May 16, 1999
Web posted at: 5:42 PM EDT (2142 GMT)

GUATEMALA CITY, May 16 (Reuters) -- Guatemalans went to the polls on Sunday for the first time since the end of the country's civil war in 1996, in a national referendum on constitutional reforms that has been overshadowed by voter apathy and the killing of a left-wing politician.

Some four million people in this Central American country of 11 million were eligible to vote yes or no on a package of 50 constitutional reforms that would recognise the rights of Guatemala's Mayan Indian majority for the first time since Europeans arrived in the 16th century.

The referendum is the first nationwide election since the government and Marxist guerrillas signed a peace accord in December 1996 to end a 36-year civil war, in which an estimated 200,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed.

The reforms, approved previously by Congress as part of the peace process, aim to correct the underlying causes of the war by recognising Mayan languages and legal rights and overhauling the executive, legislative and judicial branches.

A yes vote would reshape the Guatemalan army by mandating a civilian defence minister and eliminating a covert intelligence unit.

Last February, a Guatemalan truth commission blamed the army for 93 percent of the massacres, tortures, disappearances and assassinations committed during the war, one of the cruelest and bloodiest in modern Latin American history.

A simple majority would enshrine the reforms into the constitution.

Polling stations were due to close at 6 p.m. local time (8 p.m. EDT) (0000 GMT), with results due several hours later.

One electoral official predicted voter turnout of 20 percent. Mario Roberto Guerra Roldan, a magistrate for the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), blamed voter apathy on high rates of illiteracy and lackluster campaigning.

No violence was reported and voters were going to the polls in an orderly fashion, he told Reuters.

"This election is a sign that Guatemala is changing and that the country is entering a new democratic road," Rodrigo Asturias, a former commandant for the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit (URNG), the former guerrillas now registered as a political party, said before voting.

But the murder on Thursday of a leftist politician cast a shadow over the country as it strives to bury decades of political violence.

Roberto Belarino Gonzalez, 40, assistant secretary general for the opposition Democratic Front for the New Guatemala (FDNG) in Guatemala City, was shot several times by four heavily armed men as he left his home in what human rights groups and leftist leaders called an act of intimidation.

Through the day, voters trickled to schools and gymnasiums to cast ballots in a referendum that brought once deeply entrenched enemies to the polls.

Retired Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, who ruled Guatemala during the "scorched-earth" counterinsurgency campaign in the early 1980s after a military coup, voted early, calling on others to show up at the polls.

"Those who don't vote today are committing a sin against the fatherland," Rios Montt, who campaigned for a yes vote, told local Radio Sonora.

Human rights groups have accused Rios Montt of genocide against Mayan civilians during his 1982-83 military rule.

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