Uribe wins Colombian presidential election

Supporters of President Uribe celebrate the poll results. Picture / Reuters.

BOGOTA, Colombia - Colombia's incumbent president Alvaro Uribe has won another four years in power, after his closest rival conceded defeat.

"What we have to do at this time is recognise the victory of President Uribe," Carlos Gaviria, a former judge, told local radio at his campaign headquarters.

President Uribe, a key US ally in Latin America, led with 61 per cent after 21.2 per cent of the vote was counted less than an hour after polls closed.

Mr Gaviria of the centre-left Democratic Pole, trailed with 22.67 per cent.

As counting closed, several hundred supporters crowded into President Uribe's campaign headquarters in a Bogota hotel chanting: "Uribe, Uribe, Long Live Colombia."

Caravans of cars with honking horns and people waving the red-yellow-and-blue national flag drove through the posh district of north Bogota in a noisy celebration.

Troops patrolled the streets of the capital Bogota, high in the Andes mountains, and across the nation of 41 million people.

But the election was the most peaceful vote in years in a country that has suffered horrifying bloodshed in the past four decades.

The key to President Uribe's success has been a crackdown on right-wing militias and the FARC rebels who use Colombia's cocaine trade to sustain an insurgency that kills thousands each year.

Voters praised President Uribe for bringing greater security to the cities, although armed groups still hold sway in much of the countryside.

A victory by President Uribe, a 53-year-old lawyer and landowner, would be welcome relief for Washington after a string of election victories by leftists in Latin America and with Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez leading a campaign to counter US free-market ideas with socialist reforms for the poor.

Colombian traffickers are the main suppliers of cocaine and heroin to drug-users in the United States. Washington has pumped more military aid into Colombia than any other country outside the Middle East in the past four years.

- REUTERS