How a lone peer sleuthed out flaws in El Salvador's election

Christopher Howse comments on the report condemning the Salvador elections by Lord Chitnis (right)
LORD CHITNIS, the Catholic peer, who as executive trustee of the Joseph Rowntree trust has been able to make grants to freedom fighters in Africa, has roundly condemned the elections held in El Salvador in March as invalid, in a report published this week.* His judgment, on behalf of the Parliamentary Human Rights Group came three days after a Government backed report by Sir. John Galsworthy and Professor Derek Bowett which came to quite other conclusions.* Lord Chitnis is one of two black members of the House of Lords, the other, Lord Pitt of Hampstead also being by chance a Catholic. More relevantly, he has had experience of observing two elections in Zimbabwe — or Rhodesia as it was then — and one in Guyana. He is a man of resource, intelligence, physical courage and considerable wit, and thinks that "official observers are dangerous people. Official they may be, observe they do not — but the governments who send them have an extraordinary habit of believing what they say".
Britain was the only European country to send official observers. They performed more conscientiously than one Jamaican observer who was too scared to leave his hotel. While the British observers felt that human rights were outside their brief (one reason for the scorn Lord Chitnis pours on them) neither report considers the position of the Church in El Salvador.
Put superficially, the recent history of El Salvador is one of oppressed and miserable peasants, in whose plight four main forces have been active: the Church, the revolutionaries, the Army and the '14 families', the oligarchy of landowners. The Families and the Army share out possession of land and power to keep down the poor. The poor have the revolutionary guerrillas to fight the unjust oppressors. The Church has been adopted by the Army and Families and the governments they have thrown up, as part of the establishment, but at the same time it has been able to be with the poor. It has tended to denounce the revolutionaries for their Godless Marxism, especially since the unsuccessful revolution of 1932, which was crushed with the loss of 10,000 lives.
Napoleon Duarte — Mr Duarte as Lord Chitnis calls him — was president until the elections. He heads the rump of the Christian Democrats which has not gone to join the socialist alliance with the leftist guerrillas. While he shares the vices of power-seekers, it is fair to point out that he emerges from Lord Chitnis's report as a man of comparative courage and innocence — compared, that is, with Roberto D' Aubuisson, leader of the right wing Arena party, who was called a 'pathological killer' by the last United States Ambassador to El Salvador.
It is difficult to deny that the Army are thugs. The most disgusting examples of their thuggery have been the arbitrary and sudden arrests, followed by torture, execution and public exhibition of corpses. The Army has been in oower since before living memory. Arena is implicated in its atrocities, the victims of which include Christian Democrats. About 30,000 were killed by Army and killer squads in 1980 and 1981. But the guerrillas are waging a civil war, and Lord Chitnis does not say how many they have killed.
In the middle of this civil war, Lord Chitnis set out single handed, with no protection by armed soldiers such as that afforded to the official observers. On polling days: "It proved easy to hire a taxi and we met no serious obstacle on our journey, despite the instruction broadcast by the guerrillas station Radio Venceremos that private traffic should stay off the road."
It might have been expected to be a fake election — Duarte, who has been so gnawed by the liberal press and charitable bodies in Britain, lost the presidential elections in 1972 and 1977 by the plain fraud of his opponents. Lord.Chitnis concluded it was a worthless election. Not so the official observers.
He says: "My conclusion is that the election in El Salvador was so fundamentally flawed as to be invalid for the following reasons: Limited choice. Choice there may have been, but it was a disasterously limited choice. First, there was the refusal of all parties to the left of.the Christian Democrats to participate in the election, on the understandable ground that had they done so they would have been butchered". (The official observers also record two other opinions why the leftist parties kept out of the elections — that they would have had little support, and that they were not much interested in democracy in any case.) "Second, the electorate was given no choice on the question most of them cared about— how to end the war . . . "
Lord Chitnis goes on to list three more invalidating reasons: the circumstances of the country, wrapped in war, where perhaps half a million refugees were disenfranchised; the pressure put on Salvadoreans to vote, for fear that the lack of what they were told was an indelible mark on their identity papers would lead to their death at the hands of the Army; and the administrative chaos on polling day. Lord Chitnis points out that up to 10 per cent of voters spoiled their papers, he thinks as a protest; the official observers think it more likely through illiteracy.
Whatever happened inside El Salvador, it is impossible to ignore the presence of United States influence. They supplied military aid, allowed the elections and then decided, in a way which reminds Lord Chitnis of a head of state, who should be called in to form an administration.
El Salvador continues to totter from disaster to disaster, and Lord Chitnis suggests that the elections were just one more. But he does not hint at what sort of democracy would be provided if the guerrilla successors of Faribundo Marti were triumphant.
*The Elections in El Salvador in March 1982, Parliamentary Human Rights Group, D.
*Report on the Election in El Salvador on March 28, 1982, HMSO, E2.55.