Word: salvadorans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Capitol Hill, the White House won a small victory in its ongoing battle with Congress over emergency military aid for the Salvadoran government, which is now in its fourth year of war against some 10,000 Marxist-led guerrillas of the Farabundo Salvador, Martí National Liberation Front (F.M.L.N.). By a 16-to-13 vote, the Senate Appropriations Committee gave its approval to a $93 million aid package after President Reagan lobbied personally for the bill. At a White House lunch for Republican women officeholders, Reagan argued last week that without the aid money, "El Salvador cannot hold secure elections...
However muscular that display, it can only underline the importance that the Reagan Administration attaches to next Sunday's Salvadoran elections. The White House is gambling that an increasingly skeptical Congress will agree that a successful vote is a substantial step forward by El Salvador on the road from military-backed despotism to civilian democracy. Put more bluntly, the Administration argument is that free, open and honest elections are worth defending: the choosing of a Salvadoran President for a single five-year term would give the White House a greater chance to unblock some $250 million in additional military...
Ideally, Washington hopes for a repetition of El Salvador's electoral achievement of March 1982. At that time, according to Salvadoran figures, some 74% of eligible voters ignored guerrilla threats and cast ballots for a 60-member Constituent Assembly. Says State Department Special Adviser Otto J. Reich: "What we're supporting in El Salvador is a process-not an individual, not a party-to reverse the country's cycle of violence. If a person is elected who continues those reforms, then we would continue to support...
...high-tech U.S. approach to the elections faces a substantial obstacle: Salvadoran reality. Whatever else the elections may achieve, they are unlikely to bring even a semblance of political harmony to the deeply divided country. As the end of the hard-fought, two-month presidential campaign drew near (see following story), the front runners in the race were José Napoleón Duarte, 58, of the center-left Christian Democrats (P.D.C.) and Roberto d'Aubuisson, 40, leader of the ultrarightist Republican Nationalist Alliance, known as ARENA. Trailing behind, according to the country's unreliable opinion polls...
...Christian Democrats' Duarte is firmly identified with the notion of conciliation toward elements of the F.M.L.N. guerrillas and with such progressive measures as land reform and nationalization of the country's leading industries. His campaign platform promises a new "social contract" between the Salvadoran government and people, including support for collective bargaining, impartial courts and a restructuring of Salvador's brutal security forces...