Hair Dye and a Shave

Nearly four years ago, two gunmen walked into the dining room of the Sheraton Hotel in San Salvador and killed two American labor advisers as well as a key figure in El Salvador's land-reform program. No one has yet been convicted of the murders, but the two alleged gunmen are in custody awaiting trial. Last week, however, the Salvadoran Supreme Court dimmed hopes that at least one other man implicated in the crime will be tried. It threw out the case against Lieut. Rodolfo Isidro Lopez Sibrian, a Salvadoran army officer who was seen at the hotel that evening and allegedly ordered the two guardsmen to carry out the killings. The court's ruling was based in part on a witness's failure to identify Lopez Sibrian in a police lineup after Lopez Sibrian had been allowed to dye his red hair black and shave his mustache.

The U.S. State Department reacted angrily. The U.S., it said, "can find no reasonable basis" for the court's decision. "We do not consider the matter closed." Meanwhile, the violence goes on: the mutilated body of the Rev. Ernesto Fernandez Espino, 37, a leader of El Salvador's Lutheran Church, was found last week in a village near San Miguel.