Recounts, regrets

...EL SALVADOR, contrary to the patronizing impression held by almost all Americans, is a country with a long history of contested elections and even of elections won by the opposi-tion...

...Duarte was the Jimmy Carter of Salvadoran politics...

...La Libertad also has three times as many doctors per capita as Morazan...

...Duarte's Christian Democrats did well where turnout was high...

...In Usulutan, the leading cotton-producing province, turnout was very low because war was raging...

...Scared and without leadership, the populace went to the right...

...So even the lowest estimates indicate a pretty good turnout...

...It may well be that the present institutions of rule are too fragile to survive such an acknowledgment, but if that is so, the U.S...

...is willing to support D'Au-buisson's remedy of the physical elimination of the left and its constituents, then the left's existence must be acknowledged...

...In Congressional debate over Reagan's aid package, in continuing discussions in the press, those assumptions seem well nigh universal...

...elections in 1860...

...This early "land reform" of a capitalist sort was duly punctuated by five major peasant revolts from 1872-1898...

...Wanniski and Petras recognize clearly that this is a civil war...

...So for each side, the stakes in this conflict are survival...

...The PCN stole the election, but stole it by depriving Duarte of a few percent of the vote...

...Low turnout areas were probably the regions of greatest polarization with supporters of the left abstaining and opponents of the left choosing the most hard-line alternative...

...Most of the American media claimed a"vote for peace'' from an election in which the most striking success was gained by a man who planned the murder of archbishops and threatened the murder of American diplomats, Roberto D'Aubuisson...

...This year his party got 41 percent of the valid votes, 36 percent of all votes cast...

...And these particular elections did not even try...

...As the candidate of the center, he expected to pick up the votes which had no where else to go...

...In a June 3 New York Times op-ed article, Thomas Sheehan, recently returned from a fact-finding mission to El Salvador, raised questions about the size of the vote...

...Unlike current U.S...

...supporters to be clear about the ruthless nature of the civil war...

...He answered that contrary to much FDR propaganda, the murder in the countryside was not just the murder of random innocent civilians...

...There is no evidence that he won a majority of the vote that year even with the support of everyone from the Communists to the center...

...No one charges that the election results were rigged...

...The Christian Democrats held as many as 80 of the 261 municipalities (including San Salvador 1964-72) during the sixties, opposition parties elected 25 of the 52 Assembly members in 1968, and for a time in 1969-70 the Assembly was actually dominated by a coalition of Christian Democrats with dissident PCN members...

...Jack Clark is editor of Food Monitor magazine...

...He urged Reagan to recognize the vox populi and end land reform in El Salvador...

...For almost all American commentators, the election was treated as an exercise in the American debate rather than as an event in Salvado-ran history...

...Following Wanniski's advice, the U.S...

...Rather, the death squads had systematically killed the network of civilian supporters crucial to the guerrillas and the FDR...

...Nineteen-seventy-two was a turning point...

...should not be propping up such institutions with its power and the blood of Salvadorans...

...that land was given to any proprietor who agreed to grow coffee...

...Even with the inflated government figures on turnout, some areas emerge as clearly under the guerrillas' control...

...Using figures released by the San Salvador government before and during the elections, 115 percent of the eligible electorate voted...

...Those assumptions seem all too widely shared outside the circles of the Reagan administration...

...On June 4 and June 6, Raymond Bonner's Times dispatches from San Salvador reported on charges coming from El Salvador's largest university that the vote had been doubled...

...He warned in advance that * holding elections under present circumstances would prove disastrous...

...James Petras, writing in the Leninist weekly Guardian, posed the tough questions for the left: why the high vote, why the vote for the right...

...And any subsequent elections could be as different from this one as the election of Mugabe in Zimbabwe was from the election of Muzorewa in Rhodesia...

...2. Officials in Washington and San Salvador inflated the vote totals to show that the guerrillas had been completely repudiated...

...and in 1982 in El Salvador...

...The Christian Democrats ran strong west of San Salvador in the coffee-growing areas, in the provinces of the 1932 "Communist" uprising, and in areas where resistance to the landowner-military alliance represented by the PCN has been higher...

...First, the turnout was remarkable...

...each was violently suppressed...

...On the other hand, although the inflated figures were meant to prove the guerrillas' weakness, even the highest totals do not add up to a full repudiation of the guerrillas...

...Ten years ago Duarte "won" an election with less than a majority...

...Highly developed, well-off, and densely populated provinces had up to three times the turnout rate of the poorer, "backwards" provinces...

...The March 28 election in El Salvador worked to the opposite effect...

...We will also offer some speculations on El Salvador's future and some reflections on the American penchant for expecting too much from wartime elections...

...If the State Department is correct that there is a Pol Pot left within the revolutionary opposition, prolonging the war would strengthen that tendency and its viciousness...

...the editors of Central America Studies estimate 600,000 to 800,000 votes...

...Duarte and the Christian Democrats needed a boost...

...Petras scorned as sentimental the further pursuit of liberal humanitarian support and urged the guerrillas' U.S...

...In Morazan and in similar economically underdeveloped provinces, the guerrillas are strong...

...Consider the results more closely...

...The official total stands at more than 1.5 million...

...From the Reagan State Department's point of view, the answer seems clear...

...D'Aubuisson, like Reagan, appeared more dynamic...

...Duarte and his Christian Democrats had lost some key support...

...In view of a major break with previous allies, the turmoil of a civil war, and the responsibility of governing at an impossible time, that's not much slippage in ten years...

...Bonner said that the university critics, editors of Central American Studies, lacked hard proof, but he quoted unnamed sources in Salvadoran politics and in the diplomatic community who concurred with the criticisms...

...If the government bargains with the left, the dynamic will appear to have changed...

...The left, then, might be perceived as "winners...

...And someone is going to lose...

...A strong turnout would repudiate the left opposition and relieve pressures to begin negotiations...

...Witness U.S...

...The assumption that an election with the left excluded would lead to moderation was wrong in 1980 in the U.S...

...Any belief that Duarte would do better rested on two sets of unrealistic assumptions: first, that he would pick up the voles which otherwise would go to the left because those voters had nowhere to go...

...In a letter to the New York Times, supply-side guru Jude Wanniski applauded the wisdom of the masses in opposing "the Maoist collectivization of Salvador's farms...

...Unless the U.S...

...Bus-tamante would now claim 1.35 million...

...5. The results, which were a disaster for the people of El Salvador and for Washington policy-makers as well, were foreseeable, given previous election results and the circumstances of this balloting...

...Under these conditions, negotiations become a difficult issue for the parties to Duarte's right...

...Elections don't solve those kinds of problems...

...The Party of National Reconciliation (PCN) which ruled from 1961-1979 did well to the east of San Salvador...

...Only at the extremes of the political spectrum do we find coherent views on the election put forward...

...Political controversy over what the votes meant or even how many votes there were continues to build...

...3. A close look at even the inflated figures points in the opposite direction, i.e., that the guerrillas retain real areas of strength...

...D'Aubuisson's semi-fascist ARENA party did best with low turnout...

...At the end, whether "left" or "right" won, El Salvador would know peace-the peace of the graveyard...

...policy-makers, Robert White, Carter's last ambassador to El Salvador, understood this history...

...Absent a left, you are soon absent a center...

...it also rates second among all provinces in the percentage of elementary-age children enrolled in school (almost three-fourths enrolled...

...the lowest rate of voting occurred in northern mountain provinces along the Honduran border...

...Facts, of course, are slippery, yet it does help to know who voted and who didn't, what parties did well in which areas, how the election results compared to those in El Salvador's past...

...Actually a simple calculation would have indicated more than 2 million eligible voters, but the press never did the simple calculation nor did U.S...

...In the hard-fought 1972 election, fewer than 800,000 Sal-vadorans cast votes...

...In most elections, the strength of the social force supporting the rulers was great enough, particularly in the rural areas, to ensure a solid vote without cheating...

...As Commonweal noted in its June 4 editorial, "All sides try to squeeze the balloting into their pre-existing interpretations...

...President Alvaro Magana denied any error or irregularities...

...In that year Duarte ran as the candidate of a united center-left coalition...

...would simply arm D'Aubuisson and allies to the teeth and, if necessary, help them carry out a slaughter on the scale of the 1932 quelling of the "Communist" rebellion...

...and that this election could really resolve any fundamental issues in El Salvador...

...reporters notice the discrepancy between 1.3 million eligible and l.S million voting...

...But for the U.S., the alternative to forcing negotiations now is all-out support of the PCN and eventually of D'Aubuisson...

...Election officials had been deflating the size of the electorate to make sure that the percentage turnout looked impressive...

...The highest turnout was in the provinces around San Salvador...

...If one were to remove the military force which has held El Salvador together, the result would be a genuine social revolution...

...the unidentified diplomats and politicians quoted by Bonner guess that the real turnout was between 900,000 and one million...

...Elections were held on one side of a civil war...

...Dr: Jorge Bustamente, the head of the Elections Council, conceded to Bonnerthat "there might have been a ten-percent error" in counting voters...

...Morazan, the province lowest in turnout, has less than half its young children in school...

...That's the area where the Indians were wiped out fairly early and where resistance to the oligarchs and before them to the Spanish has been low...

...Elsewhere the revolutionary opposition united in opposing the election but made no serious effort to disrupt the voting...

...And the circumstantial evidence points to an inept job of padding the totals: at one San Salvador poll, 19 of 20 booths reported identical results...

...Thus the State Department declared the election a triumph for its policy, then turned its attention to reversing the chief result of the vote-the weakening of the Christian Democrats and the strengthening of the right...

...Opponents of American policy hastened to explain that the voters were terrorized by the need to have their cedulas (identity cards) stamped and by the potential vengeance of the death squads, but made little attempt to explain either the turnout or the results...

...The voters shrewdly judged that power rested with the army and the landowners, not with Duarte...

...Both are former national directors of the Democratic Socialists of America...

...LET us CLOSE with a provocative comparison...

...Acknowledging that existence is not to acknowledge the left's right to rule - there is no evidence as yet that the left represents the majority of the society - but simply to acknowledge its right to participate in shaping El Salvador's future...

...The official results gave Duarte 324,576 votes (43 percent) to 334,600 for the PCN candidate (44 percent).Two right-wing candidates split the remainder...

...An open-ended negotiation, with all the major parties participating, might - probably would - fail, but less certainly so than-present American policy...

...Such a course would then require a bloodier reenactment of the events of 1932 (or perhaps of Indonesia in 1965...

...Combining his vote with the 11 percent blank ballots cast by supporters of the left, we get 47 percent, probably about the percent he received in 1972...

...La Libertad, bordering San Salvador to the west, boasted the highest voter participation...

...Why were the elections held...

...For example, in failing to prosecute the murderers of peasant leader Rudolfo Viera, the Christian Democrats lost the support of the UCS, the nation's largest peasant organization...

...To be sure, that's the way the world has always worked in El Salvador...

...Using some election data from the Council on Hemispheric Affairs plus some knowledge of El Salvador's history, and trying to avoid squeezing the results into our own preconceptions, we would argue: 1. Despite all the current scandals, voter turnout was relatively high...

...media discussion of guerrilla interference with the voting, Usulutan was the only area where fighting on election day was above normal...

...In fact, the current land reform follows, by just about one hundred years, government seizure of communal lands from their owners...

...4. The vote does not, however, support claims that the insurgents currently represent the majority of the people...

...There is one exception to this correlation between low economic development and low voter turnout...

...in Usulutan 17 of 18 booths at one polling place reported exactly 999 votes cast...

...JIM CHAPIN & JACK CLARK (Jim Chapin is the Chair of World Hunger Year...

...On March 29, Congressman Toby Moffett (D., Conn...

...his vice-presidential running mate was Guillermo Ungo, now the leader of the FDR...

...Above all," according to the editors, the point was "to prove the fundamental thesis that the Salvadoran people were against the guerrillas...

...spoke reverentially of the high turnout...

...With a sweeping popular mandate, Duarte could control the army, halt some of the death squad activity, and move to consolidate a political base for victory over the guerrillas...

...The editors of Central American Studies conclude "that there was a pact between the United States, the political parties and army high command to respect the proportionality of the votes...

...Estimates of how many people really voted range widely now...

...Compared to other Americans commenting on El Salvador Petras and Wanniski seem clearsighted only because their conflicting ideologies tie them firmly to the military extremes, while most American policy-makers want to pretend that they can create a center by renaming the right...

...Abandoned voters on the left stayed home or voted for the more dynamic alternative...

...Despite all the U.S...