EL SALVADOR: Ruling Party Steps Up Harassment, U.S. Observer Warns

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Feb 27 1997 (IPS) - Some U.S. groups and observers warn that a recent spate of violent attacks connected to El Salvador’s ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) could herald an effort to scare voters and monitors off from next month’s elections.

“We have tremendous fears of fraud occurring,” says Cherrene Horazuk, executive director of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), a New York-based group supportive of the opposition Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). “We feel that a lot of the attacks being launched are (intended) to ensure that there won’t be independent monitoring of the elections.”

Horazuk claimed that the rightist ARENA party fears that their leftist rival, the FMLN, may wrest a substantial amount of power in next month’s legislative and municipal elections.

Jeffrey Popowski, one of roughly 100 U.S. citizens who plans to monitor El Salvador’s Mar. 16 election, says he was forcibly held by an ARENA member last Saturday in Ciudad Delgado in an apparent effort to forestall any outside monitoring of voting there.

“They want to frighten people not to go to the polls,” says Popowski, a student in his junior year at the University of Minnesota.

He told IPS by phone from El Salvador that an ARENA deputy, Edgardo Zelaya, locked him in a room for four hours when he visited the ARENA party office in Ciudad Delgado, and added that Zelaya interrogated him over his presence at the office. “He called me a communist, and a terrorist,” Popowski said. “He threatened my family and the United States.”

Popowski said that he has yet to receive any explanation from the Salvadoran government, while the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador, which has launched its own investigation into the matter, told him it was “an isolated case.”

Salvadoran officials contacted by IPS dispute both Popowski’s version of events and his status as an electoral observer.

“He jumped in (to the ARENA office)…carrying brochures of the FMLN,” said Orlando Guzman, minister-counselor at El Salvador’s Washington embassy. “They asked him for identification, and he didn’t have any.”

Guzman likened Popowski’s treatment to that of someone who attends a football rally wearing the uniform of the opposing team: “You will make them angry…These kinds of things are still happening because people are jealous of their own party.”

Another Salvadoran official, who did not wish to be named, said Popowski lacked proper identification as an observer. Such identification can only be provided by El Salvador’s Electoral Supreme Tribunal, she said.

“Whatever he was saying (about his treatment) doesn’t make sense,” added the official who called Popowski’s testimony contradictory.

“This is not an isolated case,” Popowski countered, noting recent shooting incidents in which two offices of the leftist FMLN were shot at and a separate case in which an FMLN worker was killed.

“I think it’s a dangerous situation,” he said. “My house is being watched, and the office of the observer mission is being watched, as well.”

The FMLN — which only abandoned armed struggle five years ago to become the main opposition party — could “break ARENA’s hold on power” in the National Assembly, and thus hold President Armando Calderon de Sol, an ARENA member, more accountable, according to Horazuk. The leftist party could also capture many key municipalities, including the capital, San Salvador, she contended.

The most recent poll results from Gallup Central America, an affiliate of the U.S. polling firm, supports those claims.

After conducting surveys in January, Gallup Central America projected that the FMLN could grab as many as 20 to 22 seats in the 81-member Assembly, with eight or nine going to the centrist National Conciliation Party (PCN) and only some 34 for ARENA, down from its present 39, Gallup Central America general manager Carlos Denton told IPS.

“The FMLN strategy, and I think it is a good one, is to position themselves by putting mayors into office,” Denton added. “We think (the FMLN) are going to elect a lot of mayors.” Although he cautioned that Gallup polls only show national trends, and cannot predict results at the local level accurately, he estimates that ARENA’s local control could drop from its present hold over 81 percent of all municipalities to only some 55 to 60 percent.

But Denton added the numbers do not signify an improvement for the FMLN so much as a growth in support for several ARENA opponents, notably also including the PCN.

The improved numbers for the left, Horazuk argued, could have worried ARENA so much as to prompt the latest alleged acts of harassment.

“Because the FMLN is ahead in all the polls, ARENA is really scared,” Popowski agreed. “They want to frighten people not to go to the polls.”

Outside monitoring of the elections already figures to be lower than in recent years, because the United Nations has wrapped up its peacekeeping work in El Salvador last year and recently decided it would not send U.N. election monitors. Several sources estimate there will be some 100 U.S. and perhaps 150 other foreign observers on hand to monitor the polls.

Horazuk urged the United States to become more involved in ensuring there is no fraud in the elections. But she noted that Washington, which for years supported rightist groups in El Salvador during the long war against the FMLN that ended in 1992, has tried to keep its distance from influencing Salvadoran politics now.