Salvador Moves to Right as War, Money Woes Continue

Four years ago, Emilia de Palacios was one of hundreds of thousands of poor Salvadorans who voted to elect a populist-style Christian Democratic president who was promising an end to war and economic recovery.

Last week, the 62-year-old cook again was among the majority of those who voted in elections for national assemblymen and municipal officials in El Salvador, but this time she cast her ballot against the U.S.-backed government that had been unable to deliver on its promises.

“We’re sinking and we want to get out,” Palacios said, waving her empty shopping bag in the central market. “Everything is too expensive, starting with beans.”

Reaping the benefits of that frustration was the ultra-rightist Nationalist Republican Alliance, led by retired Maj. Roberto D’Aubuisson. Arena, as the party is called for its acronym in Spanish, took control of the National Assembly away from the Christian Democrats and won 200 out of 262 elected mayors’ posts, including Analysis

that of San Salvador, where Christian Democrats have governed since the country’s current president, Jose Napoleon Duarte, was elected mayor in 1964.

With this stunning victory, Arena, a party that has been accused of having links with political death squads, suddenly finds itself in a strong position to win next year’s presidential election.

Official preliminary results announced by the Central Elections Council gave Arena 31 seats in the 60-seat National Assembly. The Christian Democrats, who controlled the old assembly with 33 seats, finished with only 23 seats in the new legislature, with six seats going to the Party of National Reconciliation, a Christian Democratic ally.

With 31 seats, Arena can not only block Christian Democratic legislation and effectively paralyze the final year of Duarte’s administration, but it will be in a position to make new laws and name a new supreme court and an attorney general next year.

The margin of Arena’s victory took most diplomatic observers and political analysts by surprise. Although much can happen in a year, they now say it is conceivable that Arena could end up with control of all three powers of state--the legislature, judiciary and presidency--in 1989.

Such an outcome would raise problems for U.S. policy-makers, who helped forge an alliance between the moderate Christian Democrats and the armed forces over the last four years to break the traditional ties between the military and the oligarchy--the elite that is now represented by Arena.

Arena’s success is widely regarded as a “punishment vote” against the Christian Democrats rather than an ideological turn to the right by Salvadorans. Voters were fed up with inflation, unemployment and a guerrilla insurrection with the dimensions of a civil war that has lasted for eight years. They are also fed up with government inaction and alleged corruption.

“Whatever happened to all that money that was sent to us after the (1986) earthquake?” Palacios asked in an accusatory tone. “Nobody knows.”

Party of the Rich

She agrees with Christian Democratic assertions that Arena is a party of the rich, but she figures that means Arena candidates won’t have to steal. “Or maybe they’ll steal a little, but won’t fill their pockets without extending a hand to the poor.”

Many of the 1.9 million registered voters in the March 20 election either never picked up their voting cards or did not receive them because of technical problems. Of the 1.65 million people who did receive registration cards, as many as 45% may not have voted on election day.

It is difficult to determine whether the abstention was due to disillusionment or fear. The guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front launched a violent campaign of sabotage and military attacks and imposed a national ban on the movement of traffic on the roads to keep people from participating in the elections. The guerrillas charge that elections are worthless and part of a U.S.-backed counterinsurgency campaign.

But many of those who went to the polls in spite of the violence cast blank ballots as a way of protesting.

Fear and apathy may have gone hand in hand. “Why take a risk when one candidate is just like the other?” asked one 29-year-old woman who did not want to be named and who did not vote.

Campaign by Accusations

That perception was fed by the leading parties’ election campaigns of mutual accusations. Arena called the Christian Democrats “corrupt” and “thieves,” while the Christian Democrats branded Arena a party of “assassins” and “kidnapers.”

In 1986, several Arena leaders and close associates of party founder D’Aubuisson were jailed or fled the country after being accused of running a kidnap-for-profit ring that abducted wealthy businessmen for ransom and blamed the crimes on the guerrillas.

D’Aubuisson, a former military intelligence officer once called a “pathological killer” by an American ambassador, has long been accused of having ties to death squads that killed thousands of Salvadorans in the early 1980s, including several Americans and several hundred Christian Democrats.

Linked to Archbishop’s Death

Last year, President Duarte publicly charged D’Aubuisson with masterminding the assassination in 1980 of Oscar Arnulfo Romero, the Roman Catholic archbishop of San Salvador, and Duarte is seeking the extradition from the United States of an alleged witness to the killing. The case is one that Arena might try to block with a new attorney general and supreme court.

Basic issues such as peace, human rights and ways to improve the economy were not emphasized in the campaign, but Arena ran several television advertisements that captured public sentiment against the government. One showed Duarte campaigning for president in 1984, promising to create hundreds of thousands of jobs and vowing that there would never again be a shortage of corn and beans in the country.

The ad ended: “Enough with lies. Vote Arena.”

The clobbering of the Christian Democrats is seen as a personal defeat for Duarte, and close associates say that the president is “emotionally destroyed.” His son, Alejandro, was the loser in the race for mayor of San Salvador.

Economy the Key Issue

In the cities, the economy appears to have been the main issue for voters. Inflation, down from 32% a year ago, still runs at 25%, and nearly half the population is out of work or underemployed. The earthquake of 1986, a three-year drought and the war all have taken their toll on the economy. The government, meanwhile, spends half its budget on the armed forces, while social programs to benefit the country’s poor majority languish for lack of funds.

In the countryside, Duarte’s failure to end the war may have hurt the party more.

In addition, the Duarte government is widely perceived to be inefficient and corrupt. Government officials have been accused of stealing funds meant to rebuild war-torn regions. And the party has been openly and bitterly divided into two factions, one led by former Minister of Communications Julio Rey Prendes, the other by former Planning Minister Fidel Chavez Mena, both of whom want to be president.

It is possible that neither will win the job unless the Christian Democrats can find a way to quickly turn around their devastated image. Presidential elections are scheduled in March, 1989, and the campaign will begin this fall.

Leaders Seem Dazed

In the aftermath of their defeat last week, Christian Democratic leaders seem dazed. They acknowledge that the party became isolated from the social base responsible for the election of Duarte in 1984 and of a Christian Democratic National Assembly in 1985. But they seem to be at a loss about what to do.

“We were a government of the right without the support of the right,” said a party leader analyzing the damages. “Businessmen didn’t do badly, but they never supported the (party). The poor people were hurt by inflation . . . but we broke the social pact with the unions and peasants. And we made no advances with the left.”

Duarte held three rounds of peace talks with the Farabundo Marti guerrillas that produced no results. The army believes it can win the war, and the guerrillas seem convinced that deteriorating economic conditions, together with the end of the Reagan Administration in Washington and Duarte’s administration here, will provide conditions for a popular insurrection to bring them to power.

Pessimism on Accord

The guerrillas’ civilian political allies in the Revolutionary Democratic Front returned to El Salvador late last year under terms of the Central American peace plan signed in August. They came to set up new, legal political parties. They did not take part in the legislative and municipal elections, asserting that the country can never recover until the war ends. They are pressing for a negotiated settlement with the guerrillas.

“The elections showed us our thesis is still valid,” said Ruben Zamora, leader of the Popular Social Christian Movement, one of the groups in the Democratic Front. “The solution for this country is not in elections. It is in a national consensus. Whether or not we enter elections is secondary.”

Zamora said the three small, leftist parties that have joined in a so-called Convergence have not decided whether to run a candidate for president in a bid to fill the void to the left of the Christian Democrats in the political spectrum. The three parties have little organization or money but could appeal to an apparently large pool of disillusioned Salvadorans.

That prospect worries the powerful military Establishment, which views Zamora and other returning politicians as fronts for the guerrillas.

“We had a (legislative and municipal) campaign of the corrupt versus the killers,” one angry army officer said. “If these parties (Christian Democrats and its allies) don’t do something now, the Convergence could deal a blow next March like Arena just did.”

New Laws Sought

Arena’s new political strength is likely to bolster rightist sectors of the military. Among other things, the armed forces want new laws that will let them hold suspected guerrillas for interrogation longer than the 72 hours allowed at present before pressing charges or releasing them.

Arena is a strongly nationalistic and anti-Communist party. In the coming months, Arena can be expected to continue to put forward the moderate face it displayed during the recent campaign. It is unlikely in the next year to try to abolish reforms adopted by the government under the Christian Democrats, but it will use its assembly edge to try to keep the Duarte government from accomplishing anything. It may try to investigate government corruption.

“This is going to turn a paraplegic government into a quadriplegic,” one government critic said.

Meanwhile, Arena will try to use its mayors to develop projects and support for the party in the countryside before next year’s Salvadoran presidential election.

U.S. Aid for Arena?

The United States provides about $500 million a year in military and economic aid to El Salvador to help the government battle the guerrillas. American officials publicly insist that U.S. policy has supported a democratic process, not a political party. But privately, officials acknowledge that the Christian Democrats were an acceptable moderate option and that it could be difficult to win aid from Congress for an Arena administration here.

With that in mind, analysts believe Arena is likely to chose as its presidential candidate wealthy coffee grower Alfredo Cristiani, the current party president, who would be more acceptable internationally than D’Aubuisson, who is a more dynamic campaigner.

Already, pragmatic U.S. officials have begun to describe Arena as a moderate rightist party--a shift that irks Christian Democrats.

“It is the same people and the same party it always was,” one Christian Democratic leader said.

After the presidential elections, analysts believe that Arena is likely to try to reverse or work around political and economic reforms made by the Christian Democrats in such areas as land reform, nationalization of the banks and coffee exports. It could also move to bar exiled leftist politicians from returning here.

Political analysts say that the United States would probably back an Arena government.

“They have no alternative,” said Antonio Canas, a political scientist at the Central American University here. “If the Christian Democrats are out, the United States is left with Arena or the guerrillas.”