Far-Right Party Favored in Salvadoran Election

A political party with a history of anti-Americanism and a reputation for homicide is the likely winner of El Salvador’s presidential election Sunday, marking a critical turn in the fortunes of a country tortured by civil war and economic hardship.

The Nationalist Republican Alliance--or Arena party, as it is locally called after the first letters of its name in Spanish--is leading its closest rival, the ruling Christian Democratic Party, by a margin of more than 2 to 1 in the latest opinion polls.

If the projections hold up--and all signs indicate that the Christian Democratic candidate, Fidel Chavez Mena, is continuing to lose ground--the ultra-rightist Arena, headed by Alfredo Cristiani, will win a plurality Sunday and be the odds-on favorite to win again in next month’s probable runoff election.

A poll conducted by the University of Central America here gave Arena 26.2% of the vote, the Christian Democrats 12.9% and the Democratic Convergence, a coalition of socialist and other leftist organization aligned with the rebel Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, 4.2%

Slightly more than 21% of the voters polled said they were still undecided, and 20.3% said their preference was nobody’s business but theirs. Chavez Mena was even outstripped by the 13.2% who said they would vote for none of the candidates.

The big loser is Chavez Mena, 48, a lawyer and party technocrat whose popularity declined from 18% in a survey taken last month.

Depending on the vote of the uncommitted and the ‘won’t-says,’ Cristiani, the Arena candidate, could win on the first round with more than the 51% needed to avoid a runoff. But most experts say this is not likely.

A factor favoring Arena is the guerrillas’ announced threat to kill election workers and to attack buses and other vehicles taking people to polling places.

With the balloting still three days away, the guerrillas on Thursday paralyzed bus services, sabotaged power lines and staged sporadic attacks in a stepped-up drive to disrupt the election.

News agencies reported that most bus drivers refused to work because rebels have warned bus companies to keep their vehicles off the streets and told gas stations to stay closed.

Much of the capital and the eastern half of the country were without electricity after rebels destroyed power poles. Schools were closed throughout the nation.

Arena has a solid membership base of about 500,000 voters who are considered more committed and better organized than the members of other parties and more likely to defy the transport ban.

A Cristiani victory would give Arena nearly complete control of government at the national, provincial and local levels. The party already controls the National Assembly, the Supreme Court and a majority of the provincial and municipal governments.

Cristiani, 42 and a graduate of Georgetown University in Washington, is a millionaire coffee grower with a reputation for moderation in a party founded by a man--former army Maj. Roberto D’Aubuisson--accused by the Salvadoran government and the United States of running death squads.

A Moderating Role

Cristiani’s quick rise in the party is attributed to the conviction of Arena leaders that D’Aubuisson, who ran for president in 1982 and 1984, would never be accepted by the rest of the country or by the United States.

For diplomats and local political experts, the real question posed by the election is not whether Cristiani will win but whether he can moderate the behavior of the hard-line party elements headed by D’Aubuisson, who is barred from entering the United States because of alleged human rights violations, including a charge of plotting to assassinate a U.S. ambassador.

U.S. Embassy officials say they would view an Arena victory with caution, given the party’s past, but they also express confidence that Cristiani and other newcomers to the party leadership represent a modern, more flexible approach that has abandoned the old ways.

In any event, one U.S. diplomat said, “this is an election in a democracy and we have to accept the results.”

This was not always the American attitude. In 1982, most observers think, Arena won the presidency but was deprived of the victory by the U.S. Embassy.

One of the so-called new breed, Armando Calderon Sol, the mayor of San Salvador, recently told the Associated Press that “Washington turned El Salvador into a sociological laboratory” of anti-capitalism and that “we intend to rescue our sovereignty and independence.”

Cristiani has emphasized that further U.S. efforts to use its huge aid program--$438 million a year at present--to pressure the government to change its economic and military policies will be rejected.

Fears that Cristiani is either the good face of an essentially unchanged party or is not really any different from the D’Aubuisson forces have been reinforced by the candidate’s refusal to condemn the past practices of the party’s founders, including sponsorship of death squads that in the early 1980s killed hundreds of opponents and suspected guerrilla sympathizers.

Nor has he condemned such recent incidents as the killing of a Christian Democratic campaign worker by the Arena mayor of the suburb of Soyapango. Nor has he spoken out in the face of charges and evidence that death squads have been started up again by Arena elements associated with D’Aubuisson.

Still, Cristiani is considered personally free of any human rights taint. He is known for honesty and energy, qualities that have helped him in a campaign in which the Christian Democrats have been called corrupt and inefficient.

The largest question mark about an Arena government is the nine-year-old civil war. D’Aubuisson and his associates have bitterly criticized the government and the United States for allegedly not trying to win the war. They argue that there is too much concern for human rights and too much concern for people in rural areas--and that this has reduced the army’s ability to kill guerrillas.

However, some experts say, Arena is in the best position to negotiate with the Marxist guerrillas. A European diplomat said, “Arena can make arrangements and concessions with the (guerrillas) that the Christian Democrats would be called traitors for doing.”