Next Gen News

Otto Pérez Molina has 17 points ahead of his nearest rival, according to the poll before the election on Sunday

Fifteen years after the end of the bloody civil war, Guatemala seems poised to elect its first military leader in times of peace, a former army general leading the polls ahead. Round of presidential elections on Sunday

With the country suffering from the highest rates of murder in the ground, Otto Pérez Molina of the conservative Patriot Party (PP), has wooed voters with promises to tackle violence increasing and drug trafficking with a

(iron fist).

A poll published in the newspaper Prensa Libre said Perez had amassed a 17-point lead over his rival centrist Baldizon, Manuel, with 58.5% of votes scheduled.

According to many estimates, more lives are lost in Guatemala during the 1960-1996 civil war in the country, where at least 200,000 people died in the struggle between a succession of right-wing governments and Marxist guerrilla groups.

Faced with a homicide rate of about 45.1 million - nearly double that of Rio de Janeiro, and about 40 times that of the United Kingdom -. Both candidates have pledged to implement a campaign of hard line against crime

In May, the army was sent to Peten in Guatemala, a remote area in the north, after the Mexican traffickers have killed 27 farm workers and beheaded.

"This is a war without thank you," said the outgoing president of Guatemala, Alvaro Colom, The Guardian earlier this year. "There are a lot of infiltration, a lot of corruption. We need a NATO force-type self-defense."