Anti-poverty candidate wins in Guatemala

Alvaro Colom, a businessman promising to end Guatemala's desperate poverty, won the country's presidential election, according to official results Monday.

Colom beat retired Gen. Otto Perez Molina, who conceded defeat after results showed him trailing Colom in the two-man runoff.

"I am the nation's president elect," Colom told cheering supporters late Sunday.

With 99 percent of voting stations reporting early Monday, Colom, of the center-left National Unity of Hope Party, had nearly 53 percent of the vote compared with 47 percent for Perez, who ran on a tough anti-crime platform.

Colom, 56, is a former vice economy secretary and ordained Mayan minister who won the presidency on his third try. He promised jobs, a judicial overhaul and increased social spending in Guatemala, where more than half of the country's 13 million people live on less than $2 a day.

He said he would use his experience brokering a civil war peace pact to reduce crime.

"If you don't know the root of the problem, it is hard to solve it," Colom told reporters on the eve of the vote. "And we have been studying the causes behind our soaring crime rate for six years."

Calm prevailed during the vote, which was guarded by more than 30,000 police and soldiers, on alert after a harrowing campaign in which more than 50 candidates, party activists and their family members killed.

In the first round of voting in September, Perez and Colom finished far ahead of 12 other candidates, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu.