Economist Elected Colombian President : Politics: Ruling party candidate Ernesto Samper defeats Andres Pastrana. He promises to do more for the poor.

BOGOTA, Colombia —  Promising to do more for Colombia’s long-neglected poor, ruling party economist Ernesto Samper won a hard-fought presidential election Sunday in a close contest between two survivors of this country’s brutal drug wars.

With 98% of the ballots counted, Liberal Party candidate Samper, a brainy but colorless former government minister, had 50.37% of the vote, to 48.64% for his opponent, former television anchorman Andres Pastrana.

“We have achieved victory,” Samper, 43, told cheering supporters Sunday night at a Bogota convention hall shortly after Conservative Party candidate Pastrana, 39, conceded. “The hour of Colombia’s great social leap has arrived.”

More than half of Colombia’s eligible voters stayed away from the polls. Absenteeism and the tightness of the race appeared to reflect the minimal differences between Samper’s and Pastrana’s platforms on issues ranging from drug trafficking to foreign investment. Style more than substance distinguished the two candidates, both of whom represented the political dynasties that have dominated Colombia for decades.

Isolated violence was reported, including the kidnaping of two election workers and the burning of voting booths by leftist guerrillas in several rural areas. But compared to Colombia’s deadly past, the elections were relatively peaceful and hailed by many as proof that the worst of this country’s drug terrorism has ended.

In the last presidential campaign, in 1990, three candidates were slain by assassins working for drug traffickers. Samper still has four bullets in his body from a 1989 assassination attempt, and Pastrana was kidnaped in 1988 by henchmen of cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar.

The car bombs and brazen attacks that characterized Escobar’s war on the Colombian state have subsided since the head of the Medellin cartel was killed by police in December. The more insidious Cali cartel now controls most of the cocaine trade and a growing portion of heroin production, but rather than attacking the government head-on, the cartel’s leaders have infiltrated the highest echelons of government through bribes and corruption, law enforcement officials say.

Both Samper and Pastrana said during the campaign they would continue the outgoing government’s controversial policy of negotiating plea bargains with Cali cartel leaders. Washington has been highly critical of the policy, claiming that it allows the world’s biggest traffickers to customize their own lenient sentences.

“I am convinced the policy of submitting (traffickers) to justice (through plea bargains) continues being the practical and valid instrument for Colombia,” Samper told reporters recently.

The narrow margin of victory leaves the new president without a clear mandate and is likely to weaken his hand as he tries to implement a wide range of promised domestic economic and social programs, political analysts said.

“Because of the close finish and the absenteeism, we are going to have for the next four years a president weaker than any of his predecessors, (a president) tied with the blind knots of private interests,” said Antonio Caballero, a columnist for Cambio 16 magazine.

Colombians did not show great interest in the election, which was largely overshadowed by the national soccer team’s participation in the World Cup. In this land of fervent soccer fans, many voters waited for breaks in Sunday’s games to venture to the polls, and many others took radios with them tuned to play-by-play coverage.

One radio station interviewed psychiatrists to determine what impact Colombia’s devastating World Cup loss to Romania on Saturday would have on the voting. And outgoing President Cesar Gaviria went on national television Saturday night to implore his citizens to overcome their “sadness” at the loss and vote anyway.

“Soccer is a passion,” said a clerk at a jewelry store in the posh Andino shopping mall. “Politics? The people are fed up with politicians.”

Sunday’s balloting was a runoff required after no candidate received more than 50% of the vote May 29, an election marred by high absenteeism. Two-thirds of Colombia’s 17 million eligible voters did not cast ballots in that election; on Sunday, roughly 43% of the electorate voted.

Given the general apathy, victory seemed to depend heavily on a party’s ability to get out the vote from its traditional die-hard supporters. The ruling Liberal Party and the smaller Conservative Party are the two centrist political organizations that have always dominated Colombian politics, leaving little room for other opposition or leftist parties, and their machines are effective.

“We are Liberals since before our birth,” Jorge Urazan Quinones, 78, proclaimed as he prepared to cast his vote--for Samper, of course--at the colonial Plaza Bolivar in downtown Bogota. “They say the Conservatives have softened, but we have memories in our blood of the killings, the violence, and we fear it could start again.”

The Liberals and the Conservatives battled over land and political power throughout the 1940s and ‘50s, a period known as “La Violencia,” which claimed more than 200,000 lives and set the tone for Colombia’s seemingly endless cycle of fratricide.

Samper and Pastrana ran slick, if superficial, campaigns. The few notable differences between their platforms centered on economic issues and the pace of reforms aimed at opening up Colombia’s economy to foreign investment and imports.

Under Gaviria, Colombia embarked on a vigorous free-market program that cut tariffs and subsidies and opened the doors to a flood of imports. The economy grew and trade boomed, but the estimated 50% of Colombia’s population that lives in poverty saw no benefits.

Pastrana advocated continuing apace with Gaviria’s economic policies, while Samper said he would slow the reforms, restore some subsidies for agriculture and create more than 1 million new jobs.