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Zelaya ahead in Honduras vote

Supporters of opposition Liberal Party candidate Manuel Zelaya celebrate after he won the Honduras presidential election in Tegucigalpa, on Sunday. PHOTO: AP

Opposition Liberal Party candidate Manuel Zelaya declared victory on Sunday after an exit poll showed him with 50.6 percent of the vote in Honduras' presidential race.

"Reason and love have triumphed over fear," Zelaya said. "Honduras needs fundamental change in its democratic system that can only be wrought by citizen power."

Zelaya defeated closest rival Porfirio Lobo, of the governing National Party, who garnered 44.3 percent of the vote, the survey found. The exit poll of 120,000 voters was conducted by General Engineering and published by local media.

Supporters of Zelaya broke into raucous celebration at his campaign headquarters with music and dancing.

Polls officially closed in most of Honduras at 4pm Sunday.

But Lobo did not immediately concede.

The Supreme Electoral Council had promised results for around 8pm Sunday but did not deliver on schedule. At 3pm it gave Zelaya an early lead of 50.79 percent to Lobo's 45.22, but with only 151 polling stations reporting out of a total 13,832.

"There were minor problems, such as a lack of indelible ink at some polling stations, but the rest went well," Organization of American States spokesman Carlos Flores told reporters.

Over 100 OAS observers were present.

Zelaya, who would replace President Ricardo Maduro, would take the helm of a small Central American country with 30 percent unemployment and 70 percent of the population of seven million living in poverty.

A civil engineer, rancher and former investment minister who has twice run successfully for the National Congress, Zelaya, 53, advocates instituting life imprisonment for gang members and a free-market economy.

He would inaugurate his four-year term on Jan. 27.

Honduras' 3.9 million eligible voters also chose a vice president, 128 legislators and an equal number of alternates as well as mayors of 298 municipalities.

Analysts said that the campaigns of Zelaya and Lobo focused mainly on how they would tackle gang violence.

Zelaya comes from a family of ranchers in Olancho and was president of the Association of Wood Industries, the director of the Honduran Private Enterprise Council and managed a bank as well as other businesses.

He served as minister of the Honduran Social Security Fund under president Carlos Flores, a difficult time for the ministry as Honduras was devastated by Hurricane Mitch in 1998.

It fell to the ministry to rebuild roads, buildings, aqueducts and other public works, involving local communities in setting their priorities.

Zelaya promised to revisit the idea and apply it to other tasks, such as crime, under his campaign slogan "citizen power."

However, his detractors in the National Party claimed he took the slogan from neighboring Nicaragua's Sandinista president Daniel Ortega.

The Social Forum for Foreign Debt and Social Development of Honduras lamented that "what should have been addressed during the campaign" wound up "being buried."

Gangs have become "the country's principal problem, over poverty, misery, corruption, a weak economy, immigration, lack of jobs," the Forum said in a statement.

"Most of the debate had to do with the gangs, a serious problem certainly, but not in the way it was discussed. The gangs are a long-term result -- not the cause -- of the nation's crisis," said the Forum, a think tank of economists.

First created by immigrants in Los Angeles, California, the gangs, or maras were organized in Honduras and El Salvador by gangsters the US deported to their home countries, and their numbers grew, swelling Central America's prisons.

Some 100,000 gangsters currently roam Honduras, according to the government, while the forum says there are only 45,000.

"We definitely are going to launch a real program to eradicate the scourge of crime," Zelaya pledged. "The scourge of gangs, of street crime and 'upscale' gangsters who go around in armored cars or luxury jets."
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