Salvador’s Duarte, Terminally Ill, Hospitalized in Mexico City

President Jose Napoleon Duarte of El Salvador, who is suffering from terminal liver cancer, was hospitalized in stable condition in Mexico City today, Salvadoran officials said.

Salvadoran Foreign Minister Ricardo Acevedo Peralta said Duarte is “in a government hospital.”

Embassy Minister Guillermo Rubio said Duarte, in Mexico City for the inauguration of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, is being treated for a high temperature but has not changed his plans to return to El Salvador on Saturday.

Peralta said Duarte is “somewhat ill, he has a temperature, but in general terms he is all right.

“He only has a little temperature, but these are the normal results of chemotherapy. . . . He’s a bit tired, and the altitude probably affected him.”

But government sources in El Salvador said the 63-year-old Duarte is in “very grave” condition.

An operator at the Mexico City hotel where Duarte had been staying said she is under orders not to transfer any press calls to the Salvadoran delegation.

Duarte attended Salinas’ inauguration Thursday morning but did not attend a dinner the new president held for visiting Latin American leaders.

Duarte had until Thursday exhibited in the last two months what doctors called remarkable improvement in his health. They said that the spread of the cancer in his liver had been arrested and that other organs had not been affected.

When he arrived in Mexico City on Wednesday, he went directly from the airport to the Basilica of Guadalupe, the holiest shrine for this country’s predominantly Roman Catholic population.

He told reporters he had thanked the Virgin of Guadalupe, to whom the basilica is dedicated, for a recent improvement in health.