In El Salvador, many people associate the noise of helicopters with the 12-year civil war 
that ripped apart this tiny Central American country. Yet late on March 7, seven years after the 
war ended, helicopters ferried voting results from remote provinces into the capital. The aircraft 
landed on the lawn of a commercial mall across the street from where politicians awaited the 
official tally. As the aircraft repeatedly buzzed low over poor neighborhoods on their way into 
the capital, people hardly noticed the sound anymore. 
      Nor did they notice the elections. Less than 40 percent of this country's 3.1 million eligible 
voters bothered to cast a ballot for their country's next president. Such a high level of abstention, 
several observers note, signals serious problems for the country's nascent democracy. 
 “In the transition after the war, we've constructed new institutions and new rules of the 
game, a new judicial apparatus, and a new institutional structure, but we've made few efforts to 
increase those civic values that have to accompany the institutions,” Carlos Ramos, an 
investigator at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, told LP. “We've constructed a  modern political regime but we haven't constructed a democratic culture. People have not come to associate the functioning of the democratic system with the resolution of their fundamental daily problems.” 
      So they stayed home. 
      It wasn't supposed to be this way. After 1997 legislative and municipal elections in which 
the rightist Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA) barely defeated the leftist Frente 
Farabundo Marti para la Liberacion Nacional (FMLN), the 1999 presidential elections were 
supposed to be a showdown between the two parties, a contest in which the left had a real chance to take over the executive branch. But as the campaign got underway last year, the FMLN did everything wrong. 
      When the FMLN held a convention in August to name its presidential candidate, 
“everyone in the country was watching, there was tremendous media coverage, it seemed like 
the final election of the next national president,” Ramos said. But the convention couldn't agree on one candidate, and the party needed two more conventions to finally choose a compromise 
candidate in September. In the process, the three most popular potential candidates--San Salvador Mayor Hector Silva, former human rights prosecutor Victoria Marina de Aviles, and political analyst Hector Dada--had withdrawn their candidacies or refused to run. It was a bitter, and costly, internecine fight. 
      “By the third congress, no one cared any longer what happened,” Ramos said. “A six-year 
struggle to construct a new image was thrown away in a month and a half. After 1997, when 
they presented themselves as an alternative force with a distinct type of political practice, in 1998 they publicly exhibited their intolerance, irrationality, and dogmatism.” 
      The FMLN's compromise presidential candidate, Facundo Guardado, was crippled by his 
guerrilla past (what commentators here refer to as “the smell of gunpowder”), as well as by lack of support from some “orthodox” sectors of the FMLN. Shafick Handal, head of the FMLN's 
communist tendency, was almost entirely absent from the campaign, and most of Handal's 
followers simply didn't vote. Handal had argued privately that it was better for the party not to win the presidential race this time around, since he believes a major crisis in the country's economy is looming three or fours years from now. It would be better, according to Handal, for ARENA to take the blame for that. 
      The campaign of Guardado and vice presidential candidate Nidia Diaz was also debilitated 
by a popular perception that they were trying hard to be something they weren't. “The leftist 
candidates dressed up and used a different language so as to not scare off the economically 
powerful. They put on suits to get their photo taken in book-lined libraries, and they used 
language different from how people talk on the streets,” feminist leader Morena Herrera told LP. 
“The rightwing candidates appeared in short-sleeve shirts, walking with the people, talking about 
the problems of ordinary people.” 
      The FMLN's approach, said Morena, a former guerrilla leader, “didn't fool the rich and it 
turned off the poor.” 
      ARENA's presidential candidate, Francisco Flores, seemed to do everything right. 
     ARENA washed its dirty laundry in private, and Flores presented a united front. The 39-year old philosophy professor, chosen in a February 1998 party congress, portrayed himself as different from the bloody rightists, like Roberto D'Aubuisson, who formed ARENA as an fanatical anticommunist party during the height of the war. Although ARENA's party hymn speaks of El Salvador as the tomb of “the reds,” Flores commissioned rap artists to bring it up to date. 
Although ARENA had won the last two presidential elections, Flores sold himself as the 
candidate of change. 
      Flores led pre-election polls for months, and his victory was no surprise. His absolute 
majority of 51.96 percent avoided a second round of voting. Guardado, whose FMLN joined in an electoral coalition with the small Union Social Cristiana, garnered 28.88 percent. Ruben Zamora, the FMLN's 1994 presidential candidate, got 7.59 percent as the candidate of the five-party Centro Democratic Unido coalition. 
      Sometime before he takes office on June 1, Flores will name his cabinet. It will be the first 
post-electoral sign of whether he really brings new perspectives to the presidency or whether 
he's just “the pretty face of the inner circles” of ARENA hardliners. He has promised a cabinet 
composed of qualified people from all political backgrounds, but former President Alfredo 
Cristiani warned the day after the elections that Flores had better stick to ARENA faithful. 
Should Flores wander far from the party leash, Salvadorans may begin to speak of his administration and the ARENA party as two distinct entities. 
      The FMLN faces months of political wrestling as it looks for scapegoats for the electoral 
loss. It will have to get its house in order quickly, however, if it wants to recover in time for the 
legislative and municipal elections next year. 

                             - From San Salvador, Paul Jeffrey 

Sidebar: Women target 2000 vote 

      During 1997 midterm elections, Salvadoran voters gave the leftist FMLN control of half 
the country's cities, including the mayor's office of the two largest cities. The FMLN also won 
27 seats in the Asamblea Legislativa–just one less than the ruling ARENA. 
      Besides the left's competitive showing two years ago, women candidates did better than 
ever. The FMLN's legislative bench includes ten women, for example. Of 1,320 city council 
members elected nationwide from all parties, 235 are women. Twenty-two of the country's 240 
mayors are women. The numbers remain small compared to women's share of the population, 
but feminist activists insist it's a sign that things are changing. 
      On March 23, women mayors and city council members from around the country will 
gather to plot strategy for next year. Their goal is to double the number of elected women 
politicians. They believe the results of this year's voting, when many women stayed home, give 
them new space to demand that political parties give women a chance as candidates. 
      “We've sent a message that we are not unconditional supporters,” declared Morena 
Herrera, a leader of Las Dignas, a leftist feminist group. 
      If political parties don't respond adequately, Herrera said, women may go it alone next year 
or form a coalition with the country's budding environmental movement. 
      Many feminists who might otherwise have supported the FMLN had their party fervor 
chilled in February when the Asamblea Legislativa passed a constitutional amendment banning 
abortion. Not one legislator voted against the motion. Fourteen FMLN deputies supported the 
constitutional amendment, and 12 FMLN deputies abstained. 
      The Asamblea vote was part of a recent crackdown on abortions in this country. In April 
of last year the Asamblea strengthened criminal penalties, allowing for up to eight years in prison 
for women who obtain abortions and for doctors who perform them. There are no exceptions 
for rape or incest. In the last half of 1998, the government brought abortion charges against 20 
women, compared to only five prosecutions during the previous six months. 
      While most of the participants in the March 23 meeting will likely be women elected as 
FMLN candidates, women in ARENA are also chafing at the machista attitudes of party 
leaders. 
      One prominent woman politician, Ana Maria de Gamero, the vice-ministra de salud 
publica, said recently she was tired of always being asked in ARENA meetings to serve on the 
party's committees dealing with women's affairs. “If I serve on the women's committees, then my 
job becomes arranging rooms before meetings and preparing the food,” complained de Gamero. 

                                                                         - PJ