Salvador Ruling Party, Ex-Rebels Head for Runoff

As international observers Monday analyzed serious irregularities in El Salvador’s first postwar elections, the presidential race appeared headed for a runoff between the government’s right-wing party and a coalition of former guerrillas.

U.N. peacekeepers, U.S. Congress members and other observers said disorganization, delays and other systemic problems prevented large numbers of Salvadorans from voting in Sunday’s historic national elections, and they called for reform. But most said they saw no evidence of massive fraud, and the former guerrillas retreated from earlier allegations of fraud.

With the vote count proceeding slowly, Armando Calderon Sol of the ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance, or Arena, held on to a substantial lead over leftist legislator Ruben Zamora, who heads a nine-party coalition that includes former rebels of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN.

But Calderon Sol, the portly former mayor of San Salvador, was just shy of the absolute majority he needed to avoid a runoff.

“The trend indicates that we are in the presence of a second election, since no single party reached the required percentage” of more than 50%, said Luis Arturo Zaldivar, president of the government’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal.

He said the likely date for a runoff would be April 24.

In a news conference Monday night, Calderon Sol said he still held out hope for a first-round victory but was confident that he could win a runoff easily. “We were the big winners on Sunday,” he proclaimed, saying Arena had taken most mayoralties in the country and may have gained a majority in the National Assembly.

Members of Zamora’s coalition said they believed that they could win a second round. But before Sunday’s voting, Zamora’s senior campaign strategist acknowledged that, if Arena obtained more than 45% in the first round, Calderon Sol would almost certainly win the runoff by forming coalitions with smaller right-wing parties.

With almost 77% of the vote counted Monday evening, Arena hovered just above 49%, while Zamora’s coalition fluctuated between 25% and 26%.

On Sunday night, senior FMLN leaders denounced fraud in the elections, the first voting since U.N.-brokered peace accords ended a bloody 12-year civil war in 1992. But they backed down and, on Monday, shifted their focus to the likely second round, planning ways to overcome voting anomalies and budgeting campaign money, which, by law, the government will provide for the runoff.

“We are convinced there will be a second round, and we will work to eliminate election irregularities,” said Schafik Handal, senior FMLN leader and unsuccessful candidate for mayor of San Salvador. Handal lost to Arena’s Mario Valiente by almost a 2-1 margin.

The irregularities included chaos, long lines and snail-pace processing at voting stations. Thousands of people were prevented from casting ballots because their names did not appear on incomplete voter-registration lists, even though they had valid voter cards.

Transportation was a problem for many rural and urban voters; in San Salvador, the government’s decision to concentrate voting in just five stations meant many citizens had to travel a considerable distance, then wait a long time to vote.

While the government said the problems were to be expected in a country emerging from war, some observers chalked them up to an intentional effort to discourage massive voting.

David Browning, a British expert on El Salvador who has observed elections in Central America for years, said the irregularities caused “large-scale disenfranchisement.” He blamed the woes on a lack of political will on the part of government officials because most of the problems cropped up in past elections and were never corrected.

“It is not just fumbling ineptitude (when) it could have been put right, and it was not put right,” Browning said in an interview, a day after he observed voting in the capital and its working-class suburbs.

A team of observers representing the U.S. government also said it was “troubled” that “many of the procedures cited as administrative defects” in previous elections continued to be practiced.

“The major Election Day problems stemmed from a complex registration and voting process,” said Brian Atwood, President Clinton’s envoy and the U.S. Agency for International Development director. “In case of a second round, a complete review of the voter registry and a renewed effort by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal to ensure that all aspects of the electoral process are transparent and better organized is extremely important.”

He added that he had no evidence there was a deliberate attempt to disenfranchise prospective voters.

While most observers agreed the voting difficulties did not substantially change the presidential race’s outcome, diplomats and others said the greatest damage may have been done at the local level. In many small towns, a few dozen votes can determine a race. If former combatants who were participating in elections for the first time meet only frustration, the diplomats said, they could become disenchanted with a democratic system that seems pointless.

Augusto Ramirez Ocampo, head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission here, said at least 25,000 people could not vote on Sunday because their names did not appear on registry lists.