By Andrew L. Jaffee

Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe has easily coasted to re-election victory, garnering 62% of the vote. According to the BBC, “Correspondents say his tough policies against drugs and militants paid off.” This is absolutely true. Colombia was being split up into right-wing and left-wing enclaves — fiefdoms if you will — whose life-blood was drug money.

Uribe got reelected precisely because he has started to clamp down on the feudal gangs. Like the FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, which murdered 17 peasants, including 6 women and 4 children, who were gathered to celebrate New Year’s Eve last year.

But Uribe has also taken down right-wing murderers, like the AUC (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia).

Uribe is countering the current trend in Latin America:

Mr Uribe has been an ally to Washington, at a time when other Latin American countries, for instance Venezuela under Hugo Chavez and Bolivia under Evo Morales, have been turning against the US.

The result suggests Colombians have rejected left-wing alternatives, as well as the traditional liberal and conservative parties that have dominated Colombia’s political life since independence from Spain, says our correspondent.

Government figures suggest Mr Uribe’s hardline policies have been successful, with the 15,000 murders last year fewer than half the figure three years before, when Mr Uribe was elected, and kidnappings cut by two thirds.