Round 2 of Salvador Talks Opens : Central America: The president of host Costa Rica calls on the combatants to ‘rectify the history of 10 years of war.’

Government and rebel negotiators from El Salvador opened a new round of peace talks here Monday after hearing a plea by Costa Rica’s president to “rectify the history of 10 years of war in your country.”

“Seven million Salvadorans have turned their eyes toward you, with optimism and faith,” President Oscar Arias Sanchez told the negotiators in a public ceremony. “You have an obligation to bury the past, because you do not want to leave here as accomplices of more war.”

The stern appeal by the Costa Rican leader, who won the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize for his campaign to pacify Central America, dramatized the pressure on both sides to end a war that has cost 70,000 lives.

El Salvador’s new rightist government and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front met for the first time Sept. 13-15 in Mexico City and agreed to try to end the fighting “by political means in the shortest time possible” through monthly negotiations.

This first round of substantive talks, in a suburban Roman Catholic monastery, centered on a rebel peace plan unveiled during last month’s meeting and a government counterproposal offered Monday. Catholic leaders from El Salvador mediated the talks, and representatives of the United Nations and Organization of American States attended as witnesses.

The rebel plan calls for a cease-fire by Nov. 15 in return for reforming the judiciary and the army to combat human rights abuses, as well as moving the 1991 election of a national legislature to a date in 1990. It envisions an end to the conflict by Jan. 31, with the transformation of the guerrilla movement into a political party and a sharp reduction of the 55,000-man armed forces.

Details of the government counteroffer have not been made public. But its central point, announced by Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani to the U.N. General Assembly on Oct. 2, is that all fighting must cease before serious talks can proceed.

Arias appeared to endorse that idea Monday when he told negotiators they “have a lot to learn” from the two-year-old peace process in Nicaragua. There, an informal truce between the Sandinista government and U.S.-backed Contras took hold in March, 1988, at the start of high-level peace talks, and still holds despite the lack of a final armistice.

Arriving here for the scheduled two-day session, Salvadoran guerrilla leaders ridiculed any comparison with the Nicaraguan rebels, who are apparently more dependent on foreign support, and rejected the idea of an unconditional cease-fire.

They also expanded their own proposal by calling for creation of a powerful human rights body representing “all political and social forces,” including the rebel front. The new body, working under U.N. and OAS supervision, would have access to army and police jails.

Such safeguards, the rebels insist, are needed to halt the practice of arbitrary arrests, torture and murder by government forces and right-wing death squads and to ensure a climate of peace.

“The impunity of those who kill and torture has to end,” said Joaquin Villalobos, the rebels’ chief military strategist. “It is impossible to base (a settlement) on so simplistic a concept as a ceasing of hostilities if everybody just keeps shooting as they please.”

Villalobos said the new demands are a response to a recent government crackdown on the rebels’ civilian supporters.

Indeed, the onset of peace talks appears to have sharpened the conflict. More than 70 combatants on both sides have been killed in intense fighting since the guerrillas ended an 11-day unilateral cease-fire Sept. 23, after the government began arresting and beating leftist union leaders and other rebel supporters.

On the eve of the talks, army troops used tear gas to break up a peace vigil by 100 leftists in a Catholic church in San Salvador. The same day, the Salvadoran air force commander, Gen. Juan Rafael Bustillo, made a fight-to-the-finish speech that likened the guerrilla alliance to a wounded bull.

“It’s wounded, it’s dying,” he said. “But we must not turn our backs, because that’s how great bullfighters die.”

Since taking office June 1, Cristiani has surprised his critics just by his willingness to talk. But opposition in the military and his right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance has given the rebels the edge in the propaganda war.

“We all want peace to come to our country right now,” Cristiani said Sunday in a speech televised in El Salvador. “But 10 years of fratricidal conflict is difficult to solve. We do not want people to get frustrated if, perhaps, the talks do not move forward at the accelerated pace that the people demand.”