Salvador Bomb Kills Atty. Gen. : Officials Blame Leftists, See Plot to Stem U.S. Aid

SAN SALVADOR —  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. A driver and a bodyguard sat in front while an escort car followed.

However, a man who had been in the back of a pickup truck walked calmly up to the Cherokee, placed a bomb on top--evidently attached by a magnet--and walked away. Garcia Alvarado’s driver tried to accelerate, thinking the movement would dislodge the explosive, but it blew up. The blast peeled away the top of the car and killed the official immediately. The driver and bodyguard were slightly wounded, police said.

No one took immediate responsibility for Garcia Alvarado’s slaying. But American officials, Salvadoran military officers and President-elect Alfredo Cristiani blamed the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), a Marxist guerrilla group, for the assassination.

Although the guerrillas neither acknowledged nor denied the assassination, the front named him in a radio broadcast on March 17 as “covering up for murderers.”

Garcia Alvarado was named attorney general by the National Assembly last December after the legislative body had removed his predecessor, Roberto Giron Flores, for allegedly being too soft on the FMLN and its sympathizers.

Although not a member of the ultra right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance, or Arena, party, which is headed by Cristiani and controls the Assembly, Garcia Alvarado was a close associate of the incoming president and was known for his hard-line views for fighting El Salvador’s nine-year civil war.

He was the highest ranking civilian official killed in the strife since 1980, when then-Atty. Gen. Mario Zamora was slain by right-wing death squads.

His death was the third killing of a right-wing figure in three months. Also, last Friday, a powerful bomb exploded at the house of Vice President-elect Francisco Merino, but he was not there at the time. All of the attacks have been blamed on the FMLN, although the guerrillas denied the Merino bombing.

Pair of Killings

Last Feb. 18, the FMLN acknowledged killing Miguel Castellano, a former guerrilla leader who had defected to the government. The rebels also took responsibility for murdering Francisco Peccorini, a dual American-Salvadoran citizen who once taught at Cal State Long Beach. Peccorini was targeted by the rebels for leading a drive to oust leftists from the National University, a stronghold of guerrilla supporters.

In addition, the guerrillas have murdered at least eight mayors in the past year and has used death threats to force the resignation of more than 100 other local officials. The rationale has been that mayors are legitimate military targets because they collaborate with the government’s anti-insurgency effort.

In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said that since no one had taken responsibility for the Garcia Alvarado slaying, she could not specifically accuse the FMLN. But in San Salvador, U.S. Ambassador William Walker did not hesitate to name the guerrillas.

“To me,” he told American reporters, “it quite obviously is an attempt by the guerrillas, the FMLN, to provoke a violent reaction, a nasty reaction, by . . . the newly elected government or the armed forces to their acts of barbarism.”

Walker called Wednesday’s killing, the deaths of Castellano and Peccorini and the Merino bombing “pure urban terrorism.”

The FMLN, he said, “definitely is trying to drag this place back to the violence of the early 1980s,” when military- and government-supported death squads were killing people at the rate of 800 a month.

Cristiani Blames Rebels

Cristiani learned of the attack while having breakfast with foreign reporters. He quickly asserted that “it was the work of the FMLN. It shows the problems of trying to impose justice in this country.” He added that “the attorney general had been very hard and very clear on how he was going to make sure the law was respected.”

Cristiani, who takes over the presidency June 1 from the centrist Christian Democrat President Jose Napoleon Duarte, agreed with Walker; the rebels want to provoke a violent reaction, he said, “to make the nation ungovernable by the time I take office.”

This theory holds that a bloody government retaliation would reawaken international concerns--particularly in the United States--that El Salvador’s government is a collection of murderous thugs that should lose American economic and military aid, which now averages nearly $1.5 million a day.

The strategy, Walker, Cristiani and others assert, is also aimed at marshaling international opinion to force the government to negotiate with the FMLN on sharing power in order to end the bloodshed.

Garcia Alvarado himself targeted the rebels and their supporters for more aggressive government action, saying when he took office that the army and the government were being pressured, presumably by the United States, into paying too much attention to the human rights of the leftists.

Although the U.S. Embassy, Cristiani and other Arena party leaders play down the possibility, there are signs that the retaliation has already begun. In the last few weeks, two leaders of anti-government groups accused by rightists of being front groups for the guerrillas have been kidnaped, tortured and murdered.

Earlier this week, Vice President-elect Merino publicly named several civilians, including a Spanish priest, as responsible for the bombing of his house, although he produced no evidence. In the past, such an action has been tantamount to publishing a death list.

And late last week, the army press office issued a similar list, naming the human rights office of the Roman Catholic Church as a guerrilla front and running a picture of human rights advocate Maria Julia Hernandez on national television.