HKS Graduate Elected President of Colombia

Juan Manuel Santos, who graduated from Harvard Kennedy School in 1981 and served as a Nieman Fellow at the University, was elected president of Colombia on Sunday and will take office in mid-July.

Santos defeated Antanas Mockus—the mayor of Bogotá, Colombia—by garnering 69 percent of the votes to his opponent’s 27.5 percent, marking the biggest margin in the country’s history.

In his recent years as Minister of Defense under outgoing Colombia President Álvaro Uribe, Santos played an active role in addressing the Marxist guerrillas that plagued the country.

Santo’s civic and political roles in his native country include redirecting upward the direction of the Colombian economy when he was in charge of the Colombian finance portfolio in 2000, and serving as the chief executive of the Colombian Coffee Delegation to the International Coffee Organization.

Beyond his political contributions to Colombia, Santos serves as sub-director of his family-owned newspaper El Tiempo, which boasts the largest circulation in the country, and had spent a year in the late 1980s as a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

“He had a little more going on than the rest of us did,” said John S. MacCormack, a then-Nieman fellow and currently a reporter for the San Antonio Express-News. “He seemed older and more sophisticated...The rest of us were simple journalists working about.”

Eugene Robinson, who was also a Nieman fellow at the time, said that he was not surprised that Santos—a long-time friend and a “brilliant,” “extremely gracious” man—had been elected president of Colombia.

“One thing that any bureaucratic official faces is not having enough information—not having the right information,” said Robinson, now an associate editor at The Washington Post. “I think that as a journalist at heart...Juan Manuel has the instinct to really dig and find out what’s really going on.”

Santos—who has a degree in law and diplomacy and also received multiple degrees from the London School of Economics—helped execute the raids against guerrillas and drug traffickers, exemplifying his devotion to civil service that helped pave his rise to the presidency.

Santos now faces the problems of a bankrupt public health system and high unemployment as he moves into office.

“He has all the personal skills he needs plus a strong majority in Congress,” said Ricardo Hausmann, director of the Kennedy School’s Center for International Development, who met Santos in 1992. “Things look good for Colombia.”

—Staff writer Martin Kessler can be reached at martin.kessler@college.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Xi Yu can be reached at xyu@college.harvard.edu.