Word: restrepo
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...party win 18% of the vote in the congressional elections last March. In the end, it wasn't enough. For the third time, the country's eight-year-old National Front coalition won the presidency. The winner by a better than two-to-one margin: Carlos Lleras Restrepo, 58, economist, educator and longtime leader of Colombia's Liberal Party (TIME, April...
...Lleras Restrepo, who will take office Aug. 7, faces some enormous problems. Under his do-nothing predecessor, Conservative Guillermo Leon Valencia, Colombia's coffee-based economy has gone steadily downhill, the National Front itself splintered, and Rojas' opposition group in Congress effectively blocked all government legislation. By pushing a "bloodless revolution" of economic and social reforms, Lleras Restrepo hopes to lure some of the opposition to his side and win the two-thirds majority he needs to legislate. Otherwise, he seems prepared to extend the state of siege that Valencia declared last May, and run his country...
Leaders of the front knew all too well what had happened. Said Carlos Lleras Restrepo, 57, the Liberals' candidate for President next May: "The traditional parties have lost contact with a certain sector of the population." He meant the thousands of excampesinos who squat in squalid shacks surrounding Bogota and Cartagena and have been growing restive under the lackluster rule of Conservative President Guillermo León Valencia. During the campaign, Rojas drew enthusiastic crowds with his vivid lectures on economics, in which he argued that the way to get the peso on a par with the dollar...
Last week the battered front was showing some new signs of life-thanks to the statesman who devised the for mula in the first place. He is Alberto Lleras Camargo, the longtime Liberal leader (and distant cousin of Lleras Restrepo) who served ably from 1958 to 1962 as the front's first President, then retired to Manhattan and a job as editorial chairman of Visión, Latin America's leading Spanish-language newsmagazine. Going back to Bogotá last August, Lleras set out to glue the front together by main force of personality and prestige. He urged...
Looking for a Chance. The likelihood is that Lleras Restrepo will win the presidency against a divided opposition next May. He might even be able to do something for Colombia-if he gets the chance. Though he has none of the personal appeal of Lleras Camargo, he is a respected economist and former Finance Minister who knows the hard things he must do to reduce Colombia's spiraling cost of living (up 64% in three years) and soaring foreign debt (up 100%, to $750 million...