An Election Reconsidered

By Marguerite Johnson

Charges of fraud raise new doubts as a power struggle looms

The elections that took place in El Salvador on March 28 were the centerpiece of U.S. policy toward that troubled Central American country. They were supposed to pave the way for a return to democracy, thereby reducing the appeal of leftist guerrillas who were alleged to be receiving aid from Nicaragua and Cuba. Noting the high turnout, President Reagan declared: "Now they really showed that there is a real desire for democracy there." But last week the election results came under attack. An article based on research at the Jesuit-run Central American University in San Salvador suggested that the vote totals had been hyped outrageously. At the same time, the newly elected, rightist-dominated constituent assembly's suspension of a significant part of the U.S.-backed land reform program put the Reagan Administration's request for increased military and economic aid in serious jeopardy in Congress and set the stage for yet another power struggle within El Salvador.

The charges of election fraud were made by Professor Thomas Sheehan of Chicago's Loyola University, who claimed that the total number of votes cast in the election had been vastly inflated, "with at least the knowledge of the United States Government." Sheehan's conclusions were based on calculations of the number of available ballot boxes, the hours polling booths remained open and the estimated time it would take each voter to cast a ballot. Sheehan suggested that the official tally of 1,485,185 votes could be more than double the number actually cast. He did not, however, challenge the election's outcome. The university's research, he wrote, suggests that while political leaders conspired to increase the overall turnout, they did not change the proportion of votes won by each party or the composition of the new assembly.

A senior diplomat in Washington quickly dismissed the study as "garbage." Said State Department Spokesman Alan Romberg: "We reject the charge that the U.S. was party to any fraud. Nor did any of those countless observers on the site of the elections suggest there was fraud." Romberg cited as a "key error" the claim that it took voters 2 1/2 to three minutes each to cast their ballots. A more likely estimate, he said, ranged between 30 seconds and one minute.

In San Salvador, politicians took issue with Sheehan's claim that the various parties had participated in a "pact" with the American embassy to go along with the inflated tally. But some conceded that election day had indeed been marred by irregularities. Said Luis Nelson Segovia, a deputy from the center-right Democratic Action Party: "The possibility [of fraud] has merit. There were so many variants and shortcomings on election day. But there is no proof." Christian Democratic Party Spokesman Guillermo Antonio Guevara Lacayo agreed that there had been fraud, but said that the total number of votes in question was probably around 50,000, rather than 700,000 to 800,000. Said he: "They were mainly the result of breakdowns in the system and of incidents in small towns, but to think that the fraud was a premeditated campaign orchestrated by the government, the armed forces and the American embassy has no justification."

Dr. Jorge Bustamante, head of the Central Election Council, which supervised the elections, accused Sheehan and the university of trying to "discredit the electoral process to give the impression that the elections were not representative for those people who did not want elections in the first place." He also challenged the research, noting that he took only 35 seconds to vote. The alleged pact, he said, was nothing more than an agreement by the rightists to form the coalition that now dominates the assembly.

The controversy erupted in the wake of a storm over the assembly's partial suspension last month of land reforms introduced by the civilian-military junta that ruled before the March elections. There were growing signs that a showdown was imminent between the Minister of Defense, General Jose Guillermo Garcia, who supports land reform, and Roberto d'Aubuisson, the ultraright assembly president who had pushed through the suspension. The military has backed the land reforms to win popular support from the peasantry by giving them a share in the country's economic life. Garcia also fears that D' Aubuisson's action will jeopardize El Salvador's chances of receiving the American military aid it needs to continue fighting the guerrillas.

Speculation that the military might assert itself intensified after the Senate Foreign Relations Committee trimmed $100 million from the Reagan Administration's request for aid to El Salvador in fiscal 1983. The committee stipulated that the funds would be restored only if the government certified in July that the land reform program was proceeding as scheduled. The State Department tried to repair the damage to its policy by dispatching U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador Deane Hinton to talk to Congressmen. But as a senior U.s. diplomat in Washington admitted, "there is still loots of suspicion on Capitol Hill, and there are grounds for it."

Washington also expressed seriours concern about the killings over the past three weeks of twelve Christian Democrats, including four mayors. Last week gunmen burst into the home of Evangelina Garcia de Lopez, 47, who only a few hours before had been appointed mayor of the town of San Francisco Chimameca, several miles outside the capital. She and her 18-year-old daughter were killed. Her predecessor had been abducted from a bus two weeks earlier and murdered. Together with the charges of election fraud and D'Aubuisson's attempts to suspend badly needed reforms, the continuing violence in El Salvador could only endanger U.S. support for a questionable regime.

--By Margueritte Johnson.

Reported Timothy Loughran/San Salvador and Johanna McGeary/Washington

With reporting by Timothy Loughran, Johanna McGeary

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.