Conservative takes large lead in Salvador election
SOYAPANGO, El Salvador -- Elias Antonio Saca, a conservative media executive, took a commanding early lead over Schafik Handal, a former leftist guerrilla leader, in the country's hardest fought presidential elections since the end of the civil war.
Saca, 39, declared victory at 7:15 p.m., citing exit polls. Two hours later, the Supreme Electoral Council released the first official figures showing Saca, with 36 percent of the ballots counted, winning 60 percent, compared with 33 percent for Handal. Handal's campaign officials were declining to comment.
"Today, Salvadorans have overwhelmingly elected me to be their leader," Saca, a former sportscaster, told cheering supporters in the capital. He urged Salvadorans to put their painful past behind them. "This is the moment to forget all that has happened," he said. "Today is the moment to talk about the future." The campaign revived old wounds from the civil war, which killed an estimated 75,000 of El Salvador's 6.5 million people, from 1980 to 1992. Saca's Nationalist Republican Party, or ARENA, which is accused of orchestrating right-wing death squads during the war, faced off against Handal's Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, which led a five-member guerrilla alliance that staged hundreds of kidnappings.
The two leaders also traded barbs over economic policy. Saca accused Handal, a 73-year-old former Communist Party leader, of seeking to remake El Salvador in Cuba's image -- charges Handal denied. Saca also played up comments last week by US Republican congressmen threatening to impose limits on money sent home by the estimated 2.8 million Salvadorans residing in the United States, including 60,000 living in Boston. Remittances, which hit a record $2.1 billion last year, are the country's biggest source of foreign income and are the lifeblood for thousands of families. Handal accused Saca, whose party has ruled El Salvador since 1989, of defending the interests of the wealthy elite and pandering to the United States. He pledged to forge closer ties with leftist governments in Latin America and the Arab world.
Both leaders, meanwhile, accused the other of resorting to intimidation and illegal tactics to sway the 3.6 million registered voters. They reported attacks on sympathizers, including several deaths, in one of the nastiest election campaigns in Salvadoran history.
"We're trying not to respond to provocations," said Susy Martinez, a 34-year-old housewife, who was decked out for the elections in the red, white, and blue of ARENA. She said FMLN supporters had screamed at her as she walked toward the voting station in Soyapango, an industrial town on the outskirts of the capital.
"They yelled `ARENA thiefs,' " said Martinez, adding that she didn't believe the party was to blame for recent corruption scandals. "President [Francisco] Flores didn't say `Go steal.' You can't blame the party for a few bad members."
Flores, a polished political scientist who studied at Amherst College and Harvard University, has continued his party's efforts to secure close ties with the United States since taking office in 1999. He lobbied in favor of the planned US-Central American Free Trade Agreement, made the dollar official currency, and sent several hundred troops to help in the reconstruction of Iraq. Saca has vowed to continue those policies.
But the FMLN, which opposes those measures, had recently been gaining ground, winning the largest number of seats in last year's congressional elections and gaining control of the capital and several other major cities. As the party's chances of winning the presidency increased, so have fears among the business establishment.
Despite laws banning propaganda on Election Day, ads appeared yesterday in El Diario de Hoy, the country's leading daily, insinuating that El Salvador would become communist if the FMLN won the presidency. One of the ads, which ran under the pseudonym "Women for Liberty," showed an empty bank with the message: "Under communism, there are no banks." 