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GUATEMALAN ELECTIONS NEAR, COLOM INCREASES A SHAKY LEAD.

Article Excerpt
With just a few ticks left until Guatemala's electoral clock strikes September 9, center-left presidential candidate Alvaro Colom continues to gather momentum toward a first-place finish. One poll, released July 30 shows Colom more than ten points ahead of his nearest rival, the rightwing former general Otto Perez Molina. The Borge & Asociados poll found 33% of voters intending to cast their lot with the Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza's (UNE) Colom. 23.1% intend to go with Perez and his Partido Patriota (PP). Alejandro Giammattei of the governing Gran Alianza Nacional (GANA) trails in third place with 8.9%.

Although the Borge poll of 1,008 Guatemalans who plan to vote also gives the edge to Colom in a runoff, Colom is not guaranteed the presidency at this point. The poll says that in a second round made necessary by Colom's failure to get more than 50% of the vote in the first, he would get 52% to Perez Molina's 38%. But the poll was taken between July 13 and 22, before some things with the potential to shake voter confidence in Colom happened. UNE caught in a downpour of ugly incidents

The first was that the UNE members of the legislative foreign affairs committee voted to defeat the creation of the Comision Internacional contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (CICIG) (see NotiCen, 2007-07-19). Colom was fervently pro-CICIG, and his inability to bring his own party along was not reassuring to an electorate fed up with can't-do presidencies. The betrayal eventually went for naught, however. On Aug. 1, the full legislature passed the bill creating CICIG. The country will, for at least two years, have a UN-led commission that will look deeply into illegal security groups and clandestine organizations, their structure, their financial sources, their modus operandi, and their links to the state. The state will have the means to dismantle these organizations and prosecute their crimes, and Colom may have a...