El Salvador a Chaotic Scene of Savagery

• Share

The Zona Rosa section of San Salvador is a popular night spot for foreigners and wealthy Salvadorans. On most evenings the three-block-long strip of discos and sidewalk cafes, with their red-enameled tables and brightly striped umbrellas, offers a festive distraction from the civil war that has racked El Salvador for the past five years. But for one night last week this cheerful stretch became an avenue of death. At about 8:45 p.m., between six and ten gunmen, dressed in jeans, military camouflage shirts and green caps, opened fire on four crowded cafes. In several minutes of shooting, they killed 13 people, including four off-duty Marines (all guards at the U.S embassy), two visiting U.S. businessmen and seven Latin Americans.

The scene, said an eyewitness, was "a horrible bloody mess." Blood mingled with spilled beer and ice on the concrete, and once white napkins lay rumpled, soaked in red. Some of those who had been spared took lighted candles from the tables and placed them at the heads of the dead in a Salvadoran gesture of respect. "I didn't imagine that (the civil war) would reach this savagery," said Salvadoran Supreme Court President Francisco Jose Guerrero as he surveyed the chaotic scene.

At week's end the Mardoqueo Cruz urban-guerrilla commandos took responsibility for the shooting. The little-known group is a wing of the Central American Revolutionary Workers' Party. The party in turn is the smallest of five rebel factions in the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (F.M.L.N.), the 10,000-member guerrilla group that is fighting the U.S.-backed government of Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon Duarte. In a message delivered to a French news agency, the Mardoqueo Cruz claimed the raid was part of an operation that it called "Yankee Aggressor in El Salvador: Another Viet Nam Awaits You." The message hinted at further strikes against U.S. military personnel, CIA agents and their allies. The rebels said they had aimed their "revolutionary rifles" in the Zona Rosa only at U.S. military personnel and their companions. They claimed that the other casualties in the restaurants were the result of patrons' returning the gunfire. The night before the Mardoqueo Cruz stepped forward, the F.M.L.N.'s clandestine radio station broadcast the claim that U.S. military involvement in El Salvador had caused the killings. "The first Marines are starting to fall," it said. "The first results of the Yankee invasion of our country are beginning to be paid by deaths." In recent months the Mardoqueo Cruz has claimed responsibility for the Feb. 6 takeover of six San Salvador radio stations; for ambushing national police troops on Feb. 20, killing two and wounding ten; and for the March 27 attack on national police headquarters in San Salvador, in which a woman was slain.