Central America - Electoral Stability?
Between November 29 and March 29 there were four elections in Central America-in Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala and El Salvador. The timing was not coincidental; while Costa Rica...
...Communism For most participants Guatemala's March 7 elections were an exercise in futility and false hope...
...The 1.2 million vote turnout was lauded as "a blow for democracy" even though the halfhearted registration process only managed to cover 1.8 million of the country's more than 2.5 million citizens of voting age...
...With more than 60 % of the population illiterate, the political campaigns made frequent use of radio ads and stressed ties to party traditions-and colors-over allegiance to individual candidates...
...the military and paramilitary forces assassinate them if they try...
...while Costa Rica and Guatemala had merely followed their electoral schedule, Honduras and El Salvador were under intense pressure from the United States to place a democratically elected government on line for increased U.S...
...update...
...It may not even try...
...40 By the time Reagan took office in January 1981, Honduras had taken on a critical tactical importance in relation to the war in El Salvador, the tensions in Nicaragua and the coming storm in Guatemala...
...With Salvador's Jose Napoleon Duarte now pushed aside to his own political Elba, new Provisional President Alvaro Magana becomes the "center...
...But the country's political stability seemed to be unaffected...
...The primary satisfaction of Costa Rica's February 7 elections was to give the people a chance to vote against the Unity Party's administration of the country over the past four years, during which the national economy has sunk into a painful decline...
...Every last-minute effort Paz made to hold onto his office by postponing or sidestepping the elections was firmly vetoed by the United States...
...Terms like "moderate" and "centrist" shift ever farther to the right...
...The four elections, coupled with the January unveiling of a 'Central American Democratic Community'-formed by the unlikely bedfellows of El Salvador, Costa Rica and Honduras-served a multiple purpose...
...Guevara's fraudulent victory prompted protests from the unlikely losers' alliance of Christian Democrats and the MLN...
...The military clique of incumbent President Romeo Lucas Garcia had inexplicably arrived at the choice of General Anibal Guevara as the official government candidate of the FUN party (United National Front), 41update...
...Electoral policy can then be proclaimed through the mouths of a three-headed monster: civilian rulers invite the Left to participate...
...New military strongman Gustavo Alvarez has taken'on ever greater political visibility, to the point of publicly welcoming any future U.S...
...The difference between 1965 and 1982 is that U.S...
...and the U.S...
...Six parties ostensibly participated in the elections, but only one, Major Roberto D'Aubuisson's National Republican Alliance (ARENA), actually campaigned outside the capital, moving down the highways in heavily armed caravans of armoured cars...
...About one million of Costa Rican's 2.2 million citizens turned out to vote...
...But the race belonged to the National Liberation Party (PLN), the only party to retain the same name and institutional integrity since 1953, and the incumbent Unity Party, a coalition formed in 1978 by outgoing President Rodrigo Carazo, to include the Christian Democrats, the Democratic Renewal Party and the Popular Union...
...The Left took part and the less conservative of the two mainstream parties won...
...The United States' new found commitment to democratically elected office holders in Latin America is startling in light of historical record...
...policy in El Salvador for more than a year and the Reagan Administration has pointed to it as proof that nonviolent "democracy" does indeed enjoy the popular support that the armed leftist opposition lacks...
...Yet the superficial parallels which do exist between the four sets of elections are in large measure the result of a sustained propaganda drive by a State Department determined to show that the 'democratization' of Central America is the aim of the Administration's regional policies...
...In so doing, it has abided by the rules of the game hammered out in pre-electoral talks: no investigation into military corruption, and an acHonduran President Suazo Cordova-a limited return to constitutional rule...
...As the rules are rewritten, those who adhere to the electoral road are hailed as model democrats, whatever their political complexion...
...What could be in the offing is a new understanding between the Christian Democrats, the military and the United States in a new alliance against insurgency-not at all unlike the "moderate" regime of liberal Julio Cesar Mendez...
...Costa Ricans like to say their country is dominated by the "extreme center...
...Although the provisional junta has promised new elections, there will be a period of haggling over the date and the conditions while the MLN and the PNR-PDC coalition joust for preeminence and try to decide how best to appeal for renewed U.S...
...As the results came in, the official numbers game took on a newly frantic pace...
...the 1965 intervention of more than 20,000 U.S...
...Since the revolution of 1948 it has been run without inLuis Alberto Monge emerged victorious from Costa Rica's "fiesta civica...
...Party leader Vinicio Cerezo claimed that vast numbers of MLN militants were being forced to surrender their arms and that repression against his party had come to a near halt...
...In the weeks following the coup, the Christian Democrats made a concerted public relations effort, including a trip to Washington to appeal directly for a renewal of aid...
...The Lucas dictatorship had lost all support among the private sector, the Reagan Administration and the disaffected young officer corps of the Army, as well as the embittered rival parties...
...The CIA participation in the coups that overthrew constitutional presidents Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954 and Allende of Chile in 1973 are but the most obvious examples...
...Gladiator Ag...
...By their very nature, the electoral rules favor entrenched interests, traditional rulers, the literate and urban voter...
...The real importance of elections in Guatemala-those of 1982 as well as those discussed for next year-will be to decide which of the competing military and businessmen's cliques will have the greatest access to the country's movable assets and which can present the most acceptable justification for military assistance...
...For them it was a long-postponed contest between the two traditional forces in Honduran politics, the conservative National ("blue") Party and the slightly less conservative Liberal ("red") Party...
...NACLA Reportupdate...
...U) 02 Z MadApr 1982 terruption as Latin America's most functional bourgeois democracy, achieving a 95% literacy rate, the outlines of a welfare-state economy and the complete dismantling of the country's military establishment...
...See lead article this issue...
...Central American policy, it must do for the moment...
...If the electoral process can be shown to be "clean"--an obsessive aim in El Salvador-then elections are more convenient to U.S...
...His party members planted the rumor that if he was defrauded of victory he would launch his 80,000-man private army to take charge of the country by force...
...The State Department continued this ludicrous tradition this March in Guatemala with a postelectoral-but pre-coup-press conference by Ambassador Chapin, congratulating candidate Guevara on his victory at a moment when everyone from his fellow officers to the Chamber of Commerce was denouncing his fraud and plotting his downfall...
...In Costa Rica the electoral convention meant the reassuring transfer of power from one civilian party to another with a minuscule political distance between the two...
...Festive Dissatisfaction The Costa Ricans refer to their elections as the "fiesta civica...
...The contest had been a linchpin for U.S...
...regional military aid programs...
...In other cases, Washington's silence has spoken louder than words, such as the countenancing of the baldfaced "elections" held by Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza Long lines at Salvador's polls were offered as evidence of a large turnout...
...It was commonly said that without the benefit of fraud, Guevara would place third after Mario Sandoval Alarcon of the National Liberation Movement (MLN) and Alejandro Maldonado of the National Renovation Party (PNR)-Christian Democratic coalition, Guevara won the election by a wide official margin...
...Only five months after his election, the new regime of President Suazo Cordova has suffered a sharp erosion of public confidence...
...Finally, and most importantly, elections allow the national powers that be and the United States to define what democracy is and thus to label "anti-democratic" those who oppose or are excluded by the Mar/Apr 1982 43update update Update u a U te electoral game...
...public and congressional opinion scrutinize Central American policy as they never did with the Dominican Republic, eyeing it with a suspicion raised by the geopolitical strategies that failed in Vietnam...
...For one, they sought to showcase the building of democratic institutions in El Salvador...
...Renewed Alliances But if the elections were windowdressing for the most brutal civil war in Central American history, the coup cannot be expected to alter that reality overnight...
...But comparisons are deceptive...
...But it was perhaps more true that the country's economic problems were rooted in the same rising energy costs, low commodity prices and accelerated capital flight that have been plaguing the rest of Central America...
...Honduran President Policarpo Paz Garcia, who had taken power in a bloodless coup in August 1978, had come under steady pressure from the Carter Administration to hold elections for a constituent assembly in April 1980, which the Liberal Party won easily in a massive turnout...
...policy needs an electoral facade...
...As planned, the new constitutional government has taken over many tasks of public and economic administration from the military...
...pressure resulted in elections called far in advance with a vigorous registration process and a massive turnout...
...economic and military aid...
...pdate update * u a coalition that one conservative businessman described as "not supported by a truly popular base or by the leadership of any person in particular" and "a purely economic convenience...
...In Honduras the U.S...
...His administration, 1966-1970, coincided with a bloody counterinsurgency campaign in the east, directed by Carlos Arana Osorio and advised by the United States...
...policymakers than a more thoroughgoing participatory democracy...
...Elections Are Elections What did the four Central American elections accomplish for U.S...
...U) z3 NACLA Reportupdate update update upda ceptance of the military's right to veto key cabinet appointments...
...control of its behavior...
...And the far right, cleansed by its fair play in the elections, pointedly rejects U.S...
...It was also a chance to vote against the Army, which had roused popular disgust through its corruption and mismanagement in running the economy and government...
...42 In rural Guatemala, Maldonado gets a gift...
...In El Salvador, even more intense pressure and wartime conditions led to a haphazard registration process, the total exclusion of the leftthrough-liberal spectrum and a turnout which seemed large-so long as no one questioned the number of registered voters...
...In the careless imperialism of earlier days, it would have been easier to appoint Salvadorean Defense Minister Guillermo Garcia the State Department's presidentdesignate and let him carry out desired counterinsurgency measures, perfectly responsive and responsible to Washington in a way that even fraudulent elections can never be...
...Former MLN minister Maldonado formed the PNR the year before the elections as a tool for his own political ambitions...
...A fourth party, the Authentic Nationalist Center, received lukewarm support from the business sector but ran virtually no campaign...
...update . update "A Blow For Democracy" The March 28 elections in El Salvador were intended to elect a sixty-seat constituent assembly that would create a provisional government and lay the groundwork for national presidential elections to come...
...Never were elections so hotly debated nor so misunderstood...
...marines in the Dominican Republic was directed against forces fighting to restore democratically elected President Juan Bosch, in favor of the heirs to the Trujillo dictatorship...
...And finally elections, depicted as both a cause and a symptom of democratic process, would provide the necessary guarantees for a skeptical Congress to continue approving U.S...
...As the official candidate, Guevara had all government facilities (including the vote- counting apparatus) at his disposal...
...Cars jammed the streets blasting out the syllables of their candidates' names, while in the capital ten different parties bloomed, including an all-female party whose only male inexplicably headed the ticket...
...Sandoval, a veteran of Guatemala's counterinsurgency campaigns, self-proclaimed "gladiator against communism" and candidate of the "party of organizec violence," counted on the support of the rightist eastern provinces on the Honduran border...
...But every conceivable aspect of the election was subject to confusion, hypocrisy and hype...
...Embassy denounces them for not respecting the "people's will...
...The PLN and its presidential candidate, Luis Alberto Monge, effectively attacked Unity Party candidate Rafael Calderon on the issue of Carazo's disastrous management of the national debt...
...The Costa Rican sense of well-being has been threatened by the collapse of the colon, which fell from eight to forty to a dollar over the course of the Carazo Administration, and it was said that even the electoral hornhonking campaigns had been curtailed due to the high price of gas...
...But although Rios Montt led the coup and still maintains close working ties to the Christian Democrats, to describe them as in control of the country is far-fetched...
...military intervention in Honduras...
...In exchange for withdrawing from center stage, the military has increased its real power...
...term after term, which he always won by "popular acclamation...
...Within two weeks the elections were rendered irrelevant by a military coup led by retired General Efrain Rios Montt, the Christian Democratic coalition candidate in 1974 and backed by young officers allied to the MLN...
...No Stalling, Please The 1982 Honduran elections could be called a posthumous legacy of the Carter human rights policy, looking to repeat its 1977 success in promoting clean elections in the Dominican Republic...
...In Guatemala, on the other hand, the electoral process merely fueled the conflict between military cliNelson Santana is a long time observer of Central American affairs...
...The U.S.backed Christian Democrats won a plurality, with the rest of the votes CL z Guatemalan elections anno 1982-an exercise in futility and false hope...
...Mar/Apr 1982 39update update u pdate update going to the other five parties, all of the extreme right...
...Most Hondurans were only vaguely aware of such machinations...
...military aid...
...Maldonado was counting on his careful construction of a moderate image among the journalistic and diplomatic communities to win him international support that could make him "the Duarte of Guatemala...
...policy...
...ques in a competition that was to outlast the election results...
...the new party formed an alliance with the Christian Democrats shortly afterward hoping to take advantage of its electoral base (the Christian Democrats won the elections, if not public office, in 1974...
...None of this may have the ease and predictability of a president Garcia, but in these difficult, bankrupt times for U.S...
...At the same time, they tightened the noose around Nicaragua-portrayed as anti-democratic-at a time when that country was suffering a major destabilization effort...
Vol. 16 • March 1982 • No. 2
