Worried Over Political Slayings, U.S. Sends Top Diplomat to El Salvador : Central America: Three leftist activists have been killed in 17 days. ‘This could be a disaster,’ says a senior U.S. official.

The Clinton Administration, worried that a wave of apparent death squad slayings in El Salvador could burden it with another troublesome Third World crisis, sent a top official Wednesday to ask Salvadoran rightists to stop assassinating their political opponents.

“This could be a disaster--another Haiti, Bosnia, Somalia,” one senior official said. “If El Salvador falls apart, it’s worse than the others. At least we could say we inherited the other problems from the (George) Bush Administration. This one is happening on our watch.”

The Administration “hasn’t been paying attention to El Salvador,” another official acknowledged. “But we are beginning to pay attention now.”

Three leftist activists have been killed in El Salvador in the last 17 days, including Francisco Velis, a high official of the former guerrilla front who was shot in the head with a silencer-equipped pistol as he dropped his daughter off at a day-care center.

A total of 25 known leftists have been slain since their organization, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, signed a peace agreement in January, 1992, under which they agreed to disarm and become a political party.

Some U.S. officials fear that extreme rightists are deliberately taking advantage of the peace to return to the death squad tactics they used in the early 1980s--and testing to see what the response will be.

The State Department’s top Latin America specialist, Assistant Secretary of State Alexander Watson, flew to San Salvador on Wednesday on an unannounced trip to tell leaders of the country’s parties that the United States will look with disfavor on a renewal of the civil war there.

“We are concerned about some of the recent violence,” said a spokesman for the State Department, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Secretary Watson went there to express our support for the peace process and deliver a strong message on how we would react to a resurgence of violence.”

Asked what the “strong message” was, he said: “We will not support any group that is responsible for this kind of violence. As of now, we do not have a reading of which group or individual is behind the violence. If we find out who they are, maybe there’s more we can do.”

However, other officials said the State Department has received credible reports that extreme rightists in the conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance, or Arena party, are behind at least some of the killings.

That poses a dilemma for the Administration, because El Salvador’s current president, Alfredo Cristiani, and the leading candidate in the presidential election next March, Armando Calderon Sol, are both Arena members.

“They aren’t death squad members,” one official said, “but their party may include other people who are.”

State Department documents released last week included a 1990 report from the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador stating that a political kidnaping in 1981 was planned at a meeting at Calderon Sol’s house. The meeting was planned by Roberto d’Aubuisson, who was Arena’s first leader and organizer of the death squads that killed thousands of suspected leftists in the 1980s. D’Aubuisson died of cancer in 1992.

The embassy report does not implicate Calderon Sol more specifically, however, and the candidate denied any involvement in the plot.

“These are old charges that have been looked at and examined by the United Nations and found to be without merit,” he said Wednesday in a statement released here and in San Salvador. He noted that a U.N. commission on war crimes in El Salvador reviewed the State Department documents and did not accuse him of any crimes.

During his visit to El Salvador, Watson is scheduled to meet with Calderon Sol, but only as part of a group meeting with all the candidates in El Salvador’s presidential election, the spokesman said. He also is scheduled to meet with President Cristiani and with top military officials.

The Salvadoran military has been implicated in many death squad slayings, including the assassination of six Jesuit priests in 1989, but U.S. officials said they do not believe the military is behind the current killings.

The United States sent $230 million in aid to El Salvador during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, of which $11 million was military aid. The State Department spokesman said the Administration might decrease that aid if the Salvadoran government does not act to stop the killings.

“We’re not contemplating using that stick right now, but it’s certainly a possibility,” he said.