EL SALVADOR: One Step Closer to Anarchy

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Leftist extremists provoke the new junta to violence

It was just past noon in the capital city of El Salvador, the little Central American country that had undergone a coup d'état only two weeks earlier. As merchants in San Salvador's central business district pulled down their steel shutters for the traditional two-hour siesta, a group of 180 young men suddenly jogged down the street, followed cautiously by a small band of foreign journalists. The joggers, all members of a Trotskyite political group called the LP-28, shouted "Unity!" and carried antigovernment banners. Some also held gym bags and cumbersome parcels—at least one of which, it turned out later, contained a rifle ready for firing.

As the runners approached a newspaper office that had been destroyed by bombs the previous night, a dozen policemen braced for trouble. Shots rang out, and soon army reinforcements arrived in armored personnel carriers, firing at the activists and running over bystanders in the process, "People were falling like pins in a bowling alley," said one horrified shopkeeper. By the tune the shooting ended six hours later, the streets were littered with 32 bodies, and the country had slipped one step closer to anarchy.

In the next five days, 20 more Salvadorans died in clashes among the many extremist political factions that have made civil strife a way of life in El Salvador (pop. 4.8 million). On one side are the leftist terrorist groups that seek to provoke a Nicaragua-style insurrection. On the other are the hit teams obedient to the country's ultraconservative elite. Standing helpless in the middle, unable to control either the notoriously brutal 12,000-man security forces or intransigent foes on the left and right, is the civilian-military junta that ousted President Carlos Humberto Romero only last month.

Backed by liberal academics and some members of the Roman Catholic clergy, the junta had announced a crash program of political reform. Though it quickly won support and a pledge of "significant aid" from the U.S., the five-man junta may fall apart before the program is carried out. Rumors of a countercoup by right-wing military officers swept through the capital last week, together with reports that the oligarchy was prepared to pay as much as $20 million to any group that could restore the country to military control.

The most pressing problem is the mounting outrage over the junta's failure to determine the fate of some 300 dissidents who have "disappeared" during the past three years. Military officers have opposed the junta's plan to create a special commission to investigate the disappearances, evidently out of concern that this might implicate the armed forces. Unless the junta can produce a convincing explanation of what happened to the missing 300, and quickly, warns Christian Democratic Leader José Napoleón Duarte, whose victory in the presidential election seven years ago precipitated a military takeover, "they will be digging their own graves." Not to mention those of many other Salvadorans.