Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 28, 1990 TAG: 9005280071
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: BOGOTA, COLOMBIA LENGTH: Medium
Voting was largely peaceful, and in many places, festive - a sharp departure from the tense and bloody campaign that claimed the lives of three presidential candidates in nine months.
"Although we are all afraid, we are ready to fight for peace," Arturo Romero, a 23-year-old university student, said as he waited to cast his ballot for Gaviria at a polling booth here. "For me, it is important to back democracy and to challenge the violent people by voting freely."
On the alert after a rash of bombings of public places, police and army units maintained strict security around the country, often inspecting handbags and frisking voters.
It was unclear whether the traffickers' terror campaign succeeded in reducing the turnout from the level of the last presidential election here, 7.2 million voters in 1986.
According to a 30-city survey of 15,000 voters conducted by Caracol, a private radio network, Gaviria, candidate of the governing Liberal Party, won 50 percent of the vote. Coming in second with 23 percent was Alvaro Gomez Hurtado, of the independent National Salvation Movement.
The survey results confirmed a series of polls conducted in recent weeks.
A 43-year-old economist, Gaviria will be Colombia's youngest president in this century when he takes office Aug. 7, succeeding President Virgilio Barco Vargas, who began a crackdown on the cocaine traffickers last August after Luis Carlos Galan, a popular reform politician, was shot dead on the orders of the Medellin cartel.
With the death of Galan, Gaviria, a former finance minister, took up his banner of fighting the cocaine processing and exporting business, an industry believed to earn billions of dollars a year for traffickers here. Gaviria's campaign against the dealers became more vocal as they turned to terrorism, trying to force Colombia to abandon its policies of seizing laboratories and extraditing Colombian suspects to the United States for trial.
"We have to break terrorism, we have to defeat terrorism," the candidate said in an interview on Friday in his heavily fortified campaign headquarters here.
by CNB