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Spanish for Vietnam: Elections & El Salvador

By VVAW

To hear the network news teams explain the March 28th elections, the American people should now believe that El Salvador has been turned into a democracy and that there was a clear rebuff to the guerrilla movement. But there is more going on than meets the tube.

Elections to represent some common and real expression of a peoples' will must be free: free of taxes, free of choice and free of the threat of violence if you vote for the loser. El Salvador can only claim no poll tax. Every part was not allowed on the ballot: the Revolutionary Action Party was ruled off the ballot on a technicality. For any of the guerrilla groups or their fronts to run in the election, they first had to disarm and then present a list of backers with addresses to the government. This would have been simple and straight-out suicide.

Right-wing parties did not have to disarm. The leader of the far-right ARENA Party, d'Aubuisson, was described by the U.S. Ambassador (before the elections) as the "Idi Amin of Central American." He also at the head of the "Death Squads" responsible, among other atrocities, for the assassination of ArchBishop Romero. If the Death Squads didn't swoop down on the "disarmed" guerrillas, then the government, (responsible, along with the far-right, for 90% of the killing in El Salvador, according to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops) certainly would have. In either case the election requirements the guerrillas would have had to meet effectively ruled them out of the elections.

A big deal was made of the election turnout and it seems clear that a large number of Salvadorians did vote. Salvadorians, however, are required to carry ID cards; these cards were stamped when you voted, in order to insure that people did not vote more than once, according to the U.S. State Department. According to people on the spot, however, an un-stamped ID card was enough to admit to being a friend of the guerrillas. Further, government employees were not paid prior to the election with the understanding that, in order to pick up the paycheck, a stamped ID card would be required. The same process was used by the banks and a number of other businesses to "insure" a good turnout.

Apparently the government was not content to rest with coercing as many votes as possible. According to a communique on the elections put out by the major parties representing the guerrillas (the FDR and FMLN) after 24 hours the government reported 376 thousand valid votes; 12 hours later the figure had jumped to 747 thousand valid ballots. And in the days after the election, the El Salvadorian Ambassador to Washington reported 1 million, 200 thousand votes, even though there were only 800 thousand ballots printed!

And who got the votes? An armed fascist underground is a fairly good incentive to vote for the above-ground ARENA party. After all, if they can kill Catholic Bishops, assassinate American AID personnel, torture missionaries, then keep their guns and run in an election, what is there to prevent their doing in a peasant voter later on?

This is hardly the first election designed to give a credibility to a government. Rhodesia is one of the more recent examples. An election was held there one year before the guerrilla movement took power; Bishop Muzorewa, the Black candidate backed by the West and by South Africa won 70% of the vote with a record number of 2 million votes cast. According to the press at the time, the guerrilla movement was clearly repulsed. But when an election was held less than a year later—an election supervised by the U.S. and Great Britain—the guerrilla forces won a stunning victory; Muzorewa got a total of 8% of the vote.

And almost any Vietnam vet who was in Vietnam during one of their elections has the vivid memory of government troops herding people into the polling places to make sure that the U.S. backed government got is desired margins of victory. Immediately afterwards the U.S. government, slightly sensitive to the issue since it was the U.S. which had prevented the first Vietnam-wide election in fear that Ho Chi Minh would win, trumpeted the victory as another great step on the road to democracy in South Vietnam.

In El Salvador, the simple fact is that the military and the death squads will not stop murdering their opponents just because of an election. Discontent among the people will not subside as a result of the victory of the far right; if anything it will increase. And as they U.G. government (which has already begun to backtrack on anything bad it ever said about d'Aubuisson, continues its involvement, the American people will be watching a spectacle right straight along the lines of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.