Pro-Uribe parties dominate Colombia's Senate vote

Candidates from parties allied with outgoing President Alvaro Uribe dominated Sunday's elections in Colombia to replace a Congress tarnished by lawmakers' links to far-right criminal bands.

One of those parties, largely made up of relatives and friends of lawmakers jailed or under investigation for allegedly aiding and benefiting from the so-called paramilitaries, was running fourth among 14 parties in the Senate race.

The election is considered a key barometer of how Colombians will vote in the May 30 presidential contest. A court decision last month barred Uribe, who is hugely popular for badly weakening leftist rebels, from seeking a third consecutive term.

With 75 percent of the votes for Senate seats counted Sunday night, candidates from the National Unity, Conservative and Radical Change parties -- all closely allied with Uribe -- were on their way to jointly winning control of the 102-seat Senate.

The Liberal Party, which is in the opposition, was the third-largest vote-getter and was expected to have 18 seats in the Senate.

Candidates from the party tainted by Colombia's "parapolitics'' scandal, a new grouping known by its initials PIN and allegedly created by imprisoned politicians, appeared headed toward winning eight Senate seats.

That put PIN ahead of Radical Change and the top two left-leaning parties, the Greens and the Alternative Democratic Pole, which together seemed likely to end up with just 12 Senate seats.

''The governing coalition is the big winner,'' said Ariel Avila, an analyst for the Arco Iris non-governmental research group.

Voter turnout was only about 40 percent, according to the partial official results. The vote count for the 166-seat lower house was running much slower than the Senate races and there were no early indications the party breakdown in that chamber.

It was too early to say how the Uribe-allied parties would deal with PIN, the Party of National Integration.

Colombian law does not bar relatives of people accused or convicted of crimes from running for elected office, and PIN's success in several provinces provided strong evidence that right-wing criminal bands associated with drug trafficking continue to plague Colombia's countryside.

Observers from the Organization of American States and other groups reported a number of cases of alleged vote-buying and voter intimidation in the countryside, for which such bands were blamed.

Former Uribe agriculture minister Felipe Arias held a slight lead of 43.5 percent to 42.3 percent in the Conservative Party's presidential primary over Noemi Sanin, a former foreign minister.

The front-runner in opinion polls to succeed Uribe as president is Juan Manuel Santos, who was defense minister during the daring July 2008 rescue of French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt and three U.S. military contractors.

(Published by The New York Times - March 15, 2010)