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MONTEVIDEO: Voters in Uruguay cast ballots on Sunday in a presidential vote likely to keep the resource-rich South American nation under a markets-minded leftist leader.
Jose Mujica, 74, an ex-rebel leader and candidate of the incumbent Broad Front party, needs more than 50 per cent of the vote in the first round to avoid a November 29 runoff against either of his main rivals.
Mujica, who twice escaped from jail under the military dictatorship, now is struggling to defeat rivals including conservative former president Luis Lacalle, 68, from the National Party, and Pedro Bordaberry, 49, son of the country's 1973-1975 dictator representing the Colorado Party.
Surveys put the rotund, scruffy and gray-haired Mujica – better known in Uruguay by his nickname "Pepe" – well ahead of his rivals and within striking distance of an outright win on Sunday.
Casting his ballot shortly after polls opened, Mujica urged Uruguayans to do their civic duty and vote.
"Tomorrow the country will move onward, and we're all in the same boat," he said.
If Mujica does triumph, analysts believe he will continue left-wing economic policies introduced by outgoing President Tabare Vazquez, a paediatrician who is ending his five-year term on a wave of popularity but is barred from re-election.
For Mujica, ascending to the presidency would be vindication for wrongs he suffered under Uruguay's brutal 1973-1985 dictatorship.
As a founder of the Tupamaros urban rebel movement, Mujica was shot nine times, and was jailed in 1970 by the country's then democratic authorities as they set about to largely crush his group.
After twice escaping jail and being recaptured, he ended up behind bars and enduring solitary confinement as one of the prisoners of the military regime that took power in 1973, in part responding to Tupamaro radicalism.
Mujica was freed under a general amnesty issued in 1985 when democracy was restored.
If elected, he would be only the second former guerrilla to take power through the ballot box in Latin America, following Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega.
But his guerrilla past is a sore point with conservatives in this small, temperate nation of 3.4 million wedged between Argentina and Brazil.
"They want to transform Uruguay into a communist, socialist country. I hope Mujica does not win, because I would not vote for subversives, thieves and assassins," Raquel Rodriguez, an 82-year-old retiree, said Sunday after voting for Bordaberry, third in the polls.
But analysts depict Mujica as much more a reformer than a revolutionary.
A former agriculture minister, he has promised to continue the policies of the outgoing government, which halved unemployment and strengthened minority rights, including laws allowing homosexuals to form civil unions and adopt children.
On Saturday, he praised the governing style of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a leftist whose moderate policies have eased early suspicions of the business sector.
Married to a senator who is also a former Tupamaro, Mujica became a lawmaker in 1995 after the ex-rebel group became a political party and joined the left-wing Broad Front.
Along with presidential balloting on Sunday will be a referendum on whether the country should drop an amnesty against military and police personnel accused of crimes during the junta era.
As many of Uruguay's 2.6 million registered voters took to the polls, ex-president Lacalle sounded a reflective, if not practical, note about his prospects for victory.
"I admit I am feeling butterflies in my stomach, but I am satisfied that I have given it my all," he said.
Polls were due to close at 2130 GMT, with first unofficial exit survey results expected to be made public an hour later.
- AFP/so
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