SALVADOR: Legislative Vote Called a Farce : Guerrillas Use Fire to Oppose Salvador Vote

Marxist-led guerrillas have burned or bombed at least 20 town halls throughout El Salvador in the past month, putting their fiery seal of disapproval on Sunday’s elections for a new national legislative assembly and 262 mayors for the country’s cities and towns.

The platforms of all parties include a plank for peace, but the guerrillas say that the “electoral farce” is not going to end the war that has ravaged this country for five years. As if to underline that point, rebels have marched into town after town to torch or dynamite government offices.

“In the present circumstances, the vote has no value for the people,” a rebel propaganda broadcast said this week. “The only thing that has any real meaning is the continuing war.”

In at least 26 towns dominated by guerrillas, no voting will be allowed to take place, and many thousands of voters displaced by the war will be unable to cast ballots.

Nevertheless, more than 2 million of El Salvador’s 5 million people are expected to go to the polls. And although the elections may not immediately influence the course of the war, they are still crucial for El Salvador and especially for President Jose Napoleon Duarte.

The voting will determine legislative and local government lineups for the last three years of Duarte’s four-year term. Support or opposition at those levels could make or break the president in his efforts to promote national harmony, reform and development.

How Duarte does, in turn, is critical to the success or failure of the Reagan Administration’s policy in Central America. While backing the Salvadoran army’s fight against the guerrillas, the United States has also promoted democracy with social reform as an alternative to Marxist revolution.

Sunday’s elections are the fourth for El Salvador in three years, a process that has transformed the system of government from manipulation of power by right-wing military men to relatively free and fair competition by civilian parties.

Left Not Participating

The participating parties, however, do not represent the full political range in this country because social democratic and Marxist parties are absent. They say they cannot take part because their candidates’ lives would be endangered by right-wing death squads that have killed thousands.

Duarte, a reformist Christian Democrat who took office June 1, says he wants to create conditions that will bring the guerrillas out of the hills and into the electoral process. His government held two rounds of peace talks with the rebels last year, but Duarte suspended them after the guerrillas insisted on a share of power before participating in any elections.

Duarte says he wants to resume the dialogue after the elections.

“I am going to establish the process again to continue in the search for peace,” he said in a press conference Friday.

Roberto D’Aubuisson, head of the Arena Party, the right-wing party most staunchly opposed to Duarte’s government, says that talking to the rebels is tantamount to treason.

Talks Called Betrayal

“This is like betraying our armed forces,” D’Aubuisson said in a televised campaign speech this week.

D’Aubuisson was Duarte’s rival in last May’s presidential runoff election, which Duarte won with 54% of the vote.

In the current National Assembly, elected in 1982, Arena has 19 of the 60 seats. The Christian Democrats have 24, but Arena has voted in league with other conservative opposition parties to frustrate the Christian Democrats in the assembly.

As a result, Duarte’s administration has been handcuffed. Key projects, such as agrarian reform and the investigation of death squad killings, have been stalled.

Independent analysts say that the Christian Democrats appear unlikely to win an assembly majority Sunday, but the elections may reshuffle the balance of legislative power and give Duarte a chance to negotiate new alliances with other parties.

Ready for Coalition

The National Conciliation Party, once the party of repressive military governments, says it is willing to work out a deal with the Christian Democrats after the elections. Conciliation won 14 seats in the 1982 elections, although nine of its assembly members later split to form a separate party.

Conciliation leaders say their party has been purged of its most militaristic elements and now espouses social reforms similar to those favored by the Christian Democrats.

Jose Antonio Morales Ehrlich, secretary general of the Christian Democratic Party and a candidate for mayor of San Salvador, says that he will have to see Conciliation’s new social conscience in action to believe it. But he added that his party does not rule out some kind of a working agreement with Conciliation.

“If it were necessary to make an arrangement with them, we would do it,” Morales Ehrlich said in an interview.

Could Isolate Rightists

If the two parties got together and formed a voting majority in the assembly, they could isolate D’Aubuisson’s Arena.

Hugo Carrillo, a leader of Conciliation, says that is what the United States would like to see. Asked if U.S. officials have proposed a Conciliation-Christian Democratic alliance, Carrillo said: “Of course. . . . They touch on that whenever possible.”

Carrillo said that the Christian Democrats will need an alliance and that the Conciliation Party is ready to make a deal.

“If we had done it years ago, things would be much better now,” he said.

Yet in the present assembly, Conciliation has often voted with Arena to block Duarte in the legislature.

The two opposition parties teamed up to enact a law that allows them to run as a coalition in Sunday’s elections, while maintaining their individual insignias on the ballot. An “X” on either of the two insignias will be a vote for the coalition candidate.