The Man in the Middle

As candidates hurl insults, attention turns to a dark horse

With only a month remaining until El Salvador's March 25 presidential elections, the political campaign has become a vitriolic verbal battle punctuated by rounds of gunfire. Among the casualties of the sporadic mayhem was a conservative member of the country's Constituent Assembly, Roberto Ismael Ayala Echeverria, 45, who was shot down in the capital, San Salvador, last week as he was entering his car. Local authorities could not say whether Ayala was a victim of El Salvador's right-wing death squads or of the Marxist guerrillas who are continuing to lay waste to the country.

The political climate was not improved by the campaigning of the two leading presidential candidates in the six-man race, Christian Democrat Jose Napoleon Duarte, 58, and ultrarightistRobertod'Au-buisson, 40, of the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA). At campaign rallies, D'Aubuisson kept referring to Duarte as "that crazy man" and accused him of having had links to the Marxist guerrillas. Duarte supporters, not to be outdone, called former Police Major D'Aubuisson "Mayor Escuadrdn," a Spanish reference to the infamous death squads with which D'Aubuisson's name is frequently linked.

The prospect of a D'Aubuisson victory is troublesome to Washington, which showed its displeasure with the candidate last fall by denying him a visa to visit the U.S. The Administration's main fear is that if D'Aubuisson wins, Congress will cut off all military aid to El Salvador. Behind the scenes, the embassy in San Salvador is now quietly extolling the virtues of a more acceptable conservative dark horse, whose campaign theme of conciliation aims, as the candidate puts it, "at ending radicalism and extremism of all sorts."

Francisco Jose Guerrero, 58, is a cherubic, rumpled lawyer who refers to his position in the presidential race as that of "an ordinary man caught between two messiahs." Despite such modest claims, Guerrero, known familiarly as "Chachi," is acknowledged to be one of El Salvador's shrewdest politicians. For years he was a key official in the ruling National Conciliation Party (P.C.N.), the alliance of landowners and military men that governed El Salvador, through a combination of political paternalism and electoral fraud, from 1961 until the 1979 coup that installed a reformist civilian-military government. In 1980 Guerrero began to rebuild the shattered P.C.N., which now stands somewhat right of center.

President of the Legislative Assembly from 1962 to 1968 and Foreign Minister from then until 1971, Guerrero was untainted by the corruption that pervaded the P.C.N. in its later years. In 1971 he earned high marks for his role in ending a two-year state of hostility between El Salvador and Honduras. Until last December he served as chief aide to the country's provisional President, Alvaro Magana. Deliberately vague in his campaign promises, Guerrero uses a folksy style to stress the need to heal the wounds of civil war. Says he: "Conciliation is a doctrine we must put into daily practice."

Guerrero's chances of winning an outright majority are virtually nil. In the 1982 Constituent Assembly elections, the P.C.N. took only 18.6% of the vote, vs. 40.7% for the Christian Democrats and 29.1 % for ARENA. But it seems unlikely that D'Aubuisson or Duarte will be capable of winning a majority either, which means that complex political maneuvering may be involved in choosing the new chief of state. The wheeling and dealing have already begun. Two conservative splinter parties announced last week that they had held talks on joining ranks with ARENA, and Guerrero has been carrying on his own informal conversations with that party. Even if he does not emerge from the discordant campaign as President, he may be the country's kingmaker. qed