Colombian Election Seen as Referendum on Peace Talks

Colombia holds legislative elections Sunday that are seen as a referendum on peace talks with FARC leftist guerrillas and a trial run for a presidential vote in May.

Since they opened in late 2012 in Cuba, the talks that President Jose Manuel Santos has held with the Marxist rebels have dominated political life in Colombia.

The FARC, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, have been fighting successive governments for 50 years and are Latin America's oldest insurgency.

Santos is seeking a second term, and his three party coalition government is expected to retain control of both chambers of Congress.

That would be key for the peace process, which so far enjoys the support of most Colombians.

Santos officially announced his candidacy for another term this week, and said he wanted to "finish up the job" of bringing peace to a country that has endured decades of bloodshed.

"It is highly likely that the president will retain a strong majority because it is very hard to defeat a coalition," said Sandra Borda, professor of political science at the University of the Andes in Bogota. The peace process is key, she added.

"Although many Colombians have their doubts about the process, they will not go so far as to reject it. They do not want it to end," she said.

The big question Sunday will be how Santos' predecessor Alvaro Uribe does in his quest for a seat in the Senate.

Uribe accuses Santos, his former defense minister, of treason by turning the FARC into "political players" with a high profile stage in Havana where the peace talks are being held.

Uribe, a conservative, is still popular for his no-holds-barred fight against the FARC while in power from 2002 to 2010. Campaigning on the slogan "No to impunity," he is Colombia's first ex-president to seek a seat in the Senate, from which he aims to challenge the course of the talks.

But his new party, the Democratic Center, is only projected to win about 14 percent of the votes, which would give it just 19 of 102 seats in the upper chamber.

"Uribe's list is not going to win a majority, but to some extent it will allow him to shape the national agenda," said Luis Guillermo Patino, head of the political science department at the Pontifical Bolivarian University in Medellin.

"It will be very difficult to prevent a ratification of peace accords but if those accords are put to a referendum a dissonant voice like that of Uribe can resonate powerfully," Patino said.

Hundreds of thousands of people have died in the half century old conflict, which stems from gaping inequality between landless peasants and rich landowners.

Over the years, the war has become a complex mix of rebels, paramilitary militia, drug traffickers and criminal gangs.

The possibility of rebels rejoining political life without first serving prison time -- something being discussed in the negotiations -- is a highly sensitive one in Colombia.

Leftist parties are traditionally weak in Colombia and they have failed to benefit from the peace talks.

"The left is in a very delicate position because it supports the peace process advocated by the government," said Borda.

At the same time, although the leftist parties are legal and democratic, they are associated with the armed struggle, said Patino.

An added complication is the lack of a ceasefire during the peace process.

The People's Ombudsman, or national mediator, Jorge Armando Otalora, has said that illegal groups including the FARC have exercised "pressure and intimidation" on voters to keep them from voting in at least a fifth of the national territory.

The elections have seen the rebirth of the once defunct Patriotic Union, the FARC's political ally during a first, failed round of peace talks in the 1980s, before suffering a wave of murders at the hands of paramilitary groups.

Its main candidate is Aida Avella, who survived an assassination attempt in 1996 and went into exile for 17 years.

She returned to Colombia to run in Sunday's elections but is not expected to do well.