Ex-general to face leftist in Guatemala runoff

GUATEMALA CITY, Sep 11 (Reuters) A former general who wants to use troops to fight crime stands a good chance of taking power in Guatemala after forcing a runoff with a leftist in a first round of voting for president.

Ex-Gen. Otto Perez Molina, whose recent rise has brought back memories of decades of military rule in the Central American country, came in second in Sunday's vote, just 4 percentage points behind center-left candidate Alvaro Colom.

The two men will face off in a second round of voting Nov.

4, during which Perez Molina could win the support of voters who backed other conservative candidates in the first round.

''We are totally sure we will overcome these two or three points and add to them,'' Perez Molina, whose Patriotic Party's logo is a clenched fist, said yesterday.

Guatemala, a crossroads for Colombian cocaine on its way from South America to the United States, has one of the highest homicide rates in the world. Almost 6,000 people were killed in the country of 13 million last year.

Members of street gangs like the infamous ''Mara Salvatrucha'' terrorize poor neighborhoods, beheading rivals, raping women and extorting small shopkeepers and bus drivers.

''I'd like someone to get the gang members, take them to jail and leave them there,'' said street vendor Jose Martinez, 55.

Perez Molina wants the power to declare states of emergency backed by the army in crime-hit areas and seeks more use of the death penalty for serious crimes. Guatemala has capital punishment on the statute books but very rarely practices it.

ARMY'S DARK PAST Colom, a soft-spoken economist, promises to fight poverty if elected but his National Unity for Hope party has struggled to rid its ranks of drug gangs and organized crime groups.

He sought allies yesterday from smaller parties for the second round fight.

''This means being tolerant and opening the doors to be able to create a national project,'' he said.

After a US-backed coup overthrew the democratically elected government of President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, the military ruled Guatemala almost without interruption until 1986.

Soldiers were responsible for most of the 250,000 deaths in a 30-year civil that ended in 1996.

Perez Molina helped broker a peace deal with leftist rebels but many rural Mayans hold his army past against him.

''He is a soldier and soldiers are brutal; they did a lot here,'' said Ana Bor, a 40-year-old indigenous woman in the majority Mayan town of San Juan Sacatepequez, near the capital.

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

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

A congressman kicked out of Colom's party for alleged links to drug trafficking won a position as mayor in the eastern department of Jutiapa in Sunday's elections.

Balloting was mostly peaceful, although one person was shot dead in the northern town of Tucuru.

Nobel peace laureate Rigoberta Menchu, a defender of Mayan rights, took sixth place in the presidential election with 3 per cent of the vote. She had wrapped up her electoral campaign early, complaining of a lack of funds.

Ex-dictator Gen. Efrain Rios Montt won a seat in Congress, protecting him from prosecution in a Spanish court on genocide charges for atrocities committed during his brief rule in the 1980s.

REUTERS TB RN0430