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March 9, 1999
 
 
Salvador's Leader May Blend a Guru's Nonviolence With Right-Wing Politics

 

          By MIREYA NAVARRO

          SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- El Salvador's newly elected president is both the
          philosophical follower of an Indian guru who teaches nonviolence and the political heir of a
          far-right leader linked to death squads during the civil war.

          Francisco Flores a former president of El Salvador's unicameral National Assembly, ran as the new
          face of a renovated Nationalist Republican Alliance, or Arena, the conservative governing party that
          has captured the presidency in the last three elections.

          But as he celebrated with supporters late Sunday night as the polls closed, he paid homage to
          Arena's main founder, the late Roberto d'Aubuisson, a former national guard officer and ally of
          wealthy landowners who was a suspect behind many right-wing killings during this country's civil
          war, including the 1980 slaying of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero.

          "Let's remember the values of our founder," Flores told to a cheering crowd. "Let's remember
          Roberto d'Aubuisson."

          The solemn, bespectacled Flores, 39, who holds a bachelor's degree in political science from
          Amherst College and attended study programs at both Harvard and Oxford's Trinity College, runs
          little risk of being associated with Arena's murky past. But many Salvadorans still regard him with
          apprehension, wondering whether he represents meaningful change or just a fresh image for business
          interests adverse to political reform in this poor country of 5.8 million people.

          Final election results were not expected until Wednesday, but electoral officials said on Monday that
          Flores' lead was expected to hold.

          "Is this a transformation or is he a professional at the service of millionaires?" asked the Rev. Jose
          Maria Tojeira, the Roman Catholic rector of the Central American University here. "Arena is more
          moderate than in d'Aubuisson's days but it's in the hands of rich people who don't favor social
          change."

          Flores, who won a five-year term starting on June 1, said in a recent interview that his candidacy
          was a response to Salvadoran citizens' demands for more participatory politics. The day of
          reckoning came, he said, after legislative and municipal elections in 1997 where Arena suffered
          heavy losses to the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, the party of former guerrillas whose
          presidential candidate came in second on Sunday with 29 percent of the vote.

          "If, in the political spectrum, you had the FMLN, and, on the other side, Arena, there was a need to
          make a move to the center by both parties," he said.

          The FMLN, Flores said and many others agree, tried to broaden its appeal for the 1999 elections
          but failed to come up with a candidate "without the smell of gunpowder," as a political analyst with
          the newspaper "El Diario de Hoy" put it in a column on Monday. Internal power struggles led them
          to settle on a former guerrilla commander, Facundo Guardado, a moderate who could not overcome
          many voters' aversion to a left they still remember as violent and destructive.

          Arena, on the other hand, came up with Flores, who has no direct ties to the war and was known as
          a consensus builder in the legislature.

          "I feel that the party realizes that its survival as a political institution lies on a real opening," he said.

          Known by the nickname "Paco," Flores said he spent the war years between 1983 and 1990
          teaching philosophy and managing an irrigation project for a community of 300 families next door to
          the cattle ranch and stud farm he had inherited from his grandfather. He said he paid for the project
          himself while his wife, a school teacher, ran an elementary school for the families.

          He said he had been gone from El Salvador between 1977 and 1983, when he went to college in the
          United States and ended up moving to India to study oriental philosophy after being "fascinated" by a
          professor's lecture at Harvard. In 1981, he went to the World University of America in Ojai, Calif.,
          a small unaccredited school molded after the teachings of an Indian guru, Sri Sathya Sai Baba, with
          followers in more than 130 countries.

          Back in El Salvador, Flores said he did not think of entering politics until leftist guerrillas killed his
          father-in-law, the chief-of-staff to then-President Alfredo Cristiani, in 1989.

          "When they killed my father-in-law the options were few," he said. "I didn't want to be part of the
          conflict. I wanted to be part of the solution and I didn't want to remain in the sidelines."

          Flores served in the administrations of both Cristiani and current President Armando Calderon Sol in
          various ministerial and advisory positions before he ran for the National Assembly. He now inherits
          from Calderon Sol a country reeling from one of the highest murder rates in Latin America, high
          unemployment, and other problems partly attributed to vestiges of a 12-year civil war that killed
          70,000 and ended only in 1992.

          During his campaign, Flores promised to fight crime by upgrading the skills of the civilian police force
          created after the war and to generate jobs with new investment in agriculture, manufacturing and
          small businesses and by attracting foreign investment.

          But it remains to be seen whether he can restore confidence after an election where turnout did not
          even reach 40 percent, largely because voters held no hope that a new government could solve the
          country's problems, polls showed.

          "The war left a psychological effect of a hate of war," Tojeira said. "That gives us a margin of 20
          years. But if the economic and social problems continue, these factors could be dangerous in the
          long term."
 

                     Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company