700 Protest U.S. Aid to El Salvador : Demonstration: The escalating civil war and the murders of six priests swell the marchers’ ranks.

Holding paper crosses bearing the names of six Jesuit priests murdered this week in San Salvador, about 700 people Saturday marched to MacArthur Park for a rally to protest the U.S. government’s financial involvement in El Salvador’s escalating civil war.

The high turnout for the mile-long march from Pico Boulevard and Menlo Avenue was fueled by concern after a week of intense guerrilla warfare in El Salvador culminated in the murders of the priests in the capital city Thursday, said organizers who have frequently held rallies that have drawn fewer people.

“I haven’t come out for a long time to protest,” said painter Antonio Bernal. “But things have gotten so bad that we have to do as much as we can to stop the killings.”

Organizers of the protest, Coordination of Salvadoran Committees, said the priests were killed by the army or right-wing death squads acting at the behest of Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani’s government, a charge the government has denied. They called for Congress to suspend the $90 million slated this year for military aid to El Salvador.

“Being a brother priest, the murder of the priests touches me in a special way,” said Father Mike Crotty of St. Vincent’s Church in Los Angeles, one of several Roman Catholic priests and nuns at the rally calling for suspension of U.S. aid.

The Right Rev. Frederick Borsch, bishop of the Episcopalian diocese in Los Angeles, spoke at the rally and called on both leftist and right-wing groups in El Salvador to lay down their arms and resume negotiations. Borsch’s speech followed a brief appearance by performer Jackson Browne, who sang a ballad called “Life Is in Balance.”

“While my sympathies are with the great majority of people struggling for justice against the government, I also do not think the revolutionaries should use violence because it brings a backlash like that against the priests,” Borsch said.

The slaying of the priests was reminiscent of the March, 1980, attack on Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero of San Salvador, who was shot to death as he was saying Mass in the chapel of a hospital.

Many of the protesters were carrying signs bearing pictures of Romero as they marched down Alvarado Street past pedestrians and motorists, whose progress was briefly impeded by the event. At the northwest corner of the park, the marchers clashed with a group of about five men who called themselves “Christian patriots.”

As some of the protesters linked hands to prevent the two groups from coming to blows, the smaller group castigated the marchers, calling them Communists and atheists and chanting “Arena,” the Spanish acronym for the governing party in El Salvador.

“It was the left-wing rebels who killed the priests, not the government,” said Modesto Lopez, 30, of Los Angeles, one of the counter-protesters and a former Salvadoran soldier. “They are just saying the government killed the priests because they want to use their deaths against Arena.”

Actor Howard Hesseman, who stars in the TV show “Head of the Class” and marched in the rally, said that no matter who was responsible for the murders, “the fighting just has to stop. I can’t stand the idea of one more Beirut or Belfast in the world where a whole generation of children is getting accustomed to seeing people walking around with rifles bashing other people.”