Going to Polls Could Be Life-Threatening : Salvador Vote Becomes Test of Courage

Juana Cruz shyly lowered her eyes and in an almost inaudible voice said: “I would like to come home early this week. I want to make sure I am home to vote.”

About 100 miles to the east, in La Pena, Vertila Martin said, “I won’t vote, and neither will my husband.”

The contrasting attitudes of these two, both poor women trying to survive in a country drained by civil war and submerged in economic disaster, mirror the conflicts of an election in which voting can be a life-threatening act.

In order to vote in Sunday’s presidential election, Cruz will have to leave her job in San Salvador, six miles away, by this afternoon because Marxist guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front have called a transportation strike--soft words for a campaign of burning buses, taxis and trucks--to prevent people from going to the polls.

The Martins will not vote--and probably none of their neighbors, either--because they live in an area almost totally controlled by the FMLN, as the guerrilla organization is known after its initials in Spanish. These people will boycott the election either out of fear or sympathy for the rebels.

The Martins do not even have election registration cards, which are required by law, because the guerrillas say that possession of such a card is anti-revolutionary.

Juana Cruz hopes she can get home before the strike begins tonight. Then on Election Day, she can walk the two miles from her adobe house to the polling place.

She is a maid who grew up in a family that has never owned land or a house or a car. But her employer has paid for lessons in reading and writing, and she is determined that she and her children will have a better life.

“I never voted until last time (in the 1984 presidential election), because I didn’t know how and I was afraid,” she said the other day. “But now I know who the candidates are, and I have the same right to vote as Mr. Desola (a locally renowned right-wing figure). I am part of this country, too.”

Even if she gets home and to the polling place, there is no guarantee that ballots will be available, or that people will process them. For if the FMLN has threatened to make voting inconvenient for her, it has made death a real possibility for election workers.

In a coldly worded statement read this week over Radio Venceremos, the clandestine guerrilla station, the FMLN said that “all people taking part in organizing the election should publicly resign and join efforts to seek peace through negotiations.”

Otherwise, the FMLN said, election officials and workers will be considered “part of a military counterinsurgency plan to legitimize repression, bombings of civilians and the maintenance of conditions of misery.”

In essence, that means death. The guerrillas see anything and anyone associated with counterinsurgency as a military target.

These are not empty words. The same language was used just before the FMLN pursued a terrorist campaign against the country’s mayors, and over the last six months, nine mayors have been killed. At least 134 of the country’s 262 mayors have quit in terror.

On Tuesday, to make certain that everyone understands their intentions, guerrillas blew up the election headquarters in the San Salvador suburb of Santa Tecla. No one was in the building when the bomb went off.

In another signal, delivered March 8, the guerrillas torched the telephone office in San Francisco Javier in Usulutan province. Earlier in the day they had taken over the city and told people not to vote or else to expect violence.

The promise of a transportation strike is, in some ways, just as threatening. In the last four elections, going back to 1982, the FMLN has destroyed buses, trucks, taxis and private cars.

For the most part, the anti-election campaigns have not critically disrupted the voting, although large numbers of people have never made it to the polls. Beyond this, the strikes cause severe economic problems and shortages; people cannot get to their jobs and shippers cannot get goods to market.

This year the fear seems greater than ever, if for no other reason than that the guerrillas seem more determined because of frustration over the collapse of their recent peace initiative.

A diplomatic source observed: “When the FMLN offered to take part (in the elections in exchange for postponing the voting until September), they offered as an alternative a major escalation of the war. Well, the talks collapsed, and the muchachos (as the guerrillas are called) have been told to be ready for heavy action.”

If the guerrillas are ready, so is the army, according to the minister of defense, Gen. Carlos Vides Casanova.

“We have taken steps to ensure the security and protection of people from the threats of the enemies of democracy,” he said Tuesday.

But no one was guarding the Santa Tecla election offices and, except for a heavy police presence at the factory where the ballots are being printed in San Salvador, there was no evident security around other election facilities.

The most effective countermove to the FMLN threat may derive from the very social problem that gave rise to the rebellion--a lack of jobs.

“The economy here is very, very bad,” said Vicente Ricardo Rodriguez, the head of the Santa Tecla election commission, “and the people have to work. We will continue to work despite the threats.”