Quayle, in Salvador Visit, Will Meet 2 Leftist Leaders

In the first such contact by a senior U.S. official, Vice President Dan Quayle will meet in El Salvador this week with two leaders of that country’s left-wing opposition, Administration officials said Saturday.

The vice president leaves Washington today on a journey now seen as even more important in the wake of Friday’s assassination of a senior Salvadoran official.

The killing of Jose Antonio Rodriguez Porth, a right-wing ideologue who served as minister of the presidency--in effect, chief of staff to President Alfredo Cristiani--brings added urgency to the message Quayle is carrying of reconciliation in El Salvador and of respect for human rights by the rightist Cristiani administration, which took office June 1.

Higher Visibility

At the same time, said a White House official, “it elevates the visibility of the trip and adds further proof to our long-held proposition that these people (the killers) are not interested in democracy--that they’re interested in violence and murder.”

The Cristiani government, El Salvador’s armed forces and U.S. Ambassador William G. Walker all blamed the Marxist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front for Rodriguez Porth’s assassination.

They said guerrillas of the front are trying to elicit a violent right-wing reaction that could endanger the large U.S. aid program to El Salvador. The country receives more than $1 million a day in U.S. assistance, equal to one-third of the Salvadoran national budget.

Quayle will meet in El Salvador with Guillermo Ungo and Ruben Zamora, senior officials of the Revolutionary Democratic Front, the civilian, political arm of the FLMN, as the guerrilla front is known. Ungo and Zamora were denied visas to visit this country five years ago by the Ronald Reagan Administration.

But Ungo and Zamora, more moderate than their contemporaries in the FMLN, have been urging the guerrillas to engage in negotiations and have on occasion publicly opposed some of the rebel acts branded as terrorist by the United States.

The two politicians also took part in El Salvador’s presidential elections this spring, in which their coalition received about 6% of the vote. That participation was a factor in the Bush Administration’s decision to have Quayle meet with them.

White House officials, sensitive to any suggestion that the Bush Administration might be conferring legitimacy on allies of the guerrillas, said that a failure to recognize Ungo’s and Zamora’s participation in the elections would leave the Administration open to criticism that it is not truly interested in pluralism in El Salvador.

With Cristiani now beginning a five-year term, Quayle has an opportunity to show support for him and remind the armed forces and the government that “the spotlight is on them and that they’ll have to make progress in human rights, because critics are watching for any sign of retrogression and will use that to endanger aid,” the White House official said.

In addition to El Salvador, Quayle will visit Guatemala, Honduras and Costa Rica before his scheduled return to Washington on Wednesday.

During the other stops, Quayle will seek to put pressure on the Sandinista government of Nicaragua to adhere to its pledge to hold free and fair elections and to end its role in the shipment of Cuban and Soviet Bloc arms to the Salvadoran guerrillas.

He will also seek to reinforce the efforts by the Organization of American States to put pressure on Panamanian strongman Manuel A. Noriega to relinquish power.