Paraguay Votes for a Civilian Leader : Election: Voters in South American country are marking end to military rule.

Paraguayans voted Sunday for a civilian president to end more than half a century of military government, but exit polls were too close to show immediately who the winner was.

The elections were the most democratic ever held in this landlocked nation of 4.4 million people, ruled by dictators for most of its 182-year history. Although some opposition politicians had predicted widespread electoral fraud by the ruling Colorado Party, initial reports indicated no pattern of irregularities.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, leading an international delegation of election observers, expressed approval of the voting process--one of many he has monitored. “I think it’s the best I’ve ever seen,” Carter said.

That endorsement was notable in the poor and isolated nation, where Gen. Alfredo Stroessner used rigged elections to monopolize the presidency from 1954 to 1989. Gen. Andres Rodriguez led a bloody coup against Stroessner in February, 1989, and won a lopsided presidential election victory three months later.

But Rodriguez, unlike Stroessner, has vowed to yield power to civilians. His Colorado Party ran a civilian candidate, engineer Juan Carlos Wasmosy, on Sunday.

While official returns were unavailable Sunday evening, exit polls indicated that Wasmosy and two opposition candidates were locked in a tight three-way race that was too close to call from exit poll results. The two other leading candidates in a field of nine were economist Domingo Laino of the Authentic Radical Liberal Party and businessman Guillermo Caballero of the new National Encounter Party.

One poll by a private television channel showed 35% of those interviewed voting for Laino, 34% for Wasmosy and 30% for Caballero. Caballero had led opinion surveys conducted in late April.

Another poll conducted by a newspaper, a radio network and another TV channel showed 31% for Wasmosy, 29% for Caballero and 28% for Laino. In this poll, 12% of the 51,000 voters interviewed refused to say how they voted.

Some analysts said those unreported votes could favor Wasmosy and the Colorado Party, which had asked its supporters not to cooperate in exit polls. Cavalcades of honking cars with red Colorado Party flags celebrated in the streets Sunday night.

According to independent analysts, all three candidates are centrists who advocate similar programs of government reform and economic development based on free-market principles. Wasmosy and Caballero both have become wealthy in private business; Laino is a career politician who was jailed and exiled by the Stroessner regime.

Voters also chose members of a 45-seat Senate, an 80-seat Chamber of Deputies, and 17 governors, all for five-year terms.

News media and poll watchers reported some irregularities in election procedures, such as voters’ names missing from registration lists and open campaigning at voting places. “The complaints are the usual ones,” and do not appear widespread, said Oscar Ayala, political editor of the newspaper ABC Color.

Carter said that Paraguayan and international observers systematically searched for irregularities. “I don’t see any way substantial fraud could take place without it being detected,” Carter said.

He expressed confidence that Rodriguez intends to turn power over to an elected civilian Aug. 15 as scheduled. “There is no doubt in my mind that President Rodriguez wants to go down in history as the person who brought democracy to this country.”

But other analysts say some dissident army generals, accustomed to governing with the Colorado Party and reaping the benefits of power and official corruption, might resist turning the presidency over to a member of the opposition.

Carter said the Paraguayan process is important for Latin America because any “subversion of the results” by the armed forces “would send a signal to other military leaders: ‘Maybe we can get away with it in our country.’ ”

The elections were generally peaceful, but gunmen shot up a television and radio station in Asuncion at about 2 a.m., exploding a grenade near the base of the broadcast antenna. No one was injured.

Turnout was estimated at more than 70% of the 1.7 million registered voters.