Guatemala Election Calm After Violent Campaign

Voting was peaceful Sunday as Guatemalans went to the polls to elect a president after a campaign filled with violence.

Enough returns to indicate who might replace President Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo were not expected until today. However, opinion polls Sunday indicated that conservative newspaper owner Jorge Carpio Nicolle of the National Centrist Union could be in a Jan. 6 runoff vote against either former Guatemala City Mayor Alvaro Arzu, a right-wing businessman of the National Advancement Party, or Jorge Serrano Elias of the Solidarity Action Movement, an ally of the military.

A runoff is required if no candidate gets more than half the vote. There are 3.3 million registered voters.

“My impression is that this is a very open, honest clean election. I’m impressed,” said U.S. Ambassador Thomas F. Stroop. “I hope the vote total is sufficiently big so it cannot be attacked as being non-representative.”

Arturo Herbruger Asturias, president of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, said the turnout was expected to be no higher than 60%.

The election was only the second for the Guatemalans since the government returned from military to civilian rule in 1985.

The election season brought an outbreak of assassinations, disappearances and threats.

Since July, when serious campaigning began, at least nine candidates or party leaders, three journalists and two political activists have been murdered. Carpio’s National Centrist Union said Sunday that one of its officials in El Quiche was killed Saturday.

In Guatemala City, scores of voters lined up outside polling stations to cast ballots, while police and armed soldiers in fatigues patrolled streets. Although some streets were strewn with nails to snarl traffic, no major incidents were reported.

City officials ordered a special subsidy so people could ride buses free of charge. Stores and other businesses remained closed, and alcohol sales were banned.

The winner inherits a 30-year-old civil war, a bankrupt government, 60% inflation and an epidemic of street crime and human rights abuse.

He will also have to contend with a nation where more than 70% of the people live in dire poverty and where the army and elite private sector are so powerful that coup rumors are an almost daily affair.

Guatemalans were also electing a vice president, 116 members of a new Congress, 20 delegates to a new Central American Parliament and 300 mayors.

Former dictator Gen. Efrain Rios Montt had initially emerged as the front-runner with a harsh law-and-order message.

When he was ruled ineligible under a constitutional provision that bars former dictators from running for office, Rios Montt asked supporters to deface their ballots in protest.

Serrano, 45, a born-again Christian who served in Rios Montt’s government, became a factor in the race when he picked up some of the general’s support.

Arzu, 44, is from a wealthy Guatemalan family and was backed by some of the most conservative elements of the private sector. He has said he would run this nation of 9 million like a business enterprise.

Carpio, 58, who was routed in a 1985 runoff with Cerezo, is backed by a diverse coalition that ranges from the arch-right to disaffected socialists.