Bogota renaissance factor in Colombia election

BOGOTA (Reuters) – On a drizzly spring day in 1993, a blast from a truck bomb in Colombia’s capital, Bogota, flung lottery ticket vendor Jorge Eliecer backward through the window of a savings bank, lacerating his skin.

Now, as the South American country prepares for presidential elections on Sunday, Eliecer still sells lottery tickets from the same spot outside a shopping mall, but he says the Andean city has changed beyond recognition.

“The era of car bombs and terrorists is over and will be forgotten,” Eliecer said, pointing to where the bomb blamed on late drug lord Pablo Escobar detonated, killing 11 and injuring over 100. There were several bombings in the city that year.

Juan Manuel Santos, former defense minister under outgoing President Alvaro Uribe, has a slight lead over two-term Bogota mayor Antanas Mockus heading into the election, according to polls, but the two are close and a runoff on June 20 is likely.
The city’s turnaround is a microcosm of changes seen in much of Colombia in  the last decade and helps explain the popularity of the two main candidates.

Bogota was long loathed by many of its own residents, who were sick of traffic-choked streets punctuated by car bombs, motorbike assassins and kidnapping gangs.

Parts of town previously deserted and home to derelict buildings now bustle with cafes and bars. The area around the shopping mall that was bombed 17 years ago is now full of pedestrians and new businesses.

Uribe’s two-term drive to crush a guerrilla insurgency and drug gangs made the city, and large swathes of Colombia, though still violent, a safer place.

But many Colombians now take that basic security for granted, and want their next president to focus on bettering society after corruption and human rights scandals.

Mockus is popular in the capital for markedly improving the quality of life with new parks, vehicle and pedestrian bridges, and quirky campaigns such as sending mimes on the streets to shame drivers into respecting traffic lights.

He once bared his behind to an auditorium of students and dressed in a spandex costume as “Super Citizen” to draw attention to civic values.

He says voters just need to look at Bogota to see why they should support him, while critics doubt he is ready to govern the still conflict-ridden nation.

Supporters say Mockus will help change Colombia’s often violent and lawless culture and point to what they see as his proven track record of responsible economic management.

“He and his successor totally changed Bogota, they were the best mayors we ever had, they turned the city round,” said optician Alba Pineros Rojas, waiting at a metro-bus station in the city’s formerly smoke-choked downtown.

“This area was overrun by muggers, and air was polluted by fumes from the small buses that this replaced,” Pineros Rojas said. But not everybody is sure the mathematician and philosopher has the experience and the grit to keep up Uribe’s momentum against the leftist rebels driven from populous areas into remote mountain and jungle regions in recent years.

That favors Santos, a hard-line establishment figure involved in planning one of the toughest blows against the guerrilla, the 2008 assassination of Raul Reyes, the No. 2 commander of the FARC rebels, in a bombing raid in Ecuador.

Mockus’ outlandish antics — he once urinated on students from a balcony — and fumbles such as saying doctors need not earn more than $400 a month also have hurt his chances.

“This town is safe because of Alvaro (Uribe). Mockus was a good mayor, but he’s a clown and needs more experience,” Eliecer said of the French-educated academic who got married atop an elephant in a circus tent.
“I’ll be supporting Santos.”