Ruling Party Takes Big Lead in Salvador Vote

The government’s right-wing political party jumped to a substantial lead Sunday over leftist former guerrillas in peaceful but flawed elections, the first voting since the end of El Salvador’s bloody civil war.

Armando Calderon Sol, presidential candidate for the ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance, or Arena, was leading by nearly a 2-1 margin over leftist legislator Ruben Zamora. But Zamora insisted that a runoff will be necessary.

The former rebels who dominate Zamora’s coalition party angrily denounced a host of irregularities that prevented thousands of people from casting ballots.

With the full political spectrum participating for the first time in Salvadoran history, the elections were seen as an important step in El Salvador’s struggle to rebuild and heal deep wounds after a war that claimed 75,000 lives.

Leftist guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, battled U.S.-backed forces for 12 years until both sides were forced to negotiate a settlement. U.N.-brokered peace accords ended the war in 1992.

The rebels agreed to disarm in exchange for sweeping political, military and judicial reforms, many of which are still incomplete.

Preliminary results tabulated by the Jesuit-run University of Central America and the Spanish-language U.S. television network Telemundo gave Calderon Sol 48.7% of the vote nationwide, to 25.8% for Zamora. If no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, a runoff is required by law.

Members of Arena were claiming victory Sunday, while supporters in cars, honking horns and waving red, white and blue flags, pushed through the streets of the capital.

Salvadorans were also choosing all 84 legislators and 262 mayors nationwide. Results in these races were not yet available.

Only scattered violence was reported in Sunday’s elections. But a number of irregularities were observed by journalists and international monitoring teams.

Voting stations opened with up to two-hour delays; scores of people with valid voter cards were not included in official registrar lists and thus not allowed to vote; lines that stretched for blocks under a searing tropical sun moved painfully slowly, and there were isolated reports of double voting.

“All of these irregularities take away from the transparency, honesty and liberty of this event,” said the FMLN’s top official, Schafik Handal, a veteran Communist who ran for mayor of San Salvador.

Handal spoke at a hastily called news conference of the FMLN’s senior five-member command an hour after the polls closed. The command members were clearly angry at what they called the Supreme Electoral Tribunal’s deliberate strategy of impeding voters.

The tribunal is the government agency in charge of overseeing elections and is controlled by pro-government magistrates.

“These irregularities, and they must be understood as such, are a form of fraud,” FMLN leader Francisco Jovel said. “It isn’t the fraud of military dictatorships, of filling ballot boxes and taking them to the barracks. Today it is a fraud in the sense that the people have been denied their constitutional right to vote. . . . We are talking about a lot of people who had the desire to vote, and today that was frustrated.”

Zamora himself, speaking to reporters later Sunday, took a more moderate tone. He said he was confident he would dispute a second round of voting with Calderon Sol, and pledged to make the system work better than it did Sunday.

It was difficult to determine independently just what impact the delays and other problems would have on election results. California Democrat Rep. Dan Hamburg, part of a team of observers, said late Sunday: “There’s a consistent pattern of something between willful incompetence and just plain incompetence. . . . It isn’t like any one thing was so horrible. It’s like five votes here, 10 votes there.”

Turnout was estimated by local television at between 55% and 60%, or about 1.4 million people. Authorities before Sunday had predicted that more than 2 million people would vote.

President Alfredo Cristiani, who by law is barred from running for reelection, acknowledged minor irregularities early in the day. He did not immediately comment on the FMLN’s specific charges.

“Nothing is perfect,” he said. “The important thing is that these problems are not intentional.”

Despite the problems, many voters said Sunday’s exercise represented a marked departure from the past, when fighting, rebel boycotts and fear marked elections that were riddled with fraud.

“These elections are important for all Salvadorans (as) an opportunity to show that we all have a right to express our opinions,” said Ernesto Rodriguez, 36, who was voting accompanied by his family. “Here among us are people who were carrying guns, and now they’re participating in an electoral process, and that is the most important thing.”

“I’ve voted in past elections, but there were fewer people (because) we were afraid to come and vote,” Ena de Rivas, 26, whose sister lives in Los Angeles, said as she left a voting station in the densely populated San Salvador suburb of Soyapango.

Many voters, however, met only frustration. To vote, a Salvadoran citizen with a valid voter-registration card must report to the appropriate voting station, find his or her name on a computer printout of the registrar and then report to his or her assigned voting table to receive and deposit the ballots.

In many voting stations visited by journalists, hundreds of people could be seen searching for their names on the pink computer printouts, taped to the walls of gymnasiums or nailed to trees and often not posted in alphabetical order. If the name does not appear, the person cannot vote.

One woman searched for her name for two hours--finding the names of her dead father, her dead uncle and a sister who left El Salvador for Australia nine years ago. But she never found her own name--even though she possessed a valid voter card--and was not allowed to cast a ballot.

“A lot of people just give up and leave,” said police agent Gloria Zamora, who was helping people find their names at a voting station in a San Salvador. “A lot of people don’t know how to read, and the lists are really a mess. We are losing a lot of people.”

A survey contracted by a group of reporters revealed that the highest incidence of frustrated voters occurred in former war zones. By late morning, 10% of the people who tried to vote in the northeastern town of Chalatenango were unable to do so; the rate was 5% in the towns of Suchitoto and Tecaluca. By contrast, in Santa Tecla, an upper-middle-class suburb of San Salvador, the rate was 1%.

There were scattered reports of double voting. Zamora’s campaign manager, Hector Silva, found that when he presented himself at the voting booth, someone had already voted in his name.

“I was only allowed to vote because I am a legislator and television cameras were on top of me,” Silva said. “Undoubtedly, if it is lack of ability, it is a huge lack of ability. A low turnout goes against us. Intentional or not, we are affected by the turnout.”

In Guazapa, a town north of San Salvador on the skirts of a dormant volcano that was once the scene of vicious guerrilla battles and air force bombings, more than 200 people had lined up by 7 a.m. But the polls opened an hour later. Juan de Dios Fernandez, a corn farmer in a straw hat, had hiked and taken a bus beginning at 4 a.m. to reach the school where he was assigned to vote.

“It is an obligation,” he said.

Morris Valle, a 24-year-old former FMLN fighter, was voting for the first time.

“We have to make things different,” he said. “If things don’t change, I’ll have to go to the States. But if things change, I will stay here forever in the struggle, here with my beans and corn.”

The irregularities in Sunday’s voting did not necessarily follow political lines.

Inside a sweltering gymnasium in Zacamil, a working-class suburb of San Salvador, Santos Pleitez de Sigaran, 49, would have liked to vote for Arena because she believes that the party helped bring peace to El Salvador. But her name was not on the list.

“One comes with good intentions, but if they don’t let me vote, well, there’s nothing I can do,” she said after she could not find her name. “I am not going to force it. It does not make me happy. By right, my name had to be there.”