Agencies, GUATEMALA CITY
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 US 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.
"It is a `no' to Guatemala's tragic history," Colom, 56, said when asked if the vote was a rejection of the country's military past.
Chain-smoker Colom, whose party symbol is a peace dove, says Guatemala will only cut crime by attacking poverty and removing corrupt police and judges.
"All this violence comes from the lack of employment, I just hope he creates more jobs," said doughnut seller Yolanda Morales, 26, as Colom gave his victory speech and a barrage of fireworks exploded above her.
Colom, on his third bid to win the presidency, had accused Perez Molina of seeking to take Guatemala back to the dark days of the Cold War when the military was brutal in its counter-insurgency tactics.
"We have had a strong hand for 50 years and it caused more than 250,000 victims in a dirty war," he said.
The army ruled Guatemala for decades until the mid-1980s. More than 200,000 people died in the 36-year war with leftist rebels, many of them Mayan peasants killed in army-led massacres.
The outgoing government of President Oscar Berger stabilized the economy but failed to reduce the wide gap between the rich and poor in Guatemala. Violent crime surged under the pro-business Berger's watch.
The election campaign was marred by violence, with more than 50 political party activists or candidates for Congress or local elections killed. Colom's party was hardest hit with almost 20 party members murdered since last year.
The president-elect has admitted that gangsters have infiltrated his National Unity for Hope party.
Some voters say Colom, a bookish former deputy economy minister, is not tough enough to fight cocaine cartels, corruption and infamous mara street gangs.
"We are going to be a constructive opposition," Perez Molina said. "We're willing to keep fighting the war against impunity, the war against corruption and against violence."
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema