Guatemala City

Reporting from San Salvador and Mexico City -- Argentine songwriter and singer Facundo Cabral, an icon of Latin American folk and protest music, was shot to death early Saturday by unknown gunmen who intercepted his car in Guatemala City and pumped it full of bullets. Guatemalan authorities said they had not yet determined a motive for the slaying, which appeared to be a well-orchestrated ambush, and there were suggestions that a businessman accompanying Cabral might have been the intended target.

Madison Avenue in Los Angeles doesn't look anything like its New York counterpart. Ours is a narrow side street in East Hollywood lined with old apartment buildings of stucco and brick. For generations, the poor and the newly arrived to L.A. have come to live there. On a fall night in 1962 my mother and father landed on Madison Avenue on their first night in the U.S. after a long trip from Guatemala. Five months later, I was born. Last week, I went back there with both my parents.

After three years of diplomacy that helped end a guerrilla war in Nicaragua and launch peace talks in El Salvador and Guatemala, Central America's presidents will turn to an economic agenda when they meet in nearby Antigua this weekend. Without joint efforts to pull the region out of a decade-old recession, officials believe, their achievements in peacemaking and in strengthening democracy will be fleeting.

A tough-on-crime former army general headed for a runoff against a populist congressman in the race to become Guatemala's next president as vote counting neared completion Monday. With more than 98% of precincts counted from Sunday's vote, Otto Perez Molina held a double-digit lead over Manuel Baldizon, 36% to 23%, but lacked a majority needed to avoid a second round on Nov. 6. Perez Molina, 60, who led troops against leftist guerrillas during Guatemala's 35-year civil war, went into the voting as the front-runner among 10 candidates.

A unique brand of Dixieland will come to the Los Angeles Festival on Friday via an unusually circuitous route. The Paco Gatsby Band, which hails from Guatemala City, Guatemala's capital, will perform its blend of ragtime, traditional Guatemalan music and Latin salsa during the festival's "Evening of Classic Jazz." Don't look for Paco Gatsby; the band's name is entirely fictitious.

This tiny hamlet in the remote mountains of Guatemala is to be a model city, government officials say, a place where people displaced by civil war can renew their lives with all the services and security the government can provide. But to many of the people who live here, Xexucap is a kind of prison.

The talk at cocktail parties in comfortable parts of town these days is not of politics and currency exchange rates but about who has been robbed and where. At least a dozen cars are stolen every day, many by armed men at stoplights in the city's most fashionable district. More than 20 robberies or assaults are reported daily, double the number a year ago. The real total surely is much higher because few people trust police enough to file complaints.

"You want to see a chicken sacrifice?" asks 11-year-old Sebastian, one of Chichicastenango's few English-speaking residents and a young entrepreneur. "I'll take you. What'll you pay me?" Sebastian approaches me outside the heavy wooden doors of Santo Tomas Church holding the hand of his younger brother, a scrawny boy with a dirt-streaked face and Cheshire grin. Below, on the church's flight of wide, semicircular stone steps, an old man swings a hand-held burner oozing sweet, resinous incense.

Madison Avenue in Los Angeles doesn't look anything like its New York counterpart. Ours is a narrow side street in East Hollywood lined with old apartment buildings of stucco and brick. For generations, the poor and the newly arrived to L.A. have come to live there. On a fall night in 1962 my mother and father landed on Madison Avenue on their first night in the U.S. after a long trip from Guatemala. Five months later, I was born. Last week, I went back there with both my parents.

Guatemala's capital was under a state of emergency and its airport closed Friday after the Pacaya volcano spewed black ash for miles in the southern part of the country. Television reporter Anibal Archila who had been covering the eruption was found dead by colleagues after being caught in a blizzard of rocks and debris. More than 65 people were injured and hundreds of homes damaged, according to news reports. Officials said three children between the ages of 7 and 12 were missing.

Violence-weary Guatemalan voters went to the polls Sunday to pick a new president, with a former general, who vowed to get tough on crime, taking the early lead. Sporadic bloodshed, including a shooting that left a police officer dead, was reported as voters elected a president and vice president, representatives of Congress and hundreds of mayors and municipal council members. Otto Perez Molina, promising a mano duro , or firm hand, against crime, had led nine other candidates in preelection polls.

Four years ago, former army Gen. Otto Perez Molina promised voters to employ a mano dura , or firm hand, to end Guatemala's crime epidemic if elected president. He lost, to a leftist. This year, though, Perez Molina's conservative tough-on-crime message appears to have gained traction with jittery voters as the mayhem mounts, mainly at the hands of homegrown street gangs and Mexican drug traffickers muscling south into Central America. The career soldier, who fought leftist guerrillas during Guatemala's 36-year civil war, boasts a hefty lead in opinion polls as voters prepare to pick a new president Sunday.

Plagued by Mexican drug cartels that have steadily eroded the authority of the national government, Guatemala faces a presidential election in a few weeks that pits a former military officer against a former first lady, but offers little solution to epic problems. The campaign for the Sept. 11 elections, which include congressional and mayoral posts, has been violent and tense. More than 30 people have been killed in campaign violence, according to the human rights ombudsman office.

Trying to become a Guatemalan futbol star, say, the next Carlos Ruiz (the former Galaxy striker), would have been the understandable path for a certain youngster bursting with athletic talent. What, then, if the Olympic Games happened to be the ultimate destination? The way Kevin Cordon looked at it: One made a lot more sense than 11. To reach the Olympics, playing soccer, he would need help and a lot of it. Ten other players, in addition to himself, of course. There was another sport to potentially get him to the vaunted Olympic stage, having to rely solely on the man in the mirror.

Reporting from San Salvador and Mexico City -- Argentine songwriter and singer Facundo Cabral, an icon of Latin American folk and protest music, was shot to death early Saturday by unknown gunmen who intercepted his car in Guatemala City and pumped it full of bullets. Guatemalan authorities said they had not yet determined a motive for the slaying, which appeared to be a well-orchestrated ambush, and there were suggestions that a businessman accompanying Cabral might have been the intended target.

Guatemalan authorities have arrested a man they say is a top leader of the drug gang blamed for last weekend's massacre of 27 farmworkers, President Alvaro Colom said Wednesday. The suspect, Hugo Alvaro Gomez Vasquez, is believed to have taken part in the killings in a northern province known as Peten, Colom said in his daily broadcast from Guatemala City. Colom called Gomez "one of the principal leaders" of the Zetas gang in Guatemala, which has served increasingly as a base for Mexican traffickers skirting a crackdown at home.

Three bomb blasts caused minor property damage in Guatemala City. One was at a popular evangelical Protestant church with ties to former military ruler Efrain Rios Montt, a police spokesman said Saturday.

It was just before 11 a.m. when Isabel Marroquin Tambriz once more began to cry. Her wails were so piercing they rose above the brass band. They traveled down the dirt paths of the village, which grew ever more crowded with mourners. "Walijoq caewaj!" she yelled over and over in Quiche. Wake up, my love. Wake up, my love. In a casket outside her cinder-block home lay the body of her husband, Manuel Jaminez Xum. He was dressed in a pinstripe three-piece suit, finer than anything he'd worn when he was alive.