serious crimes to “proportional penalties.”
The former economist and first-term senator says he wants to cut off their access to representation in Congress, enshrined in the agreement, under which FARC transformed itself into a political party. Duque is buoyed by the backing of his popular mentor, former president and now senator Alvaro Uribe, whose two-term presidency from 2002-2010 was marked by the all-out war on the FARC.
Ivan Duque is on course to become Colombia’s youngest president in Sunday’s run-off election after a campaign fought largely over the future of the government’s peace deal with the former rebel group FARC. A 41-year-old senator, Duque faces his leftist rival Gustavo Petro on Sunday after comfortably winning the first round. Opinion polls give him a margin of between six and 15 points over Petro. He campaigned on a ticket to rewrite the peace deal signed with the FARC by outgoing president Juan Manuel Santos. A lawyer with a degree in economics, Duque represents many Colombian voters who were outraged by concessions given to the former rebels, including reduced sentences for those who confessed their crimes. If elected, he has promised to make “structural changes” to the 2016 agreement, which led to the group’s disarmament and conversion into a political party. “What we Colombians want is that those who have committed crimes against humanity be punished by proportional penalties… so that there is no impunity,” Duque told AFP during the campaign. Latin America’s longest-running conflict left more than 260,000 people dead, nearly 83,000 missing and some 7.4 million forced from their homes.
