Voting for Peace and Democracy

By Thomas Thomas A. Sancton. Reported by Johanna McGeary/ Washington and James Willwerth/San Salvador

But a rightist maneuver leaves the winners in doubt

It's a blow to the guerillas, a demonstration to the whole world that the people want peace and tranquillity." So declared Jose Maria Fuentes, 65, a craggy-faced carpenter in the provincial city of Chalatenango last week after his fellow citizens had queued up to vote in El Salvador's constituent assembly elections. In cities and towns across the embattled country, more than 1.5 million men and women braved guerrilla threats -- and in some cases dodged bullets -- to cast their ballots. Defying widespread predictions of a dismal turnout, at least 80% of the electorate -- twice the normal figure -- took part in the most important elections in the country's history. Said President Ronald Reagan in his prime time press conference: "Now they really showed that there is a real desire for democracy there, and I am therefore going to be optimistic about what happens."

As the week wore on, however, the reasons for optimism began to fade. At first the election had looked like a stunning personal victory for Jose Napoleon Duarte, President of the civilian-military junta and the man backed by the U.S. because of his moderate reform policies. His centrist Christian Democratic Party led the balloting with a 40% plurality and 24 seats in the 60-member assembly, which will name an interim President, write a new constitution and organize national elections. The Christian Democrats hoped that after their strong showing they would easily be able to control the assembly by forming a coalition with one or two of the rightist parties. But to the consternation of Duarte and his U.S. supporters, the rightists suddenly began to form their own ruling coalition under the leadership of cashiered National Guard Officer Roberto d'Aubuisson, 38, a fanatical anti-Communist who has been linked by his enemies with the country's right-wing death squads.

Thus the unresolved election could cause further political polarization and escalating civil war. At stake were not only the future government of El Salvador but also the hopes of the Reagan Administration's entire Central American policy. A repressive right-wing government could be expected to change the junta's land and banking reforms and to multiply human rights abuses, which would undoubtedly lead in turn to a cutoff of U.S. military aid. Said Reagan: "It would give us great difficulties if a government appeared on the scene that backed away from reforms that have been instituted."

Without U.S. guns and money, the Salvadoran army might well be defeated by the guerrillas. The victorious leftists could support Marxist insurgencies in neighboring Guatemala and throughout the region. In short, Washington's worst domino-theory nightmares could result from the very elections on which the U.S. had pinned its best hopes. Said Congressman Stephen Solarz: "If a government of the right is formed, it will indeed turn out that the elections paved the road to disaster."

As election day approached, the guerrillas sought to disrupt the balloting, which leftist parties boycotted, by promising death to voters. Warned one rebel slogan: "Vote in the morning, die in the afternoon." Even before election day dawned clear and stiflingly hot on March 28, the guerrillas launched scattered attacks in several of the capital's northern suburbs and a number of provincial towns. In the eastern city of Usulutan, nearly 500 insurgents made the sharpest assault of the day. Before retreating they managed to prevent local officials from opening the polls.

But still the people came--by hundreds, thousands and hundreds of thousands--defying the guerrillas' threats and claims to their allegiance. Under a sweltering sun in the San Salvador suburb of Mejicanos, voters stood in a half-mile queue while a firefight raged six blocks away. When the action moved closer, the people dropped to the ground until it passed, keeping their places in line. In another northern suburb, San Antonio Abad, voters hid in their homes until the end of a skirmish that left twelve rebels and three soldiers dead. When the fighting stopped about 8:30 a.m., the people had to step over bodies and rivulets of blood in the dusty streets to vote. But vote they did.

Congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania, an official U.S. observer of the election, asked a woman in the eastern city of Jocoro if she were intimidated by guerrilla threats. She replied: "They can kill my family, they can kill my neighbors if we vote. But they cannot kill us all." Unable to land its helicopter in Perquin because of fighting in the area, Murtha's party looked down to see long lines of voters waiting patiently to cast their ballots. In the departmental capital of San Miguel, Father Theodore Hesburgh, president of the University of Notre Dame and a U.S. observer, happened upon a funeral cortege. A mother was burying her soldier son, whose face had been sliced away by a guerrilla machete. There was no priest there, so Hesburgh offered the last rites. And to the mother, who was going to vote, he presented a rosary given him by the Pope.

Salvadorans showed no less determination to vote in those areas that were spared of violence. In San Luis Talpa, near the international airport, voters were lined up at 6 a.m. and broke through the gates of the polling station 45 minutes before it opened. All across the country, roads were thronged with people hiking long miles to the polls because the guerrillas had sabotaged many of the country's buses. People waited as long as eight hours to vote. Marveled Senator Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas, head of the U.S. observer delegation: "I don't know of any Kansans who would wait even two hours."

The vote seemed more a mandate for peace and democracy than for particular politicians or parties. Nevertheless, the politicians had to divide the power and put together a functioning government. With 40% of the vote, Duarte's party seemed assured of a leading role in the new assembly. But the five rightist parties, who collectively polled 60%, had other plans. Their leaders met the morning after the election at the home of Salvadoran Popular Party Leader Francisco Quinonez to begin talks on forming their own coalition. Led by D'Aubuisson's ultraright Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), with its 29% of the vote and 19 assembly seats, the five parties were held together mainly by personal animosity to Duarte. "The fact is," explained one foreign diplomat, "Duarte represents change in a society that resisted change for 50 years and was entirely geared to the right's benefit." The rightists hold Duarte responsible for the country's acute economic crisis and for the land redistribution program, which has broken up the large private estates.

The rightists interrupted their talks for a luncheon meeting with U.S. Ambassador Deane Hinton, who had invited candidates and representatives from the six contending parties to discuss the elections over paella and fruit custard. Hinton urged the various parties to work together for a moderate government of national unity. But when the five rightist parties huddled again after lunch, they put the finishing touches on their call for a program with no mention of Duarte's party.

Duarte, who had been robbed of the 1972 presidential election and later fled into exile, vowed to fight this latest challenge. "Five hundred thousand voters cannot be ignored," he told reporters at a midweek "victory" party. Said Christian Democrat Leader Julio Adolfo Rey-Prendes ominously: "If we are not in the government, all the people who voted for us will lose faith in democracy. If you lose faith in democracy, you have to find other ways to power."

Surprised by the rightists' power play, the U.S. embassy immediately set to work trying to unravel their deal, talking daily with the leaders of the parties. Said a U.S. official: "We are doing our best to encourage the good guys and keep the bad guys down." The U.S. made it clear to the five parties that Congress would simply not send any more guns to a country run by a repressive right-wing coalition. Said one U.S. diplomat bluntly: "They cannot pursue the war against the guerrillas without the U.S. They know what our price for that is."

The condition for continued U.S. aid was that the Salvadoran government must "credibly" strive for three longstanding U.S. objectives: 1) continuation of the land redistribution program, 2) commitment to free elections and 3) an end to indiscriminate human rights abuses. Any new coalition, the U.S. made clear, must include a "prominent role" for the Christian Democrats, who are most closely tied to the reforms. The U.S. also hammered home the message that a leading role for the notorious D'Aubuisson would be unacceptable to Congress.

The pivotal group in the battle for the assembly was the National Conciliation Party (P.C.N.), whose 14 seats could tip the majority to either D'Aubuisson's ARENA or Duarte's Christian Democrats. The party of the military governments that ruled the country before the 1979 coup, the loosely organized P.C.N. seems to be divided into two main factions: a rightist wing, led by Secretary-General Raul Molina Martinez, and a moderate wing, led by ex-Army Colonel Roberto Escobar Garcia, whom one foreign diplomat calls "the best man they've got."

The P.C.N. at first lined up with D'Aubuisson's coalition. But the Christian Democrats hoped to win over some moderate deputies. One problem, said a foreign diplomat, is that both Molina and Escobar Garcia were "talking to different people and saying different things. [The P.C.N.] is not being led by any one person. Trying to understand them is like tying up with a lot of horses. The party is wavering." Another wavering group, the Democratic Action Party, meanwhile, was said to have broken with ARENA and to have withdrawn its two deputies from the rightist coalition.

By week's end the potential rightist bloc was beginning to give way in the face of Washington's blunt warnings. Hinting that certain Christian Democrats might be acceptable as future leaders, ARENA and the P.C.N. finally agreed to meet with Duarte's party in talks about the composition of the new government. As the largest single bloc in the assembly, the Christian Democrats still seemed likely to emerge as a major powerbroker. But the rightists insisted that they would not accept Duarte himself in the new national leadership, a decision that both he and his U.S. backers appeared willing, however reluctantly, to accept.

"If the people want me as President, I'll be President," said Duarte at a press conference at the National Palace. "If they want me out, I'll be out." However philosophical he appeared about his own fate, Duarte insisted that the Christian Democrats would "not accept any solution that will mean the destruction of hopes of justice for the people."

Surrounded by heavily armed bodyguards, D'Aubuisson later told reporters pugnaciously: "The Salvadoran people voted for us, not for Mr. Duarte to be President." He nonetheless tried to appear conciliatory, saying that his coalition "will exclude no one from the government." D'Aubuisson reiterated his stand on Duarte's land and banking reforms that he had bitterly criticized during the campaign. Said he: "We aren't going to do away with the reforms. We are going to make them more efficient."

Washington policymakers looked on all the pronouncements and maneuvers as initial "posturing" in what may be a drawn-out coalition-building process. Cheered by their apparent success in softening up the rightist opposition, U.S. officials had recovered some of their earlier optimism by week's end. The Administration was "more than hopeful," said a senior official, that whatever ruling coalition emerges will not only pay lip service to the required reforms but will actually carry them out. "It is not who runs the next government that's important," said Everett Briggs, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs.

"It is what the government does."

Far less sanguine about the future, some critics of the Administration's policy continued to press for a negotiated peace settlement with the guerrillas. "Now is the time to negotiate," insisted Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas. "When the center-right elements are the strongest they will strength." ever But be, the they success can of the negotiate from elections has likely dampened whatever interest the Administration might have had in promoting such talks. The big voter turn out may have bought the U.S. time by eas ing domestic and foreign pressure for immediate negotiations. Most important, the showing undermined the leftists' claim to popular support; in effect, every vote cast was a vote against violence. Says one top White House aide: "I don't see how you can negotiate with them without two conditions: that they are willing to give up violence and to participate peace fully in the political process."

The chances of that seem slim. Guillermo Ungo, spokesman for the guerillas' diplomatic- political commission, denounced the elections and said that they would only restore "the old oligarchic system," Said one Washington official: "There is no indication that any elements of the left have softened their attitude. They seem to want to continue to win power by force."

Meanwhile, Washington was trying to undermine the guerrillas by exerting new pressure on Cuba and Nicaragua to stop supplying them with arms and advice.

There seems to be little hope for serious talks with the Cubans. Said one U.S. diplomat: "They have expressed not the slightest desire to address anything we wanted to talk about." But the U.S. is likely to negotiate with Nicaragua's Sandinista leaders, who are eager for discussion, as soon as the contending Salvadoran politicians finish what the voters started, by forming a government . -- -- By Thomas A. Sancton.

Reported by Johanna McGeary/ Washington and James Willwerth/San Salvador

With reporting by Johanna McGeary/ Washington and James Willwerth/San Salvador

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