Law-and-Order Man.(Colombia's Alvaro Uribe Velez)(Brief Article)

Dispirited by failed peace talks with leftist rebels, millions of Colombian voters decided last week to give civil war a chance to end Latin America's oldest conflict. They elected Alvaro Uribe Velez, a right-wing former state governor, as the country's new president. Uribe campaigned on a pledge to crack down on Colombia's leading guerrilla armies, and apparently will waste little time pursuing his law-and- order agenda. Last Friday, days after the May 26 vote, lame-duck President Andres Pastrana abruptly broke off talks with the far-left National Liberation Army (ELN). The move effectively buried Pastrana's concerted efforts to reach negotiated settlements with the ELN and the much larger Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Uribe had emerged as the presidential front runner last winter after roundly condemning Pastrana's peace process as a dialogue with deaf and unyielding guerrilla leaders. That strategy certainly paid off. The hard-line Uribe won an outright majority of the votes, thereby averting a runoff election with his closest rival. It was a moment to savor for both the 49-year-old politician and the military high command, who can look forward to bigger defense budgets in the very near future. "The strengthening of the armed forces is the necessary way to protect civilians," Uribe said in his victory speech. "Colombia has expressed its will to restore civility and order."

Alvaro Uribe and the generals weren't the only ones celebrating. The military chieftain of the country's outlawed ultra-rightist militias hailed the election outcome as an "emphatic" expression of popular sentiment in favor of the hawkish president-elect. "Now is the time to win the war being waged against the Colombian state," declared Salvatore Mancuso, a former cattle rancher and fugitive from justice who heads the paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia. And in a surprising break with protocol, U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson called on Uribe at his Bogota campaign headquarters to congratulate the candidate well before runner-up Horacio Serpa had conceded defeat. The career diplomat predicted that the United States would have "very close" relations with the incoming Uribe government and said his triumph showed that Colombians are "fed up with terrorism."

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