Salvadoran Shake-Up

The election results in El Salvador are not encouraging. They will further polarize an already deeply divided society unless the Bush Administration is willing to push for a negotiated end to nearly a decade of warfare.

There are several reasons that the winner was Alfredo Cristiani, presidential candidate for the rightist Arena party. The voter turnout was very low, with one-third to one-half of eligible persons not casting ballots, especially in rural areas where leftist rebels are strongest. Arena’s most loyal supporters are found among upper- and middle-class voters in San Salvador and other cities where turnout was higher. The ruling Christian Democratic party split into two factions, neither of which campaigned effectively. Christian Democrats also were demoralized, with their longtime hero, President Jose Napoleon Duarte, dying of cancer, while several of his top aides stood accused of corruption in public office. Finally, the Salvadoran economy is a shambles, weakened by warfare and a disastrous coffee crop this year.

But whatever the causes, Arena’s victory marks the failure of a U.S. government strategy of building a centrist government that could defeat the rebels by appealing to political moderates in El Salvador and abroad, including in the U.S. Congress. Now the White House and State Department must either change strategy or find ways to rationalize sending more than $1 million per day in U.S. aid to a government controlled by a party full of people many liken to the Nazis.

That is a harsh charge, but the evidence of its validity is unnervingly abundant. Arena was founded by El Salvador’s most violent rightists, using money provided by a small oligarchy whose selfish rule created the conditions for the rebellion in the first place. Despite Cristiani’s candidacy, Arena’s most popular leader remains former Maj. Roberto D’Aubuisson, who founded El Salvador’s fearsome death squads, helped plan the murder of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero and even plotted, unsuccessfully, to kill a U.S. ambassador he didn’t like.

Cristiani and other Arena members who claim to be moderates insist that D’Aubuisson and his ilk are in the background now. And some in the State Department suggest that the United States is obligated to abide by the results of a democratic vote even if we don’t like who wins. But when the Nazis first came to power in Germany, it was through elections. That did not obligate other democracies to endorse Nazi government policies. Neither does Arena’s victory obligate the United States to go along with everything its leaders want to do.

Given past threats by Salvadoran military leaders and D’Aubuisson, an Arena government may be tempted to go after the insurgents with all-out military pressure rather than the low-intensity warfare favored by U.S. military advisers. But all-out war would exacerbate the bloodshed in El Salvador to levels no reasonable human being could accept. Given the staying power of the guerrillas over the past decade, such a bloody strategy might not even work.

So the U.S. government must use the leverage it has in San Salvador, which is considerable, to pursue a new strategy based on the painful reality that El Salvador’s crisis reflects both a divided society and a battlefield stalemate.

Early U.S. reaction to the vote made it clear that Washington understands the nature of its leverage. White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said: “We continue to press for democracy and human rights improvements in that country, and we’ll just have to see what kind of actions we get from the new government.”

The best way out of the deadlock is negotiations. Both Cristiani and the rebels said during the election campaign that they are willing to talk peace. The U.S. government must insist that Cristiani pursue the tentative negotiations begun by Duarte. Negotiations in El Salvador are likely to be slow and difficult, and the end result will not be satisfying to anyone. But it is preferable to the final solution that extremists like D’Aubuisson want to pursue, with the United States as an unhappy accomplice.