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Elections are today.
For weeks, this village of 3,000 on a verdant mountainside in central Colombia has been gripped by election fever, with candidates scouring for voters and colorful banners hanging across narrow streets. In a scene being repeated across Colombia in preparation for nationwide municipal elections on Sunday, noisy political rallies are staged in the village plaza, topped off with free barbecued beef and weepy vallenato music. Behind the festive scenes, Marxist guerrillas in this and hundreds of other communities have spent months quietly manipulating the electoral process, compromising Colombia's fragile democracy and strengthening the position of the country's largest rebel movement. Political analysts and groups monitoring the campaigns say the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, who have waged a 36-year fight for control of the nation, have made their presence felt in more than half the nation's 1,089 municipalities giving tacit approval to candidates, forcing some to withdraw and, in a few cases, assassinating others. Paramilitary gunmen have struck back, killing candidates believed to be rebel sympathizers.