Salvador Rebels Kill 40 Soldiers at Military School

Heavily armed guerrillas attacked the Salvadoran army’s U.S.-built military training school here early Thursday, killing at least 40 soldiers and wounding 68 others.

Officials at the Armed Forces Training Center on the outskirts of this seaport at the eastern tip of El Salvador provided the government’s casualty figures. They also said 10 guerrillas died in the nighttime attack. The rebels later claimed to have inflicted about 200 casualties on the army but provided no breakdown of dead and wounded.

The attack, marking the fifth anniversary of the formation of the rebel coalition called the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, was the guerrillas’ largest strike in nearly a year. It came a month to the day after rebels claiming to belong to the front abducted President Jose Napoleon Duarte’s daughter and a friend in San Salvador, the capital.

5 Americans Unhurt

A U.S. Embassy spokesman said five American military instructors were at the school during the surprise attack but that none were injured. He said he did not know if any of the Americans fired weapons during the two-hour battle. Reportedly, about 12 American trainers usually are stationed at the center.

Lt. Col. Joaquin Cerna Flores, commander of the school, said the guerrillas struck at about 1:30 a.m. when most of the 2,100 recruits, instructors and officers were asleep.

Recruits said they were awakened in their barracks by the sound of grenades, 60-millimeter mortars and 90-millimeter recoilless rifles. “I was asleep when they threw in a grenade. It hit me in the foot,” said a young recruit whose right foot was wrapped in a bloody bandage.

Andres Argueta, who was on duty guarding the compound at the time of the strike, said he had been carrying only one clip of ammunition holding 13 rounds. “When that was gone, I had to get out of there,” Argueta said. He was shot in the right ankle.

Hours after the attack, soldiers could be seen washing down two charred barracks, removing mangled metal bunk beds and sweeping out ashes and smoldering mattresses. Strips of sheet metal were blown off the roofs.

The bodies of most of the victims were laid out on the cement floor of a warehouse in the compound, with army dead on one side and the bodies of the guerrillas on the other. Piled next to the dead rebels were homemade explosives they apparently had been carrying. Military officials said the insurgents had intended to blow up the school.

350 to 400 Attackers

Cerna Flores, the school commander, estimated that 350 to 400 guerrillas participated in the attack on the school, on an open plain about 110 miles southeast of San Salvador. The attack “was very strong, very intense,” he said.

Cerna Flores said the air force responded to a call for help within about half an hour, sending helicopters whose guns helped drive back the guerrillas. The U.S.-supplied helicopters--the Salvadorans have more than 60 now--are credited with preventing the guerrillas from launching many such attacks with relatively large numbers of troops.

Last June, four U.S. Marines and nine civilians were killed by rebel gunmen at two outdoor cafes in San Salvador, but the guerrillas’ last large-scale attack was in December in El Salto, southeast of the capital, when an army element fell into a rebel ambush. In that battle, 43 soldiers were killed, 20 wounded and 40 taken prisoner.

The rebel’s last attack on a government installation was in June, 1984, when they seized the nation’s most important dam, Cerron Grande, for about three hours, killing about 60 soldiers. Rebel casualties were reported to be about as high, the government said at the time.

The military school in La Union was renovated and expanded last year with $1 million in U.S. funds after the Regional Military Training Center in eastern Honduras was closed because the Honduran army did not want soldiers of El Salvador, its traditional enemy, trained there any longer.

In a radio broadcast from a clandestine station Thursday afternoon, the guerrillas said, “The armed forces’ training center is a vital piece of the puppet army and it is run by a group of North American advisers who sometimes sleep in the garrison.”

With the attack, the broadcast said, “we commemorate the fifth anniversary of our Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front and reopen our theater of operations in the southern zone of the province of La Union, . . . which converts the entire eastern zone into a war zone.”

The guerrillas said the attack was a cooperative effort by all of the front’s five guerrilla groups. However, officials at the school said they believed it was carried out by rebels from the People’s Revolutionary Army, the largest of the insurgent groups.