GUATEMALA PRESIDENTIAL CONTEST WILL GO TO RUNOFF.

Guatemala emerged from a murder-riven campaign season to hold relatively peaceful and orderly unsurprising general elections. At the ticket-tops, Alvaro Colom was the victorious presidential contender, followed, slightly more distantly than the polls had predicted, by Otto Perez Molina. The center-left Colom beat right-winger Perez 28% to 23%. Because he failed to gain more than 50% of the vote in the crowded, 14-horse race, Colom will face Perez in a Nov. 4 runoff.

Foreign election observers were, just days before the election, ruefully predicting a bloody election-day following four months of campaigning that saw more than 50 candidates, their relatives, and activists killed (see NotiCen, 2007-08-30).

A much-relieved Wolfgang Kreissl Dorfler, head of the European Union (EU) monitoring mission, told the world on shortwave radio, "In comparison with four years ago, the situation is really quiet. What we have seen is a very well-organized election at the polling stations, especially because the participation of young women and the young people is very high."

The election was to some extent a referendum on the country's endemic violence. The international media rarely miss a chance to remind that, with 6,000 murders in the last year, this country of 13 million or so has one of the highest murder rates in the world. Colom and Perez represent polar opposite approaches to the problem. Perez Molina is a former army general, running under the banner of the rightist Partido Partriotica (PP). His campaign has centered on delivering the country from crime with a return to the death penalty and a 50% increase in the size of the police force.

Colom of the Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE), by contrast, has promised an overhaul of the notoriously corrupt security forces and dysfunctional judicial system.

Other races

These tight results were not seen at other levels in the comprehensive elections. For mayor of the capital, Guatemala City, for instance, Alvaro …