Former army officer Ollanta Humala took an early lead in Sunday's presidential elections but fell far short of the majority needed to avoid a runoff.

Peruvian presidential candidate Ollanta Humala (R), accompanied by his wife Nadine Heredia, speaks to supporters at his headquarters in Lima, April 9, 2006. Former army commander Humala was holding his lead in Peru's presidential election on Sunday, an updated quick count poll showed. [Reuters]

The political newcomer had 27.3 percent of the vote with 46.2 percent of the ballots counted. Pro-business former congresswoman Lourdes Flores had 26.5 and Alan Garcia, a center-leftist ex-president, got 26.1.

Peru's top election official, Magdalena Chu, said the results so far were mostly from urban areas and may not reflect the national vote. Most of Lourdes' support is in cities while Humala's stronghold is in the provinces, especially rural areas. Garcia's support is evenly divided between cities and small towns.

Twenty presidential candidates participated in Sunday's election. The top two finishers face each other in a runoff set for late May or early June.

Hours after being taunted by hundreds of opponents as he cast his ballot, Humala addressed hundreds of followers late Sunday, urging them to be calm and avoid violence.

"I don't want hate directed toward people who don't think as we do," Humala said at his campaign headquarters. "We see a large social fracture in the country and we don't want to deepen it."

A victory by Humala could tilt this Andean nation leftward. His main challengers vow to generally maintain free-market policies that have generated strong growth but little improvement in the lives of poor Peruvians.

Humala, 43, has instilled fear in many Peruvians, especially the middle and upper classes, by identifying with Chavez, Venezuela's militantly anti-U.S. president.

Hundreds of hostile protesters trapped the former army lieutenant colonel and his wife for nearly an hour at their Lima polling station with chants of "Assassin" and "You're the same as Chavez." A few threw rocks.

After voting, Humala and his wife were escorted to a car by riot police with clear plastic shields. Lloyd Axworthy, the former Canadian foreign minister heading an international observer team, accompanied the couple.

The "assassin" chants were an apparent reference to allegations that Humala committed human rights abuses in 1992 as the commander of a counterinsurgency base in Peru's eastern jungle. He denies any wrongdoing.

Humala, a law-and-order nationalist, has heavy support among Peru's poor, who feel bypassed by the country's recent strong economic growth. Most of the poor live in Andean mountain communities, where the Quechua-speaking inhabitants have suffered centuries of racial and ethnic discrimination by Peru's European-descended elite.

Exit polls showed Humala with overwhelming leads in those areas. In Ayacucho, a mountain state that gave birth to the extreme-left Shining Path guerrillas a quarter century ago, the Apoyo poll gave him 66 percent of the vote.

"In a country where most citizens suffer from racism, elections become an opportunity for them to take revenge," said human rights activist Wilfredo Ardito.

Humala belongs to a high-profile mestizo clan of avowed racists who believe Peru's "copper-colored" majority should have superior status over whites. He insists he does not share his relatives' views, but they have benefited him anyway.

Humala's image as a stern military man who will fight crime and punish the corrupt has also been a powerful factor.

"I'm voting for Ollanta because he'll make it safer and get rid of the corrupt," said Nancy Perez Malpartida, a 45-year-old fruit vendor. "What's lacking here is a strong hand to battle street crime. With no police around, we have no way to defend ourselves."

Humala has pledged to favor Peruvian-owned businesses over foreign investors, raise taxes on foreign companies, spend more on the poor and rewrite Peru's constitution to strip power from a political class widely viewed as corrupt.

He openly admires the 1968-75 leftist dictatorship of Gen. Juan Velasco, who took over Peru's media, implemented a largely failed agrarian reform and forged close ties with the Soviet Union.

Garcia, 56, a spellbinding orator, has warned that to embrace Humala would be to launch Peru "into a void," and President Alejandro Toledo urged Peruvians on Saturday not to elect someone who would bring "the authoritarianism and instability that we've known in the past."

Humala complained that the comment by Toledo, who by law cannot run for a second consecutive term, was directed against him and violated campaign regulations requiring government neutrality.

Flores, 46, is the first woman to make a serious run for Peru's presidency. She hopes to replicate the triumph of socialist Michelle Bachelet, who was elected as neighboring Chile's first female president in December.

Garcia, leader of the center-left Aprista party, was called "Latin America's Kennedy" in 1985 when he became the region's youngest president. But his term ended with Peru's economy in shambles.

He paints himself as having matured and says his mismanagement of the government 20 years ago, leading to more than 7,000 percent annual inflation, was mostly because his youth and power went to his head.