First Step

Guatemala opts for moderation

There was good news for the Reagan Administration last week in military-dominated Guatemala, where U.S. influence is weak at best. Some 1.8 million voters braved four-hour polling lines, tropical rainstorms and a bewildering array of political choices to cast ballots in their country's most open and fraud-free elections in more than a decade. In the race for a new 88-seat Constituent Assembly, citizens gave a strong show of of support to moderate civilian political parties and issued a sharp rebuff to the 8 military and the landowning oligarchy that have ruled the country since a CIA-backed coup in 1954.

One of the big winners was the center-left Christian Democratic Party, led by Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo, 41, which captured 22 Assembly seats. Tied for first place was the moderate Union of the National Center, led by Jorge Carpio Nicolle, 51. Guatemala's traditional ultrarightist party, the Movement of National Liberation, took 21 seats. Both Cerezo and Carpio predicted that they could fashion a majority by making deals with some of the 14 other parties in the contest.

The elections were only the first step on the road to civilian rule. General Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores, who took power from General Efrain Rios Montt in a coup last August, called the elections in March as part of his promise to return Guatemala to democracy. But he took pains to remind the competing politicians that their mandate was limited to writing a new constitution and preparing for presidential elections in July 1985. Ten days before the vote, Mejia appeared on national television, flanked by 27 armed-forces commanders, to declare that he would take "whatever means" necessary against the new Constituent Assembly if it tried to replace him with a provisional President. Said a Guatemala City lawyer: " The power is still in the hands of the ones who have the machine guns."

Even so, the election marked progress for a country with one of the worst human rights records in the hemisphere (116 political killings and kidnapings a month). The results might also earn a small reward from the U.S. Congress, which is currently studying an Administration request for $10 million in "nonlethal" military aid for Guatemala, after a seven-year embargo on such assistance. Summed up the Rev. Kenneth Baker, a Jesuit priest and one of eleven official U.S. observers at the elections: "We have seen a tremendous hope in the future, but not necessarily a certainty."