Word: leftist
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Those words, to which Cardenas appended a signature every bit as baroque as the facade of the town's main church, embodied the new vigor of Mexico's leftist parties and the hunger for change that holds both right and left in its thrall. Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the candidate of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (P.R.I.) in the July 6 election that will choose the country's leader for the next six years, is certain to prevail. But the P.R.I.'s 59-year monopoly of political power is being challenged as never before, by Cardenas and also...
...called for an accurate count. If that plea is heeded, most analysts believe, Salinas will capture about 50% of the vote; in 1982 President Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado received 71%. P.A.N., which collected 16% in 1982, is expected to increase its share to more than 20%. Cardenas' leftist coalition is also expected to top 20%, in contrast to the 5% garnered six years ago. "It is not just the presidency that is at stake, but the electoral system itself," observes Juan Molinar Horcasitas, a political scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico...
Duarte's departure is expected to deepen El Salvador's sense of political drift. Vice President Rodolfo Castillo Claramount, who is standing in for Duarte, lacks the charisma and the power to stem a slow disintegration. Recent attacks by leftist guerrillas on hydroelectric dams, bridges and power stations have stepped up the eight-year-old civil war, which has claimed some 70,000 lives. The increase in military action guarantees further erosion in an economy that is afflicted with a 26% inflation rate and cannot provide adequate jobs for half the work force. Right-wing death squads have returned, undermining...
Cristiani has also called for the 56,000-strong military to have a freer hand in defeating the guerrillas of the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, who currently number about 6,000. Some Salvadorans fear such a strategy would mean ignoring a sizable increase in death-squad activities and other human-rights abuses. ARENA Founder Roberto d'Aubuisson, a former army major who ran against Duarte in the 1984 elections and has since yielded his party's leadership to Cristiani, has been linked by U.S. intelligence to the killer squads that ran amuck in the early 1980s...
Those shadowy units seem to be expanding their business again. Human-rights groups estimate that death-squad activity -- the kidnaping and killing by unidentified gunmen of civilians suspected of leftist sympathies -- has trebled since last year. One rights group, Tutela Legal, identified 24 undisputed death-squad killings in all of 1987; this year's toll stood at 21 by the end of April. (By comparison, Tutela counted 29 executions of civilians by the guerrillas in 1987, vs. 17 so far this year.) Most Salvadorans believe the upsurge in right-wing terrorism is the work of military men frustrated by their...