Salvador Slayings Seen as Warning : Death Squad-Style Killings May Be Sign to Political Exiles

In an apparent threat to returning political exiles, two unidentified men were beaten to death and dumped by the side of a highway early Sunday with the initials of an exile group written across their chests.

The death squad-style killings, the second such incident in less than two weeks, may signal a trend of escalating political violence in El Salvador. On Oct. 26, human rights activist Herbert Ernesto Anaya was gunned down outside his home, and in September a university union leader disappeared.

The killings are another sign that a Central American peace plan enacted last week is failing to bring an end to this country’s seven-year-old civil war. The leftist guerrillas broke off cease-fire talks with the government over the killing of Anaya and rejected a unilateral cease-fire declared by the government. Last week, the rebels paralyzed public transportation for three days and knocked out half the country’s electricity through sabotage.

Police and morgue officials in Santa Tecla, on the southern outskirts of San Salvador, said the bodies of the two men were found about 7 1/2 miles south of the capital, lying 125 feet apart on the highway to the beach town of La Libertad, and that they appeared to have been tortured. The men’s tattered shirts were pulled back and the letters “FDR” written on their chests in red felt pen. FDR are the Spanish initials for Revolutionary Democratic Front, a political group allied with the armed guerrillas.

FDR leaders Ruben Zamora and Guillermo Ungo have announced plans to return to El Salvador to begin open political organizing. Many diplomats and political observers interpreted the Anaya assassination as a warning to them.

Zamora said in a telephone interview from Nicaragua that the two will return despite the latest killings.

“This is part of the blackmail so the FDR leaders do not return,” Zamora said. “It is the type of thing these rightist sectors do to try to stop any advance. We won’t be blackmailed.

“If we decided not to go now, next time they would kill four more people,” Zamora continued. “The best thing to do is to confront them as soon as possible.”

The two victims--one apparently about 20 years old and the other between 27 and 35--were found with no identification, and it was not known if they belonged to the FDR. However, their deaths surely will make it more difficult for Zamora to organize open support for himself or his small party, the Popular Social Christian Movement.

Ungo heads another small party, the National Revolutionary Movement. The two parties make up the bulk of the FDR.

The two social democrats, who have said they are not yet returning to El Salvador permanently, plan to arrive later this month.

President Jose Napoleon Duarte has said that in order to return, Zamora and Ungo must accept amnesty offered under the Central American peace plan and break their alliance with the guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front. They say they will do neither, adding that amnesty is unnecessary since they are not criminals.

Apparently unaware of the killings, Msgr. Gregorio Rosa Chavez lauded the return of the politicians in his homily in the capital Sunday, saying that it “gives priority to the political part (of the conflict) and not to the military, and it is the manner to arrive at a solution for peace by other than military means.”

He said he did not expect the government to arrest Zamora and Ungo upon their return.

Rosa Chavez denounced the guerrillas’ traffic ban and economic sabotage. He also said that Msgr. Arturo Rivera y Damas, the archbishop of San Salvador, will inform President Duarte of his meeting with the rebels in Mexico City last week to try to reopen cease-fire talks. “There is nothing spectacular, and in that sense he is not very optimistic,” Rosa Chavez said.

The five Central American presidents signed a peace plan for El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala on Aug. 7 that calls for cease-fires, amnesties and democratic reforms in the nations at war, and the initial phase of the accord went into effect last Thursday. Since the signing, the Salvadoran government and guerrillas have met twice for talks but made little progress.

Zamora blamed the U.S.-backed Salvadoran government for the recent political killings.

“This shows the incapacity of the government to control its own apparatus,” he said. “At the very least, there is institutional backing to guarantee impunity to those who carry out these killings.”

The rebels and human rights groups also blamed the government and military for the killing of Anaya. President Duarte suggested that the left may have killed Anaya to create a martyr, but Zamora said the charge was “the product of a feverish mind.”

In the early 1980s, rightist military and paramilitary death squads killed thousands of students, union leaders, human rights activists and even members of Duarte’s Christian Democratic Party.

Adan Perez Gomez, assistant administrator of the Santa Tecla cemetery and morgue, said that when he began work there in 1981, “we used to get six or seven bodies a day.” He added: “It is rare now.”

A law that went into effect Thursday decreed amnesty for all the death squad killings committed before Oct. 22 except for the assassination of Msgr. Oscar Arnulfo Romero, the previous archbishop of San Salvador, who was shot to death in 1980 while saying Mass.

Under the same amnesty, more than 130 political prisoners have been released in the last three days. Several hundred other prisoners from the leftist Committee of Political Prisoners of El Salvador are expected to leave in a group within the next couple of days.

Earlier this year, the government freed about 100 prisoners in exchange for a kidnaped air force colonel, and recently it has been releasing other political prisoners as well. Human rights workers say that at least five of the ex-prisoners, including Anaya, have been killed or have disappeared.

Anaya was the most prominent activist slain in recent years. But on Sept. 1, Jorge Salvador Ubau, leader of the Coordinating Committee of University Workers, was captured by armed men in civilian dress after leaving his home. He has not been seen since.