El Salvador Stricken President, Ailing Country

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Even if his health had not failed, the President would have faced rapidly escalating political problems. Under the constitution, he cannot run for consecutive five-year terms. His Christian Democratic Party is likely to be rejected in presidential elections scheduled for next March. Three months ago, in local balloting that amounted to a referendum on Duarte's performance, the party was trounced by the deeply conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), which gained control of the 60-seat Assembly and won 13 of 14 mayoral races. In San Salvador, the capital, Duarte's son Alejandro was defeated in his bid for the mayor's office.

Since then, the Christian Democrats have splintered over who should inherit the leadership. Duarte tried to unite the party behind a trusted adviser, Abraham Rodriguez, but found no echo; instead a divided rank and file lined up behind two former Cabinet ministers, Julio Adolfo Rey Prendes and Fidel Chavez Mena. Rey Prendes is favored to receive the presidential nomination, but his candidacy will be tarnished by corruption charges that have dogged the Duarte administration.

ARENA, by contrast, has thrown its support behind Alfredo Cristiani, 42, the U.S.-educated scion of a wealthy coffee-growing family. A poll released last week by the University of Central America indicated that, as of now, Cristiani would defeat any other presidential candidate by at least 10 percentage points. That would amount to a repudiation of the Duarte record on at least two counts: Cristiani has said that he would return to private hands export industries run by the Duarte administration as state enterprises, and that he would roll back a land-reform program that turned El Salvador's largest estates into farm cooperatives.

Cristiani has also called for the 56,000-strong military to have a freer hand in defeating the guerrillas of the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, who currently number about 6,000. Some Salvadorans fear such a strategy would mean ignoring a sizable increase in death-squad activities and other human-rights abuses. ARENA Founder Roberto d'Aubuisson, a former army major who ran against Duarte in the 1984 elections and has since yielded his party's leadership to Cristiani, has been linked by U.S. intelligence to the killer squads that ran amuck in the early 1980s.

Those shadowy units seem to be expanding their business again. Human-rights groups estimate that death-squad activity -- the kidnaping and killing by unidentified gunmen of civilians suspected of leftist sympathies -- has trebled since last year. One rights group, Tutela Legal, identified 24 undisputed death-squad killings in all of 1987; this year's toll stood at 21 by the end of April. (By comparison, Tutela counted 29 executions of civilians by the guerrillas in 1987, vs. 17 so far this year.) Most Salvadorans believe the upsurge in right-wing terrorism is the work of military men frustrated by their inability to put down the guerrillas in the field.