EL SALVADOR
ties is the Nationalist Republican Alliance
(ARENA).
This group is led by Major
Roberto d'Aubuisson, a former military officer. He has been accused by the
US-sponsored electoral maneuver weaves a tangled web
Instead of providing a facade of legality and parliamentary democracy for the Salvadoran junta, the March 25 elections highlighted the deepening crisis of bourgeois rule in the country.
In the first place, they demonstrated the shrinkage in the government's physical hold over the population, in particular since voting is compulsory in the country. Everywhere the government had effective control over people and was able to provide the facilities for voting,
Salvadorans had to cast a ballot.
However, whereas in the elections for the Constituent Assembly last year an estimated 80% of those qualified voted, this time the most optimistic of Salvadoran bourgeois politicians could not claim that more than 65% to 70% went to the polls.
In the province of Chalatenango, for example, where the insurgents are active, the number of those voting fell from 60,000 in the 1982
Constituent Assembly elections to just 19,000 this time.
According to the first official figures released by the Central Electoral
Council on March 28, the Christian Democrat Napoleon Duarte was far from getting an absolute majority and only 10% ahead of the ultrarightist Roberto d'Aubuisson.
That is, these initial figures showed Duarte with 41%, d' Aubuisson with 31% and the second rightist candidate,
Francisco Guerrero of the National Conciliation Party, with 22%.
Thus, a runott vote appears certain, and the rightists have gotten a majority. Even if Duarte is able to win the second round, he is very likely to have to openly mortgage himself to the reactionary and murderous
Moreover, the government proved unable even to organize orderly
The chaos was so great as to arouse an outcry from the bourgeois political forces themselves and in particular from the army.
The commander of the elite US-trained rangers denounced the bungling of the election officials as virtual treason.
Symbolically, after the first few days, bandoned the electronic equipment provided by
Thus, the final tally may not be known until weeks after the polling date.
The FMLN-FDR issued a communique describing the results of the
"the biggest political failure the Reagan administration has elections as suffered in this country."
The statement went on to say, of 261 municipalities, people did not go to the polls in 89, that is 34%, because they were in rebel-controlled zones."
According to Christian Martin, special correspondent for the Paris daily, Liberation, the elections were being referred to as a "farce" even in the well-to-do rightist neighborhoods of San Salvador.
Martin also interviewed the mayor of Chinameca, a village in the eastern part of the country, who complained that it would be even harder to get people to vote in the second round.
Vincent KERMEL
The March 25 presidential elections in
El Salvador had a key role to play in
US policy to block the revolutionary
They were part of a plan to upsurge.
defuse the social crisis underlying the civil war that has gone on now for several years, and to isolate the forces of the
Farbundo
Marti
National
Liberation
Front to clear the way for destroying them.
What the Reagan administration sought to do was to build up a facade of "reform" for the Salvadoran junta.
To this end, it proposed some economic measures, such as the agrarian reform and nationalization of the banks. It proposed,
International Viewpoint 9 April 1984
The US ambassador's estimate Salvadoran vote counters athe Us and returned "out of a total moreover, reorganizing the government around the Christian Democratic team and the Christian Democratic president, Napoleon Duarte.
The March 28, 1982 legislative elections and the presidential elections this year were designed to give a certain legitimacy to the new government and make it possible to achieve an equilibrium among the various bourgeois political forces in the country.
This scheme, however, ran up against fierce, concerted opposition from a local oligarchy particularly attached to its privileges, the great majority of the military hierarchy and the ultrarightist parties.
Representative of the ultrarightist parprevious US ambassador to San Salvador, Robert White, of having organized the March 24, 1980, assassination of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, and of being linked, along with a number of Salvadoran businessmen, to the Death
The polarization of an important part of the local ruling classes on the far right growth of the revolutionary struggle led by the FMLN left little room
"reform" policy initially envis aged by the US. Moreover, the stepping up of imperialist military pressure on Sandinista Nicaragua is pushing the overall situation in the region toward armed con-
The results of the March tions sharpened the crisis of political of the Salvadoran bourgeois forces, which was reflected in the conflict between Arena and the other far right parties and the Christian Democrats. The latter elected only 24 deputies, as against 36 for the coalition of the ex-
Having gained a majority in the Constituent Assembly, the rightists rapidly set about wiping out the timid reforms -in particular, the agrarian reform that had been instituted by the previous Christian Democrat-dominated ment. Alvaro Magana of the Democratic Action Party was named as the provisional president of a veritable war cabinet.
At the time, Washington was rather worried about the Christian Democrats being pushed aside, and Ronald Reagan himself said that an electoral victory for the likes of Roberto d'Aubuisson woul] cause "big problems" for the US, if the new Salvadoran government went back on Napoleon Duarte's reforms. (2) The American government brought some pressure to bear to get some officers too obviously linked to the Death Squadrons removed from important posts. But this did not go very far, which is hardly surprising when you consider that one of the main organizers of the Death Squadrons was on the CIA payroll.
Fundamentally, Washington has no local agent today for conducting any policy different from the one the ultrarightists want. Moreover, the rightists enjoy the support of the oligarchy and of a part of the local bourgeoisie, besides being very influential in the military hierarchy.
Two years after the March 1982 legislative elections, the situation has worsened for the Salvadoran junta in every sphere - military, economic and social. And in this context, the lack of cohesion in the bourgeois camp is a major obstacle to improving the military regime's capabilities for combating the guerrillas.
See "New Situation in Central America," IV, No 8, June 7, 1982.
Newsweek, April 12, 1982.
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In fact, the acute crisis of bourgeois political leadership that the imperialists are confronted with in El Salvador, the growing military activity of the FMLN forces over the last two years, and the aggravation of internal cleavages in the armed forces and in the political army on the eve of the presidential elections are all elements that in the eyes of many US imperialist leaders demonstrate the unavoidability of direct military interagainst the Salvadoran revolution. From this standpoint, the results presidential elections may fluence the Reagan administration's timing of such an intervention.
In 1983, the breakdown of the Salvadoran economy became glaring. The consequences of this would no doubt have helped to bring about the overthrow of the junta by the masses, if it were not for the vast support it gets from the US imperialists. (3)
According to a study carried out by the Salvadoran University Information and Documentation Center (CUDI), in 1983, production of goods and services was only two-thirds the level of 1978.
Production of the major export crops - coffee and cotton - was down. For the 1983-1984 season, the coffee harvest was 40% lower than for the previous year, and according to Salvadoran business sources, it amounted to only 23% of the harvest for the boom year of
Contributing causes to this drop are a decline in productivity and the sabotage actions of the FMLN, which have reportedly destroyed from of production every year since 1979. However, the amount of land on which coffee is grown did not decline over the past year, and still represents 7% of the arable land in the country.
With respect to cotton, 1983-1984 production fell 34% lower than that of the previous year, and the amount of land in cotton shrank by 29%. Cotton production was the most affected by the FMLN's actions, since 80% of the cottonareas are in zones of guerrilla
The CUDI report points out, moreover that manufacturing industry has been the hardest hit by the dislocation of the Central American Common Market, the rising prices for raw materials, as well as the slowness in renewing production other things, to the stagnation of private
On top of all these problems, there is the growing foreign debt and trade difficulties. ing to the president of the country's central bank, is that Salvador has been "set back twenty years." (5)
More than ever, therefore, the Salvadoran junta's power depends on
This is all the more decisive, since the deterioration of the economic situa tion has gone hand in hand with a new rise in urban mass struggles. On February 29, for example, 5,800 workers at the Salvadoran Institute for Social Security went on strike demanding a 50% wage in-
Salvadoran fighters in a liberated town (DR)
Some 4,000 workers at the National Water Company did the same a
In total, at the end of February, several tens of thousands of workers were on strike.
These actions have been denounced by Colonel Adolfo Blando as "a campaign of economic destabilization waged by subversives to undermine the electoral
What is clear is that these actions, which developed a few weeks before the elections and spread to many categories of workers, indicate how far the urban workers movement has gone in reorganizing, in particular in the capital. To a large extent, this process has gone the aegis of Christian Death squadrons attack strikers
The strikes have been subjected to many police attacks and to threats from the Death Squadrons. Their workplaces have been occuped by the army.
In mid-March, new public employee struggles erupted in response to the government's decision to increase wages by a joke at the expense of the working class" by the United Public Employees Union
But the political and social tensions have not been generated solely by the many strikes that have developed in the period around wage demands. They have also been fostered by differences within the ruling classes. For example, the powerful coffee producers association recently made a violent attack on the government of Alvaro Magana, rethe wholesale price for coffee proposed by the National Coffee Institute
The coffee producers even threatened to strike, warning that Magana and the board of Incafe would be responsible for "all sorts of measures that the employers' organizations will find themselves obliged to adopt in the future to obtain a just price." (6)
Such differences foster and exacerbate the political disputes going on in the ruling strata and their parties. For example, the cafetaleros (coffee growers) lobby supports the proposals of Arena, which calls for reprivatization of the banks so that they can serve the interests of the landowners. They also back the demands of the Party of National Reconciliation (PCN), the traditional voice of the military, which calls for dis mantling Incafe by setting up a parallel market for agricultural products. This party also decries "the merry-go-round of the reformers whose experiments have cost this country so much."
At a press conference organized by Abecafe (the Coffee Exporters Association), Christian Democrat leader Napoleon Duarte announced the concessions that his party was ready to make to the coffee growers. He pledged not to begin the second stage of the agrarian reform unless the Constituent Assembly decided to, which is hardly likely, since the ultra-right holds the majority in this assembly.
The presidential elections come right in the middle of these political confrontations, which reflect the resistance of most local bourgeois forces to any change in the country's economic structure, resistance that sometimes even takes the form of Death Squadron attacks on Christian Democrats. Moreover, this electoral farce can in no way lend any greater legitimacy to the dictatorship, nor
For the 1984-85 fiscal усал Ronald Reagan asked the US Congress for 333 million dollars in economic aid and 243 million dollars in military aid.
The following figures are from Inforpress Centroamericana, Guatemala, February 23. 1984.
Le Monde, March 14, 1984 6. Inforpress, March 15, 1984
International Viewpoint 9 April 1984
even bring about any greater homogeneity among the reactionary forces.
For the imperialists, the terms of the problem will remain the same after the are running six different candidates indicates, moreover, how fragmented the bourgeois political personnel is. Despite several months of discussions, the four main ultrarightist parties Arena, the PCN, the Salvadoran People's Party (PPS) and the Salvadoran Authentic Constitutional Party (PAISA) proved unable to agree on a common candidate. Not all these forces were prepared to unite behind Roberto d' Aubuisson. The role of the Christian Democrats
Besides the four ultrarightist candidates, then, Napoleon Duarte is running for the Christian Democratic Party, as well as another candidate for the Democratic Action Party. The electoral campaign was conducted under the repressive legislation of the state of emergency.
As usual, Arena accused the Christian
"accomplices Communism," and in this it got the support of several businessmen's pressure groups, which published ads in the Salvadoran press raising this sort of accusation against Napoleon Duarte.
While the Christian Democrats agreed to make concessions to business sectors upset by their original scheme for agrarian reform, they denounced the "rightist of Arena and proposed a "social pact," although it is hard to see who International Viewpoint 9 April 1984 would want such a thing today in El Salvador or who could apply it.
Nonetheless, the Christian Democrats have managed to get the public support of the trade-union grouping they influence, the People's Democratic Union (UPD), by promising the union leaders posts in the Ministries of Agrarian Reform and Labor in a future Christian
The UPD then described the deal that the Christian Democratic Party as a "historic duty...to defend the interests of the workers, peasants and of the people in general."
As for the PCN, it raised a slogan that illustrates well its yearning for the good
"We want to live the way we did before!" (7) The PPS's main slogan was "God, order and progress!" windup rallies of the PDC and Arena were supposed to have drawn respectively 10,000 and 20,000 persons, but a lot of workers have complained that their bosses forced them to go.
The FMLN, which has called for a boycott of the electoral farce, has threatened reprisals against any bosses who try to force their workers to go to vote. And the guerrilla forces have undertaken several operations to confiscate voting cards, even though the FMLN has not opted for a military strategy of interdieting the
The FMLN, moreover, is not the only force to have denounced these elections. Similar positions have been taken for example by the High Council of the University of San Salvador, as well as by Colonel Claramount, who was the candidate of ERP members in their Jucuaran headquarters (DR)
the National Opposition Union in 1977, a bloc including the Christian Democrats and the Salvadoran Communist Party no
Claramount stated forthrightly, one here can believe that this election is going to bring about a solution. there is no sympathy for the established
They have become grouplets, clubs, without any base of popular support. These elections are a masquerade staged by those who have always held the power, for the gratification of those who pay the bill, the US."
In 1982, a section of the urban masses apparently thought that voting Christian Democrats was a way to express its aspiration for an end to the war and
Today, it does not seem that the mood of the population is the same. A poll even showed that 46% of the population had no preference for "any one" of the established political parties. (9) And voting will obviously not take place in the zones controlled by the guerrillas. More infighting in the bourgeois
One thing is certain, regardless of the final results of the elections, the March 25 masquerade will increase the internal wrangling in the bourgeois camp. the ultraright is unable to put together a majority, it could make important gains in the wheeling and dealing to achieve the appearance of a stable government.
This is no doubt one of the reasons that led the FMLN to launch a proposal for a broadly inclusive provisional govern-
(See the FMLN document in this FLN apparently hoped that while this political proposal was directed to sections of the masses not yet organized by the front or which are still susceptible to the demagogy of the Christain Democrats, it could also serve to widen the differences forces. In fact, the recent urban strikes 1 have shown the combativity of the urban masses not directly led by the FMLN and subject to Christain Democratic influences in particular.
Although it decided to boycott the electoral masquerade, the FMLN wanted to take part in the political debate. And so it advanced simultaneously an answer to the preparations for imperialist military intervention and a government based on negotiations as an perspective of keeping the dictatorship intact after the elections.
In this document, over and above the specific governmental formula, the FMLN simply repeats its offer of negotiations with the dictatorship and the US. Here it negotiations based on the perspective of forming a government built around a parity agreement that would serve only long enough to introduce a series of urgent reforms, such as agrarian reform, abolishing the
Ibid., March 1, 1984. 9. Inforpress, February 9, 1984.
5
from the ruin into which it has been plunged by the oligarchical regime and by the intervention of the government of the United The broad-based provisional government will not be dominated by any one force but rather be the expression of broad
We face a complex situation nationally and internationally. participation by the political and social forces ready to scrap
The oligarchical society and the state serving its interests have repressive bodies and purging the armed would put into practice the FMLN's proposal (a broadly inclusive provisional government, tusion of the army and the FMLN forces, etc.) are thus clearly subordinated to an agreement on the tasks of such a government. And the FMN explicitly rejects laying down its arms before such an agreement is reached
The essential feature of this proposal is that in the final analysis the only support it can get is from the working masses not yet involved in the revolutionary struggle or who have become tired after several years of a bloody civil war. It is hard to see, in the present context, how it could be accepted by the forces in power today in San Salvador by US imperialism.
In fact, the rightist camp has unanimously rejected the FMLN's proposal. The American secretary of state, George Shultz, had stated that any dialogue with the forces of the FMLN is out of the
"unless they lay down their He added, moreover, "the interests of the US can only be met if the Communist subversion is ended."
Arena found it sufficient to reiterate "that it would get rid of these people in three or four months." described the FMLN's proposal as "unserious and bearing no relation to real-
(10) On the other hand, the UPD reacted positively to the FMLN's init-
What remains decisive today for the reactionary forces, regardless of their immediate differences, is the aggressive military strategy of Washington. The advance of the Salvadoran revolutionary forces and the breakdown of the governmental army every day strengthen the conviction of the imperialists that direct military intervention is unavoidable. form and the timing are still in question.
This seems to be the debate going on in the White House, when you consider that General Gorman, commander in chief of the American forces based in Panama "has already suggested that camouflaged American planes be used in Salvador to shell rebel concentrations." (11) This scheme for using American "air power" has supposedly been rejected by Washington, but it is becoming a more and more real possibility. The FMLN's response
Guillermo Ungo, leader of the Revolutionary Democratic Front (FDR), recently summed up the present contradictory situation of the revolutionary struggle in
"We have seen that the FMLN's gains are creating two paradoxes. The first is that they are bringing closer the possibil-
And a military victory followed by intervention would have a very limited scope, because the intervention would destroy a good part of its
The other paradox affects the The more the FMLN advances and the more the US feels the necessity to intervene, the more our gains make it more difficult to do so." (12)
There is no doubt in fact that the US is constantly preparing for the possibility of direct military intervention in Central
And, as the Grenada example shows, it will not miss any opportunity to
Using the March 25 elections as a pretext, the American forces based in Honduras have recently moved toward the Salvadoran frontier. The Salvadoran refugee camps that were along the border have been shifted deeper into Honduras.
American-Honduran maneuvers, broadened to include Guatemalan troops and coordinated with actions by the Salvadoran armed forces, are to take place on the northern border of El Salvador, facing the province of Morazan, which is a center of FMLN strength.
About 8,000 troops will participate in these maneuvers, while several Salvadoran battalions could be mobilized for a pincers operation against the guerrillacontrolled zones. The way for this has been prepared by bringing in additional American troops from the Panama Canal and stationing them in groups of 100 to 200 along the Salvadoran border. The US State Department has already presented this new escalation as a response to "the campaign of terror waged by the leftist guerrillas to sabotage the elections." The code name for this veritable dress rehearsal for intervention in El Salvador is "Emergency Alert."
The FMLN has responded by mounting preemptory attacks on Salvadoran army bases and announcing that its forces will be put on alert to "prepare for battle against invading troops." The determination of the Salvadoran insurgents is clear. "The FMLN will try to avoid any provocation. But if the Americans and the Hondurans invade our country, there will be sufficient arms and fighters to defend our national territory until the victory." 10. Ibid., February 16, 1984
Le Monde, March 14, 1984 El Dia Internacional, Mexico, February 17, 1984.
created a bloodbath in their death agony. Unable to meet the
FMLN demands of many thousands of Salvadorans, they have institu tionalized a machine for repression and exploitation.
same time, they are resorting to political maneuvers to conceal
FDR their determination to continue using military means. Moreover, intervention by the Reagan administration has prolonged the war and threatens to spread the conflict to the
The FMLN-FDR's
We maintain that building peace in our country requires a proposal for a broad-based
It is necessary to bring together enough forces to make possible a solution based on eliminating the previously cited factors, which are the causes of the conflict.
provisonal government
To this end, the FMLN-FDR proposes the formation of a broad-based provisional government. Such a government must have a program including the tasks that have to be accomplished to overcome the present crisis and enable our people to carry forward the process of social, economic and political trans-
I Introduction formations until they can achieve a truly just society.
For several years, the FMLN-FDR has been fighting to
Il The broad-based provisional government liberate our people once and for all. In the conviction that the greatest possible number of