Guatemalans will choose between top two presidential hopefuls

     Ignoring cold and rain on November 7, Guatemalans voted in their first peacetime general election in four decades, yet they failed to give an absolute majority to the frontrunner in the presidential race, forcing the two top candidates into a December 26 runoff.
     Noting that “all the political factions in the country have participated,” President Alvaro Arzu observed on election day that such ideological diversity “was impossible to conceive just five years ago” when the country was still at war. Indeed, the elections seemed more significant than the outcome. 
     “We can say that for the first time there is total freedom to express our will,” claimed Jorge Ismael Soto, formerly known as guerrilla commander Pablo Monsanto. “All is calm,” echoed Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchu, who spent most of her life in exile. “There is great joy.”
     According to initial tallies, Alfonso Portillo, a former leftist who ran as the presidential candidate of a rightist party formed by human rights violators, garnered 48 percent of the vote, just shy of the majority he needed for a first-round victory. The ruling party's Oscar Berger, the current mayor of Guatemala City, finished a distant second with 31 percent. A leftist coalition formed by former guerrillas finished third with 12 percent, twice the percentage of voters that campaign polls had shown they would win.
     Eleven candidates ran in the presidential race. Also at stake were 113 Congressional seats, 330 mayors jobs and city councils, and 20 representatives to the Parlamento Centro Americano (PARLACEN).
     Rising steadily in recent polls, Portillo, candidate of the Frente Republicano Guatemalteco (FRG), had hoped for a first round victory. His campaign gained ground after Berger's Partido de Avanzada Nacional (PAN) revealed that Portillo had killed two men in a 1982 brawl in Mexico. Portillo turned the revelation to his advantage, tapping widespread concerns about worsening public safety and an incompetent and corrupt justice system, portraying himself as a steely crusader against lawlessness. One Portillo television ad alluded to the Mexico incident and ended with an announcer declaring, “A man who can defend his own life can defend yours.”
     The message seemed to resonate with many Guatemalans who view their government as corrupt and unable to deliver the prosperity and citizen security they had hoped would come with peace. Although Berger earned a respectable reputation as the capital city's mayor, the PAN candidate couldn't shake his association with the Arzu administration, which came to be widely regarded as elitist and corrupt. 
     The best the colorless Berger could muster was to try and scare people away from supporting Portillo. “Let's reject the violence, the blood and the terror the opposition party stands for,” Berger told supporters a week before the vote. He called Portillo a “violent man who has never worked and who is surrounded by the people responsible for the war and violence in the past.”
     Berger was referring FRG's founder, retired General Efrain Rios Montt, and several other FRG candidates who are linked to massive human rights violations during the 36-year civil war that ended in 1996.
     Portillo, once a guerrilla supporter, lived in exile in Mexico during the worst of the repression, including the 17 months that Rios Montt controlled the government in 1982 and 1983. The populist and the general found common ground in a campaign that criticized the PAN as a club of oligarchs pushing “class confrontation” with government policies. Portillo pledged to do away with monopolies and privileges, while promoting peace and jobs for ordinary citizens. His law-and-order promises included a vow to identify and punish the killers of assassinated Catholic Bishop Juan Gerardi.
     In the weeks ahead, both will court Alvaro Colom, an industrial engineer and presidential candidate for the leftist Alianza Nueva Nacion (ANN). Colom's 12 percent of the vote might provide the winning edge to either candidate. 
     Colom had a hard time getting attention in a race where ideological positions seemed confused. The former guerrillas pushed privatization and a decentralized government along with improved exports, albeit with subsidies for the country's poor majority. Portillo portrayed himself the champion of human rights and promised to tax the rich. Berger borrowed the leftist alliance's slogan “a new nation.”
     Whichever candidate wins the runoff and takes office on January 14, the honeymoon will be short. The next president will have to quickly define a new currency policy, strengthen a flimsy financial system and carry out an ambitious tax reform to get Guatemala's ailing economy back on track. The 1996 peace accords called for the government to raise tax revenue to 12 percent of GDP by 2000 to pay for health, education and housing programs for the poor. Arzu, timid when it came to pushing his wealthy friends to pay higher taxes, only got the number up to 9.2 percent, and the target date has been reset to 2002.
     Despite 5.1 percent economic growth last year, an estimated 80 percent of the country's 11 million people live below the poverty line. The situation is exacerbated by annual inflation of about 7 percent and sagging coffee and sugar prices worldwide that have hurt export revenues. More than one-third of the population lives on income of less than $1 a day, according to a new study by the government's Instituto Nacional de Estadística. The survey found that 51 percent of rural residents lack water in their homes, that 51 percent of rural women and 34 percent of rural men are illiterate, and only 26 percent of rural children attend school. Most rural residents are indigenous. 
     The peace accords called for the implementation of sweeping constitutional and legal reforms that would have addressed these root causes of the war, yet a May referendum on the reforms was soundly defeated by the small percentage of voters who turned out. Both Portillo and Berger supported the reforms, and whichever is elected president will face the daunting task of trying to figure out how to make real peace in a country where the majority find themselves more marginalized every day.