Guatemalan ex-general leads presidential race

GUATEMALA CITY, Sep 9 (Reuters) A hard-line former general who wants an army crackdown on rampant crime led Guatemala's presidential election, but he lacked enough support to avoid a Nov 4 runoff, results showed.

With about a quarter of ballots counted, Otto Perez Molina, the former head of army intelligence during part of Guatemala's civil war, was ahead with 26 per cent of the vote.

Center-leftist Alvaro Colom and ruling party candidate Alejandro Giammattei trailed with 22 per cent each.

Perez Molina promises to use the army to patrol streets and to declare a state of emergency in areas overrun by drug traffickers and tattooed street gang members, blamed for a wave of grisly killings.

The election campaign was marred by the worst political violence since the end of the civil war in 1996, with drug gangs and political rivals killing 50 people in the campaign.

But balloting was peaceful, with only minor scuffles reported as Guatemalans voted in jungles dotted with Mayan pyramids, in towns nestled under volcanoes and in the bustling capital.

The silver-haired Perez Molina, 56, vows a ''strong fist'' against crime and corruption. His Patriotic Party's emblem is a clenched fist.

He commanded troops in the El Quiche department in the 1980s, when Mayan Indian civilians were massacred in the country's civil war, but he has not been prosecuted for any atrocities.

Most opinion polls had put moderate leftist businessman Colom ahead of the ex-military man in the run up to voting.

In a sign of how split Guatemalans are, Daniel and Angelika Perez, who have been married for 50 years, said they were voting for different candidates.

''I am going to vote for Perez Molina because there is a lot of crime and he's a military man and is trained to give us security,'' said Angelika, 71, a retired teacher.

''Trained to kill people,'' interrupted Daniel, 73, a retired civil servant who supported Colom.

Guatemala, a crossroads for Colombian cocaine moving though Central America on its way to the United States, has one of the highest homicide rates in the world, with almost 6,000 people killed in the country of 13 million last year.

An inept justice system leaves most crimes unsolved.

A UN-backed report blamed the army for 85 per cent of the killings during the 1960-1996 civil war. Many of the victims were civilian Mayan peasants.

REUTERS JT AS1158