Businessman wins Guatemala presidency

Conservative businessman Oscar Berger won Guatemala's second presidential elections since the end of a 36-year civil war, returning power to the traditional landed elite.

The Supreme Electoral Tribunal said yesterday that Mr Berger had 54 per cent support with results in from 94 per cent of polling stations and that he could not be overtaken.

Berger, a 57-year-old former Guatemala City mayor backed by the country's coffee and sugar farmers and banking power brokers, defeated Alvaro Colom, a textile factory owner and leftist politician, who trailed with 46 per cent of the vote.

In a late night victory speech, the businessman and landowner promised to tackle poverty and boost education and health services for Guatemala's 11 million people, more than half of them Mayan Indians, often living in dire poverty.

"Let there be no town with no access to drinking water, no access to a school, no access to a health centre," Mr Berger told hundreds of cheering supporters who set off fireworks to celebrate victory in Sunday's runoff election.

Mr Berger said beating crime was also a priority. There were about 30 election-related murders before the first round last month, but no serious trouble since then and voting was peaceful on Sunday.

The runoff was called after Mr Berger and Mr Colom led the field in the first round but failed to win an absolute majority.

Mr Berger ran on the ticket of the Gana coalition that had the backing of the elites, which lost power to the Guatemalan Republican Front, or FRG, in 1999 elections.

Former dictator Efrain Rios Montt, accused by human rights groups of atrocities at the height of the civil war two decades ago, ran for the FRG, but he was soundly beaten into third place in the first round.

His past, corruption allegations against the ruling party and a crime wave all hit support for the retired general.

Guatemala's vicious 36-year civil war ended in 1996 when leftist rebels signed peace accords and laid down their arms.

Mr Rios Montt is blamed for ordering massacres in hundreds of Indian villages as part of a counterinsurgency campaign during his 1982-83 rule. Most of the 200,000 killed in the civil war were Indians peasants.

Rights groups are developing a genocide case against Mr Rios Montt, who leads the ruling FRG and heads Congress, and he loses his parliamentary immunity at the end of his legislative term next month.

Mr Colom supported attempts to take Mr Rios Montt to trial but Mr Berger's stance on whether former military leaders should be prosecuted has been more ambiguous. His camp says it is an issue for the courts.