Second-round runoff looms in Guatemala vote

GUATEMALA CITY, Sep 10 (Reuters) Guatemala's presidential election was headed for a runoff between a right-wing former general and a center-left candidate after neither won enough votes to win outright, an exit poll showed.

Social democratic businessman Alvaro Colom was ahead of former Gen. Otto Perez Molina, who wants the army on the streets to clamp down on crime, but both were well short of 50 per cent support and a November second round between them loomed.

The online exit poll by El Periodico, one of the country's major newspapers, gave Colom 36 per cent of the vote, with Perez Molina trailing at 29 per cent.

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

In opinion polls before yesterday's vote, the two top contenders were running neck and neck after Perez Molina, a head of military intelligence during the 1960-96 civil war, gained on front-runner Colom in recent polls, Perez Molina had capitalized on the violence with his ''strong fist'' message against crime and corruption.

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.

In the mountain Mayan village of San Juan Sacatepequez, 20 miles (30 km) from the capital, indigenous women in traditional bright-colored dresses voted, children dangling on their backs in slings.

''There is a lot to do here. We need drinking water, roads, schools because previous governments have done little,'' said Frederico Uleu Tum, 40, a construction worker with seven children who supported Colom in his third bid for president.

COCAINE CROSSROADS 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 supporter of the death penalty, Perez Molina wants to use the army to patrol streets and also declare a state of emergency in areas overrun by drug traffickers and tattooed street gang members, blamed for a wave of grisly killings.

Colom, a soft-spoken former deputy economy minister, says a vote for Perez Molina would be a step backward into the dark days of Guatemala's civil war that killed close to 250,000 people.

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

Alejandro Giammattei, the ruling party candidate of President Oscar Berger's conservative GANA coalition, had been running third in polls.

Colom's National Unity for Hope party lost 18 supporters in attacks during the campaign, more than any other party.

Much of the bloodshed has come from powerful drug barons trying to force their candidates into office. Guatemalans also voted yesterday for a new Congress and for hundreds of local officials.

In the eastern part of the country, several suspected drug dealers are running for public office in a bid to gain control of key trafficking routes.

Other killings have been rivals shooting each other. None of the cases has been solved.

On Friday, more than 1,000 people attended the burial of two activists from San Raymundo, a town north of Guatemala City. They were shot and killed while distributing leaflets for Nobel Peace laureate Rigoberta Menchu's presidential bid.

Menchu, aiming to become Latin America's first indigenous female president, trailed by a wide margin in opinion polls.

REUTERS TB RN0635