Assassination in El Salvador

The almost methodical manner in which the murder of El Salvador’s attorney general, Roberto Garcia Alvarado, was carried out Wednesday is another sign that political assassinations have again become routine in that nation’s civil war.

Despite the heavy security that is routine for government officials and other members of the political and economic elite in that war-torn country, Garcia Alvarado was killed as he rode through the busy streets of San Salvador. He was a passenger in a Jeep Cherokee equipped with armored doors and bulletproof windows, bodyguards in the front seat and additional security men traveling behind him in an escort car. When the armed caravan stopped for a traffic light, witnesses said, a man who had been riding in another vehicle calmly walked up to the Jeep, placed a bomb on its roof and walked away. The explosion killed the attorney general almost instantly, investigators said.

Garcia Alvarado was the highest-ranking civilian official killed in the Salvadoran conflict in nine years. His death marks the definitive end of a “gentlemen’s agreement” between the government and the rival leftist guerrillas not to target politicians and the families of politicians and military leaders. The killing of the attorney general followed by just days a similar bombing at the home of El Salvador’s newly elected vice president, who was not injured in the blast.

The attacks mark an escalation in a civil war that has already been terribly bloody. Worse, an escalation by the rebels clearly invites a harsh response from the government--a government soon to be in the hands of right-wing politicians who have shown no qualms about using brutally repressive measures to fight subversion, whether real or merely suspected, in the past. In fact, that repression already may have begun. Although they have not been as widely publicized as assassination attempts on government officials, several recent killings in El Salvador appear to be the work of right-wing death squads.

The last high-ranking civilian killed in El Salvador was also an attorney general, but he was a Christian Democrat, Mario Zamora, murdered by a death squad in 1980. The Zamora assassination pushed many political leftists in El Salvador who had previously eschewed violence into an alliance with the guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front. That alliance gave the FMLN a political legitimacy it did not previously have, and that has helped the rebels prolong the Salvadoran conflict.

This sad lesson in the unintended side effects of repression should not be forgotten by El Salvador’s President-elect Alfredo Cristiani and his supporters in the U.S. government as they ponder how to respond to the latest upsurge in El Salvador’s political violence.