Fresh from a landslide election victory, Guatemalan president-elect Alfonso Portillo vowed to uphold the 1996 peace accords ending decades of civil war and called on the military to respect the country's "winds of change".
With over 97 per cent of the vote counted, Mr Portillo of the rightist Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) - a party founded by a former military dictator - had won 68.29 per cent of the vote in Sunday's run-off election.
His opponent, Mr Oscar Berger, of the ruling pro-business Party for National Advancement (PAN), won 31.71 per cent of the vote.
"This is the victory of the people of Guatemala," a beaming Mr Portillo told a news conference early yesterday. The 48-year-old former university professor said Guatemala's 11 million people could expect a "government that will rule for all and not only for the elites".
Mr Portillo said his government would be committed to the 1996 peace accords, which were aimed not only at ending 36 years of civil war but at curbing the military's power, recognising Mayan Indian rights and overhauling the judiciary.
"All the political, economic and social changes this country needs are mandated under the peace accords," said the president-elect. "The party that won this election is willing to jump on the train of peace."
He pledged to dismantle an elite presidential security unit known as the Estado Mayor, which has been accused of committing atrocities during the 36-year war between a succession of rightist governments and leftist guerrillas.
He also said that his Minister of Defence will be a civilian, not a soldier. "We need an army that understands the winds of change, not an army that looms behind civilian power," said Mr Portillo.
Sunday's vote was the first time Guatemalans voted in presidential elections since the end of the war, which left an estimated 200,000 people dead, mostly Mayan peasants.
Mr Portillo, who stunned the country by admitting he killed two men in what he said was self-defence in Mexico in 1982, has been criticised by human rights groups for his ties to the FRG's creator and leader, Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, whose 1982-83 military regime drew international condemnation for its brutality.
Human rights leaders have accused Gen. Rios Montt of waging genocide against Indians during the army's "scorched earth" campaign in the early 1980s to wipe out guerrilla support.
Gen. Rios Montt, who is barred from running for president because he previously seized power in a 1982 coup, won a seat in Congress in the November race and is likely to become the chamber's next president.