As El Salvador Vote Nears, Polarized Past Still Present : Politics: In the postwar election, ballots are still expected to be cast for the far right or left. The idea of an organized center seems to have disappeared.

The television commercial begins with scenes of maimed children and burning buses. “Suspend the past!” the announcer says sarcastically, suggesting it is impossible to forget the civil war that this country lived for more than a decade.

As El Salvador prepares to vote in historic presidential elections next month, the past is very much present.

The elections are seen here as a crucial test of El Salvador’s troubled efforts to restore peace and build democracy after 12 years of war. To be held March 20, these are the first postwar elections and the first with full participation by the left.

But while the international community and many Salvadorans originally thought the elections would serve as a final chapter, the voting now seems to represent one more step in an incomplete process: Key reforms agreed to as part of landmark peace accords are still lagging. The electoral season has been plagued with violence, a dangerously flawed voter registration system and divisive campaigning that pits the war’s former enemies directly against one another.

In this still-polarized country, polls suggest that Salvadorans will vote heavily for two extremes--the government’s right-wing candidate and a leftist politician representing former guerrillas. And although much of the electorate still refuses to say how it is leaning, an organized political center seems to have faded into oblivion.

“The elections are a long way from fulfilling the expectations at the time the peace accords were signed,” said political analyst Hector Dada. “We have the paradox that two forces created to further authoritarianism (the left and the right) are the ones which have to build democracy.”

On Dec. 15, 1992, accords brokered by the United Nations put a formal end to a war between Marxist guerrillas and a succession of U.S.-backed governments that claimed about 75,000 lives. The rebels agreed to disarm, and the government agreed to a wide range of military, judicial and political reforms.

With the end of the Cold War’s bloodiest Central American conflict, El Salvador began to experience significant change. The army was cut in half, and guerrillas became civilian entrepreneurs. But many Salvadorans today wonder if the changes are permanent or if the country could revert to its violent past.

Armando Calderon Sol, the former mayor of San Salvador, is the presidential candidate for the ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena) party. He leads most polls, followed by Ruben Zamora, a legislator who heads a coalition of leftist parties and the former guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN).

The past is present in both campaigns, with neither party able, or willing, to break completely with its extremist history, analysts say. The campaigns have failed to generate much enthusiasm in an apathetic, war-weary population, analysts, diplomats and politicians say.

Arena was founded by the late Roberto d’Aubuisson, a cashiered army major widely believed to have organized many of the death squads that terrorized this country during the 1980s and that may still be operating. Calderon Sol’s name has frequently been linked to the death squads, allegations he denies.

Nevertheless, in contrast to the Arena campaign that took Alfredo Cristiani to the presidency in 1989, the party has revived the belligerent rhetoric typical of its early days as a fervently anti-Communist faction intolerant of opposition. Calderon Sol’s supporters regularly invoke the party hymn, which pledges to make El Salvador “the tomb where the Reds will end up.”

At the same time, Calderon Sol’s well-financed, well-organized campaign employs a vague, feel-good strategy of telling Salvadorans that they live better today thanks to an Arena government. Electing Calderon Sol will ensure continued stability and prosperity, the campaign promises.

“We worked step by step to see our country in different conditions,” Calderon Sol said during a recent campaign appearance at the El Presidente hotel in San Salvador. “The people know who it was that wanted to steer the country in another direction.”

A new secret poll conducted by Arena shows, however, that while the party still leads, about two-thirds of those responding had a negative impression of Calderon Sol and a positive impression of Zamora, sources familiar with the poll said. The results have unnerved Arena campaign strategists, the sources said, and appear to indicate that Calderon Sol has failed to capitalize on Cristiani’s relative popularity.

Zamora and the left, meanwhile, are struggling to convince a dubious public that they are ready and willing to join a system that they once rejected. Although Zamora has long participated in democratic politics, the guerrillas throughout the war prohibited their supporters from participating in elections, which they regarded as a farce, and they frequently burned city halls to disrupt voting. Now the left must reverse that historical mistrust among its own followers while allaying the fears of big business and traditional sectors of this society.

So far, analysts say, despite Zamora’s personal popularity, the left has not yet been able to convey an image as a trustworthy party capable of governing. A case in point came when a faction within Zamora’s coalition missed a filing deadline last month and effectively lost at least two congressional seats.

Zamora, who is scheduled to travel to Los Angeles this week on a fund-raising tour, campaigns by blaming the government for deteriorating social conditions, higher food prices and growing poverty, despite indexes showing substantial economic growth.

“The economy is fine; the people are bad off,” he said during a San Salvador appearance.

The third major presidential candidate is Fidel Chavez Mena, whose centrist Christian Democratic Party of the late President Jose Napoleon Duarte is the largest in the country but trails badly in all polls.

The right has been especially adept at exploiting the left’s recent past, using provocative television commercials with scenes from the war to portray the FMLN coalition as warmongers who destroyed schools, bridges and the economy.

The left, racked by division, disorganized and inexperienced, has not responded in kind and has failed to mount any sort of attack on Arena’s history. FMLN officials say they decided not to confront Arena directly so that they can promote an image of conciliation over conflict and thus attract new supporters.

“To remind people too much of the past would cause fear in some people, and that is not in our interest,” said Ana Guadalupe Martinez, a senior FMLN official who is running for congress.

“We have to (project) a new dimension, a new mentality. That is what will bring us new votes. Those who would vote for guerrillas are already sure votes for us.”

Other analysts say the left has been intimidated into a meek campaign by the killings in recent months of two senior FMLN officials and several supporters. Several Arena members have also been slain, including two mid-level campaign officials last week.

The elections are coming at a time when the peace process is under strain.

The redistribution of land and the building of a professional police force, two reforms dictated by the peace accords that are considered key to lasting stability, are behind schedule.

The resurgence of political violence triggered fears that death squads have been reactivated, and small groups of former combatants, angered at not having received promised land or other postwar benefits, have reportedly rearmed in some regions of the countryside.

Under pressure, Cristiani named a four-member special commission to investigate the recent killings and whether death squads were involved. The commission, called the Joint Group, is not to explore any acts committed before 1992.

The violence and the possibility that the peace process is in jeopardy have alarmed the Clinton Administration, which dispatched Brian Atwood, administrator of the Agency for International Development, to El Salvador.

Atwood, who arrived last Monday as a special envoy of Secretary of State Warren Christopher, took the unusual step of addressing the Arena-dominated National Assembly to express support for the elections and the probe into possible political murder.

“It is clear, given the history of this country, that when murder is committed, people believe it was committed by the other side,” Atwood said in an interview with a small group of reporters. “What we fear is a return to the cycle of violence (and) retribution.”

Perhaps the biggest threat to the elections is El Salvador’s inordinately complicated voter registration system. Despite efforts by dozens of nonprofit groups, more than half a million people who registered to vote--20% of the electorate--had not yet received their voter cards by Feb. 1, according to U.N. monitors.