2 Die as Salvadoran Police Disperse Disabled Veterans : Central America: Former soldiers and rebels unite to protest medical care. Violence is the first since the civil war ended.

In the first major outbreak of political violence since the end of El Salvador’s civil war, at least two people were killed Thursday when police broke up a march by disabled combat veterans demanding medical care and benefits, witnesses said.

The demonstration outside the offices of President Alfredo Cristiani was staged by former leftist guerrillas and former army soldiers maimed in the war. The march was led by men in wheelchairs, and a number of the protesters walked on crutches or artificial limbs.

Witnesses said police with shields, clubs and gas masks lobbed tear gas to stop the march by several hundred veterans and their supporters. Many of the demonstrators hurled rocks at the police.

News agency photographers said they saw police firing guns when the demonstrators tried to break through a barrier covered with concertina barbed wire.

The government accused “unscrupulous people” who joined the march of provoking the violence by first hurling objects at the police and then opening fire on the security forces. Protesters denied they were armed and said the demonstration was peaceful until the police used tear gas.

“They fired tear gas at us, but we kept advancing. Then they started shooting,” said Evelyn Ramirez Martinez, 32, a former guerrilla who lost most of her fingers in the war. “We were asking for artificial limbs and medical attention.”

A former soldier and a former guerrilla died of gunshot wounds, Red Cross officials said. Radio reports said that a third person, a woman who supported the march, was also killed.

Protesters said 10 other people were injured. The government said 12 police officers were hit by flying debris and pieces of metal.

One of the dead was identified as Santos Martinez, 19, an amputee whose left leg prosthesis was supplied by the Los Angeles-based Medical Aid for El Salvador.

Stiff repression of protest marches was a common occurrence during the war. Government security forces frequently fired on university students, labor activists and others who tried to demonstrate. But Thursday’s shooting was the first such incident since U.N.-brokered peace accords formally ended the war last year, and it alarmed many here.

Commanders of the former guerrilla army accused the government of trying to destroy El Salvador’s peace, while the government accused the former guerrillas of trying to destabilize the Cristiani administration.

Since the end of the war, former soldiers and former guerrillas wounded in the conflict have united in an unlikely coalition to demand medical care, pensions and other benefits.