Panama expected to land U.N. seat

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Guatemala and Venezuela agreed to withdraw from the race for a seat on the U.N. Security Council and support Panama as a consensus candidate, Ecuador's U.N. ambassador announced Wednesday.

Ambassador Diego Cordovez, who hosted two meetings between the foreign ministers of Guatemala and Venezuela, made the announcement at Ecuador's U.N. Mission.

"The two candidates reached an agreement to step down and they came up with Panama as a consensus candidate," Cordovez said.

He said Guatemalan Foreign Minister Gert Rosenthal and Venezuela's Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro "will present Panama" to the 34 Latin American and Caribbean nations at a meeting today for their approval.

The voting has become highly political because the United States is supporting Guatemala over leftist Venezuela, which is led by the fiercely anti-American President Hugo Chavez, who referred to President Bush as "the devil" in his speech last month to the General Assembly.

Supporters of both countries had refused to budge through 47 rounds of voting.

Guatemala led Venezuela in all but one of the ballots on which they tied, but could not muster the two-thirds majority in the 192-member General Assembly to win the Security Council seat designated for a Latin American or Caribbean candidate.