Guatemala:Centre-left politician Alvaro Colom won Guatemala's presidential election on Sunday, defeating a retired general who wanted to unleash the army to fight a violent crime wave.
Mr Colom, a soft-spoken textile businessman, beat Gen Otto Perez Molina, the former head of army intelligence, by 5.4 percentage points with more than 95 per cent of votes counted.
He will be sworn in on January 14th, 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 has been plagued by violent drug cartels and youth 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 Gen Perez Molina's plans to send more soldiers on to the streets, boost the use of capital punishment and emergency powers.
"It is a 'no' to Guatemala's tragic history," Mr Colom (56) said when asked if the vote was a rejection of the military past.
Mr Colom says Guatemala will only cut crime by attacking poverty and removing corrupt police and judges.
On his third bid to win the presidency, he accused Gen Perez Molina of seeking to return Guatemala to the cold war era when the military used brutal 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 pro-business president Oscar Berger stabilised the economy but failed to reduce the wide gap between the rich and poor in Guatemala as violent crime surged.
The election campaign was marred by violence, with more than 50 political party activists or candidates for Congress or local elections killed.
Mr Colom defines himself as a moderate social democrat, inspired by leftist presidents Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil and Michelle Bachelet in Chile. He says his government would not clash with the landowning and business elites.
He lost several relatives in the civil war, including his uncle Manuel Colom Argueta, a presidential candidate murdered by the military in 1979.