From colorful mayor to presidente?

The slender Mockus, the only son of Lithuanian immigrants, temporarily banned the sale of alcohol after 1 a.m. in clubs and bars and instituted a community-police program that has spearheaded the creation of over 9,000 neighborhood-watch groups.

"The thinking was, 'What good does it do if I provide education to children if they can be killed? What good does it do if the people I feed are being murdered? How do you justify any type of investment if the people you represent are being killed?'" says Hugo Acero, Bogotá's undersecretary of public safety under both Mockus and Enrique Penalosa, who was mayor between Mockus's terms, and an adviser to the commander of Colombia's National Police.

By employing these techniques and others, Mockus and Mr. Penalosa cut the number of murders in half, reduced the number of street robberies by 52 percent, bank robberies by 93 percent, and assaults by 9 percent, according to Bogotá's metropolitan police. Penalosa continued many of Mockus's programs, and also renovated 10.76 million square feet of public space, built computerized libraries in low-income neighborhoods, constructed 120 miles of bike paths, and reclaimed city sidewalks that had long been used as parking lots.

The Mockus-Penalosa model has been so successful that the UNDP is helping Quito, Ecuador, adopt a public-safety program that focuses on crime prevention through citizen participation, one of the tenets of Mockus's plan for Bogotá. The agency is also drawing on the Bogotá experience to help the governments of El Salvador and northern Brazil combat criminality.

"Our project for Quito is not as ambitious as the one undertaken in Bogotá, but it is based in the model of civic participation that we believe fueled the change in Bogotá," Luca Renda of UNDP in Ecuador said in a phone interview. "The best thing is that we didn't have to look far for inspiration. We just had to look to a neighboring country to find the model of public-safety program that we want to implement here."

USAID, for its part, is investing $35 million to take a Mockus-inspired model to other parts of Colombia.

While to many, Mockus is Bogota's force of change, some resent him for taking credit for accomplishments that would not have happened without Penalosa, who is also likely to go after Uribe's seat. Some voters say that Mockus is more style than substance and has no concrete plan to deal with Colombia's 40-year internal conflict between the government and militant groups fueled by drug money. That perception may be one of the biggest hurdles he will have to overcome if he wants to win next year's election.

Meanwhile, Mockus says Bogotá's new leadership must be vigilant. In the first quarter of this year, homicides rose 9.5 percent compared with the same period last year. "We should feel proud of the much we have accomplished," he says, "but this feeling must be followed by a great understanding of our fragility."

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