Defying international rights monitors, Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos on Wednesday dismissed Bogota's elected mayor, Gustavo Petro.

Petro claims that the conservative Santos is targeting him, a leftist former guerrilla, for political reasons.

Colombian voters showed lukewarm support for peace talks with guerrillas Sunday by giving President Juan Manuel Santos a majority in Congress but also electing his conservative rival, ex-president Alvaro Uribe, to the senate.

Santos, who took office in 2010 after serving as the popular Uribe's defense minister, is engaged in talks with Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels aimed at ending their half-century insurgency.

Colombia holds legislative elections Sunday that are seen as a referendum on peace talks with FARC leftist guerrillas and a trial run for a presidential vote in May.

Since they opened in late 2012 in Cuba, the talks that President Jose Manuel Santos has held with the Marxist rebels have dominated political life in Colombia.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos submitted his official bid for re-election Tuesday, with a promise to complete the work he's begun in negotiations with leftist rebels.

Accompanied by his family and supporters from his center-right majority, Santos, 62, registered with the election authority in Bogota for the May 25 polls.

Four people were killed and 10 injured Wednesday by a strong blast that tore through a supermarket in western Colombia, local authorities said.

"The daughter of the store's owner was among the dead, along with three employees," said General Rodolfo Palomino, head of the national police.

A television news cameraman was shot to death in an area of Colombia where he had received death threats several months earlier, a press foundation said Friday.

The Colombia Free Press Foundation said 21-year-old Yonni Steven Caicedo was murdered Wednesday in the Comuna 12 section of the western city of Buenaventura.

Supporters and opponents of Venezuela's leftist government staged rival rallies Saturday in Caracas that took place amid protests and spiraling discontent at the country's stubborn inflation and basic goods shortages.

About 3,000 opponents dressed in white and carrying red, blue and yellow Venezuelan flags gathered in an affluent area of the capital, fanning out into nearby streets, just days after demonstrations left three people dead.

A candidate running for Colombia's congress next month was found after being missing for more than a day and says he was abducted, police said Friday.

Jose Gregorio Botello is in good shape, Humberto Guatibonza, director of the police anti-kidnapping unit, told reporters. He said police received a tipoff that led them to Botello.

Colombia's FARC guerrilla movement said Friday it would not observe a ceasefire during legislative elections next month unless the government also agreed to a truce.

President Juan Manuel Santos has repeatedly rejected rebel calls for a bilateral ceasefire, arguing that the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) would use it to regroup.

The death toll from a fire in an overcrowded prison in the Colombian city of Barranquilla rose to 16 Thursday, more than a week after the blaze, authorities said.

Inmates of Barranquilla's Modelo prison started the fire January 27, setting alight mattresses during a fight between rival gangs.