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El Salvador National Conciliation Party
The National Conciliation Party (Partido de Conciliacion
Nacional--PCN) was the dominant political party in El Salvador
during the 1960s and 1970s, when it was closely associated with
the military. Although its level of popular support was all but
impossible to quantify because of institutionalized electoral
fraud, the PCN had supporters among both the elite and the rural
population, especially in areas where the armed forces served as
the primary governmental presence. The party's showings in the
1982 Constituent Assembly elections and the first round of the
1984 presidential elections were respectable; it was Guerrero's
almost 20 percent total that forced the voting to a runoff
between Duarte and D'Aubuisson. From that point on, however, the
PCN's support at the polls declined steadily. This appeared to be
a by-product of the democratic transition in El Salvador. Under a
system allowing open electoral competition, the military shifted
its support to the party best positioned to ensure continued aid
from the United States and to provide some measure of stability
to the government. Until 1988 this party was the PDC. Deprived of
its military connection, the PCN was left to fend for itself in a
new and unfamiliar scheme of things. Given the polarizing
tendencies of Salvadoran politics, parties without a mass base or
superior organization tended to be marginalized. This clearly
seemed to be the case with the PCN in the wake of the 1988
elections.
During its years in power, the PCN was a rightist party that
implemented limited and controlled reform in an effort to placate
nonelite sectors, such as the peasantry and the urban middle
class. The image of the party, however, was tarnished severely by
the harsh repression undertaken by the military and the so-called
"death squads" in response to growing popular unrest in the 1970s
(see The 1970s: The Road to Revolt
, ch. 1). When the armed forces
turned to the PDC in 1980 in an effort to lend legitimacy to the
post-1979 junta governments, the separation of the PCN from the
military was begun. Unfortunately for the PCN, however, the
association between the two was strong in the public mind.
Although this lingering perception may have helped the party
among some rural voters, overall it was judged a liability by
most observers. In response to this perceived image problem, the
PCN in the mid-1980s was attempting to moderate its policy
positions, adopt a social democratic platform, and reach out to
labor and peasant groups. Any support that the PCN might pick up
from these sources was expected to come at the expense of the
PDC.
Data as of November 1988
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