Colombia's Uribe gets good marks

BOGOTA, Aug. 7 (UPI) -- Latin America experts say outgoing Colombian President Alvaro Uribe did a good job stabilizing the country with a lot of help from the United States.

Uribe's eight-year administration formally ended Saturday with the inauguration of his former defense minister, Juan Manuel Santos, in Bogota.

Santos was elected in a landslide victory in June and will likely continue Uribe's policies, which include an emphasis on security that has both slashed violent crime and tripled foreign investment in mining, energy and tourism.

"We were overwhelmed with our problems when he took office," Mauricio Cardenas, a Colombian economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington, told the Los Angeles Times. "Now we've regained self-esteem and, fundamentally, Colombia has become more of a nation."

The Times said Uribe's policies were made easier by his natural charisma and billions of dollars in U.S. aid, which was used in part to counter organized crime and the stubborn FARC guerrilla movement. At the same time, however, the security crackdown led to complaints of human-rights abuses and tensions with neighboring Venezuela.

Other analysts told the newspaper that Santos' top priorities should be restoring public confidence in the government's respect for human rights and taking concrete steps to end the sky-high poverty rate in Colombia.