El Salvador a Chaotic Scene of Savagery

By Susan Tifft.

The Zona Rosa section of San Salvador is a popular night spot for foreigners and wealthy Salvadorans. On most evenings the three-block-long strip of discos and sidewalk cafes, with their red-enameled tables and brightly striped umbrellas, offers a festive distraction from the civil war that has racked El Salvador for the past five years. But for one night last week this cheerful stretch became an avenue of death. At about 8:45 p.m., between six and ten gunmen, dressed in jeans, military camouflage shirts and green caps, opened fire on four crowded cafes. In several minutes of shooting, they killed 13 people, including four off-duty Marines (all guards at the U.S embassy), two visiting U.S. businessmen and seven Latin Americans.

The scene, said an eyewitness, was "a horrible bloody mess." Blood mingled with spilled beer and ice on the concrete, and once white napkins lay rumpled, soaked in red. Some of those who had been spared took lighted candles from the tables and placed them at the heads of the dead in a Salvadoran gesture of respect. "I didn't imagine that (the civil war) would reach this savagery," said Salvadoran Supreme Court President Francisco Jose Guerrero as he surveyed the chaotic scene.

At week's end the Mardoqueo Cruz urban-guerrilla commandos took responsibility for the shooting. The little-known group is a wing of the Central American Revolutionary Workers' Party. The party in turn is the smallest of five rebel factions in the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (F.M.L.N.), the 10,000-member guerrilla group that is fighting the U.S.-backed government of Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon Duarte. In a message delivered to a French news agency, the Mardoqueo Cruz claimed the raid was part of an operation that it called "Yankee Aggressor in El Salvador: Another Viet Nam Awaits You." The message hinted at further strikes against U.S. military personnel, CIA agents and their allies. The rebels said they had aimed their "revolutionary rifles" in the Zona Rosa only at U.S. military personnel and their companions. They claimed that the other casualties in the restaurants were the result of patrons' returning the gunfire. The night before the Mardoqueo Cruz stepped forward, the F.M.L.N.'s clandestine radio station broadcast the claim that U.S. military involvement in El Salvador had caused the killings. "The first Marines are starting to fall," it said. "The first results of the Yankee invasion of our country are beginning to be paid by deaths." In recent months the Mardoqueo Cruz has claimed responsibility for the Feb. 6 takeover of six San Salvador radio stations; for ambushing national police troops on Feb. 20, killing two and wounding ten; and for the March 27 attack on national police headquarters in San Salvador, in which a woman was slain.

In Washington, President Reagan denounced the killings as "senseless terrorism." He ordered the accelerated delivery of military equipment to El Salvador and said he stood ready to invoke emergency powers to provide additional aid. The U.S. has some 55 military advisers in El Salvador, the maximum number permitted by Congress, and for fiscal 1985 has appropriated ; $441.35 million in military and economic assistance. The nightmare in the Zona Rosa began when a white pickup truck pulled up in front of four restaurants: Las Pizzas, the Chilis, the Mediterannee and the Flashback. Four men jumped out and began spraying gunfire from G-3 and M-16 automatic rifles. Moments later, a second, dark-colored vehicle delivered more gunmen, who began blanketing a 60-foot-long section of sidewalk with bullets. Screaming people threw themselves on the ground or ran inside the restaurants. One Marine was chased into Las Pizzas and killed. The melee ended when, without a word, the

terrorists scrambled into their vehicles and sped away. Within minutes, U.S. embassy personnel, led by Colonel James Steele, head of the U.S. military group in El Salvador, were on the scene. They rushed the three dying Marines to Policlinica Salvadorena hospital. The death toll also included two American businessmen employed by Wang Laboratories, a Lowell, Mass., computer concern, a Guatemalan, a Chilean and five Salvadorans.

Salvadoran and American officials believe that the attack signals a return by guerrillas to a campaign of urban terrorism, a plan that was indicated in numerous guerrilla documents captured by the Salvadoran army this year and in broadcasts by the rebels' Radio Venceremos. Urban terrorism by left-wing groups was common in the capital in the late 1970s, but tapered off in late 1980, when the rebels took their struggle to the countryside. Indeed, over the past four or five months there have been indications of increasing numbers of rebels slipping into the cities.

The cafe killings were the first to involve official U.S. personnel since May 1983, when Lieut. Commander Albert Schaufelberger 3rd, deputy head of the U.S. military group, was shot to death in his car while waiting for his girlfriend on the grounds of Central American University. Despite the fresh bloodshed, Salvadoran and U.S. officials are guardedly optimistic about defeating the insurgents. The Salvadoran troops are better led than they were two years ago, and the 40-odd helicopters and two AC-47 gunships provided by the U.S. have helped break up guerrilla concentrations in the countryside.

After a spartan ceremony at Ilopango military airport outside San Salvador, the bodies of the four Marines were flown to Panama. On Saturday, they were flown to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, where they were met by President Reagan. Duarte, who spoke briefly at the San Salvador service, called the terrorist attack "a gesture of barbarism and savagery." Later, with reporters, he made it clear that the new bloodshed had not dampened his resolve to seek conciliation with the rebels. "This will not stop our search for a formula to solve the need for dialogue," he said. "Even in the middle of this horror, I am ready to talk peace."

With reporting by Mary Jo McConahay/San Salvador