A Final Orgy of Insults

By George Russell

The country's deep divisions are accentuated by an election

The most crucial election campaign in the history of El Salvador came to a bitter end last week with a stream of venomous accusations. The major parties indulged in a final orgy of personal insults, cries of corruption and charges of treason. The torrent of abuse not only reflected the riven society in El Salvador, where more than 30,000 people have died for political reasons since October 1979; it sadly showed how difficult it will be to build a unified nation in the future.

The political divisions are so deep that they will not disappear in the wake of the March 28 election. The aim of the balloting was to choose members for a 60-seat assembly that will frame a new civilian constitution for the beleaguered Central American republic, name an interim President and prepare for national presidential elections. Contending factions in the assembly are likely to cause further agonies for the country and more problems for the U.S. as it tries to help stabilize and reform the country. To make matters worse, the 4,000 to 6,000 Marxist-led guerrillas who opposed the election have vowed to continue to fight regardless of the voting outcome.

Despite the assortment of parties, two figures dominated the election: President Jose Napoleon Duarte, 56, leader of the Christian Democratic Party, and Roberto d'Aubuisson, 38, a former national guard intelligence major who personifies the ultrarightist Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA).

As head of the civilian-military government since December 1980, Duarte is the inheritor of El Salvador's accumulated political and economic woes. Among the reforms that Duarte sponsors are the nationalization of local banks, the continuation of the land reform that has expropriated the country's largest agricultural estates and turned them into peasant cooperatives, and a gradual purging of human rights violators from El Salvador's 22,000-member security forces.

D'Aubuisson's ARENA party, on the other hand, stressed an aggressive mixture of patriotism, anti-Communism and free enterprise, along with an all-out war on guerrillas who refuse to accept a general amnesty. As one ARENA document put it, "Nationalist Republicans believe in God, the country and liberty, in that order." D'Aubuisson would like to reverse the bank nationalizations carried out in March 1980 and replace the state-run peasant cooperatives of the current land reform with individual holdings.

But personal accusations, not policy differences, stirred the most emotion in the campaign. Christian Democrats painted D'Aubuisson as a dangerous and unprincipled killer who would bring a further reign of right-wing terror on the country if elected. The Christian Democrats accused D'Aubuisson of once having been jailed for 45 days after abandoning his troops during a state of emergency. They reminded Salvadorans that D'Aubuisson once confessed to having headed ANSESAL, the notorious Salvadoran political police, and charged that the ARENA leader had transformed the agency into "an executioner and torturer."

When it came to mudslinging, D'Aubuisson more than held his own. ARENA circulated duplicates of letters from Salvadoran guerrilla leaders to East Germany and the Soviet Union, allegedly implicating Christian Democrats as collaborators in the rebel cause. D'Aubuisson's contemptuous name for the Christian Democrats: "watermelons," meaning that they are green (the party color) on the outside but Red within. The party took out a full-page newspaper advertisement urging the nearly 150 international observers who attended the election to drop by ARENA headquarters for the party's version of events.*

To counter the Christian Democrat propaganda, D'Aubuisson showed a television documentary, which included an interview with his mother Joaquina declaring "that boy never caused me trouble in anything. He was always very faithful and loyal." In another television program, D'Aubuisson used charts explaining how Marxists take over a country and suggesting Christian Democrat complicity in El Salvador's subversion. Said D'Aubuisson: "We are at the mercy of these noxious people."

The strength of D'Aubuisson's appeal was the major surprise of the election campaign. At ARENA'S final election rally, held last week in the cavernous national gymnasium in downtown San Salvador, some 16,000 supporters jammed the building, decked out in red-white-and-blue ARENA hats and T shirts. The audience cheered wildly when D'Aubuisson appeared, looking pale and nervous after a recent death threat. He was flanked by three heavily armed bodyguards. At the rally, three mariachi bands competed to see which could present the best campaign song. The winning entry declared that D'Aubuisson "will save the people from betrayal."

Other political parties in the race were less dramatic, but equally scathing, in their attacks on the Christian Democrats. The National Conciliation Party, traditional vehicle of El Salvador's landed oligarchy, called Duarte "the symbol of betrayal." One member of the Salvadoran Popular Party, a business-oriented conservative group, noted the recent visit of a Christian Democrat leader to Switzerland and asked rhetorically: "What do they have in Switzerland? Banks with numbered accounts." The small Democratic Action Party, drawing support from middle-class professionals and businessmen, labeled the programs of the Christian Democrats as "fascist."

Representatives of the parties that hurled these epithets at one another throughout the campaign could sit down together as early as April 12 as members of the new constituent assembly to confront the country's deep economic and social problems. That will demand close cooperation and a new start, but El Salvador's history shows that its politicians are slow to forgive or forget.

--By George Russell. Reported by Timothy Loughran/San Salvador

* The official U.S. observer contingent: Senator Nancy Kassebaum, Congressmen John Murtha and Robert Livingston, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Everett Briggs, University of Notre Dame President Father Theodore Hesburgh, former University of California President Clark Kerr and Pollsters Richard Scammon and Howard Penniman.

With reporting by Timothy Loughran

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