Confounding Calculations
"We want to note that voting has begun on a massive scale throughout the country. The people are going to the polls and there have been no incidents to deplore.. .. " The voice of the Central...
...B. The restructuring of the Armed Forces, based on the officers and troops of the current army who are not responsible for crimes and genocide against the people, and integration of the hierarchy and troops of the FMLN...
...And the hard-won analyses ofjournalists and reporters who had been forced to go outside of the major cities-to the countryside, even to the areas held by guerrillas, in order to penetrate the quality of unreality were replaced by interviews with Reagan appointed observers, few, if any, of whom knew anything about El Salvador...
...Further, in March 1981, when talk of 1982 elections was first heard, the armed forces published a "traitors' list," denouncing all 130 who appeared on it as responsible for subversion and promising to pursue them "relentlessly...
...The FMLN/FDR noted in its statement on the elections that by 6:30 p.m., March 29twenty-four hours after the polls had closed-the Election Commission had validated only 376,814 votes...
...And as elections approached, the armed forces did nothing to rescind the list...
...public expected...
...Embassy and the Central Elections Council rather than the "biased," but more accurate, projections of one of the principal contenders...
...6. New York Times, February 18, 1982...
...Daniel All this entails our expressed willingness to start a Ortega, Coordinator of the Nicaraguan Junta of Na- dialogue with the civilian and military representatives tional Reconstruction presented the proposal to the that the Junta may appoint through a process of UN General Assembly on October 7, 1981...
...the rightist parties together won 52.3% and formed an alliance at whose head is the ARENA party, led by Roberto D'Aubuisson...
...CONFOUNDING CALCULATIONS I. San Salvador Domestic Service in Spanish, 133OGMT, March 28, 1982 as cited in the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), March 29, 1982, p. P8...
...If the message wasn't clear enough, a death squad published a hit list of 35 journalists that it said had betrayed the fatherland...
...Several of the parties had estimated there would be 1.2 million voters on election day.'s And at least one of the participants in the election expected more, many more...
...It was further enhanced when, in a departure from history, none of the contending parties challenged the results...
...They are psychopaths who, 4MarlApr 1982 and chasing bang-bang...
...The official election experts, Howard Penniman of the American Enterprise Institute and Richard Scammon, identified with the neoconservative tendency in U.S...
...governments was measured by the size of the turnout, that significant an increase in the number of votes in the two weeks after the elections is noteworthy...
...Carlos Rodriguez of the Cuban army, an adviser to the Sandinist air force...
...public of so large a vote was to make us doubt our own skepticism: if so many voted, maybe the election Mar/Apr 1982 9NACLA Report results were real after all...
...Individuals carried signs that echoed the banners stretched across the streets of San Salvador: "Journalist: Sell out your country, not ours...
...1 4 Manipulations What happened on election day...
...But both the MNR, led by FDR president 3NACLA Report Guillermo Ungo, and the UDN, the Communist Party's electoral arm, took the Army's list as a death warrant and refused to participate...
...Roberto D'Aubuisson, in one of his well-known fits of temper, called Warren Hoge of the Times a "communist," because Hoge quoted one of his key aides as saying "Napalm is indispensable in fighting the insurgents...
...Three weeks before the election a full-scale counter-attack on journalists was launched, with D'Aubuisson's ARENA party a key force behind it...
...Yet, carried out under the Soldier watching people lined up to vote on election day...
...FMLN/FDR PROPOSAL FOR A POLITICAL SOLUTION TO THE SITUATION IN EL SALVADOR In the fall of 1981, the FMLN/FDR offered its plan for life worthy of human beings...
...Tell the truth...
...That had created a "''certain lack of conifidence" among the parties.'" Over a million voters...
...To have participated in the elections would have been an implicit recognition of the junta and ultimately of U.S...
...La Prensa Grdfica (San Salvador), March 27, 1982...
...In other words, in half the time the CCE had doubled the number of votes...
...Fore2Mar/Apr 1982 most among those arguing for such a solution have been the joint opposition fronts fighting El Salvador's ruling Christian Democratic/military junta, the Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN) and the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR...
...NACLA ReportMar/Apr 1982 0 Z z Reporters photographing bodies of slain journalists...
...We propose that these peace talks which reaffirm our commitment to seek and implement a political If today our people are waging an armed struggle solution be based on the following principles: under the leadership of their organizations, the FMLN 1. The talks should be carried out between the and the FDR, this is because oppressive and repressive regimes have closed all peaceful avenues for delegates appointed by the FMLN-FDR and change, thus leaving our people with armed struggle Salvador...
...The FMLN/FDR rejected the elections, calling them a "democratic facade...
...Then, in an act of incredible journalistic irresponsibility, Diario de Hoy, one of the two national morning papers, ran the statement under the headline "Foreign Journalist Contact of Subversives," together with a photo of Koster and his three colleagues...
...negotiations to end the war in El Salvador...
...The problem for the State Department, as for anybody who studies the election statistics, is the absence of accurate data either on the number of eligible voters or on the number of voters registered...
...2 Voters waiting in line in town of Cojutepeque...
...Considerably more than the press and international opinion had been led to expect...
...hegemony in El Salvador...
...Salvadorean people: Those responsible for terrorism in El Salvador and our country's loss of prestige in the international community are the following traitors: [A list of over 130 names follows...
...Central telecommunications broke down on election night under the pressure of so many polling places calling in their results...
...Elections have been a farce in El Salvador...
...On March 11, Colonel Francisco Moran of the Treasury Police invited a Dutch journalist Jacobus (Koos) Koster to his office to discuss a piece of paper reportedly found on a dead guerrilla in Usulut.n...
...Responding to the murders, Raymond Bonner of the New York Times stated, "Eight foreign reporters have died covering the fighting and several have been wounded, some seriously...
...In part this was due to the low estimates, which did not change even on the eve of election day...
...that is not seriously debated...
...Jos6 Napole6n Duarte, believing himself to be the most popular and effective politician in El Salvador, strongly championed the idea when it was proposed in mid-1981...
...the conflict...
...Following these procedures, the pro-Soviet and pro-Cuban extremists have tried to stage a second offensive, since the first one was launched on 9 January 1932...
...ambassador to El Salvador, Deane Hinton, told network journalists that he would consider a turnout of 600,000 a great success...
...Yet over the next few months, his government-at U.S...
...Most knew little of El Salvador...
...In addition, they have poisoned the minds of our youths and children with the aid of Sandinist-Cuban mercenaries and mercenaries of other nationalities who, through their criminal actions have brought misery, unemployment and anxiety to the Salvadorean citizenry in general...
...That would mean 2.1 million persons eligible to vote...
...9. New York Times, April 11, 1982...
...To the eyes of the freshly arrived media reporters, the story seemed to be the advance of electoral democracy, the defeat of the Left and the triumph of the people's will...
...Its candidates had won by fraud in 1972 and 1977.17 On March 22, PCN leaders called a news conference to protest the printing of an "exaggerated number of voting ballots...
...But democracy is not defined by or limited to elections...
...Included are Shafik Jorge Handal, Salvador Cayetano Carpio, Joaquin Villalobos, Ferman Cienfuegos and Roberto Roca, the five commanders of the FMLN...
...San Salvador Domestic Service, 2102GMT, March 31, 1982 as cited in FBIS, April 1, 1982, p. P1...
...Most immediately, even a moderate turnout would help discredit the Salvadorean revolutionary forces and quiet the voices calling for negotiations...
...Noting that the voting time per person in some places was from eight to ten minutes, some calculated the number of ballot boxes (4,556) and the number of persons who voted (officially 1,551,680), and concluded that voting would have taken more than the 12 hours during which the polls were open...
...For more on these elections, see Chapters III and IV in Robert Armstrong and Janet Shenk, El Salvador: The Face of Revolution, (South End Press: Boston, 1982...
...2 On March 31, vote totals announced over the radio at 3 p.m...
...Despite pressure from important allies in Europe and Latin America to negotiate with the revolutionary forces for an end to the war, the Reagan Administration stuck to its plan...
...The oligarchy in El Salvador is angry at the country's dependence on Washington and determined to regain their monopoly of power and resources...
...The press was truly part of the story, providing the international and local hype that gave the event its festival air...
...5. New York Times, April 11, 1982...
...Two days before that, the Central Elections Council estimated a vote of 720,000...
...A political solution is necessary for our people for the stability of the region, and for the maintenance of peace and security among nations...
...2 "A Bloody Cynical Circus" So wrote two young journalists for the Village Voice to describe the bizarre, fiesta quality of the events leading up to the elections.3 Over 700 journalists came from around the world to cover this eminently splashy media event...
...At 6 a.m...
...ButJorge Bustamante, head of the electoral council, also said that polls indicated a likely 80-85% turn-out...
...But March 28, 1982, election day, arrived in the middle of a full-scale war, a war which even U.S...
...Tell the truth...
...Thus there was no systematic way of registering the eligible voter population...
...Bang-bang" is a television term for military encounters between the Army and the guerrillas...
...government officials privately admitted the Salvadorean armed forces were losing...
...Roberto Cuellar, director of the Legal Aid Office of the Archdiocese of San Salvador, newspaper publisher Jose Napoleon Gonzalez and poets Roberto Armijo and Tirso Canales.] The terrorists of the FDR and the FMLN, carrying out their strategy of prolonged "people's" war imposed by Moscow, have destroyed bridges, centers of agricultural work, industrial, commercial and banking centers and electrical, drinking water and telephone service installations...
...Looking beyond the expectations, the possible manipulations, what did it mean to vote in El Salvador...
...1 The final official count was 1,551,680-out of a voting population estimated by the State Department at 1.5 million...
...In San Salvador, with a voting age population of close to half a million, there were only 13 places to vote...
...And this time, Guillermo Ungo observed, it was even more of a puppet show...
...The inability of Duarte and the Christian Democrats to gain a majority-in large part due to his association with the escalating violence of the last two years-means that they were able to consolidate that hold without resorting to a coup...
...The paper read: "Contact with Koos Koster in Hotel Alameda, room 418...
...56 him-in English--"Tell the truth...
...The Turnout Still, the number who went to vote was surprising...
...Suddenly absent was all the macabre killing, the threats of napalm...
...economic order that will guarantee the Salvadorean 5. They should be initiated without prepeople the full exercise of their rights as citizens and a established conditions by either party...
...Ibid...
...The Reagan Administration began to pump in huge supplies of arms and economic aid, designed to shore up the junta and allow the Salvadorean military to deliver the coup de grace to the guerrillas...
...So they subtracted 400,000, as well as another 200,000 estimated to have no identity cards, 20,000 dead and 25,000 in the armed forces and thus not permitted to vote...
...The difference is that in 1972, it was the National Guard that stuffed the ballot boxes while now the work is done by the CCE's computer...
...In Washington, Secretary of State Alexander Haig was jubilant...
...This implies that governments should scrupulously observe the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other peoples...
...They must be based on an agenHowever, our desire is peace...
...After years of electoral mobilization throughout the 1960s and 1970s, only to have their victories stolen the day after elections, all of the opposition-from the social democratic MNR to the Marxist guerillas-were united in rejecting such a solution...
...There are no easy explanations...
...ing are key passages from that proposal...
...8 Terrorizing the Press Then things turned nasty...
...Information gathered from State Department by Washington Office on Latin America, March 1982...
...Whatever happens in the elections, we are not going to accuse anyone or say absolutely anything against the elections...
...Further investigation probably will reveal even more questions about the 1982 elections in El Salvador, about the procedure as well as the returns...
...To attain it we pro- da established by both parties...
...First, the number of polling places was surprisingly few...
...On this occasion, they changed their strategy, victimizing the departments of Morazan, La Union, Usulutan, Cabanas, Chalatenango, San Vicente, La Paz, Santa Ana and northern El Salvador, in obedience to the dictates from Moscow sent through Fidel Castro in Cuba and the Sandinist National Liberation Front in Nicaragua, the latter led by the Ortega brothers, the Mexican Victor Tirado Lopez, the Palestinian Moises Hassan, the Nicaraguan-Costa Rican Eden Pastora and other international terrorists such as Col...
...The same veteran photographer told of covering a D'Aubuisson rally...
...Does it promise a government of national unity, as is even now claimed...
...It was election day, long awaited by the Reagan Administration, Jos6 Napole6n Duarte, the armed forces, the FMLN/FDR, and a world primed for the event...
...Fathers Rutilio Sanchez, Miguel Ventura, Higinio Alas, Jose Alas and Fabian Amaya, Catholic priests...
...The State Department did little to clarify that issue.' 9 El Salvador has universal suffrage for all citizens at least 18 years of age who can present pro- per identification...
...A 1979 World Bank study projected the voting age population in El Salvador to be 47% in 1980...
...The follow- peace talks...
...Also on the list were Jesuit priests Ignacio Ellacuria and Luis de Sebastian, rector and vice-rector, respectively, of the Central American University...
...Both men signed a statement about the circumstances of their meeting which the Armed Forces Press Office released to the press...
...What does the turnout say about the claims of the FMLN/ FDR to represent the popular will...
...There can be election after election...
...Elections were the pet project of the junta, and beyond it, or above it, the U.S...
...Traitors Lists and Fraud The FMLN boycotted the elections...
...ACAN/EFE, 0128GMT, March 24, 1982 as cited in FBIS, March 24, 1982, p. P3...
...But a combination of forces was working to give them a surprise...
...government...
...Our struggle is, therefore, a just and necessary 3: The nature of the talks must be comprehenstruggle to build peace and equality among all the sive and include the fundamental aspects of Salvadorean people...
...But there is no doubt that a great number of people turned out and voted...
...But beyond the questions of past fraud and implicit death threats, there was the question of the legitimacy of the elections themselves...
...What complicates the analysis of the election results is figuring out how many people were eligible to vote...
...Even the armed forces, thick at every polling place, were down-played...
...This is why they have turned to their Soviet-Fidelist-Sandinist masters to obtain lethal weapons to carry out their strategy of prolonged "people's" war since 1968...
...Elections will be an important element as a mechanism of popular participation and representation...
...Washington Office on Latin America, interview with staff person who transcribed State Department description of method of estimating eligible voting population...
...The popular organizations within the FDR, whose leaders were also named, believed that registering themselves as parties through the qualifying petitions would only add more names to the list...
...circumstances...
...Guillermo Ungo, Jose Napoleon Rodriguez Ruiz, Fabio Castillo, Ruben Zamora, Hector Oqueli, Farid Handal and Rafael Menjivar of the FDR...
...FMLN/FDR, "On the Elections of March 28, 1982," March 31, 1982...
...The elections council had printed 3 million--1.08 million more than planned...
...Our Fronts consider elections a valid and necessary instrument of expression of the people's will whenever conditions and atmosphere exist that allow the people to freely express their will...
...Koster said he did not know the dead guerrilla...
...we are the only power in the land...
...Oh yes, it is pluralism, Ungo noted wryly, "fascist pluralism...
...The stench of death could not be hidden, and its exposure angered Duarte as well as the parties on the right...
...1 5 In Santa Ana, the second largest city, there were nine, while in San Miguel, third largest, there were four...
...The old story of the 1972 fraud-known as 'night voting'-had been repeated...
...Since the initial outcome pleased all of the participants from the Christian Democrats who won a plurality of the vote to the five parties of the right whose post-electoral alliance gave them a majority, no one had to...
...The Triumph of Democracy The turnout on election day was large, larger than the U.S...
...television and in the major newspapers...
...And guerNACLA ReportMarlApr 1982 9 rilla efforts to disrupt the elections appeared to have come to nothing-at least where reporters still dared to go...
...Theodore Hesburgh of Notre Dame University was on the delegation as an old friend of Notre Dame graduate Duarte as much as a spokesperson for human rights...
...and former members of the Christian Democratic Party who had resigned from the party in protest against the repression-Hector Silva, Francisco Paniagua, Alberto Arene and Hector Dada, the latter also a member of the second junta (January-March, 1980...
...The elections were important to its long-term strategy in Central America...
...New York Times, March 30, 1982...
...In El Salvador today we do not have those conditions to carry out an electoral process, inasmuch as the regime's repressive apparatus, which assassinates political and labor leaders and activists, remains untouched...
...yet if there is not opportunity for debate, no way to discuss issues that affect everyday life, no right to organize to defend people's rights, no freedom for the mass of the population to participate in that complex process-there is not democracy...
...One newly arrived reporter is said to have asked the desk clerk at the Camino Real Hotel-the principal scribes' hangout-"Can you give me the address of the headquarters of the FDR...
...On the list were Jose Alberto Ramos, Leoncio Pichinte and Julio Flores, leaders of the popular organizations...
...politics, had important experience to bring to bear...
...and La Libertad Department, all in compliance with orders from Moscow...
...Participants in these negotiations would include the FMLN/FDR, the junta, the United States, and other forces in El Salvador anxious to end the bloodshed...
...indicated that the votes cast for the six parties (excluding defaced and contested votes, 12 percent of the total) was 1,113,394.21 When final results were announced on April 14, that number had risen to 1,362,339, an increase of 22% although the percentage of votes among the six parties had not significantly changed...
...Likewise the regime has currently in effect a state of siege, martial law and press censorship and is escalating the war against the people with arms and advisers sent by the Government of the United States...
...Since mid-1981, the FMLN/FDR had carried its message of a political solution to the capitals of the world, gradually winning political recognition for itself and support for its plan for unconditional negotiations...
...Successful elections in El Salvador, along with those in Guatemala and Honduras, would present a collective example of electoral democracy in the region, in sharp contrast to the much publicized "totalitarian" image of Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas did not plan to hold elections until 1985...
...On the day of the election, U.S...
...Its political solution was elections...
...We are confident that the constitutent assembly, given the extraordinary mandate it has received from the Salvadorean people, will find ways to hold out a hand of conciliation to those who are prepared to take part peacefully in the democratic process now so encouragingly underway in El Salvador, " Haig noted in the brief full flush of apparent victory.13 The significance of the elections depended in part on one's proximity to the event and familiarity with the background...
...Also among the names were members of the government of the first junta (October 15, 1979-January 3, 1980)-Roman Mayorga, Luis Buitrago and Salvador Arias...
...Five parties of the right, representing the business community and much of the military, challenged the Christian Democrats, whose complicity in the repression had tarnished their credentials as reformers...
...Marianela Garcia, head of the Human Rights Commission of El Salvador...
...They were ambushed by soldiers who knew of their rendezvous with the guerrillas...
...D'Aubuisson himself won only 25% .23 Like Reagan's victory in 1980, the Salvadorean elections represented the ability of the Right to consolidate its support at a time when the vast majority of the population was disenchanted with President Duarte and did not see a third-party candidate as a viable alternative...
...That day a new El Salvador appeared on the U.S...
...A "Political Solution" For almost a year, a growing international chorus had been urging a political solution to El Salvador's increasingly violent civil war...
...In the United States, successive administrations increasingly extol the form of democracy while taking steps to limit the content...
...They have used the Marxist-Leninist tactic of alliance to massacre the Salvadorean people ever since 1730 hours on 10 January of this year...
...Curiously, some eyewitnesses said many polling places were deserted by mid-afternoon, while others noted that the pressure to vote was so intense that the Central Elections Council wanted to extend the time past the deadline...
...graph the major, the crowd started to shout at despite the fact that they are a minority, have sought to terrorize the peaceful and heroic Salvadorean people who, in their pamphlets, they have discredited in the eyes of the international community...
...Since the government did not fall, the offensive was called a failure...
...On that occasion, their victims were located in...
...From its years of experience, the National Conciliation Party (PCN)-the "official party" fom 1961 to 1979-smelled fraud at every turn, for it knew all the tricks...
...As he climbed onto the rostrum to photoyour right to vote...
...Could it be that obliging so many people to vote in so few places had something to do with those long lines...
...it persists in persecuting the progressive sectors of the Church and is responsible for the daily physical elimination of dozens of citizens...
...Among journalists and others who had been there longer there was decidedly less enthusiasm for the elections, little belief that they represented anything approaching a measure of people's desires and a certainty that the whole process would not only solve nothing but would further polarize El Salvador's already divided politics...
...Dutch...
...For this reason, the armed forces, fulfilling their constitutional mission of defending the Salvadorean people, will relentlessly pursue all the traitors of the fatherland so that they can account for the great damage caused to our fatherland...
...Two other crews were fired upon from helicopters...
...9 Two days later, government forces pinned down a Brazilian television crew, further tightening the net on journalists who covered more than they were supposed to...
...Duarte protested that he was fighting not only the rebels but the Washington Post and the New York Times...
...But the international press had accepted the "neutral" judgments of the U.S...
...According to the State Depart- ment, which claimed to be using World Bank estimates, El Salvador has a population of five million, of which 42% is 18 or over...
...o As the media played up the bizarre contrasts in El Salvador, trying to convey the atmosphere of elections in the midst of war, the U.S...
...The New El Salvador On election day, patriotism was the dominant image beamed by satellite and tapped out on tapes...
...All this created an image of respectability, of genuine democracy at work...
...On the list were all of the leaders of the FMLN/FDR...
...8 On March 17, Koster and the rest of his team were shot down shortly after being met by a guerrilla who had agreed to conduct them behind the lines into FMLN territory...
...on Tuesday, March 30, the Central Elections Council (CCE) had increased the total to 747,256 valid votes," the statement said...
...They marked a dramatic step in the polarization of Salvadorean society...
...Indeed, all talk of fraud ceased on the Friday before the election when after weeks of prating about its dangers, Major D'Aubuisson, perhaps sensing victory, suddenly announced, "You will not hear us mention fraud ever again...
...The Salvadorean people have the right to know that the leaders of the "political struggle" as it is called by those who are following the instructions or guidelines decided upon in Havana when the Latin American Solidarity Organization (OLAS) was established between 10 July and 31 August 1967, are Shafik Jorge Handal, Domingo Santa Cruz Castro, Americo Mauro Araujo, Neftal Ordonez, Jorge Federico Baires, Jose Domingo Mira, Renan Rodas Lazo, and Jorge Arias Gomez [members of the Salvadorean Communist Party], who received the order to begin the "political struggle...
...But 500,000 Salvadoreans are in the United States and another 300,000 in Central America and Mexico, and the State Department claims that 50% of this population are of voting age...
...The electoral council decided not to use previous voter registration lists because people had moved around so much that these were unreliable...
...The glamor had turned to pique when word of what the reporters were saying got back to El Salvador: government repression, torture and murder, death squads, accounts of "Major Bob" D'Aubuisson's remarks, all played up on U.S...
...4. Interview with Nelson Santana, May 1982...
...At first welcomed, soon the international media became irritating-and then suspect...
...And the rest of them were running around ripping off their stuff THE TRAITORS U8ST This communique by the Salvadorean armed forces was published on March 30, 1981, in La Prensa Grafica, one of the most important newspapers in El Salvador: The Salvadorean armed forces, fulfilling their constitutional duty of maintaining public order and realizing that the Salvadorean citizens wish to know who are responsible for terrorist activities, by this means wish to record for the present society and future generations that the bandits and terrorists who belong to the Revolutionary Democratic Front (FDR) and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) have used the communist tactic of deceit in an attempt to portray themselves to the domestic and international public as two different bodies...
...Whether Ambassador Hinton or the head of the Electoral Commission, Dr...
...2 2 Since victory for the Salvadorean and U.S...
...ACAN/EFE, 0128GMT, March 24, 1982 as cited in FBIS, March 24, 1982, p. P3...
...of war in a climate of regional terror, the elections were reminiscent of the stagemanaged elections of Vietnam in 1968...
...Counting by Computer Further, despite extensive use of computer technology, the election results are a confusing mess, raising as many questions as they answer...
...In the weeks before the elections Salvadorean newspapers carried photos of arriving journalists, cameras in hand, subtlely reminding their readers of the international importance of the event...
...Senator Nancy Kassebaum became a Salvador expert on the spot, simply because she was there-and a U.S...
...So based on a final turnout of 1.55 million, 107% of the eligible population voted...
...as the sole and legitimate means to attain their liberation, thereby exercising the universal and constitu- 2. They should be carried out in the presence of tional right to revolt against illegal and repressive other governments, that aswitnesseswillconauthorities, tribute to the solution of the conflict...
...The Results As is well known, the Christian Democrats won a plurality of the votes, with 35.5% of the total...
...Responding to a question from Koster, Colonel Moran denied that the armed forces were interfering with Koster's journalistic work...
...Diario de Hoy, March 26, 1982...
...The assembly would govern until presidential and legislative elections could be held, projected for a year later...
...The announcement of elections came not long after the guerrilla offensive of January 1981, called the "final offensive" by some of the forces within the FMLN...
...Diario de Hoy April 16, 1982...
...and others who, pretending to be a great majority, claimed to be leading the people's struggle for vindication, but were actually directed by agents of the Soviet KGB and Cuba's Central Intelligence Bureau (DGI...
...Both had witnessed the U.S.-sponsored elections in Vietnam in 1968...
...4 A seasoned journalist smiled ruefully: "It's about a thousand miles north of here, in Mexico City...
...A combination of luck, good timing and clever manipulation of differences among the insurgents allowed this strategy to catch the FMLN/FDR off guard and provided the Reagan Administration with a highly visiblealbeit short-term-victory...
...news: peaceful, democratic, with long lines of enthusiastic voters...
...Tel 23-9999...
...As such, elections would be a strong weapon in the Administration's uphill struggle to get congressional and popular support for longterm intervention in Central America...
...7 Koster, a veteran of eight years' coverage of Central America, went with three of his colleagues to see the colonel...
...Unified Revolutionary Directorate of the Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN) Executive Committee of the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR)8 While the other casualities came in combat, the Dutch were the first to have been the specific targets of a government operation...
...As one veteran photographer told NACLA, "There were six guys there who knew what was going on...
...7. Diario de Hoy (San Salvador), March 12, 1982...
...3. Marc Cooper and Ronnie Lovler,"Bloody Cynical Circus," Village Voice, April 6, 1982...
...The revolutionary cause is lost, was the junta's message...
...But the Reagan Administration defined a "political solution" very differently...
...State Department Demographics So, let us take the turnout at face value, 1.55 million...
...In an effort to establish a basis that will guarantee a political solution, the FMLN-FDR hereby express our willingness to discuss the following points: A. Definition of a new political, economic and judicial order that will allow and stimulate the full democratic participation of the different political, social and economic sectors and forces, particularly those that have been marginalized...
...While not rejecting elections as a way of expressing the popular will, they insisted they were possible only under certain conditions...
...These elections are a major achievement in the development of democracy in El Salvador...
...Reflecting his uneasy relationship with the military, President Duarte had not been told that the list would be published...
...Sonsonate Department...
...senator...
...2. Talk by Guillermo Ungo at NACLA dinner, New York City, November 7, 1981...
...Certainly, the effect on the U.S...
...Vote totals were suspiciously slow in coming in...
...But for those who look beyond the images, there are some interesting questions, suggesting that the massive turnout was not all that it appeared...
...New York Times, April 4, 1982...
...New York Times, March 28, 1982...
...They have always been manipulated to give an appearance of democracy...
...The unspoken premise on which the plan rested was the defeat of the armed insurgency led by the FMLN/FDR...
...The voice of the Central Elections Council came over radio and television in the early afternoon, El Salvador, March 28, 1982...
...Total eligible voters: 1,450,000...
...Instead, the media presented long lines of people waiting to vote, in every city they went...
...8. Ibid...
...Ibid...
...Voters would first elect a Constituent Assembly, which would draft a new constitution and a new structure of government to replace the series of juntas that began with the coup of October 15, 1979...
...A full-blown war, with basic rights of free speech and assembly suspended and official terror a part of daily life, did not constitute these conditions...
...This is why we are directly addressing the Government of the United States and demanding an end to its military intervention in El Salvador, which is against the interests of both the Salvadorean and American peoples and endangers the peace and security of Central America...
...urgingmade repeated pleas to two of the political parties within the FDR-the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) and the National Democratic Union (UDN)-to join in the approaching elections...
...pose a political solution whose objective is to put an 4. The Salvadorean people should be informed end to the war and establish a new political and of the entire process...
...Jorge Bustamante, were deliberately underestimating the turnout, only they can say...
...So did the military and the Salvadorean business community...
...public grew disenchanted with the talk of democracy and began to suspect the elections were in fact a facade...
Vol. 16 • March 1982 • No. 2
