Ex-Defense Chief Leads in Colombia

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — A scion of a powerful Colombian family comfortably won more votes than an eccentric former mayor of Bogotá in presidential elections on Sunday, but narrowly failed to get the majority needed to prevent a runoff election in June between the two men.

The lead vote-getter, Juan Manuel Santos, the architect of crushing blows against guerrillas as a defense minister under President Álvaro Uribe, took 46.6 percent, against 21.5 percent for his main rival, Antanas Mockus, a French-educated mathematician who had unexpectedly emerged as a strong contender in the race, Colombian election authorities said Sunday night. Several other candidates garnered shares of the remainder of the vote.

Mr. Santos’s inability to win more than 50 percent opens the way for a new campaigning phase in which the two are expected to fiercely criticize each other’s capabilities yet again. Mr. Mockus has emphasized human rights scandals on his opponent’s watch as defense minister, while Mr. Santos has questioned if Mr. Mockus is ready to lead a country that faces resilient security threats from leftist rebels and drug-trafficking gangs.

Despite polls that briefly signaled that Mr. Mockus was within grasp of a victory, the results showed that many voters were instead ready to support Mr. Santos, who portrayed himself as the political heir to Mr. Uribe, a strong ally of the United States who lowered kidnapping and murder rates during his eight years in power.

“Of all the candidates running, Santos wears the pants when it comes to confronting the guerrillas,” said Fernando Morales, 37, a security guard, after casting his vote here.

“I don’t like Mockus much because he’s someone who lowers his pants to get attention,” Mr. Morales said in a dig at Mr. Mockus, who as a university dean rose to prominence in the 1990s after dropping his trousers and mooning an auditorium of unruly students. The episode forced Mr. Mockus to resign from his post, but gave him the publicity to run successfully for mayor of Bogotá.

Mr. Mockus, 58, won plaudits in two colorful terms as mayor after improving the quality of life in a city that had been plagued by car bombs and generalized chaos. Drawing on arcane philosophical concepts, he used mimes to curb traffic violations and persuaded Bogotanos to pay more taxes in exchange for improved services.

Mr. Mockus campaigned on an anticorruption platform, emphasizing scandals including wiretaps of prominent judges by Mr. Uribe’s intelligence agency and the killing of civilians by soldiers who then catalogued them as guerrillas in efforts to raise combat-kill statistics.

But at the end of the day many Colombians voted for continuity, even if Mr. Mockus’s message of accountability resonated. “Colombians want stability, but they also seem to want clean government,” said Cynthia Arnson, a specialist on Colombian politics at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

Just as Mr. Mockus ran an antiestablishment campaign as the head of the Green Party, Mr. Santos, 59, embodied the establishment that is the bedrock of support for President Uribe. Mr. Santos’s granduncle Eduardo Santos was president of Colombia; a cousin, Francisco Santos, is currently vice president; and his family wields influence through El Tiempo, a leading newspaper here in which it has a stake.

While Mr. Santos campaigned on his record of marginalizing the country’s largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, it still wreaks havoc in some areas. Underscoring this threat, the FARC killed two children in a grenade attack on the eve of the election in the remote hamlet of El Plateado in southwestern Colombia, the Colombian armed forces reported.

That episode followed an ambush by the FARC in the southern department, or province, of Caquetá last week that killed nine marines on a patrol, the biggest loss of life by the security forces since January. Indeed, the FARC’s resilience in recent months had emerged as an issue for some in Colombia ahead of the vote.

“Don’t let them say they’re leaving behind a country that’s a paradise,” Héctor Abad Faciolince, one of Colombia’s top writers and social commentators, wrote in a column criticizing the Uribe administration in the newspaper El Espectador on Sunday.

Other countries in Latin America are closely following the election here, especially Venezuela, where President Hugo Chávez, who has already traded barbs with Mr. Santos and who has tense economic and political relations with Mr. Uribe’s government, has vowed to limit trade further with Colombia if Mr. Santos wins.

“Mr. Chávez and I probably don’t agree on anything,” Mr. Santos, 59, said in an interview here, acknowledging that relations with Venezuela would be a challenge. “The concept of democracy, the concept of freedom, the concept of private property, the concept of the independence of the powers of the state. But if we respect the way we differ, we can have cordial relations.”