On and On in El Salvador

The deaths of two U.S. citizens in El Salvador’s civil war is a sad reminder that the conflict is still unresolved more than seven years after it began. Worse, the conditions under which one of the U.S. advisers died suggest that the war could go on much longer than many analysts had thought.

One of the dead is an unidentified employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, killed when a helicopter crashed on a reconnaissance flight. The other was Army Staff Sgt. Gregory Fronius, 27, one of 78 persons who died in a surprisingly ferocious attack by leftist guerrillas on a major military base in the northern province of Chalatenango. The region is one of three that Salvadoran government forces have been trying to wrest from guerrilla control for several years.

Before Tuesday’s attack, military officials in the Salvadoran government and at the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador had been suggesting that the guerrillas were facing an imminent demise because of the increasingly aggressive pursuit by an army that is larger, better trained and better equipped than it has ever been--thanks to U.S. support.

Yet since the start of this year, as if to respond to those confident claims, the rebels have begun inflicting serious damage on government forces with troubling regularity. Although the attack that killed Fronius is certain to get the most attention in the United States, it was only the most recent setback for the Salvadoran army.

Since Jan. 1 the guerrillas have launched four attacks in which they massed enough troops to strike at major military installations. They have also continued a strategy of methodically sabotaging the nation’s electrical and transportation systems, and have expanded into areas where they had rarely operated before--such as El Salvador’s western provinces.

So while they are not nearly as powerful as they were two years ago, the Salvadoran rebels are far from defeated. That sobering reality suggests that El Salvador’s President Jose Napoleon Duarte should once again try to renew the long-stalled peace talks between his government and the guerrillas’ political representatives. Unless he does, the war will claim many more lives--not just of North Americans but of many, many more Salvadorans.