Heart Attack Kills Salvador Archbishop : Central America: Arturo Rivera Damas, 71, championed civil rights, justice. Hundreds attend Mass for prelate who helped to end civil war.

Archbishop Arturo Rivera Damas, who led El Salvador’s besieged Roman Catholic Church through civil war as its priests were assassinated and its parishioners persecuted, died Saturday of a heart attack, aides said.

He was 71.

Often a lone voice of the nation’s conscience, Rivera spent much of the last decade promoting dialogue between leftist guerrillas and U.S.-backed military and government forces, whose war claimed tens of thousands of lives. His efforts were ultimately crucial to the signing of peace accords that ended the conflict in 1992.

And as the peace agreements faltered in recent months, Rivera spoke out to demand political reforms, a fair system of justice and an end to the impunity that has allowed some of the war’s worst atrocities to go unaccounted for.

“He died at a critical time, for the church and for the country,” Msgr. Gregorio Rosa Chavez, the auxiliary bishop of San Salvador and Rivera’s assistant, said as hundreds of weeping mourners crowded into the Sacred Heart Basilica in downtown San Salvador for an open-casket Mass on Saturday.

Rosa Chavez said Rivera, who had a history of heart trouble but who seemed in good health, had played Ping-Pong on Friday but took ill about 2 a.m. Saturday. He suffered a coronary failure at his home and died two hours later at a hospital, the prelate’s doctor said.

Rivera was appointed by Pope John Paul II to take over the church after the 1980 killing of Msgr. Oscar Arnulfo Romero, who was highly critical of the Salvadoran army and the government it backed. Romero was slain by a right-wing death squad as he said Mass.

The new archbishop adopted a less confrontational, more measured style. Where Romero was combative, Rivera was a mediator, careful to criticize both sides and to urge dialogue.

Still, he emerged in the 1980s as a champion of human rights and social justice--notions that often put him and his church at odds with right-wing officials who considered such talk to be leftist subversion.

His condemnation of air force bombings of civilian territories invited death threats. He wrote the U.S. Congress to lobby against military aid, and chastised then-Vice President George Bush for the Ronald Reagan Administration’s failure to adequately weigh the influence in El Salvador of a brutal right wing.

The church in El Salvador played a delicate and complicated role during the war. Its commitment to working with the poor challenged a status quo where power and wealth were concentrated in a few hands and made some priests the enemy of the elite. And a number of priests and seminarians crossed the line, joining the rebel movement.

The church itself was divided too, with most bishops more conservative than Rivera. He had to walk a fine line to keep the Catholic leadership together and to define the church’s mission.

When “to dialogue” with the guerrillas was still considered taboo, Rivera called for dialogue. In 1984, he mediated the war’s first peace talks in the northern Salvadoran town of La Palma.

Especially after an army platoon killed six Jesuit priests, their cook and her daughter at the height of a guerrilla offensive five years ago, Rivera became more outspoken.

As the Jesuits’ bloodied bodies lay on the grass where their killers had dumped them, and as the government and U.S. officials sought to blame the rebels for the slayings, Rivera solemnly sprinkled holy water on the victims and proclaimed: “They were killed by the same people who killed Msgr. Romero.”

In the days that followed, threats against Rivera’s life were broadcast over roving loudspeakers.

With the Jesuit order, Rivera led the charge to demand that the priests’ killers be brought to justice--in contrast to the Romero slaying, where no one was ever charged despite the widely held belief that death-squad founder Roberto D’Aubuisson ordered the killing.

Ultimately, two officers were convicted in the Jesuit case and imprisoned. But they were later released in a government amnesty.

“His work is immense, and all we could say about him would fall short, but he was the greatest defender of human rights,” Maria Julia Hernandez, head of the Catholic Church’s human rights office, Tutela Legal, said of Rivera on Saturday.

To the end, Rivera criticized the failure of the Salvadoran system to name Romero’s killers.

In presidential elections last March, he took the unusual and controversial step of publicly discouraging parishioners from voting for the ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance party, founded in the early 1980s by D’Aubuisson and other reputed death-squad leaders.

The right-wing party’s presidential candidate, Armando Calderon Sol, won anyway.

Rivera continued the tradition started by Romero of using his Sunday homily to comment on the week’s political events, denounce war abuses and plead for peace.

During the 12-year conflict, when there was no opposition press, the homilies were often the only source of information and the only public voice of dissent.

In his final such appearance last Sunday, Rivera sounded a pessimistic note upon returning from a three-week tour of the Salvadoran countryside and amid concerns that some elements of the peace accords are unraveling.

“I find a country on the brink of desperation and disillusionment,” he said. “To succumb to that temptation would be to reopen the door to the use of force as the solution. For that reason, it seems fundamental to me that the truth be sincerely sought. . . .

“Truth and justice are the unsubstitutable pillars of peace,” the archbishop said. “But it seems there are still some among us who would build peace on the illusion of lies and injustice.”