Questions and answers on Colombia's presidential election

Colombia's presidential election on Sunday is among the most compelling in Latin America in a long time, pitting a quirky former university president and big-city mayor who wears an Abraham Lincoln-like beard against the scion of a powerful establishment family who became one of the country's most successful defense ministers.

Antanas Mockus, who went from National University president to Bogota mayor, stresses clean, effective government, taxes on the rich and a strict adherence to the constitution. Juan Manuel Santos, whose family once ran the country's most influential newspaper, stresses vast experience in government and a continuation of current President Alvaro Uribe's tough anti-guerrilla policies. The two are expected to emerge from a field of six candidates in a first round of voting and will likely face each other in a second round, scheduled for June 20. The Washington Post's Juan Forero spoke with them on the campaign trail.

Antanas Mockus

Q: What do Colombians see in you?

A: People are thinking, "I myself am good, and here is a leader who is good, who appears a bit ingenuous at times, but I see myself in him." The people feel the need to believe in something good and in someone who wants to push a process that calls on people to be the best they can be.

Q: Colombians have been obsessed by security. Has that changed now?

A: People feel that we can think of a future that doesn't depend on [illegal armed groups] . It's the triumph of a normal agenda, of a society that feels free of those pressures that[illegal armed groups]had installed. It's like they robbed us of the past and the future, and now the door has been opened to the future.

Q: You've stressed respect for the law and human rights. Explain what you'd like to do as president on this front.

A: We have to ensure that constitutional justice replaces the justice handed out by the armed groups and situations in which people take justice into their own hands.

Q: That brings us to extrajudicial executions, in which soldiers killed peasants and dressed them up as rebels. Your thoughts on that scandal?

A: To dress a poor farmer as a guerrilla and kill him and put a gun next to him for an officer and three soldiers to get Mother's Day off, well, that's something that deteriorates the moral fiber of society.

Q: Are you from the left, the right, the center?