Dissidents El Salvador

About 10,000 Salvadoran workers, peasants, students and war refugees marched through the capital of El Salvador to commemorate the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero. The marchers walked under the blazing sun to Metropolitan Cathedral, where the archbishop used to preach sermons defending the poor and denouncing death squad killings.

Just before dawn on Feb. 9, in the heat of a guerrilla war and an election campaign, arsonists set fire to the offices of El Salvador's only leftist opposition newspaper and crippled its presses. Standing amid the ruins of Diario Latino that day, Editor Francisco Valencia blamed the attack on "the armed forces, the government and their death squads, the same ones who massacre the people and murder priests."

Thirty Salvadorans stormed the Costa Rican Embassy and seized about 40 hostages Thursday to protest what they called the repressive policies of Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani's rightist government. "We are here to denounce human rights violations and so that the Costa Rican government pressures Cristiani to end the repression against the people," a spokeswoman for the activists said in an interview.

Guillermo Manuel Ungo, vice president of the Socialist International and the principal leader of El Salvador's unarmed leftist opposition, died in a hospital here Thursday of complications from surgery. Although he was a social democrat in a country long dominated by the military and extreme right, Ungo, 62, was a major figure in Salvadoran politics for more than 20 years.

The stakes in Ruben Zamora's political gamble are as high as they come: life or death. An exiled social democrat allied with El Salvador's armed guerrillas, Zamora has decided to return home to the country he fled eight years ago after his brother was killed by a right-wing death squad. Zamora, 45, says he will go back to El Salvador before the Nov. 7 date set in a regional peace plan for cease-fires, amnesty programs and democratic reforms in the Central American countries at war.

Leftist civilian political leaders allied to armed rebels fighting the government in the countryside announced an alliance Sunday with a small Social Democratic Party, thereby gaining a legal political platform and a means to participate in elections in El Salvador. Guillermo Ungo and Ruben Zamora, leaders of the Revolutionary Democratic Front, said they do not expect to run candidates in National Assembly elections scheduled for next March but have not made a firm decision.

Leftist student demonstrators and opposing riot policemen gave it all they had Friday, but when it was over, the only casualties were bystanders with vibrating eardrums. It was a battle of sound trucks. First, the demonstrators blasted out insults: "Assassins! Assassins!" Then: "Gorillas and bourgeoisie!" Across the street the police fired back, blaring first the sound of sirens and whistles, then: "Don't be fooled by people who have nothing to offer you."

In an apparent resurgence of threats by self-proclaimed "death squads" in Los Angeles, four Salvadoran activists have received two death threats recently from a group purporting to be a foreign arm of El Salvador's most feared death squad, it was disclosed Monday. "We take this seriously," said Carlos Vaquerano, one of the four. "It is psychological war. But if psychological war is to work, they have to act on their threats sometime."

After a week of intense guerrilla warfare and the murders of six Jesuit priests, hundreds of opposition political activists have gone into hiding or taken up arms in a severe and perhaps fatal blow to El Salvador's "democratic opening."

Guillermo Manuel Ungo, vice president of the Socialist International and the principal leader of El Salvador's unarmed leftist opposition, died in a hospital here Thursday of complications from surgery. Although he was a social democrat in a country long dominated by the military and extreme right, Ungo, 62, was a major figure in Salvadoran politics for more than 20 years.

After a week of intense guerrilla warfare and the murders of six Jesuit priests, hundreds of opposition political activists have gone into hiding or taken up arms in a severe and perhaps fatal blow to El Salvador's "democratic opening."

Thirty Salvadorans stormed the Costa Rican Embassy and seized about 40 hostages Thursday to protest what they called the repressive policies of Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani's rightist government. "We are here to denounce human rights violations and so that the Costa Rican government pressures Cristiani to end the repression against the people," a spokeswoman for the activists said in an interview.

Leftist student demonstrators and opposing riot policemen gave it all they had Friday, but when it was over, the only casualties were bystanders with vibrating eardrums. It was a battle of sound trucks. First, the demonstrators blasted out insults: "Assassins! Assassins!" Then: "Gorillas and bourgeoisie!" Across the street the police fired back, blaring first the sound of sirens and whistles, then: "Don't be fooled by people who have nothing to offer you."

In an apparent resurgence of threats by self-proclaimed "death squads" in Los Angeles, four Salvadoran activists have received two death threats recently from a group purporting to be a foreign arm of El Salvador's most feared death squad, it was disclosed Monday. "We take this seriously," said Carlos Vaquerano, one of the four. "It is psychological war. But if psychological war is to work, they have to act on their threats sometime."

About 10,000 Salvadoran workers, peasants, students and war refugees marched through the capital of El Salvador to commemorate the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero. The marchers walked under the blazing sun to Metropolitan Cathedral, where the archbishop used to preach sermons defending the poor and denouncing death squad killings.

Leftist civilian political leaders allied to armed rebels fighting the government in the countryside announced an alliance Sunday with a small Social Democratic Party, thereby gaining a legal political platform and a means to participate in elections in El Salvador. Guillermo Ungo and Ruben Zamora, leaders of the Revolutionary Democratic Front, said they do not expect to run candidates in National Assembly elections scheduled for next March but have not made a firm decision.

Just before dawn on Feb. 9, in the heat of a guerrilla war and an election campaign, arsonists set fire to the offices of El Salvador's only leftist opposition newspaper and crippled its presses. Standing amid the ruins of Diario Latino that day, Editor Francisco Valencia blamed the attack on "the armed forces, the government and their death squads, the same ones who massacre the people and murder priests."

The stakes in Ruben Zamora's political gamble are as high as they come: life or death. An exiled social democrat allied with El Salvador's armed guerrillas, Zamora has decided to return home to the country he fled eight years ago after his brother was killed by a right-wing death squad. Zamora, 45, says he will go back to El Salvador before the Nov. 7 date set in a regional peace plan for cease-fires, amnesty programs and democratic reforms in the Central American countries at war.