The war continues:

...The efforts of both the Convergence and the Christian Democrats (PDC) to turn out their vote were severely hampered by the transportation stoppage...

...It lies in the FMLN's belief that an Arena government will sow the seeds of a massive insurrection later this year...

...Arena's absolute majority on the first round will give them bragging rights to a U.S...

...Ironically, it was U.S...

...Arena didn't so much win this election as the PDC lost it...

...They have called for a boycott of the elections or the casting of a blank ballot...

...The second is for the likes of Cristiani and other respectables who'll swear that Arena, is just like the U.S...

...The week before the balloting was marked by continuous sabotage against water service, electricity, and transport...

...There is little question that an Arena government will lean heavily in the direction of a free-market model, meaning harder times for the bottom 85 percent of Salvadoran society...

...The FMLN, however, miscalculated...

...has spent $3.6 billion here in the last decade and things are going well...

...Bush has proposed $386 million for this fiscal year, with $97.6 million of that strictly for the military, even though-believe it or not-the Salvadorans have yet to spend any of the military aid in last year's pipeline...

...They mobilized 24,000 poll-watchers, all decked out in vests of red, white, and blue horizontal stripes, to watch 6000 polling places...

...There are moments when your heart wells up, the eyes tear over, and your cynicism drops away...

...This moment for sharing defeat and victory was one of those rare times...

...But if the PDC wins, they'll continue to receive the millions that Washington sends to fight against us...

...There are three strata within Arena...

...But that isn't his only problem...

...Two days before the elections, and under the watchful eyes of the military, hammer-and-sickle posters went up in the capital with photos of Convergence candidate Guill-ermo Ungo, Zamora, and FMLN leader Joaquin Villalobos, conveying the message that the Convergence and the FMLN were one and the same...

...The U.S...

...Chavez Mena gives a good protest speech, but Salvadorans could not forget that he was the candidate of the corrupt and inefficient ruling party...

...The embassy would have preferred a government led by the Christian Democrats willing to sign off on the U.S...

...Since 1980, power has been vested, with U.S...

...The Bush administration says that all this depends on the human rights situation and the continuation of the reforms in some fashion...

...The first, where the levers of power are located, is where Roberto D'Aubuisson presides...

...He promised to talk with the FMLN about peace, revive the economy by giving free rein to the "productive sector" (as the oligarchy arrogantly dubs itself), and root out the kind of skimming that allowed $24,000-a-year PDC ministers to buy million-dollar houses...

...Of course, they want to make that judgement rather than leaving it up to a Congress with higher standards on such issues...

...blessings, in the Christian Democrats...

...Two years from now he may be dead, she may be...

...Congress likely to believe, until shown otherwise, that Arena represents a more moderate right...

...The Convergence, which had hoped to crack double figures, limped in with just over 4 percent of the vote...

...The military are second-in-command after the U.S...

...Ex-Colonel Sigifredo Ochoa, now the swashbuckling vice-president of the National Assembly, has promised that Arena will give the military what it needs to maintain "order" and carry on the war...

...Going further, Diaz opined that the FMLN is "the political majority in the country...

...Arena has learned its lesson...

...A member of the Convergence, was blunter: "They don't have half the possibilities that existed with the 'final offensive' in January, 1981...

...He knew too well the smell of decomposing flesh as he searched for comrades killed and dumped by the side of the road in the seventies...

...Given Arena's total lack of support from organized labor, look for additional strictures limiting strikes by permitting militarization of workplaces...

...The U.S...

...policy itself as played out over the last five years that crippled President Jose Napoleon Duarte and his party by stonewalling serious efforts at a negotiated settlement with the rebels and pressing him to accept an economic austerity package in 1985-86 that undercut his trade union and peasant base...

...Then, in the 1984 presidential balloting, the U.S...

...Though critical of PDC's use of government resources for party purposes, Arena will undoubtedly continue the practice joining its clout in the public sector with its near unanimous support in the private sector...

...first thwarted Arena in 1982 when it imposed Alvaro Magana as provisional president over death-squad architect Roberto D'Aubuisson...

...Indeed, at the polling place in Chalchuapa, "Don't vote for the thieves and murderers of the Convergence" was painted on the pavement in front of the polling place...

...On this kind of scrutiny will depend the continued existence of some modicum of political space in El Salvador-space for political forces like the Democratic Convergence...

...The third level encompasses the folks on the ground-who'll slap up a poster or slap down an opponent depending on what's called for at the time...

...Guerrilla attacks in two dozen towns on the morning of the voting, coupled with ongoing military operations, insured a low turnout (900,000-plus out of 1.8 million eligibles), which helped Arena...

...The PDC campaign never really got moving under former Planning Minister Fidel Chavez Mena...

...Arena ran a $4 million advertising campaign that gave new meaning to the term "saturation media...

...From my observations at a couple dozen polling places, I can report that Arena folks were often pushy and aggressive, "advising" people how to vote or positioning themselves close to the ballot box to catch a look at preferences...

...In fact, the U.S...

...I don't know about the future," my friend Jorge told me, the day after the balloting as we were waiting for a meeting of Convergence party members with Ungo...

...How did they do it...

...In the view of the Salvadoran right, however, this has been "Washington-directed" socialism and revolution on the installment plan...

...If the postponement is accepted," said FMLN leader Nydia Diaz to President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica in mid-February, "the Convergence would transform itself into an absolute majority...

...Maybe the objective conditions are present in the deterioration of the economy," said one Salvadoran ob-server, "but the subjective conditions just don't exist...

...The U.S...

...For now, the U.S...

...That counts for something...

...People aren't going to rise up...

...While they had a few good words for their erstwhile allies in the Convergence, their call for a boycott had come without warning...

...Embassy remains the leading power in El Salvador, followed by the military, and only then by the civilian government...

...Republican party with its conservatives, moderates, and liberals...

...All I know is that six months ago there wasn't the courage to have a meeting like this, much less the courage to call D'Aubuisson an assassin in public or denounce the military in a small town square for betraying the people...

...Which is the real Arena...

...True, voter turnout was down, but abstentions and null ballots-nearly 13 percent in last year's Assembly elections (won by Arena)-were barely 3 percent this time around...

...Something very different happened on election day...

...The guerrillas are active in thirteen of El Salvador's fourteen departments and have the capability to strike almost at will within the capital itself...

...As one Convergence worker in the small town of El Congo in Santa Ana province told me, "you'd have to be suicidal to vote for the Convergence here" because if anyone found out you'd be marked as a guerrilla sympathizer...

...funneled nearly $2 million to Duarte against D'Au-buisson...

...The message: The U.S...

...They'll be walking people into a propeller blade...

...Their candidate this time was Alfredo ("call me Freddy") Cristiani, a wealthy, smooth-talking, Georgetown-educated coffee-grower, who waged an effective campaign against Christian Democratic corruption, economic deterioration, and the continuing war...

...The first level communicates with the second and vice versa, but the second level doesn't communicate with the base, as shown by the slogan among the fresh-faced, upper-middle class Arena volunteers: "Cristiani to the Government, D'Aubuisson to Power...

...When the FMLN proposed in late January to postpone the March 19 elections until September, to keep the army in their garrisons during the elections, and to give the vote to the hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans living outside the country, the FMLN clearly thought that given those conditions, the Convergence could win...

...claim of having turned the corner on the military conflict is hollow indeed...

...See these people," he waved across a sea of folding chairs being filled by comrades settling in for the meeting...

...In the view of the right, Duarte has nationalized banking and the lucrative export trade, promulgated an inefficient agrarian reform and-in the process-fueled the PDC with government resources...

...As we speed past volcanos and verdant coffee plantations huddled beneath their base, Zamora, the Convergence campaign coordinator, is disturbed by a communique issued the day before by the FMLN guerrillas...

...We've built an organization to continue the struggle...

...Duarte, Ungo, Zamora-all are in it only to prepare the way for the takeover of Marxist-Leninism," stated one columnist in a leading Salvadoran daily...

...with the guerrillas, they may be in exile...

...That was a fiasco...

...It was they who had the last word in turning thumbs down on the proposed election postponement...

...More seriously, they have decreed a transportation stoppage to begin the following Thursday and to last through election day, March 19...

...The number of guerrillas is half what it was, the military has become more professional, and a fragile democratic culture is in place that allows for the orderly transfer of power among civilians...

...At what point does excellent organization and presence at the polls cross over into intimidation...

...The rightist Arena party, playing by the somewhat democratic rules, stunned observers by winning more than half the votes, obviating the need for a runoff...

...On election day they were omnipresent in all voting places...

...That's not the whole story, though...

...We've done the best we could with a difficult situation...

...At the age of thirty-two, Jorge had already had fifteen years of political work and two years in exile...

...When the Salvadoran military says that they are "above" politics, they mean no matter who wins, they still call the shots, with the appropriate bow in the direction of the embassy to insure that aid keeps flowing...

...counterinsurgency project yet possessing the veneer of a proper social base and reform credentials (somewhat tattered, of late...

...He has a shooting muscular pain in his shoulder that slices toward the nerves whenever the Toyota land cruiser bounces on the blacktop byway between El Salvador's capital of San Salvador and the eastern city of San Miguel...

...government has assured Salvador that aid will continue...

...The name being bandied about for Defense Minister in the new Arena government is Air Force General Rafael Bustillo, a hardliner who was involved in the Nicaraguan contra resupply effort and is an ardent supporter of air power...

...He is coau-ihdrofEl Salvador: Central America in the New Cold War (Crrove Press) and national organizational director of the Democratic Socialists of America.ratic Socialists of America...

...He'd been tortured himself by the National Guard...

...For the FMLN, a tragic fantasy may have been bom of the campaign and election...

...PATRICK LACEFIELD 'Patrick Lace field, who worked for two years in El Salvador as director of a rural development project of the local Catholic-church, was a member of the observer team of the Socialist International for the recent Salvadoran elections...

...The FMLN doesn't want either Arena or the PDC, because both will continue the war," said FMLN leader Ana Guadalupe Martinez...

...Embassy hailed the balloting as a wonderful exercise in democracy...