Candidate With Violent Past Leads in Polls for Today's Guatemalan Vote

                  By Serge F. Kovaleski
                  Washington Post Foreign Service

                  GUATEMALA CITY, Nov. 6—Not only has leading presidential
                  candidate Alfonso Portillo admitted to fatally shooting two men--in what he
                  says was self-defense--during a brawl in Mexico 17 years ago, but he has
                  come close to boasting about it in TV campaign commercials.

                  It is also no secret that the opposition party he represents, the Guatemalan
                  Republican Front (FRG), is headed by a onetime military coup leader,
                  Efrain Rios Montt, whom human rights groups have accused of genocide in
                  the early 1980s. An estimated 200,000 people lost their lives or
                  disappeared during a 36-year civil conflict.

                  But as Guatemalans prepare to vote Sunday in the country's first
                  presidential election since the conflict ended in 1996, polls make Portillo
                  the clear front-runner, riding a wave of popularity that reflects the
                  problems, frustrations and complexities the country is grappling with in the
                  aftermath of Central America's longest and deadliest civil conflict.

                  Portillo, 48, has waged a populist law-and-order campaign that has
                  attracted the support of many Guatemalans disenchanted with a
                  government they consider elite, corrupt and unable, if not unwilling, to
                  deliver the social and economic dividends they hoped peace would bring.

                  In a country where the ravages of war have given way to distressing levels
                  of more common violence--forcing the government to rush recruits of the
                  new civilian national police force into duty with minimal training--Portillo
                  has deftly used the Mexico shooting episode to portray himself as a steely
                  crusader against lawlessness.

                  He has thus tapped into Guatemalans' widespread concerns about
                  worsening public safety and a justice system that remains dysfunctional
                  because of corruption and incompetence. In one Portillo TV ad, which
                  proudly alludes to the Mexico incident, an announcer says, "A man who
                  can defend his own life can defend yours."

                  "There is so much chaos and crime that I think someone like Portillo is
                  needed to bring order and more safety for us so we do not have to sleep in
                  fear," said Carmen Sequen, 30, a Mayan bread vendor in the town of San
                  Juan Sacatepequez just outside this capital.

                  Manfredo Marroquin, a political analyst at Citizen Action, a Guatemala
                  City think tank, said, "Here, impunity is the law. Why should people judge
                  Portillo? Here, only fools go to jail."

                  In September, Portillo admitted that in 1982 he gunned down two men
                  during a confrontation that began at a street party in the Mexican state of
                  Guerrero. Portillo, who was a law professor there at the time, said he fled
                  because he feared he would be prosecuted unjustly. A judge closed the
                  case in 1995.

                  Portillo's candidacy has also been boosted by those who are nostalgic for
                  the era of Rios Montt's rule during which he conducted crackdowns on
                  common crime and corruption while giving short shrift to human rights. It
                  was also during that period that Rios Montt carried out his "scorched
                  earth" counterinsurgency campaign to eliminate support for leftist rebels in
                  the countryside, targeting indigenous people in particular.

                  Sunday's election comes at a time of disillusionment and concern over the
                  failure of the government of President Alvaro Arzu to implement key
                  reforms tied to the three-year-old peace accords that were aimed at
                  rebuilding Guatemala and addressing the social, political and economic
                  problems that fueled the war.

                  For instance, officials do not expect to meet next year's deadline for
                  revising the tax structure to bring collection totals to 12 percent of the
                  gross domestic product, from the current 9.2 percent, to help pay for
                  increased social spending. A new target date has been set for 2002.

                  A recent series of polls gave Portillo around 45 percent of the vote, about
                  12 percent ahead of Oscar Berger, a former mayor of Guatemala City and
                  the candidate for the ruling National Advancement Party (PAN). Portillo
                  put in a strong showing four years ago against Arzu, who is constitutionally
                  barred from seeking reelection.

                  The election is also the first in which former guerrillas are running as a
                  political party. But polls show that Alvaro Colom, an industrial engineer
                  who is the candidate for the leftist New Nation Alliance coalition, which
                  includes the rebels, is lagging a distant third. To avoid a Dec. 26 runoff,
                  one of the 11 presidential candidates must win an outright majority.

                  Rios Montt, 74, who came to power in a 1982 military coup, is running for
                  a congressional seat with the FRG and is likely to prevail. He would be in
                  position to become the chamber's next president.

                  The political debate about the future of Guatemala's peace has taken place
                  amid growing calls from war victims' groups to prosecute the many military
                  officers believed to have committed wartime crimes. Hugh Byrne, senior
                  associate for Guatemala at the Washington Office on Latin America, said
                  of the FRG, "Can a party so closely tied to major human rights violations in
                  the past seriously address the issue of impunity? It is almost impossible to
                  imagine."

                  While Portillo openly sympathized with Marxist rebels during the war, he
                  and Rios Montt have found common ground in a platform that criticizes the
                  government and the PAN as a club of oligarchs who heightened a "class
                  confrontation." He has also broadly pledged to promote peace and jobs
                  for Guatemalans while doing away with the monopolies and privileges of
                  the few who control the country's wealth.

                  In a recent interview, Portillo, who identifies himself as a social democrat,
                  shied away from advocating a leftist economic model. "I have rejected the
                  intervention of the state in the economy, the class struggle, the dictatorship
                  of the proletariat. That was an era of romanticism in my life," he said.

                  But much of Guatemala's future hinges on the evolution of the peace
                  process, which suffered a major setback last May when voters rejected a
                  complex package of constitutional reforms that would have, among other
                  things, officially recognized the legal and cultural rights of indigenous
                  people, who make up a majority of the population, and limited the army's
                  broad functions.
 

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