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Colombians see next year’s elections as a choice between incumbent Santos, who is pushing for a peace deal with the FARC, and his main rival Oscar Zuluaga, a conservative who opposes the peace talks.
Ask any Colombian what the determining factor has been in the country’s presidential elections in recent decades, and most will answer - the FARC rebels.
And it appears to hold true this time around as Colombia’s presidential election campaign officially kicked off this week, following the decision by President Juan Manuel Santos to seek a consecutive four-year term in next year’s election.
Santos said he’ll run for re-election to continue a peace process he initiated with the country’s largest Marxist guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), in the hope of reaching a peace accord to end Colombia's 50-year-old war, which has killed more than 200,000 people and displaced more than 5 million.
“I am running because I am convinced we have advanced enough and that finally it is possible to reach that future of prosperity and peace that all Colombians deserve," the 62-year-old incumbent said in a televised address to the nation from the presidential palace in Bogota on Wednesday.
"I am doing it because when you can see the light at the end of the tunnel you don't turn back. We can’t stop half way. We have to finish this task.”
Many Colombians see next year’s elections as a choice between Santos, who is pushing for a peace deal, and his main rival Oscar Zuluaga, a conservative candidate who opposes the peace talks. Zuluaga says the government shouldn’t be negotiating with the rebels, who he has described as drug-running terrorists.
“The next elections will be decided between those who want war and those who want peace,” Piedad Cordoba, a former senator, is quoted as saying in El Espectador’s newspaper.
The FARC peace talks are the most important campaign issue in the run up to the 2014 presidential campaign, although it’s not the first time the rebels have been at the centre of election campaigns and at the forefront of voter’s minds.
Back in 1999, it was another Colombian president, Andres Pastrana, who sat down at the negotiating table with the FARC to try to get a peace deal signed in the town of San Vicente del Caguan in southeast Colombia. The town was part of an area the size of Switzerland that the government had declared a demilitarised zone, off limits to government troops.
Pastrana ended the peace talks after three years of arduous stop-start negotiations with the FARC, and accused the rebels of using the demilitarised zone to regroup, take hostages, continue drug trafficking and attack government troops.
It was on the back of these failed peace talks that Colombians elected with a big majority Alvaro Uribe in 2002, a hardliner who vowed to crush the guerrillas.
Four years later, Colombians re-elected Uribe to continue his military offensive against the FARC, which many felt had improved security and placed the rebels on the back foot.
Then in 2010, current president Santos won the presidential elections, pledging to continue Uribe’s hardline security policies against the rebels.
It’s because of these election results that many Colombians say that the FARC always end up determining the outcome of the country’s presidential elections.
Last year, Santos started peace talks with the rebels in Havana, Cuba.
But starting a peace process hasn’t made Santos hugely popular. A scion of an elite family, Santos fails to connect with the man in the street, analysts say.
His approval rating rose to 29 percent in October, from a record low of 21 percent in August, when farmers staged nationwide protests over the economy and lack of rural reform.
Still if Colombia’s elections were held today, recent polls indicate that Colombians would choose peace over war, and that Santos would be re-elected in a second-round vote.
“I’ll give my vote to Santos. I’ll give him a chance and more time to get the peace deal. It’s better than continuing as we have been for years with the war,” said Ricardo Tellez, a security guard standing outside a supermarket in north Bogota.
Much could change, though, over the coming months ahead of the presidential elections in May.
The vote hinges on whether Santos is able to reach a peace accord. Signing a peace deal with the FARC would boost support for Santos and almost guarantee his re-election, analysts say.
So far, the government and rebels have reached two partial agreements on land reform and the FARC’s participation in political life.
The next round of peace talks in Havana is expected to resume later this month when both sides will tackle the thorny issue of cocaine production and the drug trade, the third issue in a six-point agenda.
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