Salvador Convicts 2 in Americans’ Deaths

Two former corporals in the Salvadoran National Guard were found guilty of murder late Thursday in the 1981 shooting deaths of two American land reform experts and a Salvadoran.

A five-member jury deliberated for nearly three hours before reaching its verdict in the one-day trial.

Santiago Gomez Gonzalez and Jose Dimas Valle confessed to the killings after they were arrested in 1982, but the case has been mired in tortuous legal proceedings.

Mark David Pearlman of Seattle, Michael P. Hammer of Potomac, Md., and Rodolfo Viera were shot down Jan. 3, 1981, while they sat in a hotel coffee shop.

The Americans were advising the government on a controversial land reform program that took thousands of acres from wealthy families for distribution to poor peasants. Viera headed the Agrarian Reform Institute, which was overseeing the project.

Their murders were linked to rightist death squads, which were most active here early in the six-year-old civil war.

A court decided in July that there was insufficient evidence to arrest an army captain in connection with the murders. Three people had testified that Capt. Eduardo Alfonso Avila told them that he ordered the killings.

Charges also were dropped against a former officer, Lt. Rodolfo Lopez Sibrian, for lack of evidence.

The two corporals have said they acted on the orders of Avila, Lopez Sibrian and Hans Christ, a wealthy Salvadoran businessman.

According to witnesses’ testimony, Avila told them that he and Lopez Sibrian were at the hotel with Christ and that Avila ordered his bodyguards--the two defendants--to kill the three men.

El Salvador abolished the dealth penalty in 1983. The guardsmen face a maximum prison term of 30 years.

The trial is the second of Salvadorans charged with killing Americans since the civil war began. In May, 1984, five former guardsmen were convicted of murdering four American churchwomen in December, 1980.