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Margaret Thatcher, certainly. Also Tony Blair and current British prime minister David Cameron. But who else should a soon-to-be Latin American president call on while in London? Why grammy award winner, Shakira, in town for a concert, of course.

Juan Manuel Santos – president-elect of Colombia but a man not known for his common touch – is on a working holiday in Europe before taking up his post in August. It’s not just about glad-handing, though. The 58-year old former defence and finance minister is on an earnest mission to project Colombia’s image abroad.

“We want to get out of this 40 year tunnel that we’ve been condemned to, the stigma, which was a reality, of being the most violent country, where guerrillas were dominating the democracy,” he says. “But this is past history.”

Not all would agree: 13 police and soldiers, for example, were killed on election day last month. But violence has dropped dramatically, and kidnappings are down by 88 per cent since his predecessor, Álvaro Uribe, first took office in 2002. That, says the businesslike Santos, allows him to focus instead on what he insists is his number one priority: economic growth (he has targeted a heady 6 per cent a year) and poverty reduction.

“We have the second highest unemployment rate in Latin America, poverty of roughly 45 per cent, extreme poverty of around 17 per cent. Those numbers are too high.”

To that end a free trade agreement is on track, and soon to be approved, with Europe; ditto, he hopes eventually, with the US. And beyond that? “Colombia wants to join the OECD, like Chile and Mexico. These are the big boys.”

If that all sounds implausible, it is a marker of how much Colombia has changed since 2002 that Uribe’s inauguration was marked by rebel mortar fire on downtown Bogotá. In 2010, by contrast, Santos says he will begin his with a remote mountaintop ceremony conducted by Kogi Indian priests.

And here’s a further illustration of how Santos hopes to differentiate his presidency from Uribe’s. When the presidential entourage moves on to the capital later in the day, he expects to see Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa at the ceremony (Santos says he has already accepted), and even Venezuela’s fiery Hugo Chávez, with whom Santos has clashed with in the past because of what Bogotá sees as Caracas’ indulgence, or indeed succour, offered to Colombia’s leftist Farc guerrillas.

That would be a meeting to see. Expect cool handshakes, at best, rather than warm embraces.

Photo courtesy of the Colombian Embassy in London

Related reading:
Colombia’s Santos offers change of tone, FT