"Santos is Not Uribe's Clone"

Kirsten Begg
Colombia Reports
July 26, 2010

As the handover of power from outgoing Colombian President Alvaro Uribe  to President-elect Juan Manuel Santos draws closer, a U.S. analyst likens the transition to that between former U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. at the end of the 1980s.

Eric Farnsworth, the vice president of the Council of the Americas - a U.S. business organization whose stated goal is promoting free trade, democracy and open markets in the Americas - told Colombia Reports that he believes that Santos does not represent as much of a continuation of "Uribismo," as some people may expect.

Farnsworth likens the Uribe-Santos transition of power to that of the Reagan-Bush transition in 1989, "when many people said that Bush would be a continuation of Reagan, that he would continue with Reagan's agenda," because both presidents came from the Republican Party.

"However it became clear that Bush's agenda was different, that he didn't just represent a third term of the original president... in some ways the transition was quite different and I think that's what's going on in Colombia," Farnsworth said.

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