Salvadoran Rightists Are Campaigning on Fear, Critics Insist : Latin America: Charges and countercharges come with elections just a week away. It will be the first postwar vote in which the left will fully participate.

The master of ceremonies at a rally for right-wing presidential candidate Armando Calderon Sol was trying to warm up the placid crowd that had gathered here one recent Saturday morning.

Peasants, farmers and market vendors stood under a searing sun to listen to the candidates for the front-running Nationalist Republican Alliance, or Arena, the government’s party. “All those who support Arena, raise your hats!” the emcee implored the crowd.

A few people lifted their hats.

“All those who support Arena, raise your hats!” he tried again.

“And those who don’t raise their hats are terengos !” he added, invoking a slang word for “terrorists” used by the army throughout this country’s brutal civil war.

A lot of people took their hats off.

In historic elections March 20, Salvadorans will choose a president, an entire national legislative assembly and more than 200 mayors. These are El Salvador’s first postwar elections and the first with full participation of the left.

Calderon Sol is running a well-financed campaign that reminds many people of the worst images of the war.

Critics say his campaign plays on fear and is polarizing a shell-shocked nation.

Calderon Sol and his associates say they are simply distinguishing between those who can build a country and those who have spent a decade destroying it.

In stump speeches at rallies all over the country, Arena candidates refer to the former rebels who are now a political party as Communists and terrorists who planted the land mines that blew off children’s legs.

Ruben Zamora, the left’s presidential candidate who was never actually a guerrilla, is portrayed as a Marxist in democrats’ clothing.

They do not mention Arena’s own past involvement in the formation of death squads, a major cause of the war.

In fact, Calderon Sol used a campaign appearance last month to attend a memorial Mass for Roberto d’Aubuisson, the Arena party founder widely considered to have been the principal organizer of death squads that killed thousands of leftists and their sympathizers throughout the 1980s. D’Aubuisson is believed to have ordered the 1980 murder of Roman Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero.

At the Mass in Sensuntepeque, in north-central El Salvador, Arena supporters dressed in the party colors of red, white and blue filled the front pews of El Calvario church and then distributed flyers with pictures of D’Aubuisson, his fist clenched and raised, above the slogan, “Our leader, now and forever.”

Calderon Sol, the portly former mayor of San Salvador, denied later to reporters that his party is inciting violence.

He said it is important to remind voters of the war so that war will not return.

“We believe that the violence has been left behind,” he said. “We believe that our country has gotten beyond these problems of violence, that the Salvadoran people are tired and do not want violence, not even verbal violence, not to mention physical violence.”

In fact, the violence has continued.

Dozens of party activists from the left and right have been killed in the months leading up to the elections.

Prominent former guerrilla Commander Nidia Diaz, who is running for a seat in the legislature, narrowly escaped an assassination attempt late last month.

The former guerrillas, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, blame the escalation in violence on the climate created by Arena.

David Escobar Galindo, a conservative writer who is close to President Alfredo Cristiani, said Arena’s use of the language of war is intended to appease hard-line party members opposed to negotiating with the rebels.

“Arena has many people who sustain it, who still do not like the (peace) process,” he said. “There are people who want to hear barbarities about the peace process, who want to continue singling out (the left) as enemies and terrorists.”

Arena was founded by D’Aubuisson, a cashiered army major, in 1981 as a staunchly anti-Communist militaristic political organization. The campaign that first took Arena to the presidency in 1989, however, avoided the more belligerent rhetoric and portrayed then-candidate Cristiani as representative of a less-extremist, more-pragmatic faction of Arena.

Calderon Sol’s campaign, on the other hand, seems aimed at reviving some of the confrontational rhetoric used in Arena’s early days.

It is not clear what impact these tactics have had on voters.

Some pollsters and analysts say voters may be frightened and intimidated; others may approve of a strong-arm image that they believe is necessary to govern.

The Roman Catholic Church has responded by discouraging Salvadorans from voting for Arena.

Calderon Sol has denied participating in death squads. However, secret U.S. documents declassified last year tied him to a kidnaping ring active in the 1980s.

Arena’s election strategy also includes portraying itself as the party that will fortify economic and political stability.

The Calderon Sol campaign seeks to capitalize on Cristiani’s record and the government’s public works projects that have brought water and electricity to a number of poor neighborhoods. The left is portrayed as warmongers who could not run a country.

“They may have shaved their beards and bought a few suits,” Calderon Sol said during the rally at Cara Sucia, in the far western part of El Salvador. “But the same people who were on the Guazapa (volcano) with rifles are now cynically asking for your votes.”

Members of the FMLN, who agreed to disarm and form a political party as part of the peace accords that formally ended El Salvador’s war Jan. 16, 1992, complain also of Arena’s party theme song.

“Peace is written in blood,” the theme begins. It proceeds to pledge to make El Salvador “the tomb where the Reds will end up.”

The United Nations will monitor the vote.

If a candidate does not receive more than 50% of the vote, a runoff will be held between the two top vote-getters.

All polls today favor Calderon Sol.