INVASION AFTERMATH: THE VICTIMS : Left With Emotional Wreckage, Panamanians Hunt Relatives : Missing: About 400 have been found by international agencies. Many searches end in local morgues.

Every day, Rosa Maria Salcedo makes a pilgrimage to the burned-out shell of her home in the slum neighborhood of El Chorrillo. Along the way, she stops at the morgue, where she asks, “Have you seen my son?”

Salcedo has not seen her son, Archimedes, 18, since the evening of Dec. 20, when he went out to drink beer with friends in an open-air cafe. The place was just down the street from the Salcedos’ two-room flat and not far from Panama’s military headquarters, the Comandancia.

“I was asleep when I heard a loud noise and felt the walls shake,” she said. “At first I thought Archimedes was drunk and slammed the door. Then the building began to burn.”

What she heard and felt were the opening salvos of the American attack on the Comandancia, which was destroyed along with the Salcedo apartment building and dozens of other buildings. When she ran into the streets in the first hours of Dec. 21, “all I wanted was to find Archimedes,” she said.

She did not, and she still has not.

Many in Mourning

And Rosa Maria Salcedo is not alone. Amid the physical, economic and emotional wreckage left by the U.S. operation to capture strongman Manuel A. Noriega are the mourning relatives of many who were killed or are still listed as missing.

Of the 27,000 American soldiers who took part in Operation Just Cause, 23 were killed; 324 were wounded. Enemy casualties, as reported by the U.S. Southern Command, included 314 dead, 124 wounded and 5,704 detained.

Until Tuesday, in the absence of official estimates, there had been widely varying figures on the number of civilian casualties; some ran into the thousands. But on Tuesday, the Pentagon estimated that 220 Panamanian civilians had been killed in the operation.

Earlier, the Pentagon said it was virtually impossible to count civilian casualties.

“How do you count (Panama Defense Forces personnel) in civilian clothes, or the members of Dignity Battalions (paramilitary units) or looters who were shot?” U.S. Army Lt. Col James Swank asked. “We are leaving that to the international agencies; that is the sort of thing they are good at.”

But the International Red Cross, the Panamanian Red Cross and the Panamanian Human Rights Commission have no consensus. The most detailed figures have been supplied by the country’s Human Rights Commission, a private organization with a reputation for fairness and objectivity. According to Raul Escoffery, the commission’s executive director, 207 civilians were killed and 480 wounded as a direct result of the invasion.

The Panamanian Red Cross reports that between Dec. 20 and Jan. 5, a total of 129 civilians were killed and 517 were injured.

Sandra DeCorrea, speaking for the Panamanian Red Cross, said she has received inquiries on about 1,200 people believed to be missing and added, “So far, we have found 400.” Most had simply fled the areas where heavy fighting took place and had either chosen not to return immediately or had difficulty getting home because of blockades and closed roads. The figures on the missing do not include the 5,000 detainees still being processed by U.S. forces.

Rosa Maria Mota, a representative of the International Red Cross, said she has received reports of 2,000 missing but that these “came in the hours immediately after the invasion and are not accurate.”

Most of the dead and wounded came in the first three or four days of fighting, and the majority of them were shot, according to Dr. Juan Ramirez Harris, a staff physician at Santo Tomas Hospital, where many of the casualties were taken, particularly after the first day of fighting.

“However, starting about the 23rd (of December),” he said, “we noticed that more people had been cut, some of them severely.” He said these people apparently were cut by broken glass as they broke into stores to loot them.

‘No More Than 300’

Roger Montero, head of the Forensic Registry, said he expects the civilian dead to total “no more than 300.”

Some critics, among them former U.S. Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark, say the U.S. military is hiding a civilian casualty rate as high as 4,000 dead and missing, but no one has provided any evidence to substantiate such figures.

In fact, Oswaldo Velasquez, president of the Human Rights Commission, said in an interview that “we have not received one complaint of American troops committing one atrocity or killing any unarmed people.”

Whatever the final toll, it presumably includes Archimedes Salcedo. Chances are that he was incinerated when the building behind the sidewalk cafe was reduced to charred rubble. But his mother, a tiny woman whose hard life as a street vendor and part-time cleaning woman has added ages to her 40 years, continues to look.

“I think he ran away,” she said, “and is afraid to come back because the gringos think he was in the Dignity Battalions.”

If he were a “DigBat,” as the Dignity Battalion people are commonly called, it could be that he was jailed and lied about his name.

Whatever his fate, every morning, after the curfew lifts at 5 o’clock, his mother leaves her sister’s home in the outlying neighborhood of San Miguelito and on foot and by bus heads for El Chorrillo, hoping to find Archimedes, her only child.

En route, she stops at the city morgue because of a lingering fear that this is where she will find him. So far, she has not been able to identify Archimedes from the pictures of corpses shown to people asking about relatives and friends.

“We can’t use the actual remains for identification in most cases,” the Forensic Registry’s Montero said. “Nearly all the dead were brought here in the first few days and are hard to identify. So we use photos taken when they came in, or we ask them to make the identification on the basis of clothing the victims were wearing.”

Sometimes, this method works. Ramon Paredes, a San Miguelito tailor, was able to pick out his missing cousin, a member of the Panama Defense Forces, who evidently changed into civilian clothes when the attack started. Paredes had made the clothes his cousin was wearing.

“I knew it was my work,” he said. “I didn’t want it to be, but there was no doubt.”

Still, in some cases the missing are not dead--not even really missing.

Sixta Luce, 33, a hotel maid, was working the night the invasion began. When men in civilian clothing, masked and brandishing rifles, rushed into the hotel and began rounding up guests, she fled out a service exit and spent the night hiding behind a trash bin.

The fighting that followed kept her on the run. She managed to hitch a ride out of the city. Finally, she was picked up by U.S. troops and taken to a refugee camp.

It was not until late last week that she was cleared and allowed to leave the camp. Because there is no telephone in her home and there was no mail service at the time, Luce was out of contact with her family until she got home Friday.

By this time she had been reported missing by three different relatives. Thus, her reappearance reduced by three the number of missing on lists kept by the Panamanian Red Cross and the Human Rights Commission.