Already there is dispute over the cleanliness of El Salvador's bellwether legislative elections, the first the nation's leftist guerrilla movement
hasn't boycotted. But despite fraud complaints - the vote was March 10 and some ballots are yet to be counted - and despite a U.S.-style turnout (about 50 percent by one estimate), freewheeling politics appears to have made a cameo appearance in this sad land where 75,000 have died in civil war.
Whether it can endure, of course, is another question. But just this once, we'd like to see the positive accentuated in El Salvador. While President Alfredo Cristiani's rightist Arena Party may have clung to a slight majority, the left-wing coalition called the Democratic Convergence appears to have won a toehold in the legislature - a tentative sign that the often-oppressed left in El Salvador can flex electoral, as well as battlefield, muscle.
