After decades of civil war, a tranquil vote

 BY GLENN GARVIN

 GUATEMALA CITY -- Without much fanfare or even visible enthusiasm, hundreds
 of thousands of Guatemalans went to the polls Sunday to vote in the country's
 first peacetime elections in more than 40 years.

 ``You see how it is,'' one poll worker said, gesturing at a voting center where
 street vendors seemed to outnumber voters. ``It's calm, but also very slow -- very
 few people.''

 The voters who did show up seemed unconvinced that their ballots would make a
 great deal of difference. ``Treaty or no, we haven't really seen peace around here,''
 23-year-old factory worker Elena Tzuban said after voting on the east side of
 Guatemala City. ``And I don't think we'll see it after the election either.''

 Polls closed at 7 p.m. EST, but by 11 p.m. no results had been announced. In
 the meantime, both front-running opposition candidate Alfonso Portillo and his
 main rival, Guatemala City Mayor Oscar Berger, predicted victory.

 Pre-election surveys showed Portillo with a lead of 10 to 16 percentage points,
 and close to winning without a runoff.

 In addition to the presidency, 113 congressional seats and hundreds of local
 offices were also at stake Sunday. But to many Guatemalans, the election itself
 was more significant than the outcome. It was the first to be held since a bloody
 36-year civil war ended in 1996.

 ALL VIEWS PRESENT

 ``This is the first time since the peace treaty was signed that all the political
 factions in the country have participated,'' President Alvaro Arzu said after casting
 his ballot Sunday. ``All the ideological extremes are represented. This is
 something that was impossible to conceive just five years ago.''

 Former Marxist guerrillas, many of them voting for the first time, agreed. ``There is
 no military presence,'' said Jorge Ismael Soto, formerly known as guerrilla
 commander Pablo Monsanto. ``There is no pressure; all is calm. We can say that
 for the first time there is total freedom to express our will.''

 ``All is calm,'' said Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu, a guerrilla
 sympathizer who spent most of her life in exile. ``There is great joy.''

 The former guerrillas not only voted but had a candidate on the ballot: Alvaro
 Colom, an industrial engineer, running under the banner of the leftist New Nation
 Alliance coalition. But his presence has been more historic than relevant: Polls
 have shown Colom running a distant third, with only about 6 percent of the vote.

 The real battle has been between the populist Portillo, a former law professor who
 boasted in campaign ads that he killed two faculty colleagues during a 1982 brawl
 in a bar, and the colorless Berger, whose only shooting has been directed at his
 own campaign's feet.

 DISMISSED AS `PUPPET'

 Portillo lashed out repeatedly at Berger, calling him a puppet of Guatemala's elite.
 Berger retorted that Portillo is reviving the sort of class warfare that led to a civil
 war that killed more than 100,000 people.

 Portillo turned the disclosure of his 1982 killings in Mexico into an asset, arguing
 that he's the right man to clean up Guatemala's festering crime problem. The
 killings resulted in murder charges, which were eventually dropped when the
 statute of limitations ran out; he says he fired in self-defense.

 Berger, by contrast, made blunder after blunder in the campaign. In one of the
 worst, he stood by at a rally, smiling as his vice presidential running mate
 dismissed criticism over the way the government handled the privatization of the
 national phone company with the observation that most Guatemalans are too poor
 to have phones anyway, so what difference did it make?

 Waiting in line to vote on the west side of Guatemala City, 20-year-old secretary
 Yadila Paniagua said Portillo can't be trusted. She said his Guatemalan
 Republican Front party, a peculiar alliance of former leftists and ex-military men,
 was a sham.

 ``Portillo's just a front,'' she said. ``The ones who will really rule are standing
 behind the screen.''