Profile: Alvaro Uribe Velez
Uribe's goal is to bring radical change to Colombia
Alvaro Uribe Velez, re-elected as Colombia's president, is a tough right-winger whose political life has been dominated by the desire to rid the country of the rebels who killed his father 20 years ago.
His landslide victory in the May 2006 election gives him the four more years he says he needs to tackle Colombia's armed groups and drug-traffickers.
Mr Uribe's hardline stance against the guerrillas who have waged a four decades-long war on the state won him plaudits.
He has forced the rebels out of Colombia's towns and cities and back into the countryside, thereby bringing peace to most Colombians' everyday lives.
His implacable stance against the rebels has kept his approval ratings above 70% for much of the time, and his re-election indicates that most Colombians want more of the same.
But critics say the peace process has stuttered backwards and forwards, while there have been protests against growing unemployment and his plans to raise taxes to plug the fiscal deficit.
US ally
The challenges facing Mr Uribe are those that have dominated life in Colombia for many decades: civil war, drug-trafficking and poverty.
He can count on a largely supportive Congress which analysts say will be crucial if he is to introduce the necessary measures to control spending.
Mr Uribe has said he will offer peace talks to rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), who still control large rural areas, but only if they first lay down their weapons. The guerrillas who continue to launch attacks, often on civilian populations, and carry out kidnappings, have so far refused.
The president also faces the challenge of completing the demobilisation of the estimated 30,000 paramilitary fighters.
Human rights groups say the government has been too lenient with the paramilitaries, many of whom received an amnesty despite committing abuses, including massacres, forced displacements and disappearances.
Mr Uribe is President Bush's staunchest ally in Latin America and Washington will be closely following the efforts to stamp out the huge illegal drugs trade, which has so far produced very mixed results.
Colombia is still the world's main producer of cocaine despite the government's attempts to eradicate drug crops, boosted by more than $3bn in aid from the US through Plan Colombia.
Second term
Since sweeping into office in 2002, President Uribe has both talked and acted tough.
Some 14 months into his first four-year term, he put his popularity on the line, calling for people to pass a referendum which he said would stave off economic disaster, bolster security and tackle endemic corruption.
It was a resounding failure, with voters backing only one of the measures, which barred politicians convicted of corruption from standing again.
But Mr Uribe went on to achieve a significant victory in December 2004. After months of heated debate Congress approved constitutional amendments allowing the president to stand for a second term. The amendments were then backed by the country's constitutional court.
However, Mr Uribe was accused of allowing the re-election issue to detract from the country's pressing social problems.
In June 2003, Mr Uribe unveiled a long-awaited policy to end the civil war, which has contained the left-wing guerrillas to some extent, though critics say it has opened the door to human rights abuses by security forces.
In April 2004, Plan Patriota - according to the UN, the largest military operation in modern Colombian history - was put into effect against the guerrilla rearguard in the south of the country.
Entire generations have grown up knowing nothing but violence
Mr Uribe's relations with the Farc go back to 1983, when they gunned down his father in the family ranch in Antioquia.
"I hold no bitterness," he said before being elected president for the first time. "I just want to serve Colombia."
But the rebels clearly are bitter and have tried to assassinate him several times. In April 2002, the guerrillas placed a bomb in a bus along the route Mr Uribe's campaign convoy was using in the Caribbean city of Barranquilla.
The bomb went off, but the armour of Mr Uribe's vehicle saved him from harm. Sixteen passers-by were not so lucky. Three were killed and 13 wounded in the blast.
The president travels with dozens of bodyguards and sniffer dogs.
Mr Uribe, born in July 1952, is a lawyer by training and was educated at Oxford and Harvard. He is married and has two sons.
