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BBC MUNDO RADIO
Nina Negron Election-day violence marred Colombia's presidential run-off vote on Sunday, after attacks left at least seven police officers and three soldiers dead.
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"We have had an unfortunate event -- an attack with explosives on a police patrol that has left seven police dead," said Margarita Silva, a top official from Colombia's Norte de Santander state, which borders Venezuela.
Silva said eight other police were unaccounted for following the attack, which occurred at around 11:00 am (1600 GMT) as a uniformed police patrol traveled from the town of Tibu toward the Venezuelan border.
Interior Minister Fabio Valencia reported that three soldiers had been killed in separate incidents in the states of Meta and Antioquia.
The vote in violence-torn Colombia comes with the country keen to maintain political continuity in the face of an ongoing war with Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels.
The second-round balloting, which was set to wrap up at 4 pm (2100 GMT) pits a former defense minister, Juan Manuel Santos, 58, against his rival Antanas Mockus, a former Bogota mayor running on a Green Party ticket.
Santos, the big winner in the first round of voting on May 30 with 46.6 percent against 21.5 percent for Mockus, has promised "to keep in place the legacy of Uribe, the best president Colombia has had."
Some 350,000 police and military officers have been dispatched across the country to maintain order on election day, in a bid to ward off attacks by leftist militants.
The insurgents have been hard hit in recent years by operations organized by Uribe and by Santos, who stepped down from his defense post last year to campaign for the presidency.
Praised for turning around the ultra-violent capital Bogota as mayor, Mockus announced earlier this year that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease but said it wouldn't affect his work and should not alter his bid.
Political analysts, though, held out little expectation that the 58-year-old son of Lithuanian immigrants and former mathematics professor had managed to turn around his faltering campaign.
"If (Mockus) could not get people to turn out for the first round, which was a relatively tight race, he most likely will do even less so in the second round," National University's Alfredo Rangel told AFP.
The outgoing Uribe, 57, leaves office with a 70 percent approval rating, having served two consecutive mandates from 2002.
He remains hugely popular with Colombians, largely because of tough security policies to aggressively take on the leftist insurgencies that have destabilized the country for more than four decades.
The courts rejected Uribe's bid to seek a third straight term, which has helped rally his supporters around Santos, who served as his defense minister and oversaw successful military campaigns against the leftist FARC rebels.
Santos, a familiar political insider whose lengthy government resume includes stints as commerce and treasury minister, has vowed to pursue the policies of the highly popular outgoing president.
Colombians also associate Santos with several successful military campaigns, such as the attack against a FARC encampment in Ecuador in March 2008 that killed the group's number two Raul Reyes and Operation Jaque that rescued 15 high-profile hostages, including Ingrid Betancourt, in July 2008.
In a country where 46 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, Santos has made commitments to reduce the endemic problems of unemployment and under-employment, including a promise to create 2.5 million jobs in four years.
Authorities have also sought to maintain security Sunday by closing all its border crossings with Brazil, Ecuador, Panama, Peru and Venezuela when the country votes.
Another election-related security measure went into effect on Friday, with the banning of sales of all alcoholic beverages until after the polls close.
