Colombia's Santos says opposition poisoning peace talks
Cucuta (Colombia) (AFP) - Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos, in an interview with AFP, accused his opponents of waging a "dirty" campaign to poison peace talks with leftist guerrillas.
Facing the first round of voting in a re-election battle in less than two weeks, the 62-year-old holds a slight lead in the polls but the contest has been muddied by scandal.
Santos, who is running for a second four year term, has found his bid to end a 50-year-old leftist insurgency through peace talks under attack from the right.
Behind conservative challenger Oscar Ivan Zuluaga is former Santos mentor Alvaro Uribe, who fought the FARC, Colombia's largest rebel group, during his own 2002-2010 presidency.
Uribe tried, and failed, to defeat FARC militarily. In November 2012 his former protege Santos began peace talks in Havana to end the insurgency.
In an interview over the weekend during a campaign stop in Cucuta, a cauldron of drug trafficking and illegal armed groups on the border with Venezuela, Santos hit out at opponents of the talks.
"They are desperate because the see that peace takes away their reason for being," he said.
"There are people here who have become accustomed to living in war, to living from the war."
He said that as he tries to negotiate peace with the rebels he has had to contend with a war of "lies," including rumors that he plans to shrink the army or put the FARC in command of the police.
"That's absurd," he declared.
Scandals have also spilled into the presidential race.
One of Santos close aides resigned last week after being accused of receiving bribes from drug traffickers.
Zuluaga's campaign, meanwhile, was linked by prosecutors to the hacking of Santos' communications with the FARC, seen as an attempt to torpedo the negotiations.
"There has been a systematic dirty campaign to poison the peace process and this has generated doubts among certain people," Santos said.
"But I am convinced that the Colombian people are sensible, that they want peace and that in the elections they will express themselves clearly in favor of peace and in favor of a better future."
- 'Peace can't be improvised' -
Although Santos acknowledges that no one is "irreplaceable," he argues that the continuity of the talks with the FARC would be threatened if another candidate is elected.
"It would be risky because peace can't be improvised," he said.
At the same time, Santos defended his decision not to declare a cease-fire until a peace agreement has been reached.
"The least costly path to a prompt solution to the conflict is to continue the military offensive and continue negotiating in the midst of conflict," he said.
"A cease-fire would be a perverse incentive to prolong the negotiations indefinitely because the FARC would have the best of both worlds," he said.
Hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result of Latin America's oldest guerrilla war, which began with the FARC's founding in 1964.
As defense minister under Uribe, Santos inflicted heavy military losses on the FARC, which now has an estimated 8,000 fighters, about half its size 10 years ago.
Santos hopes that the weakening of the guerrilla movement will lead to an outcome similar to that accepted by the IRA in Northern Ireland or ETA in Spain.
"Let them set aside their weapons and exchange weapons for arguments, bullets for votes, and continue their struggle by democratic means, and if tomorrow they convince the rest of Colombians that their ideas are correct, it would be welcomed -- but without violence," he said.
Santos, who believes he can secure a peace agreement by the end of the year, has promised that in that event he would "extend a hand" to the leader of the FARC, Timoleon Jimenez, alias "Timochenko," a scene that now seems unthinkable.
"Of course, I would shake his hand because that is what peace is all about: end the violence and shake hands, without it meaning that one agrees with the other."
