World Notes Guyana

The polls had not yet closed last week in Guyana when familiar cries of "fraud" rang out. As in every election in the South American country since it was granted independence from Britain in 1966, opposition politicians and others charged that the polling and the vote count were rigged to favor the ruling People's National Congress. Indeed, the margin of victory was improbably large, with the P.N.C. taking 76% of the vote and six opposition parties dividing the rest. The win gives the P.N.C. 42 of the 53 seats in the national legislature and allows President Hugh Desmond Hoyte, 56, to remain in office for five more years.

Hoyte has led Guyana since the death last August of Forbes Burnham, a charismatic Marxist who had eviscerated the country's bauxite-and-sugar-base d economy. Although he was Burnham's principal deputy for the past decade, last week the newly elected President offered his 800,000 fellow citizens some hope, promising that a revitalized economy would be his first priority. "I am a socialist," he said, "but I hope that I am not an airy-fairy socialist, that I am not bound by the dead hand of the past."