BOGOTÁ, Colombia
The elections on Sunday, which gave allies of President Álvaro Uribe overwhelming control of the 268-member Congress, virtually assure him the political leverage to win re-election in May and to push forward important items on his agenda, from continuing the fight against Marxist guerrillas to approving a trade deal with Washington and enacting tough fiscal reforms.
"The big winner was President Uribe," said Juan Manuel Santos, whose pro-Uribe party, the U Party, did better than any other, winning 20 seats in the Senate.
With 94 percent of the votes counted on Monday, 61 percent of the Senate's 102 seats and 57 percent of the 166 seats in the lower house had gone to supporters of Mr. Uribe. Political analysts saw the results as a sign of Colombia's widespread support for Mr. Uribe's two-pronged strategy to pacify the country: aggressively fight the rebels while providing benefits to rightist paramilitary militias to prod them to disarm.
"This was support for his security policies," León Valencia, a political analyst in Bogotá, said of the vote. "People feel they're better off economically. They also see the president's ties to Washington and see them as a secure support."
The decisive results were a blow to the opposition Liberal Party, led by former President César Gaviria, who had warned that politicians controlled by paramilitary groups would surge in Sunday's election, endangering Colombia's democratic institutions. The Liberals won only 17 seats, a loss of 12, while another opposition group, the left-leaning Democratic Pole, won 11.
"We've found that paramilitarism and easy money played an important role in the election," Mr. Gaviria told reporters.
After pre-election warnings from Colombian lawmakers and the United Nations about the potential for the manipulation of elections by the paramilitaries, parties allied with Mr. Uribe expelled several members of Congress who had been accused of ties to the illegal anti-guerrilla militias. Two of those representatives, Rocío Arias and Eleonora Pineda, who were openly sympathetic to paramilitary commanders, still ran on Sunday but lost.
"I had everything it took to get to the Congress," Ms. Arias said, weeping as she spoke to La W radio on Monday morning.
But others who have been accused of having ties to paramilitaries or other underworld figures won. Among the more controversial victories was that of Héctor López, son of Enilce López, known as "The Cat," a power broker along the Caribbean coast who is under arrest on money-laundering and other charges.
While three-quarters of South America's governments are now run by left-leaning governments, Mr. Uribe has shown himself to be a stalwart of the right and an unflagging supporter of the Bush administration, which is not popular in Latin America. The United States has provided Mr. Uribe and his predecessor, Andrés Pastrana, about $5 billion in aid to fight rebels and reduce drug crops.
Opinion polls indicate that Mr. Uribe, a technocrat with a populist streak, is very likely to win a majority in the first round of voting in the May 28 presidential election, beating the leading opposition candidate, Horacio Serpa of the Liberal Party, to secure another four-year term.
