Curfew Imposed on Half of San Salvador

Salvadoran authorities placed half the population of the capital under a 24-hour curfew today and said 466 people had died in a three-day guerrilla offensive.

As mortars and machine guns echoed through the city, a guerrilla commander in one rebel-controlled suburb called for a cease-fire to let civilians leave embattled neighborhoods.

Col. Arturo Lopez, a spokesman for the military high command, told reporters that the army had imposed the curfew because guerrilla snipers had taken up positions in heavily populated areas and had to be flushed out.

“We are talking about an eighth or a tenth (of the country’s population),” he said. A fifth of El Salvador’s 5 million people live in the capital, San Salvador.

Lopez said that 17 civilians, more than 300 guerrillas and over 100 soldiers had been killed since Saturday night, when the fiercest fighting in 10 years of civil war began.

The military ordered a 24-hour curfew in seven working-class suburbs in the north and east of the city that contain half the capital’s population, he said.

“Because terrorist elements have taken up positions inside these neighborhoods and are acting as snipers . . . we consider it necessary to maintain the curfew during the day,” he said.

The guerrillas, who began their offensive by attacking the official and private residences of right-wing President Alfredo Cristiani, proposed a cease-fire today to allow civilians to leave embattled areas.

“Let’s make a truce in a humanitarian sense, let’s make a truce in the sense of aiding the population,” guerrilla commander Carlos Argueta told reporters in a working-class housing complex in the rebel-controlled suburb of Zacamil.

“If afterward (the army) is confident they can oust us, let’s renew the action. We don’t fear them,” he said.

As the leftists continued their offensive, helicopter gunships strafed guerrilla positions. A light aircraft circled over the city calling by loudspeaker for people to stay indoors.

Residents of the Soyapango suburb, where government paratroopers have been fighting the rebels street by street, said troops had built barbed wire barricades on main roads.

Cristiani, whose government was discussing peace proposals with the guerrillas only weeks ago, had put the capital under a dusk-to-dawn curfew, and the decision to order a 24-hour curfew indicated new efforts to oust the rebels.

The rebels, who had complained that the government was not negotiating seriously in the peace talks, are thought to have launched the operation to convince Cristiani and international opinion that they remain a force to be reckoned with.