Folksy Candidate Is a Compromise for Arena Party

El Salvador’s ruling party once stated its platform in a single swipe: Maj. Roberto D’Aubuisson, founder of the Nationalist Republican Alliance, would slash a watermelon in half with a machete.

“Just like the Christian Democrats,” he would say of the rival party, with its green banner. “Green on the outside, red on the inside.” Arena--as his party became known--was unmistakably anti-Communist.

D’Aubuisson died of cancer in 1992, and polls show that the once-dominant Christian Democrats will be lucky to get 5% of the vote in Sunday’s presidential election. And Arena’s candidate, expected to win decisively, is a philosopher and follower of an east Indian mystic named Sai Baba.

Francisco Flores is no watermelon slasher. Bespectacled and pudgy at 39, he campaigned mostly by listening to voters. When he does speak, he tells parables.

Recently, he recalled climbing a volcano for a view of Lempa River, the great resource of Chalatenango province, and meeting a tortilla vendor. She had put her son through medical school.

“I realized then that the great wealth of Chalatenango was not the Lempa, but people like this woman,” Flores concluded.

“This style has given the party an image of being more open, more participative,” said political analyst Luis Cardenal, who added that he is not sure how much is image and how much is substance.

In the old days, “Maj. D’Aubuisson just decided that I was going to be the candidate,” said former President Alfredo Cristiani, recalling his own nomination for the 1989 elections.

This time, the party’s central committee met behind closed doors and chose Flores, building consensus among different sectors before nominating him at a party convention last year. Not exactly a free-for-all.

Similarly, at a recent campaign stop Flores outlined a platform promising to combat crime with better education, to jump-start agriculture and to protect the elderly, children and single mothers. Then he invited responses.

Speakers ranging from coffee growers and cattlemen to union leaders, former guerrillas and even the Mara Salvatrucha, the country’s most feared street gang, offered reactions. All were carefully selected and most limited their remarks to pledges of support.

“Given its history, everyone is reluctant to say that Arena is a traditional political party because it has these dark corners and you never know what’s going to jump out of them,” said Geoff Thale of the Washington Office on Latin America, a U.S. think tank.

Until Flores, Arena leaders clearly were linked to either the Salvadoran oligarchy or the death squads that caused intellectuals, students, labor leaders and others to “disappear” during a 12-year civil war that ended in 1992.

Early in the war, Flores--whose nickname is Paco--was an Arena youth leader. A graduate of the elite American School here, he studied at several U.S. universities, receiving a bachelor’s degree from University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a master’s in philosophy from the World University, an unaccredited, Sai Baba-affiliated college in Ojai.

On returning to El Salvador, he filled various mid-level positions in the Cristiani government.

Flores remained little-known as President Armando Calderon Sol’s press secretary and a party delegate to the Legislative Assembly in 1994.

Both Flores’ presidential candidacy and Arena’s new image stem from a voter rebellion two years ago that unseated many Arena mayors and deputies.

Without a majority in the Legislative Assembly, Arena had to find a compromise candidate for assembly chairman. The opposition parties accepted Flores, considered a conciliator.

They also were betting that he could not parlay the chairmanship into a presidential bid. No one foresaw that he would handle a banking crisis so well that his status would rise.

So, when Arena leaders deadlocked over choosing a presidential nominee, Flores again emerged as a compromise candidate. “He’s a creature of the Arena process, rather than having shaped and created that process,” Thale said.

Yet, with his folksy anecdotes and attentive expression, Flores has wooed back disillusioned voters.

“I would like to think that a new generation of young people on both the left and right are able to move the country forward and deal with each other,” Thale said. “That is the image that Paco Flores is trying to project. I hope it’s true.”