Word: aubuisson
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...Aubuisson's ARENA party, on the other hand, stressed an aggressive mixture of patriotism, anti-Communism and free enterprise, along with an all-out war on guerrillas who refuse to accept a general amnesty. As one ARENA document put it, "Nationalist Republicans believe in God, the country and liberty, in that order." D'Aubuisson would like to reverse the bank nationalizations carried out in March 1980 and replace the state-run peasant cooperatives of the current land reform with individual holdings...
...personal accusations, not policy differences, stirred the most emotion in the campaign. Christian Democrats painted D'Aubuisson as a dangerous and unprincipled killer who would bring a further reign of right-wing terror on the country if elected. The Christian Democrats accused D'Aubuisson of once having been jailed for 45 days after abandoning his troops during a state of emergency. They reminded Salvadorans that D'Aubuisson once confessed to having headed ANSESAL, the notorious Salvadoran political police, and charged that the ARENA leader had transformed the agency into "an executioner and torturer...
When it came to mudslinging, D'Aubuisson more than held his own. ARENA circulated duplicates of letters from Salvadoran guerrilla leaders to East Germany and the Soviet Union, allegedly implicating Christian Democrats as collaborators in the rebel cause. D'Aubuisson's contemptuous name for the Christian Democrats: "watermelons," meaning that they are green (the party color) on the outside but Red within. The party took out a full-page newspaper advertisement urging the nearly 150 international observers who attended the election to drop by ARENA headquarters for the party's version of events...
...counter the Christian Democrat propaganda, D'Aubuisson showed a television documentary, which included an interview with his mother Joaquina declaring "that boy never caused me trouble in anything. He was always very faithful and loyal." In another television program, D'Aubuisson used charts explaining how Marxists take over a country and suggesting Christian Democrat complicity in El Salvador's subversion. Said D'Aubuisson: "We are at the mercy of these noxious people...
...strength of D'Aubuisson's appeal was the major surprise of the election campaign. At ARENA'S final election rally, held last week in the cavernous national gymnasium in downtown San Salvador, some 16,000 supporters jammed the building, decked out in red-white-and-blue ARENA hats and T shirts. The audience cheered wildly when D'Aubuisson appeared, looking pale and nervous after a recent death threat. He was flanked by three heavily armed bodyguards. At the rally, three mariachi bands competed to see which could present the best campaign song. The winning entry declared...