Kirkland Urges Duarte to Pursue 1981 Murders

Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon Duarte met Friday with AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland, who urged him to pursue the slayings of two U.S. labor advisers in San Salvador in 1981.

Other unionists, including the brother of one of the victims, complained that Duarte is not doing enough about the case and called on Congress to restrict aid to El Salvador until the murder is solved.

Duarte, on the second day of a nine-day visit to the United States, met Kirkland for breakfast, and an official of the labor federation said the slaying of the director of El Salvador’s land reform agency and of the two AFL-CIO advisers “was touched on.”

But the brother of Michael Hammer, one of the victims, told a congressional subcommittee that he does not believe the case is being pursued with sufficient energy by the Reagan Administration, by Duarte’s government or by the AFL-CIO.

Contradiction in Policy

“I believe the State Department’s commitment to achieving justice for these men is half-hearted,” Frank Hammer, a Detroit auto worker, charged. “They talk about justice on the one hand but indirectly support the death squads and their military connections with the other.”

The AFL-CIO leadership, he added, “doesn’t seem to be pushing hard on the case any more.”

Michael Hammer, fellow labor adviser Mark Pearlman, and Salvadoran land reform chief Jose Rodolfo Viera were gunned down as they sat at a table in the coffee shop of San Salvador’s Sheraton Hotel on Jan. 3, 1981. U.S. officials believe that two Salvadoran army officers linked to the country’s extreme rightist groups gave the order for the murder, although the only arrests made have been of two lower-ranking trigger men.

Frank Hammer said he discussed the case with Duarte during a recent visit to El Salvador and was impressed with the Salvadoran’s frankness, but he concluded that there would be no progress in pursuing the higher-ups in the case unless the United States threatened to reduce its economic and military aid.

“You must put conditions on the aid that we send to El Salvador,” Hammer told the House Appropriations Committee’s panel on foreign operations.

Duarte, who made no public appearances Friday, did not comment publicly on the issue.

Appeal for Immigrants

But in a television interview that will be broadcast Sunday, he did ask the Reagan Administration to stop turning away Salvadoran refugees who have fled the war in their own country and entered the United States illegally.

“I’d be delighted if you . . . let them stay in the United States because this is Salvadoran people who have come to this country to try to make a living and they are helping their own people in their own country,” he said.

An estimated 500,000 Salvadorans are living in the United States, many illegally. The Reagan Administration characterizes most of them as economic migrants and has prosecuted some churchmen who have offered them asylum.

On another television program, Duarte said Salvadoran forces on Thursday night captured a ship, which they suspected of bringing supplies to leftist guerrillas.

But the ship, an oceangoing barge out of Houston, turned out to be carrying a cargo of cigarettes instead.

Duarte is scheduled to travel to South Bend, Ind., this weekend to accept an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame and to return to Washington for meetings with members of Congress next week.