Editorials

...FURTHERMORE El Salvador's was not the only Central American and Caribbean election this year...

...No one really knows what amount of support the Salvadoran rebels might gain if they could campaign openly and securely...

...Our millions go to El Salvador...

...Is that the best we can do...

...job losses and budget deficits, And the administration's announced quotas on sugar imports fall hard on the Dominicans...

...Only if we are more interested in confirming our preferred ideologies than in bringing democracy and peace to a bleeding land...

...That the Christian Democratic center "did not hold" is blamed by these critics on the very fact of attempting elections in conditions of insecurity and army repression...

...President Reagan's Caribbean basin plan, combining duty-free trade, investment tax credits, and direct aid...

...It was natural therefore, for all sides to try to squeeze the balloting into their pre-existing interpretations of the Salvadoran conflict...

...Guatemala's of course, came and went...

...The new Constituent Assembly is headed by the man who is generally held responsible for Archbishop Romero's assassination and who believes that even the mttdest reformers are "reds...

...In the absence of a decisive shift of power in El Salvador, land reform was always an uncertain initiative...

...The sad fact is that some influential figures in Washington simply don't want negotiations at any time, nor do they want land reform, for that matter, especially if it means conflict with hardline anti-Communists like Roberto d'Aubuisson...

...The same squeeze between high oil prices and low commodity prices - in this case for sugar - has braked what was an impressive rate of economic growth in the Dominican Republic...

...Four years ago, the army sequestered the ballot boxes, and only the Carter human-rights policy, firmly communicated to the Dominican military, assured an honest outcome...

...What happened on March 28 did not fit the predictions of either right or left, here or in Central America...

...And a still milder social democrat, Salvador Jorge Blanco, was elected president of the Dominican Republic on May 16...

...should press for negotiations between El Salvador's government and the rebel forces...

...Supporters of the elections blame the-Christian Democrats' failure on the refusal by the left insurgents to participate peacefully...

...The rebels, as the phrase goes, would be allowed to win at the negotiating table what they could not win either in the fighting zones or at the ballot boxes...

...This year's further gain for democracy is not apt to stick if the Dominican Republic's economy continues to sink...

...Liberal and left-wing critics pointed out, as they had before the .voting, that no election can be truly valid when an opposition is unable to campaign openly...

...Unlike Costa Rica, however, the Dominican Republic has no implanted tradition of democracy...

...Fear is not a sufficient explanation for what happened...

...whether the coup that followed and the new "born again" president...

...Whatever one may think of that position, there is little in the March 28 balloting to suggest that many Salvadorans agree...

...Senator Percy was right to threaten a suspension of aid if the land reform program were to be subverted...

...Special note should be taken of these last two elections...

...There is no very bright future for El Salvador at the moment, no future in which the accomplices and executioners in the military, or the ruthless and authoritarian elements in the guerrillas, will quickly disappear...

...And finally, we believe that now, and not manana, is the moment to press for the negotiations that could establish conditions in which the political hopes Salvadorans manifested two months ago might really flourish...

...A month ago, Luis Alberto Monge...

...General Rios Montt, will open a path to deescalation of terror and civil war remains to be seen...

...The opposite argument asks what better time to negotiate than when the military situation is stalemated and the government has some claim to legitimacy...

...Congress should not misconstrue the March 28 election as the Good Housekeeping Seal justifying a renewal of military assistance regardless of the Salvado-ran government's record on repression...

...On the other hand, despite all the caveats the critics express about the voter turnout, it did reveal a mighty will to a political resolution of differences on the part of El Salvador's people...

...a moderate social democrat elected last February, was sworn in as president of Costa Rica...

...The practical question of the moment is whether the U.S...

...has little chance of surviving congressional worries over U.S...

...The governments in Washington and San Salvador hailed the size of the vote as a victory for democracy...

...If an election held in these circumstances could not provide decisive evidence that the people actually support the political standard-bearers elected, it provided even less positive evidence of the widespread support for the guerrillas and left-wing rebels that their supporters in this country have often assumed to exist...

...More important...

...Each party in this debate has a bit of the truth...

...Costa Rica remains one of the bright spots of democratic decency in the area: no army, no terror, a determined effort to provide basic welfare for its citizens...

...They noted that the number of eligible voters had been diminished by the exiles and refugees who had been forced to "vote with their feet.'' They emphasized the distorting effect of El Salvador's history of terror on the voters' calculations, and they raised questions about the practice of indicating whether an individual had voted by marking his or her identification card...

...One of the assembly's first acts was to kick (he remaining supports from beneath an already crumbling land reform program...

...One argument has it that such pressure would undermine the legitimacy of the new assembly - and of the relatively fraudless election that produced it...

...Nor can it explain the relatively low proportion of blank ballots that were cast - votes, in effect, for the insurgents...

...but far more threatening to its future has been the sharp rise in oil prices followed by a drop in coffee earnings followed by the hike in interest rates...

...For those committed to democracy and an end to the killing in El Salvador, the turnout was impressive, the results disappointing, the whole election process ambiguous...

...From every quarter comes much the same message: "I told you so...

...A fair number of Americans, if they have thought deeply about the matter at all, seem to believe that the Leninist doctrines of much of the guerrilla leadership are of less relevance than the possibility that the combined Leninist and non-Leninist revolutionary forces in El Salvador may offer some promising alternative to the historical rut of oligarchical control and violent repression...

...Whether the March 28 election leads to that process or whether it only provides a platform for more unrestrained violence depends on signals Washington gives...

...Now the shift seems to have occurred in the opposite direction, and newly installed peasant farmers are threatened with rough-and-ready evictions...

...But the process by which politics replaces shooting has to be engaged...

...Like the "working poor" at home, societies like Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic don't have much pull...

...But that does not mean that the election's outcome holds much promise for a better future either...

...The military struggles convulsing Costa Rica's neighbors may yet spill over into this peaceful and open society...

...extrapolations from an election where the political spectrum was foreshortened don't provide an answer, as the earlier experiences in Zimbabwe ought to remind us...