El Salvador: paralysis is still the winner
Clark, Jack & Chapin, Jim
, IONS ARE NOT GOING TO STOP THE ESCALATION El S alvador: paralysis ")..',.is still the winner IIM CHAPIN & JACK CLARK M EDIA COVERAGE of the March 25 elections in El Salvador was far better...
...If Reagan is re-elected, perhaps ARENA may be identified as the "new democratic center" in time for the I985 Assembly elections...
...These include the areas of denser population, greater modernization, and historically of the greatest resistance to the oligarchy...
...The other two major parties, the PCN of Guerrero and the farther-right ARENA of Roberto D'Aubuisson, also turned in national percentages very close to their 1982 showings...
...In neither case could the election solve the problems facing Salvadoran society...
...Reagan and his supporters hang on to a naive fantasy that somehow democracy will take root and the guerrillas disappear, and the grinding war will come to an end...
...A victory for the ARENA candidate Roberto D'Aubuisson could lead to a coup because the army fears the cut-off of U.S...
...Commonweal: 270...
...The logic of our policy since 1980 leads inexorably to military involvement in both nations...
...When Secretary of State George Shultz spoke those words on February 5, he was, of course, condemning proposed elections in Nicaragua...
...Nicaragua's Sandinista government cannot be overthrown with the current level of harassment, and, given the logic of our position in E1 Salvador, intervention in El Salvador makes no sense without intervention in Nicaragua (the "source" of all the troubles in El Salvador, according to the Reaganites...
...The fight engaged in apocalyptic anti-Christian Democrat rhetoric in this election, calling it the final choice between Communism and freedom...
...Fancy U.S...
...The press hasn't been as sharp as it should have been on this point, but the Reagan administration has been taken to task for practicing this policy to the point of self-parody...
...The reality is almost exactly the reverse...
...Witness the U.S...
...As in Lebanon...
...But D'Aubuisson is far enough right to alienate some moderate elements in the PCN, and to scare enough of the armed forces, so that they will opt for Duarte as the lesser of evils...
...A very dangerous game of escalation is going on in Central America...
...This was far from the best election ever held...
...On this point, the general media coverage was much sharper than the last time around...
...El Salvador has none...
...In areas where the Christian Democrats did best, the turnout was highest...
...And Duarte's only hope in dealing with the army is American pressure...
...I F THE May 6 runoff elections are conducted "fairly" it is likely that Duarte will win...
...When Douglas MacArthur was military governor of Japan, he was not thinking of protecting the interests of traditional conservative elites of army and landowners, but rather of dispersing them...
...In the Fall 1983 issue of Foreign Policy, Tom Farer suggested that the goal of our Central American policy should be "the Finland option...
...The floods of refugees into these areas introduce even more "uncontrolled" elements...
...election procedures were used in a country where the population has been moving (or moved) a lot...
...The current government of Alvaro Magana, after all, was elected by no one...
...But this slaughter does not recreate the old social system, now gone forever...
...When the 1972 elections were stolen from Duarte and his running mate Guillermo Ungo (now the leader of the political arm of the revolutionary opposition), the PCN did the stealing...
...But even "victory" does not end the problems in these nations...
...Ruben Zamora, the left Christian Democrat who is one of the chief spokesmen for the political arm of the revolutionary opposition, claims that between 70 and 90 of the 251 Salvadoran municipalities are in the opposition's hands...
...Even in this controlled electoral system, urbanization and modernization tend to favor the Christian Democrats (~nd probably would favor parties of the left in an open system...
...Lucky" societies end up with Francos...
...Two of the greatest foreign policy victories of the Eisenhower administration were in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954...
...This time, in fact, the media noted many problems which it "overlooked" last time...
...Two years ago we wrote in this magazine ("Recounts, Regrets," June 18, 1982) that elections could not work because "the stakes in this conflict are survival for each side...
...Both are former national directors of the Democratic Socialists of America...
...The important thing is that if there is to be an electoral process, it be observed not only at the moment when people vote, but in all the preliminary aspects that make an election really mean something...
...A full-scale occupation of El Salvador by the U.S...
...Which makes it important to examine the specific results of this latest Salvadoran election, to see what it tells us about the progress of the situation in a country in which -- should American policy continue on its present track and should Reagan be re-elected -- Americans will almost certainly be fighting by this time next year...
...The only consistent thread of that policy, as Robert Dahl has recently pointed out, has been support of fight-wing authoritarian governments and opposition to left-wing governments, whether democratic or authoritarian...
...El Salvador cannot be "saved" indefinitely with meaningless elections and $90 million aid packages...
...If all this seems to belabor the obvious, perhaps the obvious needs some more working over...
...In only three of the fourteen provinces did the Christian Democratic vote vary as much as 5 percent up or down from 1982...
...ARENA's vote moved up or down by more than 5 points in six of the fourteen provinces...
...Members of the security forces also like to watch the actual balloting...
...An April 9 Defense Department statement indicates that the administration is preparing to make just such a troop commitment in Central America a live option...
...policy based on renaming a section of the fight "the new democratic center...
...For, given Reagan's present policy, we see American troops in place in 1985...
...We opened by congratulating ourselves on our prescience in analyzing events in E1 Salvador...
...They are dependent on the American government, and that government will not permit them the mass slaughter which alone might save their position...
...As we keep it up, the government and its forces slowly disintegrate under the grinding...
...aid if the government is headed by the man who is widely believed to have ordered the murder of Archbishop Romero...
...But we would be happier to be wrong than fight now...
...chances are more likely that the instinct to protect local elites is so ingrained that it would not...
...The world community condemns this as outlaw activity...
...Nicaragua goes to the World Court, Congress complains...
...It does seem that the evolution of Salvadoran politics has the old oligarchy in a bind...
...The seven provinces with low turnout and low density, are, of course, the areas in which the guerrillas have the upper hand...
...some estimates had as many as 300,000 voters being turned away Commonweal: 268 from the polls...
...Ultimately, social vacuums are filled by strong dictators...
...In San Salvador, however, the PDC vote jumped by some nine points, to an absolute.majority, and since the San Salvador vote as a proportion of the national vote also rose, the result was a 3 percent gain for the Christian Democrats at the national level...
...The only cases where American policy has matched American rhetoric in carrying out modernizing and democratic reforms have been cases of clear conquest, such as Germany and Japan...
...rather it means the destruction of socialpolitical forces of hundreds of leaders and thousands of activists...
...Imagine the reaction from Shultz if the Archbishop of Managua and halfa-dozen Americans were murdered, and Sandinista defectors traced the killings to the highest levels of the Nicaraguan government...
...congressional observers pointed out that voting is also mandatory in Australia and some Western European nations...
...In E1 Salvador today, there are armed groups representing almost every variety of politics spawned in the last two centuries: Maoism, Communism, social democracy, Christian democracy, liberalism, conservatism, fascism, feudal oligarchy, and so on...
...was looking to the PCN as the remedy to the ills caused by its own rule...
...Not voting is against the law in El Salvador...
...In E1 Salvador, one per cent of the population has been murdered in the last four years, almost all by paramilitary death squads tied to the Salvadoran government...
...Reporters were also more skeptical about the "triumph of democracy" propaganda put forward by the Reagan administration...
...Obviously, these two parties of the right are competing for the same social base...
...It's very likely that the U.S...
...The seven provinces with lower turnout included the east and the north provinces where the oligarchy exterminated native populations earlier and more thoroughly...
...Honduras has already been built up over the past two years to serve as a base for such an operation...
...so those who were prevented from voting were more likely PDC than not...
...A murderous as things have been in El Salvador in recent years, they have not come near the levels necessary for the right to re-establish "traditional" society there...
...The 1979 coup which was supposed to reform El Salvador was directed against the PCN...
...IONS ARE NOT GOING TO STOP THE ESCALATION El S alvador: paralysis ")..',.is still the winner IIM CHAPIN & JACK CLARK M EDIA COVERAGE of the March 25 elections in El Salvador was far better than the coverage of the elections two years ago...
...Here the administration position goes beyond the ludicrous...
...Despite toothless roars about the American mining of Nicaraguan harbors, it is worth noting that even the Democrats in the Senate supported some $90 million more in military aid for the Salvadoran government and more than $20 million for the Nicaraguan "contras" by a vote of 23-18...
...Current U.S...
...The issue in Salvadoran society is survival...
...So American policy, for the moment, remains unchanged...
...Nicaragua, which has curtailed many important freedoms, still has an opposition press, although a censored one...
...The U.S...
...policy claims to promote independence, democracy, and modernization, revolutionary goals in the third world now, revolutionary goals which our own country fought a revolution and a civil war to advance...
...In this case, the "vital new force" was Francisco Jose Guerrero of the National Conciliation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . lUlII I I II I JIM CHAPIN was the Chair of Worm Hunger Year, 1983...
...might produce similar results...
...N OT ONLY in regard to relative party strength but voter turnout as well, the patterns visible in 1982 were, if anything, more marked in the latest election...
...embassy will again have to cobble together some coalition of those who would murder each other (and do) once outside the room...
...The Sandinistas have jailed many of their political opponents...
...government will keep on carrying out disastrous policies because it can't think of anything else...
...But those nations, by all accounts, don't have armed death squads to enforce higher turnout...
...With adequate arms, it's still possible for military forces to wipe out major portions of their opposition...
...unlucky" ones with Pol Pots or Somozas, and are worse off after the dictator than they were before...
...Someone w.ill win, and someone will lose...
...The PCN ruled the country from 1961 to 1979 as the favored instrument of the army and the oligarchs, keeping the countryside in the brutal grip of its dreaded paramilitary network ORDEN...
...With transparent voting urns into which one deposits a color-coded ballot, even one folded up, it isn't hard to fathom why some voters might conclude it most prudent to support the party favored by the local militia...
...The area of high turnout was seven provinces in a bloc from the west to the center of the country...
...With all these problems, however, the elections do tell us something about the present state of Salvadoran politics and society...
...From their point of view, they may have been correct...
...he may get enough to save his life, but almost certainly not enough to enable him to govern effectively...
...That quote fairly summarizes the necessary conditions for democratic elections...
...In all six,' the PCN vote moved in the opposite direction by more than 5 points...
...If our claims were true, that would amount to a major shift in the reality of our Latin American policy for the last century...
...It does seem that everyone in the United States now has a much better idea of what is going on in Central America...
...Party (PCN...
...By the same theory, Russia could mine our harbors because we are "attacking" Afghanistan...
...If Jos~ Napolebn Duarte wins, there's a distinct possibility of a coup because the army doesn't like his reformist policies, and a certainty of chaos because the economic elite hates him...
...The result is an immense social vacuum, if we remain determined to win, that vacuum can be filled for a time with U.S...
...As in Vietnam...
...And now, five years later, the U.S...
...In short, if you find the emergency wisdom familiar, you should...
...At the same time, the guerrillas are successfully taking away significant portions of the right's traditional stamping grounds...
...One thing that stands out is that the political divisions on the government side of the civil war have shifted very little since 1982...
...All demonstrating once more Isaac Asimov's dictum: "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent...
...In both our 1982 election report and our 1983 article ("The El Salvador Labyrinth," June 3, 1983), we discussed the fallacy of a U.S...
...Everyone except the executive and legislative branches of the American government...
...Anticipating the election results, the New Republic decried their futility: "The Salvadoran government is not holding elections to which nobody comes, but rather elections in which nobody wins...
...Losing does not mean joining a loyal opposition...
...But our reinstallation of the Shah led to the Khomeinei regime in the end, while the victory in Guatemala has led to worsening chaos and destruction for the last thirty years...
...But all that is likely to do is to return El Salvador to the governmental paralysis of 1980-82...
...Reporters were better informed about the contending forces in the elections and about the activities of the revolutionaries...
...Some U.S...
...In our article last June, we also concluded by suggesting that the concept of "Finlandization" might "serve as a useful model for the region...
...only two among the top seven PDC provinces...
...Too bad for them...
...In fact, the combined PDC vote in the thirteen provinces outside the metropolitan province of San Salvador went from 39.3 pecent to 39.2 percent...
...ARENA, which last time tended to do better in low turnout areas, also seemed to have "modernized" its vote a bit, perhaps a reflection of the help it has gotten from right-wing figures in the United States...
...Nor do these militias limit their civic participation to checking i.d.'s for voting stamps...
...troops...
...After the 1982 elections, the fight-wing parties, en bloc, were in the process of forming a government when the American government prevented them from doing so and installed Magana...
...On the basis of this election, his claim has some validity...
...JACK CLARK is editor of Food Monitor magazine...
...The nation which fought two wars over the issue of freedom of the seas is now mining harbors and international waters...
...Six of these latter seven provinces were among the top seven PCN provinces...
...In this context, it is important to look hard at Reagan' s claim that his policy represents "toughness" while those who oppose it are "naive...
...Voters' names could not be found on the lists...
...elections of 1860...
...You can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it...
...Reaganites don't admit what they're doing, but justify it in theory as defending El Salvador against Nicaraguan attack...
...All three major parties drew about the same share of the national vote as they did two years ago, and this similarly extended down to the provincial level...
...Elections don't solve these kinds of prOblems...
...Even the barest traces of "democratization" in the countryside open a seething social cauldron, because the traditional politics of El Salvador has rested on the century-old ability of the oligarchy 4 May 1984:269 to kill "uppity" members of the peasantry...
...It should be noted that, were he to face a run-off with Guerrero rather than D'Aubuisson, that would not be the case...
...Even the best election cannot bridge differences of such magnitude...
...In a political system without the left and left-center, the fight retains its majority, and will probably get a majority of seats in the 1985 Assembly elections...
Vol. 111 • May 1984 • No. 9
