In response to U.S. prodding, the assembly names a moderate
He was no stranger to politics, but he had never run for public office before. While his backers portrayed him as a competent moderate, his enemies in the ultraright Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) denounced him as "the biggest thief in El Salvador." But when the votes were counted in San Salvador's linoleum and plate-glass Legislative Palace last week, the members of El Salvador's newly elected constituent assembly had chosen Alvaro Alfredo Magaña, 56, a U.S.-educated economist and banker, as the country's provisional President by a vote of 36 to 17.
For all the controversy surrounding the choice, Magaña's election came as no surprise. Indeed, it was part of a compromise worked out by the major political parties after strong prodding from the Salvadoran military and the U.S. embassy. The same agreement also led to the election of three Vice Presidents instead of one. Representing the largest parties in the assembly, they were Raúl Molina Martinez of the rightist National Conciliation Party (P.C.N.), Gabriel Mauricio Gutiérrez Castro of ARENA, and Pablo Mauricio Alvergue of the centrist Christian Democrats. The result gave at least the appearance of a political consensus. Declared U.S. Ambassador Deane Hinton: "A government of national unity is good news for El Salvador. Democracy is at work."
Perhaps. But it was a fragile democracy of byzantine complexity that put Magaña in the Presidential Palace. The selection of a provisional head of state capped a month of cutthroat political maneuvering that began with the March 28 election for a constituent assembly. That ballot had given 40% of the popular vote to the Christian Democratic Party, led by outgoing junta President José Napoléon Duarte and supported by the U.S. because of its progressive land and banking reforms. But a right-wing coalition headed by ARENA and the P.C.N. won control of 34 of the assembly's 60 seats and boldly moved to seize power. It gave the assembly presidency to ARENA Leader Roberto d'Aubuisson, 38, a former army major with alleged links to the country's notorious death squads, and then sought to put one of its own men at the head of the new provisional government.
The right's relentless drive for total control of the new government was blocked only at the last minute. Weeks of none too subtle pressure from the U.S. had convinced the country's military commanders that a rightist monopoly of the most important jobs in the government might cause Congress to cut off military aid. Without Washington's largesse, which is expected to total $362 million in 1982, the military would be hamstrung in its fight against the leftist guerrillas seeking to topple the government. The generals therefore insisted on a respectable moderate as provisional President. Their preferred candidate was Magaña, who was also acceptable to the U.S. and to a faction of the P.C.N., the old political arm of the military regimes that ruled the country from 1961 until the October 1979 coup that ultimately brought outgoing President Duarte's civilian-military junta to power.