GLENN GARVIN

 SAN SALVADOR -- The leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front kept
 control of the mayor's office in this capital city in Sunday's voting, but a slow
 count left doubt about which party will control the country's Congress.

 Hector Silva, who frequently preaches the blessings of market economies even
 though his FMLN party is composed mostly of former Marxist guerrillas, was
 headed for an easy victory in the San Salvador mayor's race.

 Exit polls conducted by the University of Central America's Institute of Public
 Opinion, as well as first fragmentary returns reported by news media, showed
 Silva winning with about 60 percent of the vote to 39 percent for Jose Cardenal, a
 conservative businessman and the candidate of the right-wing ARENA party.

 But results for 84 congressional seats and the other 262 mayor's offices at stake
 Sunday were not expected to be available until early this morning. An attempt by
 a San Salvador television station to make results quickly available collapsed after
 electoral tribunal officials ejected 2,000 university students from voting centers.
 They were to phone in results from each precinct as they were counted.

 There were signs that an expected victory by ARENA, which led the FMLN by
 about seven percentage points in preelection surveys, may have failed to
 materialize amid a startlingly high rate of abstention in Sunday's voting.

 Election officials said preliminary statistics showed that 57 percent of registered
 voters stayed home. And some political analysts said many of the no-shows were
 ARENA voters.

 ``A lot of the ARENA support was very soft,'' said Rodolfo Cardenal, vice rector of
 the University of Central America. ``And those soft voters didn't make it to the
 polls Sunday.''

 Earlier Sunday, it appeared the voter turnout would be even worse.

 Midway through the eight-hour voting day, barely 16 percent of the registered
 voters had shown up at most San Salvador polling stations, and dismayed poll
 workers were predicting a turnout of less than 40 percent of the nation's three
 million voters.

 ``This is just awful,'' said a precinct supervisor at the International Fairgrounds, the
 capital's largest single voting center. ``It's very, very slow.''

 At most precincts, there were no lines at all. And the enthusiasm that marked
 last year's presidential election, with crowds of voters clad in party colors
 shouting and releasing balloons, was nowhere in evidence.

 The widespread apathy Sunday was in startling contrast to elections held during
 the civil war that raged here between 1979 and 1992. During the war, election-day
 body counts often led actual results in the next morning's newspapers.

 But in a statistic that either reflects how far Salvadoran democracy has
 progressed since those days, or demonstrates how little anyone cared about the
 outcome of this election, the only fatality Sunday was a mayoral candidate killed
 in a one-car traffic accident in eastern El Salvador. Voters, in fact, seemed most
 interested in finding out which party can spur El Salvador's economy -- growing at
 a tepid 2 percent a year -- and control its burgeoning criminal population.

 ``For me, personally, the most important thing is unemployment,'' said 32-year-old
 Teresa de Jesus Lara, who lost her sales job during a companywide cutback last
 year. ``We have to improve this economy.''
 

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald