The Making of a President

By George Russell

An election hinges on death squads, land reform and gringos

His way cleared by eight bodyguards, Salvadoran Constitutional Assembly President Roberto d'Aubuisson struck an aggressive pose last week as he approached a specially erected platform in the remote Salvadoran farming cooperative of Parra Lempa. D'Aubuisson wore white and a .38-cal. revolver, an emblem by which he is familiarly known. "Some people write that we are barbarians and bloody," he shouted to an audience of some 400 campesinos. "But today, you have seen that we stand for land reform. In return for your vote, we Nationalist Republicans promise to work for the people." The crowd cheered, and for good reasons. Just after his speech, D'Aubuisson presented the agricultural workers with formal title to the lands they had farmed for years as propertyless tenants.

D'Aubuisson's populist rhetoric contrasted sharply with his reputation as a right-wing extremist. The boyish-looking onetime Salvadoran police major, now 40, has consistently tried to delay implementation of U.S.-sponsored efforts at land reform in El Salvador. Last November, D'Aubuisson was refused an entry visa to the U.S., a rebuff linked to his alleged ties to the country's nefarious right-wing death squads. For the present, however, he wishes to appear a man of the people, and is running hard in a long-awaited presidential-election campaign that is crucial both to his country's future and to the foreign policy aims of the Reagan Administration.

With only two months remaining until the March 25 elections, campaign fever is high in El Salvador, despite the continuing violence of the government's war against some 10,000 members of the

Marxist-led Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (F.M.L.N.). Along the highway leading out of the capital of San Salvador, trees are beribboned with the red-white-and-blue emblems of D'Aubuisson's Nationalist Republican Alliance, known by its Spanish acronym of ARENA. Sidewalk intersections are spray-painted with the green fish symbol of ARENA'S chief rival in the eight-party presidential race, the centrist Christian Democrats led by Jose Napoleon Duarte. On El Salvador's four television channels, political advertisements exhort voters to choose the man among the many who can save the country.

The differences between the two chief rivals for the presidency are pronounced and profound. At his own campaign rallies around the country, the Christian Democrats' Duarte stresses conciliation and optimism as the answer to El Salvador's bloody woes. If elected, Duarte promises to speed up the progress of Salvadoran land reform and begin negotiations that would bring members of the F.M.L.N. insurgency within the legitimate political process. Duarte has also vowed to rid El Salvador of human rights violations, which are among the worst in the hemisphere. He proposes to eliminate the country's 2,500-member Treasury Police, the ill-trained and thuggish force that is believed to serve as a major reservoir of talent for the murderous death squads, who have added thousands to the estimated toll of 40,000 Salvadoran civilians killed since 1979.

D'Aubuisson's solution to his nation's difficulties is straightforward: a military victory over the guerrillas. He has drawn cheers at rallies by promising on occasion that, if elected, he will deport all "leftists," a term that some rightists interpret as incorporating anyone who favors dialogue with the insurgents. D'Aubuisson talks of providing new investment incentives for business in the war-battered Salvadoran economy, and wins approval from thousands of small businessmen and farmers who have suffered grievously from the guerrilla strategy of attacking the country's economic infrastructure.

D'Aubuisson has played skillfully on both sides of the land-reform issue. Despite his grandstanding act of handing over land titles at Parra Lempa, D'Aubuisson and ARENA fought hard to limit the size of Salvadoran holdings that could be expropriated under the agrarian reform for peasant use.

Recently, D'Aubuisson used an old weapon from his campaign arsenal: anti-Americanism. At rallies, D'Aubuisson has increasingly stressed the theme of the Reagan Administration's meddling in

Salvadoran affairs. Appealing to a well-developed Salvadoran sense of nationalism, D'Aubuisson declares that "we prefer tortillas and beans and to eat them with dignity than gringo bread and to eat it with pain in our souls." ARENA bumper stickers issue a challenge: SURRENDER YOUR COUNTRY, NOT OURS.

D'Aubuisson's jingoism and xenophobia have risen in proportion to Reagan Administration efforts to bring an end to the death squads. In the past two months, Administration officials, including Vice President George Bush, have streamed into San Salvador to denounce right-wing killing as no more acceptable than the violence perpetuated by the left. That view received additional endorsement from President Reagan's bipartisan Kissinger commission on Central America, which suggested "conditioning" vastly increased amounts of U.S.

aid to El Salvador on the basis of an improved human rights performance.

In Washington, the aid vs. human rights debate over El Salvador will likely increase in stridency this week, as Congressmen return from recess to Capitol Hill. Anticipating the controversy, the Administration last week released a Salvadoran human rights assessment asserting, as the Administration has done in the past, that "important progress has been made." Among other things, the report claims a drop in the rate of violent Salvadoran civilian deaths during the latter half of 1983, to 104 monthly, but offers a blunt admission that there has been a "significant increase" in casualties attributable to death squads. The Administration's report will undoubtedly fuel vociferous partisan criticism as the U.S.

presidential election nears. El Salvador's interminable bloodshed, in fact, now could have an impact on the electoral future of two countries. --By George Russell.

Reported by David DeVoss/San Salvador and Johanna McGeary/Washington

With reporting by David DeVoss, Johanna McGeary