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prosecution and preserve their power and relative autonomy; in fact, he could not do otherwise and survive.49 In the year and a half that has elapsed since he took office, Cerezo has made no meaningful move toward land reform, has supported the army vigorously against any accounting, and has made no move to dismantle the civil patrols, the development poles, and other features of institutionalized terror.50 The human-rights situation in Guatemala “remains terrible,”51 although improved (but partly because higher rates of killing are no longer deemed beneficial). The poor, for whom he expressed so much compassion during the electoral campaign, have suffered further losses in real income, as Cerezo’s “reforms” have accommodated the demands of the army and oligarchy. He is on very poor terms with the Mutual Support Group. Thus, the postelection pattern shows that Cerezo, in part by prior agreement but more decisively by structural constraints, has been entirely unable to serve his mass constituency. In the 1984–85 election, Cerezo gave the Guatemalan people an opportunity to vote for a man of seeming goodwill and good intentions, but one unable to respond to democratic demands opposed by the real rulers of the state.

In Nicaragua, in 1984, the spectrum of candidates was much wider than in El Salvador, Guatemala, or, for that matter, the United States.52 The Conservative Democratic party and the Independent Liberal party both issued strong calls for respect for private property, reduced government control of the economy, elimination of press and other controls, and a foreign policy of greater nonalignment and accommodation. Both were able to denounce the Sandinistas for the war and to call for depoliticization of the army and negotiations with the contras. Arturo Cruz, after lengthy negotiations with representatives of the government, chose not to run in the 1984 election. But this was a voluntary act of Cruz (albeit under heavy U.S. pressure),53 in contrast with the position of the left in El Salvador and Guatemala, and was not based on physical threats to his person or limits on his access to the populace.54

The FSLN had a strong advantage over the opposition parties as the party in power, defending the country from foreign attack and having mobilized the population for their own projects of development. The LASA group felt that much of the incumbency advantage of the FSLN was characteristic of governments everywhere, and concluded:

It seems clear that the FSLN took substantial advantage of its incumbent position and, in some ways, abused it. However, the abuses of incumbency do not appear to have been systematic; and neither the nature of the abuses nor their frequency was such as to cripple the opposition parties’ campaigns or to cast doubt on the fundamental validity of the electoral process . . . Generally speaking, in this campaign the FSLN did little more to take advantage of its incumbency than incumbent parties everywhere (including the United States) routinely do, and considerably less than ruling parties in other Latin American countries traditionally have done.55

We would conclude that the ability of candidates to qualify and run, and the range of options, was substantially greater in Nicaragua than in El Salvador and Guatemala. Furthermore, as all major political groups of the left were off the ballot by threat of violence in the latter two cases, those elections fail to meet still another basic electoral condition.

3.2.5. ABSENCE OF STATE TERROR AND A CLIMATE OF FEAR

During the years 1980–84 the death squads worked freely in El Salvador, in close coordination with the army and security forces. The average rate of killings of civilians in the thirty months prior to the 1982 election was approximately seven hundred per month. Many of these victims were raped, tortured, and mutilated. All of this was done with complete impunity, and only the murder of four American women elicited—by dint of congressional pressure—any kind of legal action. Even William Doherty of the American Institute for Free Labor Development