by the El Reportero news services
GUATEMALA – CENTER-LEFT VICTORY: The campaign was marred by violence, with more than 50 political party activists or candidates for Congress or the local elections killed.
Center-leftist Alvaro Colom won Guatemala’s presidential election on Sunday, denying power to a retired general who had sought to unleash the army to fight a violent crime wave.
Colom, a soft-spoken textile businessman, beat General Otto Perez Molina, the former head of army intelligence, by 6 percentage points with more than 97 percent of votes counted.
“I am the nation’s president elect,” Colom told his cheering supporters.
He will be sworn in on Jan. 14, becoming the first president from the left since the end of the country’s civil war in 1996, which deeply scarred this coffee-producing nation of jungles, volcanoes and Mayan ruins.
The Central American country, a U.S. free-trade partner, has been plagued by violent drug cartels and youth street gangs since the war and has one of the world’s highest murder rates.
But voters with bad memories of atrocities under military rule rejected Perez Molina’s plans to send more soldiers onto the streets, boost the use of capital punishment and emergency powers to fight crime. Perez Molina conceded defeat.
While the complete Guatemalan Cabinet will be announced December 1st, Alvaro Colom advanced some names on Monday, including that of the future foreign minister, Haroldo Rodas.
Rodas, current general secretary of the Central American Economic Integration system (SIECA), will formally announce his withdrawal from that post at the Ibero-American Summit in Chile on Wednesday.
Colom also invited legislator Alejandro Arevalo (Unionista Party) to lead the Finance Ministry and publicized plans to transform the Economy Ministry into the General Economic Development with involvement of his advisor Edgar Barquin.
