Maria Julia Hernandez

Maria Julia Hernandez, a celebrated human rights activist who spoke up for victims during El Salvador's protracted civil war and tended to their families in the years that followed, died Friday of a heart attack. She was 68.

Maria Julia Hernandez, a celebrated human rights activist who spoke up for victims during El Salvador's protracted civil war and tended to their families in the years that followed, died Friday of a heart attack. She was 68.

ZWELAKHE SISULU, South Africa. Sisulu is the editor of New Nation, a black-run, anti-apartheid weekly newspaper. He was arrested in 1986 and jailed for two years without trial or charge. His father, Walter Sisulu, is the former secretary general of the African National Congress and his mother, Albertina Sisulu, is co-president of the United Democratic Front, an anti-apartheid coalition. "If apartheid is dead, please give us the corpse, because we want to bury it once and for all."

ZWELAKHE SISULU, South Africa. Sisulu is the editor of New Nation, a black-run, anti-apartheid weekly newspaper. He was arrested in 1986 and jailed for two years without trial or charge. His father, Walter Sisulu, is the former secretary general of the African National Congress and his mother, Albertina Sisulu, is co-president of the United Democratic Front, an anti-apartheid coalition. "If apartheid is dead, please give us the corpse, because we want to bury it once and for all."

Forensic experts have unearthed the skeletons of children and babies in this remote hamlet, bolstering charges that soldiers killed hundreds of civilians in the largest massacre in El Salvador's civil war. Twenty-two battered skulls and skeletons were exhumed Monday from the ruins of a church where U.S.-trained soldiers of the elite Atlacatl Battalion allegedly began a three-day slaughter of more than 800 people in December, 1981. "They are all children and several were babies.

The National Guardsmen who raped and killed four American church workers will not be pardoned under a government amnesty program, El Salvador's Supreme Court ruled in a decision made public Tuesday. The ruling rejects a request from two of the five convicted killers that they be freed as part of a blanket amnesty sponsored by President Alfredo Cristiani and approved last March by the Legislative Assembly, which is controlled by Cristiani's right-wing political party.

In a case that revisited U.S. involvement in Central America's bloody civil wars, a federal jury on Friday found that two retired Salvadoran generals could not be held responsible for the 1980 rape and murder of four American churchwomen. The verdict by a 10-member jury in West Palm Beach drew gasps of disbelief from the slain women's relatives, who have tried for years to hold the two men liable for the killings carried out by Salvadoran national guardsmen under their command.

Archbishop Arturo Rivera Damas, who led El Salvador's besieged Roman Catholic Church through civil war as its priests were assassinated and its parishioners persecuted, died Saturday of a heart attack, aides said. He was 71. Often a lone voice of the nation's conscience, Rivera spent much of the last decade promoting dialogue between leftist guerrillas and U.S.-backed military and government forces, whose war claimed tens of thousands of lives.

The attorney general of El Salvador was assassinated Wednesday in what government and U.S. officials said was part of a leftist strategy to provoke a bloody government reaction that would endanger American support and prove the country ungovernable. Roberto Garcia Alvarado, 53, was killed when an unknown assailant placed a bomb on top of his car as it was stopped at a traffic light in the Don Rua section of San Salvador at about 7:45 a.m. Military and U.S. officials said the attorney general was on his way to work, riding in the back seat of a Jeep Cherokee equipped with bulletproof windows and armored sides.

Twenty-five years after Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero was cut down by an assassin's bullet, Vatican officials plan to announce that they will open the beatification process for the prelate, a move that would put him closer to sainthood. Church officials in Rome and El Salvador confirmed that the announcement would be made at a news conference Saturday in the San Salvador cathedral crypt containing Romero's remains. Beatification is a step before sainthood.

The air war in El Salvador, an object of mixed military reviews and heavy criticism from human rights groups, is growing in intensity as the armed forces here acquire more and more weaponry. The bombs dropped by the country's small fleet of jet fighters are heavier than those dropped last year. More rockets are being fired from increasing numbers of helicopters that also are armed with rapid-fire machine guns. Slow-flying propeller driven planes pepper the countryside with thousands of bullets.

Increasing numbers of peasants, many of them children, are losing limbs, eyes, and sometimes their lives in explosions of land mines that are buried throughout the countryside. Although the Salvadoran army employs mines supplied by the United States, a majority of the civilian casualties appear to be caused by homemade mines that are planted by guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, according to dozens of victims and other peasants interviewed.