San Salvador

An earthquake registering 5.4 on the Richter scale and aftershocks jolted San Salvador on Friday, knocking tall buildings off their foundations, shaking adobe and brick buildings apart, sending terrified residents swarming into the streets and knocking out power and communications. More than 240 deaths and hundreds of injuries were reported. The death toll was expected to rise.

Reporting from San Salvador and Mexico City -- Rene Emilio Ponce, the once-powerful army general blamed for one of the most egregious atrocities in El Salvador's civil war, the killing of six Roman Catholic priests, has died. He was 64. Ponce died Monday at the Military Hospital in San Salvador, the capital, after being admitted last week in critical condition with heart trouble, El Salvador's Defense Ministry said in a statement. Ponce served as defense minister and army chief of staff in the last half of the Cold War-era conflict that ended in 1992, becoming one of the U.S.-backed government's most important military strategists.

A strong earthquake today off the coast of El Salvador terrified residents of the capital and shook much of Central America, but no damage or casualties were reported. Thousands of people ran into the streets of San Salvador, where an earthquake two years ago killed 1,500 people and injured 20,000. Readings on the 8:47 a.m. quake varied. The U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colo., said it had a magnitude of 6 and was centered in the Pacific Ocean about 60 miles off El Salvador.

Robert "Roberto" Rotherham stepped onto the black-sand beach before 6 a.m., cradling his well-worn surfboard. Gone are the times when he would tackle El Salvador's majestic waves alone. There were at least 30 other people out before dawn on this warm weekday morning. It was late March and the swells were the season's biggest yet. "Blessed by the good Lord," Rotherham said. El Salvador's surf has long been an open secret among the wave-wise aficionados who journey here from California, Europe and the rest of Latin America.

With tensions escalating, Saturday is the final deadline for El Salvador's leftist guerrillas and the U.S.-backed army to meet terms of a U.N.-brokered agreement that seeks to end 12 years of civil war. Under the treaty, guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front are to lay down their weapons and demobilize by the deadline. Similarly, the army is to disband several elite battalions and reduce its 63,000-member force by half.

Salvadoran authorities placed half the population of the capital under a 24-hour curfew today and said 466 people had died in a three-day guerrilla offensive. As mortars and machine guns echoed through the city, a guerrilla commander in one rebel-controlled suburb called for a cease-fire to let civilians leave embattled neighborhoods. Col.

El Salvador's lengthy civil war appeared to have moved into a new stage Wednesday after at least four powerful bombs were set off in affluent neighborhoods of San Salvador, the capital, late Tuesday. Half a dozen people were injured in the blasts, and damage to nearby shops and restaurants was reported to be extensive. The explosions marked the addition of a new type of urban terrorism to the already brutal battles that have been fought largely in the countryside and smaller cities.

With ringing church bells and exploding fireworks, religion and rock 'n' roll, thousands of Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front guerrillas and their supporters celebrated the end of a 12-year civil war Thursday under a searing midday sun in downtown San Salvador. Rebel banners draped the Metropolitan Cathedral, where two rebel radio stations--Venceremos and Farabundo Marti--broadcast live to combatants in the mountains.

As fighting intensified around guerrilla strongholds in the Salvadoran capital Wednesday, a thunderous explosion shook the roomful of slum dwellers holed up in a Catholic mission called St. Mary of the Poor in Santa Marta. A rocket-propelled grenade, apparently aimed at a rebel bunker 50 yards away, crashed into the gray, concrete-block shelter, wounding two children and two adults among 150 people already driven from their shacks, witnesses said.

Four U.S. Marine embassy guards, an American businessman and nine other people were killed late Wednesday night when gunmen dressed as Salvadoran soldiers raked two crowded sidewalk cafes with automatic weapons fire in the Zona Rosa nightclub district of San Salvador, the U.S. Embassy said. Two Marines escaped injury in the 10-minute attack, the embassy spokesman said. Witnesses reported that three Marines were wounded but the embassy spokesman denied that report.

Simply belonging to a gang is about to become a criminal offense in El Salvador, a country where street gangs that incubated in Southern California terrorize neighborhoods and contribute to a high homicide rate. The measure was prompted by outrage over gang attacks on two buses in June that killed 16 people. Congress approved the law Thursday, and it now awaits the signature of President Mauricio Funes, which probably will come soon. Funes was an early sponsor of the bill. But several human rights activists and groups that work with gangs complained that the law emphasized punitive measures over tackling root causes.

When Mauricio Funes took office a year ago as El Salvador's first leftist president, he promised to "reinvent" the impoverished, polarized nation. "The Salvadoran people asked for change, and change starts now," he proclaimed in his inaugural speech. His election was greeted with high expectations and celebration by many Salvadorans who had long felt disenfranchised. A year later, Funes faces an avalanche of criticism, from opponents and supporters alike, over broken promises, corrupt management and a failure to halt rising violence that threatens to turn the nation into "a criminal state."

At least 16 people were killed when street gangs attacked two passenger buses, spraying one with bullets and dousing the other with gasoline before setting it on fire in a congested neighborhood in the Salvadoran capital, police said Monday. The attacks represented a dramatic surge in ongoing street violence attributed largely to gangs but exacerbated lately by a growing presence of drug traffickers, authorities say. Police say gangs have been demanding protection money from bus companies, and major criminal forces, including drug cartels, are believed to be recruiting gang members to do their dirty work.

In a sign of the remarkable changes afoot in El Salvador, the government Monday bestowed the nation's highest award on six Jesuit priests slain by the army exactly 20 years ago. Right-wing governments that ruled El Salvador since its civil war have traditionally relegated the case of the murdered Jesuits to a historic past they preferred to forget. But the election in March of a new president from a leftist political party made up of former guerrillas set the stage for Monday's recognition.

Reporting from Verapaz, El Salvador, and Mexico City -- The hill-ringed town of Verapaz is now a wasteland of fallen boulders, thigh-deep mud and broken little houses. Rescue workers and desperate residents dug amid the debris Monday for signs of those people still missing a day after severe flooding and landslides left at least 136 dead across El Salvador. Verapaz, a bean- and coffee-growing town of 6,000, was one of the worst-hit spots. Earth and boulders poured down the side of Chichontepec volcano in a thunderous wave, burying some homes and inhabitants.

Torrential rains in El Salvador triggered flooding and mudslides that left at least 91 people dead across the Central American nation, officials said today. At least 60 people were reported missing, and authorities warned that the toll could rise as rescuers reached hard-hit zones that remained cut off by floodwaters and landslides. About 7,000 people were evacuated and scores were plucked from flood zones by helicopter, Interior Minister Humberto Centeno said. The impoverished nation of 5 million was pelted by three days of rain attributed to "a disturbed weather area" off the Pacific coast of El Salvador, according to the Miami-based National Hurricane Center.

Ask Hector Silva, the Boston-born gynecologist who is the mayor of San Salvador, about politics in his country, and he is likely, as he did with a Los Angeles audience Saturday, to describe the current situation with a slogan from an American cigarette ad: "You've come a long way, baby." Silva, whose gray-speckled beard evokes a slight resemblance to Fidel Castro, claims to embody a new kind of leader in a country that was once a focal point of the U.S.-Soviet superpower standoff.

Ending two decades of politically activist leadership of the Roman Catholic Church in El Salvador, Pope John Paul II has named the Rev. Fernando Saenz Lacalle to be archbishop of the capital city of San Salvador. Saenz Lacalle, 62, will be installed Sunday, succeeding Bishop Arturo Rivera y Damas, who died Nov. 26 of a heart attack.

A French filmmaker who recently made a documentary on El Salvador's street gangs has been fatally shot. Police said they found the body of Christian Poveda in a car in Tonacatepeque, a rural region north of the capital, San Salvador. He had been shot in the head. Salvadoran Public Safety Minister Manuel Melgar deplored the "repugnant and reproachable criminal act" and said police would work "tirelessly" to find Poveda's killers. Poveda, who was in his 50s, lived in El Salvador and recently made the documentary "La Vida Loca," which follows the lives of members of the street gang Mara 18.

Father Antonio Rodriguez keeps the image on his cellphone. A 12-year-old boy. Headless. His killers probably boys not a whole lot older than him. When Josue went missing, his frantic grandmother sought the priest's help. Rodriguez went looking for him and found the body. The crime chilled and disgusted him. Somehow, he needed to document the loss of another young life in a dizzying spin of daily, casual death.