By GLENN GARVIN
             Herald Staff Writer

             SAN SALVADOR -- A conservative former philosophy professor appeared
             headed for the presidency here early today as the governing National Republican
             Alliance party rolled to its third consecutive victory since 1989.

             With 92 percent of the ballot boxes counted, the Ivy League-educated Francisco
             Flores had about 52 percent, enough to avoid a runoff next month and assume the
             presidency June 1, election officials said.

             Flores himself claimed victory 2 1/2 hours after voting ended, saying reports from
             his ARENA party poll-watchers showed him getting a consistent 53 percent of the
             ballots all across the country.

             In distant second place was former guerrilla commander Facundo Guardado of the
             Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), whose badly divided party
             was drawing only about 27 percent. The remainder of the vote was split among
             five other candidates.

             ``We gave the country the best we could,'' a jubilant Flores said.

             Only 39, Flores already has 10 years of experience in senior government
             positions, including president of the Salvadoran congress. He burst into the public
             eye two years ago when he presided over congressional hearings on corruption at
             El Salvador's central bank.

             Flores has a philosophy degree from Amherst and has studied at Harvard and
             Oxford. After teaching for several years, he embarked on a career as a cattle
             rancher, but gave it up to go into politics when his father-in-law, chief of staff to
             then-President Alfredo Cristiani, was assassinated by FMLN guerrillas, a casualty
             of the 13-year civil war that ended in 1992.

             His mild-mannered campaign against the same organization that killed his
             father-in-law was a reminder of how far El Salvador has come since the end of the
             war. It was especially obvious Sunday, when voters went to the polls with a calm
             bordering on lethargy. Supporters of the two parties, once blood enemies, mingled
             peacefully around the country's 387 polling places.

             ``Nobody's scared now,'' said bricklayer Nicolas Guevara, 53, at a nearly
             deserted polling place in this working-class suburb north of San Salvador. ``You
             can go to vote without worrying about getting hit by gunfire. In the old days, it was
             dangerous to vote.''

             But if voting was safer, it was also apparently less attractive. Election officials said
             turnout would probably be even less than the expected 50 percent.

             ``Absenteeism is so high,'' lamented Feliciano Salmeron, a Mejicanos precinct
             captain. ``People just don't have the interest in voting they once did.''

             Part of the problem is El Salvador's odd voter-registration system, which assigns
             voters to polling places based on the first letter of their last names rather than
             where they live. Some residents of the capital had to travel 2 1/2 hours across the
             city, changing buses several times, to reach their voting center.

             Even with the low turnout, traffic was hopelessly snarled throughout much of the
             San Salvador area as voters made the long commutes to unfamiliar neighborhoods.
             The 25,000 police on duty Sunday worked mostly at directing traffic, rather than
             checking for guns and explosives as they did in the old days.

             But traffic couldn't account for all the voters who stayed at home Sunday. This
             presidential campaign never really caught fire. All the candidates agreed that crime
             and unemployment are the major issues, but there were few concrete proposals
             for dealing with them.

             ``The problems are so overwhelming that they'll be there no matter who wins, and
             everybody knows it,'' said Cesar Bladimir Serrano, mayor of the northern
             provincial capital of Chalatenango and a longtime FMLN activist.

             ARENA has controlled the presidential palace since 1989. The party enjoyed
             wide popularity after negotiating a peace treaty with the FMLN that ended the
             bloody civil war in 1992 and produced economic progress.

             But by 1997, with economic growth slowing and corruption scandals burgeoning,
             ARENA was slumping. In midterm elections, the FMLN captured enough
             congressional seats to pull even with ARENA and also won control of about 100
             city halls.

             But a devastating rupture last year between the FMLN's reformist wing and its
             hard-line Marxists split the party and sent it into a tailspin.
 

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