Registration Flaws Mar Salvadoran Vote Today

Maria Hernandez, a 67-year-old war refugee, tried to retrieve her voter registration card three times before today’s national elections. Each time, she was told the card was not ready, and now Hernandez cannot vote for what would have been her first time.

In the nearby town of Arcatao, Carlos Franco Chavarria, a former guerrilla commander, received his voter card a couple of days ago, but his name does not appear on the master list. Franco, who is a member of Arcatao’s Municipal Election Board, does not think he will be allowed to vote.

“We have put down our guns,” Franco, 29, said of the rebels’ decision to disarm as part of peace accords that ended more than a decade of civil war. “Now, our weapon is our voice and our vote, and that is what they are denying us.”

Hernandez and Franco are among tens of thousands of Salvadorans--many of them supporters of the former guerrillas--who cannot vote today because of what U.N. peacekeepers say are flaws in the electoral system that will likely benefit the ruling right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena).

The problems have marred otherwise hopeful elections that are seen as an important test of El Salvador’s efforts to build a peaceful democracy after 12 years of war between leftist guerrillas and U.S.-backed forces. The war claimed an estimated 75,000 lives and sent a million people fleeing to Los Angeles and other cities around the world.

At least 2 million Salvadorans are expected to vote for president, all 84 members of the legislature and all 262 of this country’s mayors. These are the first elections since U.N.-brokered peace accords ended the war in 1992, and the first with full participation of all elements of the political spectrum, including the former guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN).

The two leading presidential candidates in this still-polarized country represent parties known more for their violent pasts than their democratic tendencies. Arena’s Armando Calderon Sol, the hard-line former mayor of San Salvador, holds a sizable lead in polls over leftist legislator Ruben Zamora, who heads a coalition that includes the former rebels. But if no candidate among the seven running for president obtains a simple majority, a runoff will be held between the two top vote-getters.

The elections will determine the pace of reforms mandated by the peace accords, including the formation of a civilian police force and redistribution of land to former rebels. Both reforms have been lagging.

“With our suffrage we will decide the path over which the next government guides the country,” President Alfredo Cristiani, whose five-year term is ending, said in a nationally televised speech to encourage voters to go to the polls. “We will do this with votes, not with guns. We will do this with the force of reason, not the absurdity of force.”

Many of the people who do not have voter cards live in the Chalatenango, Morazan and Usulutan departments, onetime strongholds of the guerrillas and battlefields during the brutal war. The rebels, who are venturing into mainstream politics for the first time, contend they will be deprived of more than a dozen mayoralties because of registration problems.

Perhaps more important to the long-range stability of El Salvador, analysts and diplomats say, the flaws in the registration process have excluded people who were told for decades that elections were fraudulent farces that didn’t matter. For many people who were to vote for the first time but now cannot, the elections were an important step in building trust in a democratic system.

“These people have lived outside the electoral system for years,” Zamora said. “We invite them to participate . . . and then the door is slammed in their face.”

Neither Zamora nor U.N. peacekeepers are alleging fraud. Because more than 3,000 observers will be deployed across the country today, the chances for massive fraud seem remote and the elections are likely to be the cleanest in El Salvador’s murky history, U.N. officials say. And those who are now locked out the system represent a very small percentage of voters.

“Despite remaining difficulties with the registration of voters and a political climate where mistrust among contenders still persists, the condition for the holding of free and fair elections are generally adequate,” U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said last week.

The problems nevertheless raised tensions on the eve of El Salvador’s most important elections. The campaign has been bitter at times, with Arena blaming the left for the war and the left reminding voters of Arena’s reputed association with death squads that killed Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980 and thousands of suspected leftist sympathizers.

According to a U.N. report on registration flaws, about 74,000 people who registered to vote were not given cards because authorities could not find their birth certificates. During the war, scores of municipal buildings--and the records housed inside--were destroyed, and efforts to restore the documents after the war were slow and incomplete.

The number is small in a pool of 2.6 million potential voters and is not expected to have an impact on national results. But the FMLN argues that in 35 municipalities in former war zones, the number of people who couldn’t get cards because they didn’t have birth certificates is enough to defeat the former rebels’ mayoral candidates.

The FMLN had targeted the municipal level as a priority in these elections because it provides entry-level government experience for political novices who until recently were warriors. For villagers, the mayor is the most important elected official, the one who has the greatest impact on their day-to-day lives.

Up to 300,000 other people are on the voting rolls but were not given cards, without which Salvadorans cannot vote. It is impossible to determine, however, how many of these people ran into problems and how many simply never bothered to pick up their cards.

The Supreme Electoral Tribunal, the government agency in charge of overseeing elections, says the flaws are purely technical and to be expected.

“You know, he who is going to lose tries from the very start to detract from the process,” tribunal President Luis Arturo Zaldivar said Saturday.

Ignoring U.N. protests, the tribunal also told people in four villages in the Chalatenango department that they would have to travel up to 25 miles over dirt roads to vote in the departmental capital, also named Chalatenango. The tribunal said the villages, including San Jose Las Flores and Arcatao, are “ghost towns” without enough people to justify polling stations.

The four villages, which dot the hardscrabble hills and valleys in northeastern El Salvador near Honduras, are microcosms of the civil war. They are largely populated by FMLN supporters and their families, many of whom settled in 1986-87 after years of fleeing army bombings. The current mayors of the towns, as well as pro-government townspeople, moved to the department capital to escape the FMLN, which often executed or kidnaped mayors who didn’t support it.

The decision to force people to vote in the Chalatenango capital appeared to favor the pro-government faction and violated electoral law, according to the United Nations. It also outraged opposition parties and the residents of the villages, who said they would not leave their hometowns to vote and would not recognize a mayor elected in the departmental capital.

On Friday, the villagers announced they were boycotting the elections. On Saturday, bowing to a hailstorm of international pressure, the tribunal reversed itself and said residents would be allowed to vote either in their hometowns or in the Chalatenango capital.

That may have solved one problem but did not help people like Franco, Hernandez and others who could not obtain voter cards or found themselves otherwise blocked from voting.

“We were enthusiastic at first because . . . we were going to vote to see if the country is changing,” said Maria Esperanza Ortega, 40, a community leader in Arcatao who supports the FMLN. “We have never voted. But now they want to set up obstacles.”