Volume 32, Number 13 · August 15, 1985
What Duarte Won
By Julia Preston
On March 31, just after the national legislative elections were over, many American reporters in El Salvador seemed close to being in a state of shock. By Salvadoran standards, the vote had been uneventful. The balloting was more or less orderly. Attempts by leftist guerrillas to disrupt the election were scattered and largely unsuccessful. The news that stunned the correspondents came from the Spanish International Network (SIN), a US television company which had contracted to conduct the exit polls. The first SIN results showed that the party of the Christian Democratic president José Napoleón Duarte—described almost universally by the press in the days before the vote as a 'beleaguered' leader, with his right-wing enemies closing in on him—had just won thirty-three of sixty seats in the national assembly. Against even his own predictions, Duarte had won the commanding majority he needed to govern.
Feature, 7276 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |