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Salvadoran Guerrillas Get New Soviet Bloc Weapons, U.S. Says

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From Reuters

Guerrillas in El Salvador recently received large new deliveries of Soviet Bloc weapons at a time they were expressing interest in a political settlement of their country’s civil war, the United States said Friday.

“They are additional arms, and in terms of the kind of arms, I believe they are of different kind,” State Department spokesman Charles Redman told reporters.

“There have been large deliveries. The importance of this, of course, is again at a time when the FMLN (guerrillas) had said that they were seeking peace, they were willing to negotiate,” he said.

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Just Before Elections

The U.S. disclosure came two days before El Salvador’s presidential elections, which the guerrilla umbrella organization, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, is trying to disrupt with calls for a boycott and renewed fighting.

Redman provided few details of the new weapons shipments.

“The most I could say is that there is evidence that in the last few months the FMLN has received large deliveries of Soviet Bloc weapons, such as AK-47 rifles and ammunition manufactured in Cuba,” he said.

He refused to say if the arms came by way of Nicaragua, where the Marxist-led Sandinistas are in control but asserted that “there has been much evidence in the past of Sandinista support for the FMLN, both political and material.”

Redman suggested the new shipments strengthened the guerrillas in their efforts to disrupt the elections.

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