SAN SALVADOR -- (AP) -- Francisco Flores of El Salvador's governing rightist
             party won an overwhelming victory in El Salvador's presidential elections and
             immediately pledged Monday to form a broad-based government.

             Preliminary official figures gave Flores and his National Republican Alliance party
             about 52 percent of the vote in Sunday's election -- enough to avoid a runoff
             against No. 2 finisher, Facundo Guardado of the leftist Farabundo Marti National
             Liberation Front.

             In comments to radio stations Monday, Flores promised ``to form a Cabinet of the
             widest range possible,'' though it was not clear whether that meant members of the
             leftist opposition would be included.

             Flores, who starts his five-year term June 1, promised ``a frontal attack'' on crime,
             as well as increased attention to education and agriculture.

             Flores, 39, is part of a new political generation that had little direct role in the
             12-year civil war that ended in 1992 and cost 70,000 lives. He succeeds
             businessman Armando Calderon Sol as president.

             Flores, a former philosophy professor, earned a bachelor's degree in political
             science from Amherst College in Massachusetts and a master's degree in
             philosophy from World University in Ojai, Calif.

             His rightist party's two previous presidents were wealthy businessmen and its
             founder was a former army major, Roberto D'Aubuisson, accused by a U.N.
             commission of links to right-wing death squads in the 1980s.

             The election was a heavy blow to the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front,
             a former guerrilla coalition that became a political party after the peace treaty. It
             received about 29 percent of the vote.

             Guardado blamed the loss in part on competition from another former guerrilla,
             Ruben Zamora, who took about 7 percent of the vote, as well as ``those who
             control the telecommunications, the economic power'' that financed Flores' costly
             campaign.
 

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