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arrest ON FEBKUARY 5 seventy members of the British peace movement protested outside the Russian embassy in sympathy with Olga Meoveokova, a member of the Moscow peace group.

She faces trumped up charges of having assaulted a KGB man last October. The alleged incident took place on October 13 when Olga, together with several other members of the group, tried to attend the trial of their comrade, Oleg Podzinsky. To forestall this the police arrested her and the others and held them at a police station till the court proceedings ended and Podzinsky was sentenced.

I Olga Medvenkova is brought to trial she can expect a sentence of three years in a labour camp.

Her case has already been taken up by the campaign of "Women for Life on Earth" who have strong connections with the Greenham women. It was this organisation that arranged the demonstration on But history shows that the formalities of electoralism in El Salvador provide little more than a fig leaf for the naked class dietatorship of the "14 families"

The "reformist" military regime of the 1950s allowed no opposition although it went thember she fore it i histag members or the (pro-government) party elected to the assembly.

In 1960 that regime was toppled by a broad coalition of oppositionists but a countercoup quickly installed another miltary dictatorship.

The military decided that although they would establish their own party (the PCN -Party of National Conciliation) they would also attempt to curry favour with moderate civilian oppositionists.

The newly formed middle class Christian Democrats (PDC) were asked to join the new government. The PDC declined the offer but the PCN allowed them to hold a reasonable amount of seats in the Assembly.

The PCN could always assure itself of a majority in the assembly by a mixture of judicious ballot stuffing, mobilisation of the rural vote through the Napoleon Duarte was elected mayor of San Salvador. His high spending on urban sanitation, new markets and construction projects won him the loyalty of the city's workers and poor.

In 1969 a border war with Honduras led to an influx of Salvadorean peasants who had previously crossed the frontier looking for unoccupied land. This increased the problem of landlessness and in the 1972 Presidential elections land reform was a burning issue.

A reformist coalition of the PDC, PCS and Social Democrats backed Duarte for President, land reform being one of their election pledges. Despite the sabotaging of Duarte's broadcasts and the murder of several of his aides, initial election returns indicated that he had secured about 54% of the national vote.

After this was announced there was a mysterious 24hour silence on national radio. When the silence was broken it was to announce that PCN candidate Molina had won by 9,884 votes.

Molina was quickly sworn in.

Two weeks after the elections El Salvador soldier - and three victims strike. The rebels were beaten when the army outside of San Salvador refused to support them and Somoza of Nicaragua came to Molina's aid by bombthe 1977 elections. There was massive fraud and in response a demonstration of 40,000 oppositionists marched through San process.

In March 1982 it was a similar story. Armed soldiers sporting armbands of the extreme-right ARENA (National Republican Alliance) looked on as voters dropped their ballot papers into clear perspex boxes.

Estimates of the turnout on election day put the voters at around 720,000 but when the final result was announced it was declared thai 1,551,680 had voted out of a population of 1,500,000.

For then US Secretary of State Haig an election in which intimidation, press censorship (four Dutch journalists had been murdered) and ballot stuffing were the rule were "a major achievement in the development of democracy in El Salvador."

Duarte and ARENA leader D'Aubuisson are the main contestants in the presidential election next March.

Duarte presided over the dietatorship from 1980-1982 which was responsible for 20,000 deaths. D' Aubuisson is the man who coined the ditty "make El Salvador the tomb of the reds" and who is personally implicated in several high-level assassinations.

Although D'Aubuisson is the hero of San Salvador polite society and of every butcher from the Rio Grande to the Magellan Straits, many sections of the Salvadorean bourgeoisie fear that his election would endanger future arms supplies from the US. This possibility is heightened by renewed bipartisan demands from the US Congress that Reagan should regularly certify progress in human rights ör risk all aid funds being blocked by Congress.