Chief of Staff to Salvador’s New Leader Is Slain : 2 of Victim’s Aides Die in Attack Blamed on Marxist Rebel Band

Jose Antonio Rodriguez Porth, an ultra-right-wing ideologue who was one of President Alfredo Cristiani’s closest advisers, was assassinated here Friday nine days after taking office as presidential chief of staff.

The 73-year-old Rodriguez Porth, whose formal title was minister of the presidency, was shot to death at 8:10 a.m. (7:10 PDT) just as he was entering a station wagon parked in front of his house in the La Mascota district of the city. His driver, Juan Gilberto Clara Carranza, and his groundskeeper, Benjamin Perez, also died.

The Salvadoran government, the military and U.S. Ambassador William G. Walker all blamed the deaths on the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, a Marxist guerrilla movement that has fought a nine-year civil war here. They charged that the rebels are trying to provoke a violent right-wing reaction that would endanger the massive U.S. aid program for El Salvador.

Widow’s Suggestion

However, a guerrilla spokesman in Mexico City told the British news agency Reuters that “it is almost impossible” that the FMLN, as the rebels are called, carried out the murders. And Rodriguez Porth’s widow suggested the killers could have been “terrorists from the right.”

Rodriguez Porth, a founder and one-time director general of Cristiani’s ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena party), was the second senior member of the party to be assassinated in the last two months. Atty. Gen. Roberto Garcia Alvarado died April 19 when his car was bombed. In addition, an unsuccessful attempt was made April 14 on the life of Vice President Jose Francisco Merino.

Although they deny responsibility for these attacks, the rebels have pledged to make El Salvador “ungovernable” under Cristiani’s leadership.

In a news conference at the end of the day, Cristiani said the killing of Rodriquez Porth demonstrates that the “dark forces” of the FMLN “don’t want peace, nor reconciliation, nor agreement nor progress for the country.”

Punishment Vowed

In reply to questions about a possible violent government or Arena reaction, the president stressed that “we are going to respond under the law . . . and punish those responsible for this crime . . . but we will not be provoked into sinking the country into a whirlpool of violence.”

Rodriguez Porth was a natural target for the rebels. Over the years, first as a lawyer and a member of the country’s wealthy business establishment, then as a law professor, diplomat and official of Arena, he was a bitter critic of any opponent of right-wing policies. He consistently advocated hard-line action against the National University for supposedly harboring FMLN supporters.

A close friend who held similar opinions, Francisco L. Peccorini, was shot to death March 15. The FMLN acknowledged killing Peccorini, a dual American-Salvadoran citizen who had retired from teaching philosophy at Cal State Long Beach.

Rodriguez Porth, who served as foreign minister during a right-wing military dictatorship in the late 1970s, probably was best known to the public for his almost daily denunciations of former President Jose Napoleon Duarte, whom he called a Communist dupe.

Yet, although he had been an unrelenting advocate of hard-handed suppression of the FMLN, Rodriguez Porth last week called for talks with the guerrillas to end the civil war. It was this that led his widow to say Friday that he could have been murdered by the right.

Friday’s killings clearly were well planned. As the official walked the 20 feet from his front door of his house at 240 La Mascota St. to the Jeep Cherokee parked at the curb, the killer sat on a motorcycle about 50 yards away. He evidently knew that Rodriguez Porth never used bodyguards and left for work at the same time nearly every day.

Just as Rodriguez Porth clambered into the back seat of the car and the two other men were walking to the front doors, the motorcycle drove up and stopped. Watched by a jogger only 90 feet away and two housekeepers from a home across the street, the killer calmly but quickly walked to the curb-side and fired three shots into Rodriguez Porth’s upper right chest.

He turned and shot Perez once and Carranza twice and then climbed onto his idling motorcycle and drove away as Perez’s wife and small child came to the door. The roar of the departing motorcycle did not drown out the sound of the child crying “Papita, papita. “

The attack was over in less than two minutes.

In a statement read to reporters, Ambassador Walker said that the killing was “an act of mindless terror . . . that fits the pattern of other recent terrorist attacks and killings.”

That, he said, is to “do something so atrocious, so provocative, so repugnant that the government, or others, must retaliate.” The “others” Walker mentioned are the right-wing death squads that killed thousands of FMLN supporters and other anti-government critics in the early 1980s. Many Arena leaders are widely suspected of involvement in the death squads, which were responsible for 17 killings during the first four months of this year, according to the human rights office of the Roman Catholic Church.

In fact, the guerrillas proposed last month to call off attacks on government and Arena leaders if Roberto D’Aubuisson, another founder of the party and one whose name is most often linked with the death squads, were tried for the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero. The offer was rejected.

In Washington, the White House issued a statement saying that President Bush “strongly condemns the vicious murder” and “again calls on extremist groups to put an end to the violence in El Salvador, noting that only through the renunciation of terrorism and war, and the acceptance of democracy, will there be peace.”

“The president noted a pattern of violence against government officials in El Salvador by those who seek to destroy the democratic gains made in that country,” the statement said.

Although Walker said he expects the government to pursue the killer “within the legal system,” powerful Arena leaders were speaking of revenge within an hour of Rodriguez Porth’s death.

“We are facing outright terrorism,” said Sigifredo Ochoa Perez, a former army colonel who once led a military mutiny against Duarte’s government. “They are troglodytes, and the only way to make them understand is to fight fire with fire.”