Preliminary results in Guatemala's presidential election pointed to the likelihood of a second round of voting and narrowed the field considerably early Monday from nearly two dozen contenders to the two candidates leading for spots in the Aug. 20 runoff.
With 97 per cent of the votes counted early Monday, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal reported that former first lady Sandra Torres for the conservative UNE party had captured 15.6 per cent of the vote and Bernardo Arevalo for the leftist Seed Movement had 11.8 per cent. In a more distant third, was Miguel Conde of the ruling VAMOS party with 7.8 per cent
Torres, watching the results from a downtown hotel conference room, told reporters that regardless of her opponent, she was ready for the runoff and "God willing, to be Guatemala's first woman president." She recognized the high number of invalid ballots and said it indicated the citizens' lack of confidence in the process.
With them in exile, the government then turned its sights to other critical voices, including the media. Earlier this month, a tribunal sentenced newspaper founder Jose Ruben Zamora to six years in prison for money laundering, in what press freedom groups decried as Giammattei silencing a prominent critic.
Other popular excluded candidates were leftist Thelma Cabrera from the Indigenous Mam people and Carlos Pineda, a conservative populist running an outsider campaign and leading in the polls until his candidacy was canceled a month before the vote. "This time the problem is to rescue the rule of law and reconstruct institutions, because if we don't do this, you won't be able to address all of the underlying problems," Gutierrez said.Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has gone to extremes to quash all opposition, first terrorizing with his security forces, persecuting enemies through targeted legislation, then jailing and exiling any critical voices.
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