Many Salvador Activists Hide--or Join Fight

After a week of intense guerrilla warfare and the murders of six Jesuit priests, hundreds of opposition political activists have gone into hiding or taken up arms in a severe and perhaps fatal blow to El Salvador’s “democratic opening.”

The tentative climate of political tolerance, carefully nurtured over the past two years in the hope of ending a decade of bloodshed, collapsed last Saturday as the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) rebels launched their fiercest urban offensive of the war.

It has been further undermined this week by a right-wing government crackdown on labor unions, human rights groups and religious organizations, along with the slayings Thursday of the six priests, who were leading educators and intellectuals of the left.

“There was a political equilibrium, but the FMLN broke it,” said Humberto Centeno, a labor leader whose house was sacked by police Thursday night. “The offensive has created chaos. . . . The attitude of the government now is to annihilate the opposition, kill the dog, end the rabies.”

Thousands of casualties have resulted among the rebels, army and civilians during the guerrilla offensive. Among those killed Friday was British journalist David Blundy, 44, of the Sunday Correspondent.

Roman Catholic Church officials said Friday that the U.S.-backed government and leftist rebels have agreed to church mediation for a cease-fire, although there was no official declaration of agreement from either side in the conflict.

Msgr. Gregorio Rosa Chavez, auxiliary bishop of San Salvador, made the announcement of the cease-fire agreement. But Vice President Francisco Merino, one of the hard-liners in President Alfredo Cristiani’s government, appeared to dismiss the idea out of hand, and there was no word from the rebels’ clandestine radio station.

The climate of fear is a stunning turnabout from El Salvador’s new politics, initiated in late 1987 with the return of Ruben Zamora and Guillermo Ungo, the country’s leading leftist exiles.

They came home to head legal parties, which were given “political space” and allowed to compete in presidential elections last spring, even without breaking their uneasy alliance with the FMLN.

Cristiani, the rightist winner of those elections, took things a step further by opening a fluid dialogue with prominent civilian leftists and peace talks with the guerrillas.

The rebels suspended the talks Oct. 31 after a bomb attack on a leftist union headquarters killed 10 civilians, then launched their military offensive. Zamora and Ungo took refuge in foreign embassies after Cristiani declared a state of siege Sunday.

“The political space has been dramatically reduced, if not eliminated,” said a member of Ungo’s National Revolutionary Movement.

The director of a leftist women’s group, Norma Guirola de Herrera, was fatally shot in the head after being captured by an army patrol on a street in her San Salvador neighborhood Sunday while treating people wounded in the fighting, the Roman Catholic Archdiocesan Legal Protection Office reported Friday.

At least 30 people, including 15 foreigners, have been detained without formal charges in police and army raids since Tuesday.

The National Guard detained 12 Lutheran missionary workers, four of them Americans, after they took refuge in a church following the murders of the Jesuits. They were held overnight and freed on the condition they leave the country.

Lutheran Church officials in El Salvador identified the Americans as Paula Brentlinger, a physician from Seattle; Thomas Gabriel, a nurse from Seattle; Bradley Fields, a social worker from San Diego, and Paul Fitch, a volunteer (hometown unknown).

Two American human rights activists were arrested and later freed when police ransacked the offices of Comadres, a group of relatives of Salvadorans missing in political violence.

Police looking for guerrillas have entered church-run shelters for the thousands displaced by the fighting, demanded lists of those inside and confiscated food and medical supplies.

“We have to confess our justified fear that this is only the beginning of actions against political leaders, union members and peasants,” said Fidel Chavez Mena, the Christian Democratic runner-up to Cristiani in the presidential election.

On Friday, hundreds of mourners filed through the bloodied yard of a Central American University dormitory where the priests were shot to death, apparently by men in military uniform who dragged them from their beds. The dead included Fathers Ignacio Ellacuria and Ignacio Martin-Baro, rector and vice rector of the Jesuit-run institution.

Lingering at the spot, a university student activist said he feared for his life unless the guerrillas succeed in their offensive and seize power--an unlikely prospect at this point.

“If they can kill people who were supposedly untouchable for their intellectual stature and international reknown, what are they going to do to people like us?” he asked. After a pause, he added: “There’s going to be a wave of horrible repression.”

A voice on a loudspeaker near the downtown Roman Catholic archdiocese, speaking in the name of the army’s First Infantry Brigade, exhorted people to support the armed forces. According to Gregorio Rosa Chavez, auxiliary bishop, the message concluded: “Ignacio Ellacuria and Martin-Baro have fallen. We will continue killing Communists.”

The Jesuits issued a statement calling for justice but pleading with Salvadorans not to avenge the deaths with violence. Ungo’s and Zamora’s parties, which have joined moderate opposition groups in calling for a cease-fire, have made similar appeals to their followers.

But many have ignored them and taken up arms with the rebels.

Three women from a legally recognized human rights group turned up at an FMLN press conference in a San Salvador apartment building this week brandishing AK-47 assault rifles.

“We are not front people any more,” one of the women said. “Now we’re FMLN.”

“We don’t doubt that many of our supporters took the option of self-defense or of joining the FMLN,” said labor leader Centeno, who went into hiding this week.

A Western diplomat said the danger to left-wing activists could increase as the guerrillas, whose offensive in the capital appears to be waning, scatter and the security forces pursue them all over the city.

He said he is alarmed by the appearance of Cherokee four-wheel-drive vehicles with smoked windows, a trademark of right-wing death squads associated in the past with Cristiani’s Nationalist Republican Alliance, or Arena.

“The thing that worries me is to what degree Cristiani is in charge of events,” the diplomat said. “One of the problems with hard-liners in Arena is that anyone who doesn’t agree with it is a Commie. In that sense I am cautious about the future of democracy. It depends to what extent the ultra-right and the extremists have been unleashed.”

Cristiani has promised a thorough investigation of the priests’ murders.

A right-wing businessman close to Arena said Friday that the president considered the slain Father Ellacuria “his biggest asset on the left” in efforts to reconcile the country.

“Ellacuria was supportive of what Cristiani was trying to do, to open the door to a more constructive political environment,” he said. “They were on the same wavelength.”

Acknowledging the possibility that a military or paramilitary death squad was responsible, the businessman said he was confident of Cristiani’s intention to prosecute the killers, but “I’m not saying he has the ultimate power to do it.”

CUT THREATENED--An outraged Congress may end assistance to El Salvador. A19