Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front El Salvador

JAIME HILL GIVES A SHORT, amused laugh as he recalls the first time he met Ana Guadalupe Martinez in 1979. He was a prisoner of the guerrillas, locked in a closet-sized cell while the rebels negotiated his release for a ransom that would top $3 million. Martinez, dressed in olive-drab fatigues, was a leader of the incipient guerrilla force that was trying to finance a revolution against the Salvadoran oligarchy--people like Hill.

El Salvador's chief leftist party had a strong lead Monday in legislative elections, with 50% of the vote compared with the conservative Arena party's 40%. But the leftists, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, lost their stronghold in the capital, getting 47% to Arena's 50%, with almost 70% of the votes counted. Mayor Violeta Menjivar, running for reelection, conceded defeat to physician Norman Quijano, but accused his party of sending extra voters into the capital.

Vice President Dan Quayle's trip here last month to demand that the government end human rights violations or face the loss of American aid has had almost no impact, with the number of killings actually increasing since his visit, according to diplomats and human rights groups. In the month before the vice president's February trip, the number of civilian deaths attributed to death squads and the military was eight. However, since Feb.

Salvadorans voted Sunday in elections that many believe will set the stage for the country's left wing to come to power for the first time -- a milestone in a nation still polarized after a civil war that ended nearly two decades ago. Most preelection surveys gave the overall advantage to leftist candidates in races to choose 84 legislators and 262 mayors. However, early returns indicated that the left would lose the major prize, the mayoralty it has held in San Salvador, the capital.

U.S. military autopsies show conclusively that two American soldiers were "murdered in cold blood . . . executed" by Salvadoran guerrillas after they had survived a crash-landing of their helicopter, U.S. Ambassador William G. Walker said Saturday.

A Salvadoran army call for a cease-fire in the country's nine-year civil war was answered Wednesday by Marxist guerrilla bombs, bullets and hard words. Within hours after the army had said it was suspending all offensive operations as of midnight Tuesday until June 1, units of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front struck at several military and civilian targets.

In an address last Friday to a hastily assembled group of priests and rabbis at St. Nicholas Episcopal Church in Encino, the best-known of the surviving Jesuits of El Salvador provided grim, previously unreported details about the murders that may have changed the course of the war in El Salvador.

A right-wing politician who was a former president of the Salvadoran Supreme Court was gunned down in his car at a busy intersection Tuesday. Francisco Jose Guerrero, 64, a leader of the conservative National Conciliation Party, was ambushed at mid-morning and shot in the chest, according to army and hospital officials. He died minutes later at a local hospital.

Tense and tired, with weapons in hand, 12 U.S. Army Green Berets raced from a luxury hotel tower Wednesday, 28 hours after leftist guerrillas trapped them inside. They said the rebels who had occupied the Sheraton Hotel escaped Tuesday evening while church and relief workers evacuated 17 civilians from other floors of the hotel's VIP tower. "They slipped out the back," one soldier said. "They slipped down the stairwell, went out back and jumped over the wall."

THE CONVOY of more than five-score trucks rumbles through the barbed-wire gates of the Colomoncagua refugee camp in Honduras. It is February, 1990, and this is about the 10th group to depart in the past month. Those remaining behind line the roadway for the joyful, albeit tense, leave-taking, waving and wishing good fortune to loved ones and neighbors; their time to follow will come soon. All face danger and uncertainty.

The young men ran across the street, their faces covered with bandannas. One fired an automatic weapon, imitating the guerrilla warfare of an earlier generation. The actions of the men, photographed at a demonstration here last month that left two police officers dead, have reverberated deeply in Salvadoran society, leading many to wonder whether the bad old days of civil war might return.

A leftist former guerrilla was declared the winner of the mayor's race in this capital city Thursday, following a disputed, razor-close finish that exposed the continuing divisions in El Salvador between right and left. Violeta Menjivar of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, won the race by a scant 44 votes, following a tense night of protest and street battles in San Salvador three days after Sunday's election.

Tens of thousands of mourners said farewell to former communist guerrilla chief Schafik Handal, in the country's biggest street gathering in more than 25 years. Handal was a senior leader of the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, the rebel group that fought a series of U.S.-backed right-wing regimes throughout the 1980s in a war that claimed an estimated 75,000 lives. He died of a heart attack Tuesday. He was 75.

The ex-guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front proved that they have transformed their battle skills into campaign skills as electoral results announced Monday showed the leftists with more seats in the Legislative Assembly and control of more provincial capitals than any other single party. Now, analysts say, they will have to demonstrate their political skills in a congress that also includes two right-wing parties that traditionally are allied with each other.

Facundo Guardado has long taken pride in being the leading advocate for molding the Marxist guerrillas-turned-politicians of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front into a party that can win elections.

Leftist former guerrillas on Wednesday expanded their allegations of fraud stemming from last Sunday's elections, focusing now on a clumsy and unusually slow vote count that they claim is being distorted. Ballots have been voided during the count, monitors' access to the tallies has been restricted and ballot boxes have apparently been stuffed, members of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) claimed as election authorities continued to delay release of official results.

Leftist rebels attacked a military academy in western San Salvador with grenade and mortar fire Friday, wounding two soldiers on the eve of a three-day election truce, the military said. The attack followed the shooting Thursday of a left-wing parliamentary candidate by alleged rightist activists, blinding her in one eye. More than 2 million Salvadorans are expected to vote Sunday to renew the 84-seat national assembly and choose mayors in 262 municipalities across the country.

After a week of meetings with the opposing sides, U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar expressed cautious optimism Friday that his efforts to mediate an end to the 11-year-old civil war in El Salvador will succeed soon. "We have made progress" in restarting the peace talks, stalemated for the past two months over the issue of how to integrate the guerrilla units of the rebel Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front into the civilian society, he told a press conference.

The Marxist guerrillas who fought U.S.-backed Salvadoran forces for more than a decade--and who were championed by many in the American left--killed civilians, shot prisoners and committed other war crimes, a U.N.-sponsored investigation found. The probe by the Commission on Truth blamed the overwhelming majority of violent acts in El Salvador's civil war on state security forces and allied death squads.

An international Commission on Truth, in a scathing report on the pattern of Salvadoran violence, identified prominent military and Establishment figures Sunday as perpetrators of assassination, massacres and other atrocities in the long civil war that has finally come to an end in El Salvador under a U.N.-mediated peace agreement. In some of the most prominent case studies, the U.N.