BUSH ALLY FACES A CRITICAL TEST

Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, one of Washington's closest allies
in Latin America, is a heavy favorite to win re-election Sunday, which
would break a string of victories by populist candidates elsewhere in
the region. The latest polls give Mr. Uribe, who pushed through an
amendment to Colombia's constitution last year to permit presidential
re-election, 56% of the vote against 24% for his closest rival, Sen.
Carlos Gaviria, the candidate of the left-wing Alternative Democratic
Pole party.

Mr. Gaviria, a former Supreme Court justice, has surged past Horacio
Serpa, who is running for the third time as the candidate of the
once-dominant but now anemic Liberal Party. Many Latin American
nations bar presidential second terms because of the region's history
of autocratic leaders.

A win by Mr. Uribe, an outspoken conservative, would be welcomed in
Washington, which has been hard put to stop a tide of populist
victories that has roiled the region in recent months.

In December Bolivia's populist Evo Morales, a close ally of
Venezuela's populist president, Hugo Chavez, won a landslide victory.

This month, Mr. Morales nationalized Bolivia's natural-gas industry.

Voters are expected to reward Mr. Uribe, 53 years old and a workaholic
provincial lawyer, for a markedly improved security situation since he
donned the presidential sash in 2002, and for an improving economy.

Fueled by the country's billion-dollar drug trade, left-wing
insurgents from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC,
Latin America's largest and oldest guerrilla army, seemed to be
getting the upper hand in their decades-long struggle against the
Colombian government before Mr. Uribe took office. Mr. Uribe levied a
war tax and has used about $3 billion in U.S. antinarcotics and
military aid to beef up and professionalize a once-anemic army. Since
then, the army has gone on the offensive against the left-wing rebels,
driving them back into remote and underpopulated jungle zones mostly
in the south and east.

Mr. Uribe also negotiated with right-wing paramilitary groups, many of
whom are considered terrorists and drug traffickers by the U.S.,
persuading them to lay down their arms in exchange for leniency for
their crimes.

More than 30,000 paramilitary combatants have taken advantage of Mr.
Uribe's offer. While FARC's 17,000 fighters refuse to negotiate, a
smaller leftist group, the National Liberation Army, is negotiating
with the government to demobilize.

The program is controversial among human-rights advocates, because
former combatants will get short prison terms and then be eligible for
government retraining. With their crimes all but forgiven and fortunes
intact, the critics say, Mr. Uribe's policy will turn former drug
lords into a powerful political class, while rank-and-file fighters
will turn to crime to survive. For now, though, violence is declining
sharply, and foreign investment is coming into the country.

Colombia's economy has expanded more than 4% annually for the past
three years.