Ex-President Garcia leads Peru runoff election

LIMA, Peru, June 5 (Reuters) Former President Alan Garcia led a runoff election, staging a political comeback after his 1980s government ended in economic ruin, rebel violence and accusations of rights abuses, exit polls and unofficial counts showed.

Garcia, who portrays himself as a left-of-center democrat, won 52.7 percent of votes, according to an unofficial count by pollster Apoyo that sampled 91 percent of ballots yesterday.

Nationalist ex-army commander Ollanta Humala, who spooked many middle-class Peruvians and won support from Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez with his calls for a revolution against the rich, had 47.3 percent of votes.

The Apoyo results, which the pollster says are 99 percent reliable, echoed other exit polls as well as another unofficial count by Datum pollster.

''Garcia is essentially Peru's president-elect,'' Apoyo Director Alfredo Torres told America Television.

A Garcia victory would undermine efforts by Chavez to take advantage of a populist tide in Latin America to challenge U.S.

influence. Chavez and Garcia insulted each other before the vote after the Venezuelan leader publicly supported Humala.

Many Peruvians apparently voted for Garcia -- dubbed ''Latin America's Kennedy'' when he was first elected to the presidency at the age of 35 -- because he was seen as the lesser of two evils and less hostile to business.

''It's a sad day. Neither of them is a good candidate,'' said 45-year-old psychologist Ida Blanc after she cast her vote for Garcia in an upper-middle-class neighborhood of Lima.

Hundreds of people in northern Peru, the bastion of Garcia's APRA party, burst into applause and waved white handkerchiefs on hearing the results of the exit polls, while supporters in Lima shouted ''We've won!'' and waved flags.

Humala's supporters said it was too early to admit defeat as rival voters threw water and rubbish at each other in the southern Andean city of Arequipa.

''We have to wait because exit polls don't show the hidden vote,'' Humala's spokesman Carlos Tapia told reporters.

Election officials say they will have more than half of votes counted by end of Sunday.

PERUVIANS STILL SUSPICIOUS Garcia says he has learned from his mistakes who will better manage Peru's economy after five years of unprecedented growth. But Peruvians who were left destitute by his first term are still very suspicious of the 57-year-old lawyer.

''Peru is being tremendously generous to Garcia, something that he doesn't really deserve ... But this is not a blank check, he has to work hard, to do something better this time,'' said Augusto Alvarez, analyst and editor of daily Peru.21.

Garcia still preaches state regulation and his victory would be another sign of a backlash against free-market reforms in Latin America, which have done little to improve the living conditions of millions of voters.

Humala, who has charged that the election could be tainted by fraud, declared ''everything must be transparent'' after he voted with his wife in Surco, a middle-class district of Lima.

Humala's plans to put the billion economy in state hands seem too risky to many people who have lived through 30 years of turbulent governments ranging from military dictatorships to President Alberto Fujimori's corrupt populist government from 1990 to 2000.

Humala's campaign has also been hurt by the vocal support he has received from Chavez, who is generally unpopular in Peru, a country that has good relations with the United States and has a significant migrant population there.

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