Hard-Liner Is Favored in El Salvador

Like many of the party faithful, Armando Calderon Sol has decorated his office with a large portrait of the late Roberto D’Aubuisson, the cashiered army major widely believed to have organized El Salvador’s most notorious death squads during the last decade of civil war.

With his mentor D’Aubuisson, Calderon Sol founded the Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena party) in 1981 as a bulwark against communism. Today, barring major surprises, Calderon Sol will be elected president of El Salvador in a runoff that concludes the country’s first postwar election.

Calderon Sol, a former mayor of this capital, brings with him his party’s hard-line history, yet he will preside over a country where leftist former guerrillas--his recent enemies--for the first time have a legal role in government as legislators and mayors.

In today’s voting, the right-wing Calderon Sol, 45, is expected to defeat leftist Congressman Ruben Zamora, who leads a coalition made up primarily of former guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN).

The victor replaces President Alfredo Cristiani, also of Arena. Cristiani represents the modern business faction of Arena that has projected the image of a more pragmatic and less extremist party. Calderon Sol, however, has included hard-line elements of the party in his inner circle, raising questions about the government he will run and its commitment to U.N.-brokered peace accords signed by Cristiani.

The accords ended the war in 1992 and required a host of reforms, including the creation of a nonpolitical police force and the overhaul of El Salvador’s corrupt and inept judiciary. Many of the reforms are still incomplete, and opponents fear that Calderon Sol will backtrack on changes seen as crucial to building democracy here.

“The real danger is that Arena, with its wide margin of victory, will be tempted to impose a one-party system, marginalizing the (opposition) rather than working with it,” said Christian Democrat businessman Abraham Rodriguez.

Calderon Sol says he supports the peace accords but disagrees with some of the measures they require. A U.N.-backed Truth Commission that investigated war crimes went too far, he argues, because it blamed most atrocities on government forces. And the police, he told reporters, should be professional but should also be “feared.”

Today’s runoff is required because no candidate obtained an absolute majority in March 20 elections. In that contest, Calderon Sol took 49% of the vote to Zamora’s 25%. Arena and an allied pro-military party won majority control of the National Assembly.

The elections had been seen as an important test in El Salvador’s struggle to recover and rebuild after the war, but widespread irregularities in the March 20 voting cast a pall over the entire process. Tens of thousands of people were prevented from voting.

“There was frightening mismanagement of the election beyond our worst expectations,” a senior U.N. official said last week. “There was widespread lack of trust by the electorate before the voting, (and) now it’s much worse.”

The most scathing criticism has been leveled at the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, which supervises the elections and is dominated by Arena. It refused international advice, declined to spend money to transport voters to the polls and made voting unnecessarily complicated, U.N. observers say.

“The (tribunal) is completely discredited and has therefore tarnished the election,” the U.N. official said.

The FMLN claims the irregularities cheated the party out of several municipal and legislative seats, and U.N. observers have confirmed that thousands of people were denied voting cards in 30 towns where the FMLN is strong.

The FMLN challenged the results in 37 cities and towns, but the tribunal rejected all the claims--a decision that Rafael Lopez Pintor, who heads the U.N. electoral division, called “shocking.”

Calderon Sol and other Arena officials say the party has changed in the last decade as it has sought to widen its appeal to the political center. They describe a well-organized, more moderate party without whose cooperation Cristiani could not have forged a peace agreement with the rebels.

“In 1981, I thought the only way to save El Salvador was to kill all the communists,” said Ricardo Montenegro, an Arena veteran and vice president of the National Assn. of Private Enterprise. “The situation was either we killed them or they would kill us. . . .

“Seventy thousand people have been killed, the country has been destroyed. This makes us see things from another perspective. Just killing people does not solve things. . . . The people with Calderon Sol have changed, as the majority of Salvadorans have changed in the last 15 years.”

Critics question just how deep those changes go. D’Aubuisson’s name, for example, is still invoked in reverent tones at every Arena rally. Diplomats say the strongest leverage that can be applied to Arena will be the desire of business leaders to continue to prosper.

In the two years that have passed since the end of the war, San Salvador has experienced a construction boom, and commerce is brisk.

“There is a very powerful private sector here that depends on the exports market and does not want (the Salvadoran government) to be an international pariah,” said a diplomat who follows Arena. “Changes in the Arena party are not done for altruistic reasons but because it works politically and helps attract investment.”

According to secret U.S. government documents declassified last year, Arena’s paramilitary unit, directed by D’Aubuisson, was responsible for thousands of murders and a wave of terrorism through the 1980s. The Truth Commission found that D’Aubuisson ordered the 1980 assassination of Roman Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero.

“Ultra-rightist standard-bearer Roberto D’Aubuisson and members of his Nationalist Republican Alliance cooperate with and direct some terrorist groups,” according to one of the documents, a February, 1985, CIA briefing paper. “Although we perceive Arena’s internal terrorist network to be one component of the much broader phenomenon of rightist violence in El Salvador, the party’s attitudes and goals probably influence extremist perspectives in general.”

D’Aubuisson died of throat cancer in 1992.

The documents also report that the 1981 kidnaping of Emilio Charur, president of the Salvadoran Soccer Federation, was plotted at Calderon Sol’s home. An army officer who worked for death squads and is currently in jail in the Salvadoran city of Santa Ana claims that Calderon Sol was part of a group of young Arena militants who bombed the Ministry of Agriculture and wreaked other havoc in the early 1980s.

The group’s alleged goal was to destabilize the government at the time, which was initiating an agrarian reform that took land from wealthy Salvadorans. Calderon Sol has denied the allegations.

Diplomats, politicians and business leaders point to substantial differences between Cristiani and Calderon Sol. A lawyer by profession who made a popular mayor, Calderon Sol is seen as a quick-tempered man who lacks Cristiani’s intellectual and negotiating skills. He relies more on affability than wit and has been described as malleable. One businessman tells a story of meeting with Calderon Sol three times to discuss a tax, and each time Calderon Sol had a different position.

Such characteristics, analysts say, make those who surround Calderon Sol all the more influential. Diplomats say they will be watching closely to see if Arena extremists are given Cabinet positions.