Joaquin Villalobos

Joaquin Villalobos, an elusive guerrilla leader with a boyish grin, has sent a defiant message to anyone inside El Salvador or outside the country who thinks his rebel movement is dead, not to mention that he might be. "We're going to win this war," said the man considered to be the top front-line commander of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front. "Within a year, we expect to have taken the war to the totality of the national territory."

A decade ago, the search for Joaquin Villalobos required a bone-grinding jeep trip past hostile army checkpoints, across a mined riverbed and into the rough mountains of El Salvador. Even that might come to naught if one of Latin America's ablest and most ruthless guerrilla leaders refused to show his face to outsiders, as he often did for years at a time.

Salvadoran rebels offered a negotiating plan for upcoming peace talks that calls for a cease-fire in the civil war and a reorganization of the government to include the guerrillas. The proposals were made by Joaquin Villalobos, a leader of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, in a broadcast on the rebels' clandestine Radio Venceremos.

Salvadoran rebels today proposed a cease-fire in their country's decade-old civil war, prosecution of human rights violators and reduction of the armed forces. Rebel leaders made public their proposals at a news conference moments before renewing talks in Mexico City with representatives of President Alfredo Cristiani's rightist administration. But both sides said they have scant hope of negotiating an early end to the war, which has cost more than 70,000 lives.

Leftist rebel leaders said Friday that they had indefinitely suspended the demobilization of their guerrilla forces as El Salvador's peace process floundered. The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, said it would not meet Friday's deadline to demobilize the second 20% of its 8,000 rebels, and it accused the government of violating the peace accords that ended 12 years of civil war in January. Four days of intense U.N.

Leftist rebels Thursday offered an 18-point peace plan to end El Salvador's eight-year-old guerrilla war and called for a new round of negotiations with the U.S.-backed government of President Jose Napoleon Duarte. The plan, read by rebel leader Joaquin Villalobos over the insurgents' clandestine radio, reiterated previous rebel positions, including a demand for power-sharing with the government.

Everything seemed to be in place Sunday for San Gabriel Valley in its bid to win its seventh Babe Ruth World Series title at the 16-year-old championship in Carmel, Ind. San Gabriel Valley had fine-tuned its offense Friday in scoring a tournament-high 16 runs in a thrashing of Indianola, Iowa, that earned it the right to play Marietta, Ga., in the title game.