By Robyn Marshall
The elections "of the century", as they are being called in El Salvador, are just two months away. The political parties had to present their final list of candidates for the presidential, legislative and municipal elections by the end of January. The Supreme Electoral Tribunal finalised the voter registration list on January 20 and will send out final voting cards by March 12.
To be eligible to vote, all Salvadorans had to obtain a voter registration card. As of the second week of January, the Electoral Tribunal had processed 510,000 applications of the 725,000 received by the November 19 deadline.
Approximately 40,000 applications had not been "found" by the tribunal and were rejected due to lack of corresponding birth certificates. Many of the applicants came from the war zone areas where the churches and administrative offices which held the documents had been totally destroyed, so it was impossible for many people to obtain sufficient evidence of their citizenship.
The FMLN estimates that more than 100,000 of the 440,000 new voter applications will be rejected for the same reasons. But the FMLN will not ask permission for these people to vote, believing it would open the doors to widespread fraud.
Electoral fraud continues to be a fear. The tribunal was to provide different political parties with updated voter lists every three months, but this has not happened. The last voter lists appeared in May 1993. The FMLN noted that in past elections, eligible voters registered in one area of the country were listed to vote in another department, which destroyed their vote.
With the limited data it has available from the tribunal, the FMLN has found an unusually high number of voter rejections from specific geographical areas, such as Tecoluca, San Vincente, Cinquera, Cabasas and Las Vueltas and Chalatenango — all communities in the former conflict zone.
The FMLN, because of a number of electoral anomalies and technical fraud committed by the Tribunal, announced on January 13 that it will send a delegation to New York to inform the United Nations Secretary General Boutros-Ghali of the situation.
The FMLN may achieve a high vote in the March 20 elections, according to the latest polls. A Central American University poll of more than 1600 persons during December showed over 55% of the eligible voters as undecided. This probably indicates that FMLN supporters are still afraid to indicate their vote. Another 7.6% state that they will not vote for any of the candidates.
In the poll, ARENA led with 20%, followed by the FMLN-CD with 12% and the PDC (Christian Democrats) with 3.5%. Another poll of 2000 people found that ARENA presidential candidate Armando Calderon Sol was preferred by 40.2% of the population while FMLN-CD candidate Ruben Zamora came second with 22.2% and Fidel Chavez Mena third with 14.1%.
The Christian Democrats have low support due to many internal disputes. The PDC candidate for mayor of San Salvador has to be decided between former president Duarte's son, Jose Napoleon Duarte Jnr, and David Trejos.
After negotiations between the Democratic Convergence (CD) and the FMLN, the CD announced it would run its own candidate for mayor of San Salvador. The FMLN and CD formed a coalition for the presidential campaign. The FMLN candidate for mayor is well known Communist Party secretary Shafick Handal.
Another left party, the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) joined the FMLN-CD coalition on December 18.
In late December, the FMLN denounced the destruction of its two large murals on the highway from San Salvador to La Libertad by persons who confessed to having been contracted by an employee of the Ministry of Public Works.
Jose Dolores Aleman, a member of the FMLN political committee, escaped an assassination attempt in La Libertad in the last days of 1993. The FMLN denounced the assassination, in the style of the death squads, of three party members from Santa Ana on December 29. One was a woman of 106 years and another 88 years old. An FMLN spokesperson said the killings were part of a campaign to intimidate those sympathetic to the party.