El Salvador Assassins Kill Cristiani’s Closest Adviser

SAN SALVADOR —  Assassins firing submachine guns from a moving car Friday killed the new government’s most senior Cabinet minister and two bodyguards as they drove from the minister’s home, officials said.

The armed forces and leaders of the governing right-wing Republican Nationalist Alliance blamed leftist guerrillas who have pledged to make the country ungovernable. Rebels did not immediately claim responsibility.

Jose Antonio Rodriguez Porth, 73, who was minister of the presidency and President Alfredo Cristiani’s closest adviser, died shortly after arriving at Zaldivar Hospital, a nurse said on condition of anonymity.

Police sources said the bodyguards, one of whom was driving the bulletproof car, died at the scene. Machinegun fire can penetrate so-called bulletproof cars.

U.S. Ambassador William Walker called it “a truly lamentable and senseless event.”

“I am obviously appalled by this act of mindless terror; shocked that anyone would attempt to project their political will by gunning down, in cold premeditated blood, a 73-year-old man,” he said.

The motive “fits the pattern of other recent terrorist attacks and killings,” Walker said.

Party President Armando Calderon Sol said the minister was ambushed just after leaving his home in a western neighborhood of San Salvador.

Witnesses, however, said four men traveling in a red vehicle fired in front of Rodriguez’s house before the car was started. They said they heard five or six shots.

Rodriguez was the first Cabinet member killed in the nine-year guerrilla war.

The attack was the first on an official of the party, known as Arena, since Cristiani took office June 1. It was the fourth attack on party officials this year.

Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front guerrillas recently offered to halt attacks if the new government eliminated death squads. The proposal was refused.

Arena was founded in 1981 by cashiered army Maj. Roberto d’Aubuisson, an Arena legislator who has been linked to the squads that killed thousands of suspected leftists in the early 1980s. He denies the accusations.

Col. Sigifrido Ochoa, another Arena leader, called for action against the slayers.

“We are confronting brazen terrorism, commanders and communists,” he said. “We either let ourselves be killed like cowardly rats, or we organize to defend the country.”

Calderon Sol told reporters: “A man who defended law and justice has fallen.”

Rodriguez, also a founding member of the party, was a vice minister in the 1940s, a member of the civilian-military junta in 1961 and foreign minister in 1978.

His assassination came on the third day of a new guerrilla campaign.

On Thursday, rebels bombed a gasoline station in the capital and attacked troops in central and eastern El Salvador.

The day before, they attacked nine military posts and the army said 21 rebels and three soldiers died.

Cristiani Initiative Rejected

The intensified fighting follows the guerrillas’ rejection of Cristiani’s proposal for dialogue. An estimated 70,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in the war.

Meanwhile, in Chile, a former air force officer who allegedly led a death squad that killed more than a dozen opponents of the military government was assassinated Friday outside his home.

The assassination came as President Augusto Pinochet proposed an amnesty for people accused of human rights violations after the September, 1973, coup that brought the strong-arm general to power.

Police officials said Roberto Fuentes Morrison died instantly after being hit several times by automatic gunfire from five assailants who fled the scene in a car.

Fuentes Morrison was accused in 1984 by an air force deserter of directing the “Joint Command,” a death squad that took part in widespread oppression against the left during 1975 and 1976.