Sudden Death over Dinner
Two more Americans are gunned down, and another is missing
It was a particularly festive night in the 288-room Sheraton Hotel in the hills behind San Salvador. The hotel's new roller disco was crammed with teenagers, many of them students from U.S. schools home for the holidays. In the Izalco Supper Club, older couples danced to an eleven-piece orchestra. Across the hallway, in the Salon Centre America dining room, three men chatted earnestly over coffee. Without warning, two well-dressed men stepped into the nearly deserted restaurant, pulled out automatic pistols and sprayed the three diners with 9-mm and .45-cal. gunfire, hitting them in the chests and heads. Moments later, they tucked their pistols into the waistbands of their trousers and calmly strode through the crowded hotel lobby and out into the warm night air.
Once again the gruesome internecine warfare that claimed 10,000 deaths last year had taken a toll in American lives. Killed in the massacre were Jose Rodolfo Viera, president of El Salvador's Institute for Agrarian Transformation, and two U.S. labor lawyers, Michael P. Hammer and Mark David Pearlman. Hammer, 42, an agrarian expert who had arrived in the capital the day he was killed, and Pearlman, 26, a former Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines, were both employees of the American Institute for Free Labor Development, an international arm of the AFL-CIO. The organization has been under contract to El Salvador to provide technical assistance for the country's major land-reform effort.
Last week it appeared that the violence may have claimed yet another American: John J. Sullivan Jr., 26, a freelance journalist from Bogota, N.J., on assignment for Hustler magazine. Sullivan, who had previously spent a year in Rio de Janeiro, checked into the Sheraton six days before the slayings in the dining room. He left his room the next day, leaving behind his camera, tape recorder, typewriter, a Spanish dictionary and a well-worn handbook on South America. The tall, bearded newsman never returned to his room and has not been heard from.
The latest incidents came only a month after slayings of five other Americans who had been working in El Salvador. In early December, suspected right-wing terrorists shot three nuns and a Catholic lay worker alongside a dirt road. 30 miles east of the capital. A fortnight later an American ex-policeman working as an investigator was gunned down.
Jose Napoleon Duarte, President of the U.S.-backed civilian-military junta, promised an "extensive investigation" into the murders of Hammer, Pearlman and Viera, but was vague about what interests in the strife-torn country might have been responsible. At first, he said the killings were "an action of the extreme right," but then he added, "Of course, it could be the left." Officials believed that Viera, 39, had been the killers' main target, that the two Americans might have been shot solely because they happened to be with him.
El Salvador's land-reform program, actively backed by the U.S., has already created cooperative farms for 386,000 peasants. It has been bitterly opposed by both political extremes: the right, because it has taken land away from the almost feudal oligarchy of the country's 14 wealthiest families, and the left, because it attempts to take much of the steam out of their Marxist promises and deprives them of a rural power base.
El Salvador's 5,000-strong leftist guerrillas vowed last month to launch a "final military offensive," in an attempt to defeat the junta before U.S. President-elect Reagan takes office and can deliver on a campaign promise to increase military aid to El Salvador's security forces. The government is mustering a concerted series of counterattacks in an effort to thwart the insurgents. A guerrilla stronghold on a volcanic slope 25 miles from the capital has become a battleground for some of the heaviest fighting in months. Army forces last week repeatedly sprayed the area with grenades from hovering helicopters. In one engagement alone, 22 guerrillas, including four women, were reported killed. At week's end, the guerrillas seized a radio station, announced the start of a general offensive, and called for popular uprisings against the regime.
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