Leading Leftist Politician Assassinated in El Salvador

Amid a surge in politically tinged violence, a prominent member of El Salvador’s former guerrilla front was shot to death Monday morning as he took his small child to a day care center.

The murder of Francisco Velis came as U.N. peacekeepers are denouncing an alarming resurgence in rightist death-squad-style killings 10 months after the end of El Salvador’s brutal civil war.

Such murders not only are on the rise but are not being adequately investigated, the United Nations says in a new report.

The threat of escalating political violence endangers El Salvador’s shaky peace process and could taint upcoming national elections, according to analysts, politicians and church officials.

Velis, 37, was a congressional candidate in those elections, representing the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, the former guerrilla army turned political party.

He was also a member of the FMLN national governing council and helped direct electoral affairs for the party.

He was killed as he delivered his daughter to a nursery that is used by many FMLN parents.

Witnesses told reporters that two men approached Velis and his daughter as they walked along a sidewalk and that one of the gunmen opened fire at close range, shooting Velis in the head.

The little girl, about 2, ran from the scene covered with her father’s blood but was not hurt, FMLN officials said. The gunmen fled and nothing was stolen.

Velis was the first senior FMLN leader to be killed since U.N.-brokered peace accords put a formal end to the war last Dec. 15.

However, at least two other mid-level officials have been killed under murky circumstances in recent months.

“This is very disturbing, especially in the context of what we have been denouncing for some time now,” said Diego Garcia-Sayan, head of the human rights division of the U.N. peacekeeping mission here.

Leaders of the former rebel movement were clearly shaken by the Velis murder, which they said bore all the markings of a premeditated hit.

They and other leftist politicians said the murder was part of a campaign by clandestine right-wingers to intimidate FMLN supporters.

“This is a new dirty war,” Congressman Jorge Villacorta said.

President Alfredo Cristiani ordered an investigation of the slaying, adding that “there is no place in our country” for political violence.

The United Nations, in a report issued Friday on the status of human rights, said serious violations appear to be increasing with the approach of elections, scheduled for March.

It reported arbitrary executions, the “isolated but extremely worrying” reappearance of death squads and several cases of torture, despite substantial progress in pacifying the country.

“Arbitrary executions”--defined as deaths caused through a violation of legal or civil rights--increased 34% in the third quarter of the year as compared to the previous quarter, the United Nations said. Forty-three cases were reported, and in half of those the assailants were unidentified or were “irregular” armed groups.

Two were blamed on the FMLN and one on the paramilitary National Police.

The Roman Catholic Church estimates that 12 death-squad murders a month are committed, although some appear to be the work of vigilantes who target common criminals in response to a soaring crime wave.

And both U.N. and church officials have denounced a spate of telephoned death threats made against leftist politicians by callers identifying themselves as members of the Secret Anti-Communist Army and other shadowy groups using the names of well-known death squads that operated in the early 1980s.

The current rate of political murder and torture does not begin to approach levels of the past.

During more than a decade of war between Marxist guerrillas and a series of U.S.-backed governments, death squads waged a campaign of terror that killed thousands of civilians suspected of supporting the rebels.

Yet the persistence of political violence, and the inability of the government to investigate and prosecute cases, sows mistrust and highlights the longstanding obstacles to peace and democracy in a nation that must rebuild after the devastation of war, observers here say.

“The credibility of the (postwar) changes in this country is at risk if this murder is not cleared up,” FMLN leader Ana Guadalupe Martinez said in a hastily called news conference as word of Velis’ death spread.

“There are sectors who never wanted to accept the peace accords,” she said. “We must not see the death squads as isolated, clandestine groups. They have a political plan, a political body and a political head. There is sufficient evidence to find the guilty.”

She was alluding to statements made in recent weeks by a group of imprisoned former army officers who have described in unusual detail their death-squad activities in the early 1980s.

The officers, who are in prison because of their alleged participation in an apolitical kidnaping-for-ransom ring, have implicated several prominent members of the ruling political party, the Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena), in the planning of bombings and other terrorism.

Among those accused by the former officers is Arena’s current presidential candidate, Armando Calderon Sol. Cristiani has dismissed the accusations as unbelievable and suggested that the officers were trying to blackmail their way out of prison.

A panel known as the Truth Commission, appointed by the United Nations as part of the peace accords, examined El Salvador’s war crimes, and in a lengthy report issued March 15 denounced the death squads.

But that report did not delve deeply into how they were formed and financed. To the surprise of many, the Truth Commission failed to name prominent civilians who are believed to have sponsored the death squads.