Death as a Way of Life

October 15, 1979. The general expected the call, but when it came, he wasn't ready.

For two years, he had been the president of El Salvador, the last in a 50-year line of carefully selected dictators. He had been picked by the general who preceded him because he was tough, and he had set out to show that his reputation was justified. His government would suffer no dissent from Communists who wanted to restructure the society of his little country. They would be taken care of as they were always taken care of. They could leave the country, or they could disappear, or they could die.

But now everything seemed to be going wrong. Everywhere the general turned, more Communists were springing up. They seized factories, government buildings, churches, embassies. In the countryside, they somehow managed to train 30,000 peasants, workers and students. They brought them into the city and marched them through the streets and nothing seemed to stop them. What was the point of having 80,000 paramilitary men in Orden if they let that kind of thing happen?

Three months earlier, Nicaragua had fallen to the Communists and everything pointed to El Salvador as their next target. Mother of Jesus, if Somoza could fall, anything could happen. Thousands of Somoza's national guardsmen had been rounded up and thrown into jail. Some had escaped to El Salvador to tell stories of defeat and chaos, and the general's soldiers had listened to them. Horrified.

Now his troops were growing restless and disillusioned. He could see it. There were Communists in their ranks and constant reports that they were plotting a coup. The troops were saying they had never had a voice in picking him for the job, but why should they? Nonetheless, they resented him. He paid them, applauded them, and they hated him still.

In August, the general had called several of the most obvious conspirators to the Casa Presidencial. Of course, they denied everything. Where could he turn? Washington was no help. The Yankees were always throwing their weight around, but they were never there when you needed them. Now they were full of this human-rights talk. Human rights was nothing but Communist propaganda, but Mr. Carter up in the White House played right along. The general would have no part of it. He refused to take a single Yankee gun for his troops rather than listen to such nonsense.

Besides, today there was a more immediate problem. All morning long, the general's aides had been calling the cuartels and no one was answering. Now there was a phone call for the general from one of those colonels--Jaime Abdul Gutiérrez--who had denied everything in August.

This was too soon. It was the wrong time of day. Coups always came at midnight on a weekend in El Salvador, and this was a Monday morning. Outside the breeze-blown palace, beyond the scar-faced guardsmen with their machetes and machine guns under the trees, traffic was moving normally. The city seemed peaceful, more peaceful than usual.

"Señor Presidente," said the voice, "the armed forces of El Salvador have decided to remove you from the presidency of the republic. We have declared ourselves in rebellion."

•

Within five hours, General Carlos Humberto Romero was on an airplane bound for Guatemala. His key ministers and his high command were with him.

Two young colonels, Gutiérrez and Adolfo Arnoldo Majano, were now in command--vowing economic reforms, respect for human rights and the beginning of a new democracy.

On the other side of the city, behind the reinforced concrete and the bulletproof glass of the American Embassy, there was palpable relief. "We weren't promoting a coup," an American policy-maker said coyly. "We were just promoting things that the general's government wasn't doing."

U. S. officials knew what the young officers were up to weeks before they finally made their move. And October 15 was not a moment too soon as far as the State Department was concerned. A bloodless coup averts a bloody insurrection. For once, reform had a chance to beat out revolution. The left would be co-opted, its banners removed. El Salvador would not be another Nicaragua.

Maybe the Salvadorans didn't understand all the ramifications and maybe their culture, their history and society gave them no preparation for such a move. But now they would learn to do things with American guidance. The basic principles were easy enough to understand.

•

Washington, winter 1979. A cold drizzle was freezing on 36th Street in Georgetown, but the air inside F. Scott's bar was thick with warm congeniality. Jean-Pierre told three stories that night. One was about the murdered husband, one about the Nazi funeral and one about artillery on the mansion's lawn. Jean-Pierre's English was not good and his memory may have been tinged by the champagne. And probably they were not stories he told often, because so few people had heard of El Salvador and so few cared.

This was before the troubles there became the war and before the White House drew a thick red line around the country warning world communism to keep out. It was before Ronald Reagan was President, before advisors and helicopters and secret slaughter on a massive scale. America was watching Iran for the hostages to be released, for the United States to bomb Tehran in vengeance, for something to restore the nation's crippled pride. Ted Kennedy was on the campaign trail. Carter was in the Rose Garden. Reagan was waiting to make his move. There had been a brief flurry of interest in the Nicaraguan war, but now that it was over, Central America had slipped back to the clichéed recesses of America's mind. Picturesque peasants, comic-opera dictators, bearded revolutionaries. Bananas.

The occasion was a goodbye dinner for one of Jean-Pierre's friends at a back table amid F. Scott's art-deco flash. The friend was a reporter, a novice correspondent about to leave for Central America on his first foreign assignment, and Jean-Pierre had lived in El Salvador with his first wife in the early Sixties. As the champagne flowed, he started talking about his ex-wife and Los Catorce, the Fourteen Families. His wife was one of them and he had traveled among them, a Frenchman among Francophiles. Rich Latins seem always to be Francophiles or Anglophiles or Italophiles; they want so desperately to be European, something other than what they are. Even the idea of Fourteen Families, a journalist's fancy in the Fifties, became a cult among the Salvadorans. Really, there were perhaps 100 families that controlled the wealth of the country, but every one of them tried to prove it was one of the Fourteen.

They told Jean-Pierre all sorts of stories, but there were these three incidents he could not forget.

A young woman of the Fourteen married an American. They lived part of the year on the family's finca--a sprawling estate, a hacienda, a world of its own, where the couple were absolute rulers. The American developed a taste for peasant women. Often he returned to his own bed only late at night.

His wife was proud and beautiful, like so many daughters of the Salvadoran rich. She knew too well what the gringo was doing, and one night, as he returned to her side, she ordered him to make love. He apologized: He was tired. She ordered. He demurred and she pulled a revolver from the drawer next to the bed and put it to his side and again demanded love. There was none. Of course, there couldn't be. And she shot him through the liver. It took him three months to die. Then his body was shipped back to the States with no questions asked. None would ever be.

Jean-Pierre smiled and shook his head. "They are that way," he said. "They could always do whatever they wanted. It is like another universe."

It is a universe that accepts brutality and loves the trappings of power. During World War Two, its leaders were quietly sympathetic to the Nazis, breaking relations with Germany only under heavy pressure from the United States. Afterward, a certain kind of German found El Salvador--like the feudal Paraguay and Guatemala--a comfortable place to settle.

The final solution held little horror for the Salvadoran powers that were. Although some of the supposed Fourteen were Jews, they understood the need to rid the country of its dangerous socialist refuse. In 1932, some Communists led by Farabundo Marti ignited a peasant revolt. The military government slaughtered at least 17,000 peasants--maybe 30,000; there was no one really interested in counting. To the Fourteen, it was a satisfactory final solution.

Jean-Pierre knew all that. Still, he was surprised when he saw the honor guard in full Nazi regalia escorting a funeral cortege in San Salvador more than 15 years after the fall of Berlin.

Yet he had grown comfortable in Salvadoran society. It was full of comfortable people--articulate, well educated, self-confident and competent in the management of their often vast holdings. Even the decadence had a certain appeal. It is fascinating to be rich in a country where the rich are supremely different from everyone else.

But the dinner party changed all that for Jean-Pierre. It made the comfort and the difference seem despicable. The house was one of the most spectacular in San Salvador. Looking back on it, Jean-Pierre smiled. It seemed incredible. The table was set with the finest silver and crystal, of course, but what stuck in the mind was the floor, made of glass, above an aquarium full of exotic fish.

The families gathered there that night would have gone on dining in their accustomed opulence and obliviousness if the troops had not arrived. The soldiers asked at the door and the owner permitted them to come around the side of the house to set up their light guns on the lawn beneath the terrace overlooking the city.

There was trouble below, a student demonstration to be crushed. Champagne was brought out to the terrace, along with such binoculars as could be found, and the ladies in their evening dresses and the men with their cigars flinched a little and called out "Good shot" when the guns went off.

An artillery captain, informed that Jean-Pierre had been in the French artillery, gallantly offered to let him fire a few rounds.

"I shouted at him," said Jean-Pierre, "I couldn't believe it. I went inside. I couldn't watch anymore."

A few months later, he went home to France.

Almost 20 years afterward, as the fledgling correspondent heard the stories, they seemed wicked fairy tales. Over the next year in El Salvador, he looked for the house with the glass floor. Behind the high walls and menacing guards of the rich, he never found it. But killing, guns and that same savage disregard for life were everywhere.

•

The old Communist was 50, but his face was heavily lined. Salvador Cayetano Carpio had once been a seminary student, then the leader of the breadmakers' union in San Salvador. He gradually rose to be secretary general of the Communist Party. He was arrested and tortured many times. For a while, he lived in Mexico. There were also trips to Havana.

He talked of "guerra popular prolongada," a long war leading like Fidel's from the mountains to the cities. He called himself Marcial. Years later, left-wing Latin journalists would call him the Ho Chi Minh of the Americas.

But 1970 was a bad year for Marcial, (continued on page 172)A way of life(continued from page 110) and 1971 was worse. In those first two years of the decade, El Salvador was moving toward democratic government. Guerrillas seemed superfluous.

The Christian Democratic Party was steadily building a popular base as a fresh alternative to the military regimes of the past. The Christian Democratic leader, José Napoleón Duarte, had been elected to three successive terms as mayor of San Salvador. In 1972, Duarte was running for president and his party had allied itself with every liberal and leftist opposition group in the country. There seemed no way the coalition could lose. All but the oligarchs and the army were behind Duarte, and even they were letting him run. He had to win.

After he did, the army moved in. The elections were voided. There were guns in the streets. The university was shut down and Duarte was jailed, beaten, threatened with execution, forced into exile. Suddenly, in the eyes of so many defeated liberals, students, priests and peasants, Marcial's way appeared, as he had always said, the only way. With new confidence, Marcial gave his group a name: the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Forces. Like all political groups in El Salvador, it came to be known by its initials: the F.M.L.N.

Within a few months, another group was formed as well. Its members were looking for a strategy that was not so prolonged, that would fight not just for the hills but, right away, for the cities. Those guerrillas were younger and brasher and their Popular Revolutionary Army--the E.R.P.--went in for direct fund-raising activities. One after another, leading oligarchs and foreign businessmen were snatched from the streets and ransomed for millions of gun-buying dollers.

The soul of the E.R.P. was a student poet named Roque Dalton. He shared leadership with Ernesto Jovel, his closest friend, and with Ferman Cienfuegos and Joaquin Villalobos.

At first, all were caught up in the excitement of their revolutionary commitment to social justice and democracy. But as one, two, three years passed, Dalton began to have doubts about their tactics. He saw his group becoming a collection of freebooting renegades--saw that for all its rigorous militarism, it had garnered no great popular following. For hours on end, he would debate with Villalobos and others, who began to suspect that Dalton's ideals--and, worse, his ideology--were tainted.

The end came suddenly for Dalton. In 1975, he was given a "people's trial" and summarily executed.

Jovel and Cienfuegos were furious. They broke away and formed their own guerrilla group, the F.A.R.N. Following Dalton's thinking, they believed that organization must be the key to insurrection. The masses must be mobilized.

The F.A.R.N. spawned F.A.P.U. The F.P.L. created the Bloque. The E.R.P. finally created the LP-28. The strength of the left instantly started to grow as unions and peasant groups were pulled together into those new "popular organizations."

By the late Seventies, although guerrillas continued their kidnapings and small-scale assaults on the military, the popular organizations were the new vanguard. New leaders emerged. They were bitter, charismatic young men like Juan Chacón of the Bloque, whose peasant parents were slaughtered by the security forces. Chacón led fights for basic issues such as the price of food. People flocked to him.

From their poster-covered offices in obscure corners of the university--in back of the law school stage, in a little room behind the student-union offices--these lords of the streets could virtually paralyze the country at will. And when they were arrested or tortured, their friends would seize an embassy or call a strike and set them free once again.

Yet they were taken by surprise the day General Romero was ousted. The young colonels who were now in command announced that they were bringing all the popular organizations' intellectual allies, even the avowed Communists and socialists, into the government.

Should a truce be called? Chacón briefly thought so. But to call a truce was to abandon the fight for ultimate power when it seemed almost ready for the taking.

Then, too, the security forces seemed uninterested in the colonels' promises. They denied having any political prisoners. They said they just couldn't seem to find any. And while the generals and scores of other officers were dismissed, many whom the left believed were guilty of countless crimes remained in powerful positions. The killing was increasing, not subsiding.

There was no truce.

•

The reporter packed up his desk in the vast Washington newsroom, sorted files, made an occasional phone call, getting ready to head south. He needed to know more about the new Ambassador the Carter Administration was sending to El Salvador.

It seemed this Robert White would have a tough time with conservatives at his confirmation hearings. He was Ambassador to Paraguay and blasted the corrupt old dictatorship there for human-rights abuses every chance he got. Now Senators who thought dictatorship was a useful ally against international communism would get a shot at him.

The Carter people at State thought White was just what they needed in El Salvador. He was tough, outspoken, direct, a perfect point man for the Administration's plan. The reporter called one of his friends, a liberal Senator's aide. They talked about how hopeless the Salvadoran situation seemed, how relentlessly bloody and confused.

"White has a lot of enemies already," said the aide. "I don't know what to make of it, but, you know, there are some people saying he's being sent down there to end his career."

•

Soldiers who heard the tape recording laughed like children who overhear an adult's obscenity. La Puteada, they called it, a kind of "Fuck-you song" the military high command used to force out all the civilians in the government ten weeks after bringing them in.

It was never a comfortable union. The civilians blamed the military for continuing violence and repression. Especially, they blamed the minister of defense, Colonel José Guillermo Garcia, and his tight-knit clique in the high command.

Garcia was a short, round-faced, quick-smiling man with a large, unsightly mole on his chin. He was about as physically unimposing as anyone who wore a uniform. But he was part of the old order. At one point, before General Romero edged him out, Garcia seemed to be in line for the job of president-dictator. Moderate leftists both inside and outside the government believed he still wanted the job. They wanted him out and they wanted all the armed forces restructured.

With tacit backing from Colonel Majano, the civilians tried to foster a kind of democratic council of young and low-ranking liberal officers to which everyone in the armed forces would be accountable.

It was a bad move. It gave Garcia all the excuse he needed.

The Salvadoran army has a fixation about its integrity. Many of the soldiers who supported the ouster of the generals were lukewarm on the reforms supposed to follow. But they saw that the corruption of the high command was damaging their beloved institution. They also saw that the civilians in the government were getting nothing done and now those same civilians were openly attacking the entire foundation of the army.

The showdown came at the end of December. The cabinet and the junta were meeting when suddenly commanders from all over the country marched in and seated themselves around the room.

The commander of the Guardia Nacional, Eugenio Vides Casanova, stood up and told the civilians that they were sons of whores, unfit to govern anything. The military, he announced, would not listen to them, would not follow them, and gave its entire allegiance to Garcia.

The civilians were shocked. Some were terrified. What did the armed forces want them to do? For days after the confrontation, they went around asking the question. But the army didn't want them to do anything except get out. It was already negotiating with the Christian Democrats to replace them.

Afterward, White would say that the civilians in the first government were the best people El Salvador had to offer. But by then, most of them were on the side of the guerrillas.

•

The Pentagon had an idea. Zbigniew Brzezinski on the National Security Council liked it. The Central Intelligence Agency thought it seemed logical and was putting together information that made it seem more so.

A Deputy Secretary of Defense told Congress there was "evidence of Cuban efforts to orchestrate Communist movements in Central America." He didn't say what the evidence was. "There are also indications that the Cubans currently appear to be involved in the situation in El Salvador." He didn't say what the indications were, but he had begun laying the groundwork for the new idea.

It was quite simple--send American advisors down to show the Salvadoran army how to fight guerrillas while, of course, respecting human rights. Send them transportation and communication equipment to help them fight more effectively. (They already had plenty of guns.) Generally, shore them up, then let them go out and clobber the agents of international communism.

White was livid. Not yet Ambassador, his confirmation stalled by Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, he already found himself in the middle of a policy showdown.

"The Pentagon has this driving need to get in there and show they can win a guerrilla war," he fumed in private.

The Salvadoran armed forces were butchering people in wholesale lots. They had destroyed the best chance for a political solution by ousting the civilians from the first coalition. The Christian Democrats were already dividing in the second junta because their paper agreement with the colonels proved, within weeks, to be nothing more than that.

And now the Pentagon, with information that some of the guerrillas had been trained in Cuba--ignoring the fact that they were ill-armed and their support among the people, their real strength, would only grow if the United States endorsed the bloody excess of the military--wanted to give the military everything its chiefs desired.

White was supposed to oversee this lunacy?

"If we are prepared to back a government this shaky," he told a friend, "we have to look at what our options are down the road. I believe that 75 percent of this is political within the United States--a fear by the Administration that it will be accused of 'losing' something else like it 'lost' Iran, Nicaragua and the Panama Canal."

Six American advisors had secretly been sent to El Salvador for a few weeks in November. Now there might be 36. That, White and his allies in the State Department were convinced, would be only the beginning of a new quagmire in Central America. There would inevitably have to be more and more advisors.

If any U. S. troops went in, White made it clear, he would not.

•

The El Salvador international airport was completed in the last few months of General Romero's rule. It stands gleaming white and modern on the coastal plain, surrounded by the tidy plots of farmland. San Salvador, the capital, is 40 miles away, but the beaches are right at hand. The airport was intended to service international tourists flocking to the wide expanses of gray Pacific sand.

But on the day the young reporter arrived in mid-February, the airport was all but deserted. The only crowd was at the ticket counter for outgoing planes. Anyone who had enough money to get out was leaving El Salvador and, if they were smart and could afford it, they took everything they had with them. Well-groomed men in dark business suits stood waiting, while their bodyguards--square-built thugs wearing dark glasses and carrying briefcases--watched over them. At the boarding area, a sign advised passengers that they would be searched lest they carry guns on board "by accident."

The superhighway leading from the airport to San Salvador dissolves in dirt after about ten miles and taxis must take a seemingly endless, twisted road to complete the trip. The reporter thought about ambushes all the way to the hotel. By the time he got there, he wanted a drink.

At the bar, a pudgy, pig-eyed man with small hands and an obscene voice sat down on the stool beside him. The man laid a wrist wallet showing the butt of a .38 Colt on the bar.

"You always carry that?"

"I am a wealthy man. I take precautions. In my car, I have an UZI. You know the gun?"

The reporter looked down into his drink and the man started telling anyone who would listen what assholes and whoresons the members of the government were.

"Well," said the reporter cautiously, "where would you say you are on the political spectrum here?"

The man stared. He would have seemed ludicrous if it weren't for the pistol. "I am not capitalist. I am not Communist," he said in his whiny voice. "I am National Socialist. You know--a Nazi."

The reporter cut the conversation off as quickly as he could. It was too much. El Salvador was not a nation of Nazis. Nothing was as simple as that. But already he was being confronted by the mad bitterness, the striving after simple, final solutions. "We must kill all the snakes," said the man.

Old money was more tactful than that. The Fourteen were more secretive and more subtle in their schemes, even if the end were the same. But this was a self-made man, the kind who couldn't get out to Miami as the Fourteen could. He was a madman trapped in a madhouse--believing that murder was the only way out.

•

Hundreds of people--most of them poor, some in rags--came to listen to the soft, humble voice of the archbishop. There were also some in the crowd who carried notebooks and tape recorders, and at the beginning of his homily, the gray-haired little pastor made what seemed a joke about people who thought "our Masses were more political rallies and that people came out of political curiosity." But this was a serious matter.

"What I intend is in no way to make policy," said the archbishop. "If because of the need of the moment I am illuminating the politics of my homeland, it is as a pastor reading from the Gospel."

Archbishop Oscar A. Romero made that statement in various ways countless times. But there was little doubt that his was the most powerful political voice in the country.

Few priests have ever been so intensely loved or hated. To many of the poor, he seemed a saint. Visiting the shacks that smothered the ravines in the capital, the hovels made of sticks in the countryside, Romero brought the people hope. To the radical left, he was not only an ally but an authority, a figure of international standing--and also a moderating force they found nowhere within their own ranks. To the right and much of the military, he was a Communist demagog.

His platform was the pulpit of the Metropolitan Cathedral, perhaps one of the ugliest buildings in the world. He left it unfinished because he felt the money was better spent on the poor. Its concrete-and-brick had faded, and rusting iron reinforcing rods protruded from its spires. Where stained glass might be, there was only corrugated fiberglass, its only design the random points of light left by bullet holes.

On this Sunday, the archbishop had heard that the United States might be sending men and military equipment to the Salvadoran government. He had written a letter to President Carter and he read it to his people. The aid would only make things worse, he said. The Salvadoran military was already killing more people than under any previous regime. If the equipment being sent was, indeed, designed to make the soldiers more efficient, whether the equipment itself was lethal or not, then they would only be able to kill more people with more impunity.

"I hope that your religious sentiments and your sensibility for the defense of human rights will move you to accept my decision," Romero wrote to Carter, "thereby avoiding a greater spilling of blood in this suffering country."

•

To the extent that he could, the reporter ignored the burst of gunfire outside the hotel. He sat on his bed, watching El Salvador's newest television star--a slight, muscular man, a young-looking 40 with thick black hair, who sat behind a studio desk asking his countrymen why so many Communists were still in the government.

Before the October coup, Major Roberto D'Aubuisson was chief of intelligence for the Salvadoran Guardia National. He was reputed to have a rather rough way of questioning people, and some of the officers who seized the government from the generals thought D'Aubuisson might have been planning his own right-wing coup at the time, so they discharged him along with the old high command.

Instead of retiring, however, the major went straight into politics. Taking advantage of the new freedom of speech, his backers bought him television time every few nights to blast the liberals in the government and identify the Reds.

D'Aubuisson was well trained to track down Communists. He had studied at the International Police Academy in Washington, D.C., before the Congress found out torture was on the curriculum and shut it down. He went on to refine his antiterrorist techniques with the police in Uruguay and Taiwan, then briefly did a stint with the U. S. Green Berets in Panama during the early Seventies.

Few people would have guessed that he would be so charismatic on the screen. His appearance and his opinion quickly made him the darling of the conservative Salvadoran middle class. After years of living in the shadow of the oligarchy and struggling their way up through any opening in their country of limited opportunity, the burghers of San Salvador had finally found a voice. The left never took them into account--the guerrillas wanted their war to be a class war and the bourgeoisie was the incarnation of evil. The middle class was small, but it had grown in the past decade as El Salvador began to industrialize; and now that most of the Fourteen had abandoned the country, it was up to the middle class to save it. They were being kidnaped and killed, and as far as they were concerned, they were at war. D'Aubuisson might get money and guns from the Fourteen in Miami, but he had the hearts of the middle class.

Tonight he was talking about the Communist reforms the junta was getting ready to announce and he was focusing attention on the Christian Democrats in particular. This man, Mario Zamora Rivas, was a Communist. Why was he allowed to serve as a minister of the government, as the "attorney general for the poor"? Why do the great Salvadoran people endure such a travesty?

•

Children climbed trees to look over the crowd and down through the shattered windshield of the car. The reporter squeezed among the cluster of spectators. Through their sweat came the butcher-shop smell of the corpses.

Two women had already been taken to the hospital. There was no rush for the men. One in the back seat of the little Toyota was slumped over on his side. Puckered, dime-size holes showed through the torn fabric of his shirt. The man sitting in front of him in the driver's seat was apparently the main target. There was nothing left of his face. An eyeball hung in the vicinity of what was once his cheek. There were some teeth visible in that general area. But so many heavy-caliber bullets had been pumped into his head that it had collapsed like a melon rotted in the field.

The reporter wanted to find some way of putting meaning to what he saw. That was why he had come out here. The only dead he had ever seen before were relatives in funeral homes, the embalmers' wax replicas of people he had known. He wanted to see death as the Salvadorans saw it.

But death, presented like this, on a street full of the curious in a quiet suburban section of the city, without mourners, without even the trappings of officialdom--there were no policemen, no medics--seemed meaningless. The reporter found himself thinking, like the children around him, could he look at it again? He could. He could have looked at it all day, if there had been any point in that. There was not even a story in these deaths. Murder on the streets was a commonplace, not news at all, in El Salvador. But the reporter began asking questions of the bystanders.

It seemed a pickup truck had pulled in front of the little car and slammed on its brakes. Two men riding in the bed stood up with automatic rifles, G-3s, the kind the army used, and started shooting.

The killers had lingered a bit at the scene. One had drawn a large skull on the wall beside the car and another had taken a glob of the driver's brain and lobbed it into the middle of the drawing--a little message from the Union of White Warriors.

But why were these men killed? An old woman said they had worked for the attorney general of the poor. One of them, the driver, may have looked a little like Mario Zamora. "But they were just clerks on their lunch hour," said the old woman. "They never got involved in politics."

Apparently, the message had gone to the wrong man.

•

The party was still going on at one in the morning. Most of the Christian Democratic leaders were there telling political jokes and stories while Zamora or his wife kept their glasses filled with Scotch. It took a while for everyone to relax, but they had protection--their bodyguards were stationed near the door.

The death squad came in through the skylight. There were perhaps a half-dozen men in all, but nobody remembers very clearly. Everybody was ordered face down on the floor. One by one, the partygoers were asked their names.

"We don't want to make any mistake," said a gunman. "What's your name?"

"Mario Zamora Rivas."

"Get up. Come on."

No one heard any shots. The gunmen left. When Zamora's body was found in the bathroom, he had more than a dozen bullets in his head.

The Christian Democrats flatly blamed D'Aubuisson for the murder, and privately they said his tactic was obvious. He was trying to intimidate or eliminate anyone who might be a bridge to the moderate left, who might be able to begin negotiations for a peaceful settlement. If he could force them out of the government altogether, he would succeed.

Already the Christian Democrats were badly split. Zamora's death was the final blow for some members. Héctor Dada Hirezi, one of the two Christian Democrats on the junta, resigned from the government and the party and left the country. He was replaced by Duarte.

The military promised a thorough investigation of Zamora's death. No suspect was ever found. There was, in fact, no investigation.

•

The rhythm of killing was approaching some kind of climax, but it was impossible to say what that would be. The left had slowly pulled its ranks together. All the guerrilla factions except the E.R.P. had joined a coordinating directorate. The leading civilians from the first junta formed the Democratic Revolutionary Front to lobby for world-wide support of the rebels.

Although the Salvadoran government finally began its reform program in March 1980--after nearly six months of unfulfilled promises--the archbishop was edging ever closer to endorsing insurrection and he continued to blast the government at every opportunity. The reforms were good, he said, but they had to be taken in "the context of the dead and the annihilation."

Something was going to happen, but the reporter was sick and would not wait for it. After only a few days, he returned to the apartment he kept in Mexico. He telephoned the woman in the United States he had been seeing--or trying to see--for more than a year and, on impulse, they decided to get married immediately, before some new horror show dragged him back to El Salvador. It would take just four days in Philadelphia for the blood tests to clear and the papers to be processed.

He didn't tell the office where he was going, just that he would be gone. When he saw his bride-to-be at the Philadelphia airport--how strange and quiet and peaceful even that crime-ridden city now seemed to him--he told her that nothing could stop them from marrying now except. ...

"They're going to kill Romero. I don't know when, but soon. If it happens this weekend, I'll have to go back down. That's all there is to it."

It seemed, in Philadelphia, so melodramatic to say that. It was just a feeling, after all.

•

D'Aubuisson's failure to carry off a February coup against the Christian Democrats was a setback, but hardly a defeat. His people reorganized and now, as the Presidential race in the United States was fully under way and Reagan took the lead, they were regaining confidence. Some of them already had contacts among Reagan's entourage who recognized the danger of letting communism sweep over El Salvador and saw what quasi-Communists the Carter Administration had put in power.

Men in the Senate like Helms and his staffers understood the danger and could be talked to. This was a time of phone calls and meetings, a time to build a base of political backing in what D'Aubuisson and his people were sure would be the new Administration.

But there were other things to be done as well, and to be done right now, before the chaos worsened and the left had the guns to mount a full-scale insurrection. Notes made by D'Aubuisson and his friends at the time refer to something called Operation Pineapple. A gun was bought--a .22--caliber rifle with a telescopic sight. Money was deposited in a Miami bank account.

•

There is a hospital for the incurable in San Salvador. The archbishop lived there and often said evening Mass in the adjoining chapel.

This night there was a special service, a memorial Mass for the mother of one of the few leftist publishers still in the country. It was a pleasant evening, with the doors of the chapel open, as always, to let the cool night breeze circulate.

In his Sunday homily the day before, the archbishop had denounced the violence of both the left and the government, but, as so often happened--because there were so many more examples of government violence to cite--he had seemed to be attacking only the regime. More boldly than ever before, he had made an appeal--a demand--for the violence to end. He had directed his words to the troops: "I ask you, I pray you, in the name of God, I order you to stop the repression!"

But this evening his words were quieter. He talked of the need for any Christian to involve himself in the world, despite the risks. "He who wants to withdraw from danger will lose his life," said the archbishop. But the person who gives himself to the service of others will be like a grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies--but only apparently dies, for by its death, its wasting away in the ground, a new harvest is made.

The archbishop prepared the Eucharist and raised the chalice to God.

He never saw the gunman just inside the chapel doors.

•

An awkward calm settled over San Salvador in the days following the archbishop's death. Everyone was waiting for the funeral on Sunday, but the violence did not increase.

Chacón warned his people that they were being tempted into a trap. Stay quiet, he said, the government is trying to produce an insurrection before we are ready. The spontaneous uprising never came, but the tension remained, a palpable bitterness and despair settling over the barrios.

Conservatives openly gloated. Of course, they didn't approve of murdering priests, they said, but one had to admit that Romero got what he deserved. When you put yourself in politics in this country, you have to expect this kind of thing.

Ambassador White had been in El Salvador for three weeks. A personally conservative and religious man, a New England Irish Catholic whose faith was somehow strengthened by decades in Foreign Service posts where suffering was always visible, White was appalled at what he saw in El Salvador.

"When we have cuerpos de seguridad who commit more crimes than they solve, it is a very sad situation," he said. There was no applause that week when he appeared before a chamber-of-commerce luncheon. It was not a friendly audience and White was not friendly to it.

"The violence in the countryside continues," he said. "The excesses of the security forces continue," causing disaffected workers and peasants to join the ranks of the militant left. "They are being killed and tortured and I have talked to them and I know who is doing it."

White looked around the room grown arctic with silence. Reporters at the rear began furiously taking notes.

The series of right-wing assassinations was an abomination, White continued. What was gained by the killing of Mario Zamora? By the murder of the archbishop? By the killing, just today, of Juan Chacon--

Several reporters dashed out of the room to telephones.

Chacón dead? They began checking furiously. He was not dead. He was at the university, as surprised as anyone at White's remarks.

The import of White's speech that day was lost in embarrassment and backtracking. He had been assured at least twice that morning by his military and intelligence people that Chacón had been killed. They had either lied to him or been lied to by their Salvadoran contacts. Either their information was grossly erroneous or someone was setting White up for a fall.

•

Palm fronds waved above the heads of the crowd. It was Palm Sunday. The reporter had forgotten.

People were everywhere, filling the cathedral square and spilling over into the side streets. Many, perhaps most, were women and children--50,000 mourners for the archbishop. A folk choir sat around the coffin on the cathedral steps, singing, "You are the God of the poor." No troops, no guns were in sight. The only people in uniforms were boy scouts manning the ropes that kept the crowd off the sidewalk in front of the high steel gate at the bottom of the steps. The morning sun was hot, and near the rope, where the crowd was most tightly packed, women were fainting.

The funeral oration was begun. A Mexican cardinal delivered a long, droning message of Christ that carefully sidestepped all the volatile issues once addressed by the man now lying in the heavy casket. Above the coffin sat the archbishop's chair, symbolic and empty.

The reporter listened awhile from the shade of trees at the corner of the cathedral, then moved out onto the sidewalk in front of the fence.

A cheer went up from the crowd. The muchachos&mdash"the boys"--of the popular organizations had arrived after marching through the city. The crowd somehow managed to pull apart to let them through. Many of the boys and girls wore kerchiefs over their faces, and some carried banners. Many others carried the plastic bags and satchels and the long thin boxes that the reporter knew from experience held Molotovs, pistols and rifles. At the sides of the crowd, two embassy officials observing the funeral decided to return to their offices.

The cardinal kept speaking. A wreath of plastic flowers in the yellow-and-red colors of the Bloque was passed forward above the crowd and placed on the coffin. Another cheer went up. The muchachos raised their fists in salute and chanted a revolutionary slogan. The cardinal paused a moment, then went on.

An explosion.

Everyone turned to see where it came from--somewhere near the closest corner of the National Palace diagonally across the plaza, leaflets were floating through the air. The muchachos often used little bombs to launch their propaganda above the heads of a crowd, but this--

Another explosion. Another. A quick burst of shots.

The only place for the reporter to go was over the fence and he surprised himself with his speed as he vaulted it. He shouldered his way up the stairs through the crowd of clerics, but at the top, the priests blocked his way.

Panic had swept the crowd. Shots were going off everywhere now and people were running, most of them toward the cathedral steps.

The priests seemed oblivious to what was happening. "Calm down. Calm down," they said to the wailing masses. "There's nothing to worry about."

Automobiles exploded at each corner of the plaza, sending liquid flame spreading out across the pavement. The barrier rope had disappeared and now hundreds, thousands of people were pressing against the fence. It was still locked. Some were making it over, but many were not. Old women were being crushed to death, their faces squeezed between the bars.

The screams, the shooting, the bombs were deafening, and the priests--their cries for calm now altogether lost--fell back into the cathedral, stumbling, knocking over the archbishop's chair, some of them trying to drag the coffin with them. The reporter made his way to the stairs leading into the choir loft and spires, but they were already blocked by masked muchachos, pistols drawn.

The gates were forced open and people poured into the cathedral. Desperately, they sought out friends, relatives, some touch of safety. Within minutes the cathedral was so crowded that it was impossible to move. Men who stripped off their shirts and twirled them above their heads to keep the air circulating found themselves so tightly pressed they couldn't get their hands back down to their sides. Children were lifted onto shoulders.

Behind the reporter, an old man was expiring. The people around him were shouting for room. The old man was naked from the waist up, his chest deformed, his eyes staring at nothing. For 30 minutes he was wrestled through 20 feet of crowd toward one of the areas in the church more exposed to bullets but with more air to breathe.

On his hands and knees, the reporter worked his way up the stairs past women and children and old men who were praying amid the rattle of machine guns and the blast of Molotov cocktails pushing in at them from outside. Finally, in the choir loft, he could begin to study the situation. Most of the shots were outgoing. The muchachos were blasting away from all three entrances to the cathedral and from high in the spires. Others were prone in the street, firing at any sound or movement. Some were children, perhaps ten years old, almost overwhelmed by the pistols in their hands.

Everyone's immediate fear was that the military would appear and start firing into the building or even invade it to clean out the snipers. But the army, the police, the Guardia were nowhere to be seen.

The shooting died out slowly in the cathedral square and slowly, very slowly, people began to trickle outside. Smoke from burning cars still hung heavy on the scene. The reporter looked at the shoes piled near the fence where their panicked owners had lost them, at the leaflets with Romero's face on them, at the bodies. Volunteer rescue teams had appeared. They were loading unconscious mothers and grandmothers, old men and boys--the possibly alive--into trucks and ambulances to be taken away.

Off to one side of the cathedral was a muchacho who had seen a photographer taking his picture when the shooting started. He had struck a revolutionary pose with his Molotov and it had blown up in his hands. Now he lay on the sidewalk, the bones showing at the stumps of his arms, a hole under his chin where a bit of shrapnel had entered, the back of his head gone and the brain spilling where it had exited.

Perhaps he had spun around as he fell or perhaps somebody had come along later and done it. The boy's body was wrapped in a banner of the popular organizations.

•

The debate about who, how, what had started the massacre would go on for months and never be resolved; but in the end, the question was irrelevant. Anyone could have started the madness and the panic that day. It was the culmination of so many months and years of fear and hatred and hopelessness, and it ultimately made the hopelessness worse. These were the boys who were asking for the people's faith, who were preparing to lead them in a glorious revolution, and the boys had panicked with everybody else. They had kept firing long after there was anything to fire at--if, indeed, there had ever been--and more than 30, perhaps more than 40 people lay dead for nothing.

A goal of the terrorism all along had been to make the people cry out, "Basta ya!"--Enough!--bring us peace, no matter what you have to do. The guerrillas thought "the masses" would believe, as they did, that insurrection was the only answer. The rightists were certain that the great people of El Salvador would support a ruthless crackdown on the troublemaking Communists. But no side looked as if it could win quickly or would deliver what it promised if it did. The people turned inward and with resounding apathy said to their would--be saviors, "To hell with you all."

But the patterns of power-grabbing competition within the government, the embassy and the left continued. They were well established by April 1980 and over the next eight months, the militarists would be strengthened on all sides. Within the government, the pre-eminence of García and Gutiérrez would continue to grow. At the embassy, the Pentagon would find ways to work around White and, in deference to President Carter, put a human-rights veneer on its initiatives. On the left, the popular organizations would steadily lose their power to mobilize the masses, but the guerrillas themselves would begin to get the guns they had wanted and needed for so long.

This was a waiting time, the period of "the phony war," as one disillusioned Marxist called it. The casualties were real enough, but there was a growing consciousness on all sides that each little maneuver, each little skirmish, might be used to influence world opinion.

Delegations of civilians who had once served in the government and now sided with the guerrillas traveled all over the world to establish links with Social Democratic parties and convince potential Western friends that the regime the insurgents wanted would be a democratic paradigm, not a Marxist dictatorship. Duarte and his party lobbied the Christian Democrats of Europe and South America, looking for allies to join the United States in its support of their regime. They were embattled moderates, they said, caught between the extremes of a Neanderthal right and a Pol Pot left, but the reforms were winning them more support every day and their troops had the country under control. D'Aubuisson and his followers traveled mainly to Miami and Washington, with occasional side trips to the sympathetic regimes of Guatemala, Honduras and the southern cone. All they wanted was a real democracy like the one described in the U. S. Constitution, where free men could work and thrive in a truly capitalist economy.

The left was easily taken care of, they said--it didn't have the support of the people. It might be necessary to use some severe measures against the subversives and their sympathizers for a while, but that was the price you had to pay for freedom.

•

The hotel was as empty as it had ever been, and after five days in El Salvador, the reporter was glad to be getting out. It was Thanksgiving Day. He tried not to think about it, just listened to the radio as he packed his bags.

"We have it confirmed," came the voice breaking into the music, "Enrique Alvarez, Juan Chacón and four other leaders of the Revolutionary Democratic Front have been arrested."

Jesus, there was no getting out of here.

The reporter called everyone he could think of--Church officials and Garcia, White and the commander of the embassy military group. It was the usual culpability merry-go-round.

The Church claimed that the Democratic Front leaders were getting ready to hold a press conference when men in civilian clothes backed up by uniformed troops broke in and dragged them away. White and Duarte said it must have been right-wing extremists trying to destabilize the regime--but they didn't rule out the chance that some of the security forces helped. García said he had no knowledge of any arrests and had no information on the incident, which had taken place at a Catholic boys' school in the center of the capital. Later in the afternoon, after calling around to all the cuartels, he would refine his statement to say there had definitely not been any arrests and the military had had nothing to do with the affair.

There were no clear answers, but the consequences were extreme. In the next few hours, the bodies of the revolutionaries, strangled and shot, were found littered outside the city.

•

Already the Christmas Muzak drifted through the hotel bar as the reporter sat talking with Jean Donovan and Dorothy Kazel the day before the funeral. The left was trying to explain away the expected small turnout--people were going to show up but not really in force, because you know what happens under this genocidal government and there is no point in having your people slaughtered needlessly. Dorothy and Jean, who spent most of their days with the peasants around La Libertad, were skeptical of the relationship, but they were in constant contact with the fear.

Dorothy was a nun, but the kind of nun one meets so often in Central America. More frequently than a habit, she wore blue jeans and a checked shirt. Jean was younger, a lay worker who looked like a nun. It wasn't their clothes that made them so obviously religious women, it was their manner, their smiles and their thinking--their seemingly boundless concern about other people's suffering.

"Things have changed so much in the past year," said Dorothy. "There's such hatred everywhere."

The reporter called it an atmosphere of vendetta. Everyone was looking for some kind of revenge. Often, he said, the clergy were vulnerable targets.

"We're OK," said Jean. "The safest person in El Salvador has to be a blonde, blue-eyed gringa."

The reporter was called to the phone and Dorothy and Jean decided to leave. They waved goodbye as they went out the door.

"Let's stay in touch. ..."

"I'll call you in a few days," said Dorothy.

•

Robert White knew what he was going to see and he dreaded it. The black bulletproof Cadillac and its two chase cars drove on and on through the parched dry-season countryside. For a while, they seemed headed for the airport along the winding, rough-surfaced little road. Another time, White might have been concerned about the possibility of an ambush laid out from the high banks on either side of the narrow pavement. But he hardly thought of such things anymore. It wasn't worth it. The security men would worry about that. So far, no attempts against him had come even close. He had luck or Providence to thank for that, he supposed. Sometimes it occurred to him that he had been taking up an inordinate amount of God's time since he arrived in El Salvador.

He wanted to get there. That was all he cared about. Get there and see who the gringas were in the shallow grave, hoping-- But there was no hope. He knew who they were. He and everybody at the embassy had been calling everywhere for more than a day. The military had said it had no information. Finally, the Church had gotten a tip.

Two of the women had stayed in White's house just two nights before. They had come over for dinner with the priest they worked with and they had stayed up too late to drive all the way back to La Libertad. So White and his wife had asked them to stay.

It was just the next night that they had gone to the airport to pick up Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, and then they had just disappeared.

The Cadillac turned off the airport road and headed east toward--what was the name of the little town?--San Juan Nonualco. There were other little villages on the way. Peaceful. Ordinary. As if nothing had happened.

The violence was widespread but so viciously selective. Graham Greene had written about such things. "Cruelty swept through the country like a spotlight." The Ambassador had been reading and rereading Greene. The books seemed to say a lot about White himself, about his God, about these people--"the torturable class." It had once seemed that certain people were immune to the viciousness, but now anybody, everybody was eligible. Torture had become a great equalizer.

The Cadillac stopped among the reporters' cars plastered with signs telling the world they were Press, as if that would do any good. They were clustered around a mound of dirt in a little patch of land like all the other little patches of land, dry and dusty, with a few trees and bushes.

The grave was opened and there were a couple of Guardia standing around, watching nothing in particular, and an officious little justice of the peace who had to oversee such things and the reporters and photographers wondering whether or not to look--not knowing not to. The smell of the dead ran like a poisonous current through the still air.

One by one, the bodies were pulled out. Jean. It must be Jean, but her face had been exploded by a bullet in the back of the head. Her pants were half unzipped. Her underwear somehow hung from her ankle. Now Dorothy, Sisters Ita and Maura, being dragged like sides of meat from the pit.

Reporters were talking to White, but he didn't hear. He turned and stared at the Guardia, the little judge, the camera crews, stared all around, trying to control himself.

•

One day after the nuns' bodies were discovered, all United States aid to El Salvador was temporarily suspended. A special commission was appointed in Washington to go down and investigate what appeared to be a cover--up of the killings. Every bit of the evidence that existed, and there was not much, pointed to members of the security forces--most probably the national guard--as the murderers. They had set up a roadblock where the nuns might have been stopped, and it was clear that the military in the area knew where the nuns were buried but had said nothing about it in answer to the embassy's inquiries.

"They've got an old--boy network," said White. "They know damn well who did it, but they're not saying."

More than moral indignation was at work here. There was also the coldly observed political opportunity for the Christian Democrats to gain the upper hand in forging an agreement with the army. They would have the full backing of the United States and they might at last force the military to clean its ranks from the bottom to the top.

The right saw an opportunity as well. D'Aubuisson returned from Guatemala. Reagan was already President-elect of the United States. If D'Aubuisson's friends in the military could just hold out a little longer, another six weeks, then the Reagan Administration would take office and the pressure would be off.

All the powers in the country were moving to take advantage of the regime's confusion in the wake of the killings. Some changes were bound to take place and some officials were going to lose out.

The first to go was Adolfo Majano.

He had dithered and plotted for too long and, in his frustration at steadily losing power, he had begun to make thinly veiled criticisms of the high command. Majano was a chess player, one of the best in El Salvador, and he played politics like he played the game--full of infinite calculation and subtle maneuver. But in García and Gutiérrez he was up against a pair of linebackers who simply threw over the board. At a secret meeting of the military's commanders--to which Majano was not invited--a vote was taken and by an overwhelming majority, they voted to remove the colonel from the junta. He was assigned to an insignificant diplomatic post, the usual exile, the kind so many of his former backers had gone to. Instead, he went into hiding.

White was calling on all his powers to resolve the crisis in the Christian Democrats' favor. But his powers were waning. Word had leaked in Washington of a Reagan transition-team "hit list" that named White as one Ambassador sure to be sacked. He appeared a lame-duck envoy of a lame-duck Administration and El Salvador's conservatives saw less reason than ever to listen to him.

White sent a steady barrage of cables to Washington, asking for public support from Reagan's people. For a while, he seemed to get it. Reagan foreign-policy advisor Richard Allen said on national television that the Reagan Administration would continue to support a moderate, reformist regime in El Salvador.

But, at the same time, Cleto DiGiovanni had come to town. He was not exactly a member of Reagan's team, but close to it. A former CIA man, DiGiovanni had contacts with Reagan's advisors on Latin America as well as with D'Aubuisson's people in El Salvador. White was not sure what DiGiovanni was telling those people, but he suspected--and many of the D'Aubuisson crowd believed--that the hidden message he brought was exactly what they wanted to hear: "Do what you want and need to do. The Reagan Administration will back your play."

•

One by one, the officers walked into the Casa Presidencial with their pistols drawn. The reporter standing in the doorway of the waiting room got a little nervous. He walked down to the guard post to see what was happening and, to his relief, saw a long table piled high with pearl--handled .45s and customized .357 Magnums, UZIs, nine-millimeter automatics with extra-long clips. Good idea to leave them down here, he thought. Somebody might get angry.

Upstairs on the balconies above the tropical courtyard, the final decision on the new structure of government was being made. Majano was now officially out. The four other junta members would remain in place, but Duarte would get the title of president. Real power would remain, however, with Gutirrez, now the vice--president and commander in chief, and with Garcia, still ensconced as defense minister. All that would be made public later in the day. There was another, secret agreement--the price the Christian Democrats demanded for staying in the government.

Certain key members of the military would have to be removed from their commands. Most prominent on the list was deputy minister of defense Nicolas Carranza. A year before, he had voted against bringing the Christian Democrats into the junta. He wanted a military regime with technocrats handling day--to--day administration. That was close to the D'Aubuisson scheme of things and the Christian Democrats suspected Carranza of being their most dangerous opponent within the army. He would have to go in January.

At the same time, a couple of other commanders would be relieved of their posts, and by the beginning of February, the chief of the treasury police was also supposed to go.

It was not an agreement the soldiers liked, but it would do for the moment. And, some considered, it could always be amended.

They picked up their guns and left.

•

"Let the Yankee Pentagon make no mistake. If it attacks the Salvadoran people, it will have another thorn in its side."

The Havana auditorium erupted in long, enthusiastic applause, and Salvador Cayetano Carpio stood back and soaked up the adulation. After so many years underground, the 60-year-old guerrilla leader was at the peak of his power, speaking before his socialist brothers at the second party congress of Cuba. Representatives were there from all over the Communist world, and he wanted to thank them for the help that was going to make his revolution possible at last.

For months now, arms bound for El Salvador from Vietnam, Ethiopia, Cuba, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union had been flowing into Nicaragua--so many that bottlenecks were forming. They couldn't be moved fast enough. But they were on their way nonetheless and the Salvadoran guerrillas--with all the people behind them, they said--were going to present Reagan with an "irreversible military situation" by the time he took office on January 21.

"Revolution or death!" shouted Carpio.

"Viva Salvador," screamed the crowd. "!Viva!"

But later, when the first shots of the long-awaited "final offensive" came, they missed pretty badly. A guerrilla squad attacked Ilopango, the military air base just outside San Salvador, with some newly arrived American-made, Cuban--supplied recoilless rifles. Every round they fired soared over the barracks, over the planes and helicopters they were trying to hit and over the long, broad runway to land harmlessly in a weed patch on the other side.

It was not an auspicious beginning for the guerrillas and things would get worse. The government army was supposed to split. Except for a few minor incidents, it stayed united. The people were supposed to rise up en masse, as they had in the Nicaraguan revolution, to build barricades and hit the soldiers hard wherever they appeared. But the people did not rise up. Attacks were mounted on cuartels throughout the country and the guerrillas demonstrated a level of coordination they had never shown before. But not a single cuartel was taken.

After those first few clays in January 1981, the guerrillas declared that the final offensive was actually a general offensive. It really wasn't supposed to be final at all, just a beginning.

It was that. The phony war came to an end with the attack on Ilopango airport. In San Francisco Gotera, where some of the heaviest fighting took place, bodies lay rotting on the streets for days. They were burned to help kill the stench and disease until there was nothing left but charred meat on sets of ribs and femurs with perhaps a recognizable foot attached. The same scenes were repeated in Zacatecocuca, in Suchitoto. Soon the countryside would be nothing but deserted fields and clusters of buildings become bullet-riddled ghost towns.

•

The reporter was sick of it. The bloodshed, the venal idiocy of it all. It meant so little, finally. At least 13,000 people had died in El Salvador since his arrival there almost a year before. One could play games with a statistic like that, could say that proportionate to its population, the United States would have to lose 500,000 people to political violence in order to sense the same social and human cost.

But, of course, death isn't measured that way. Numbers of corpses don't count until you know one, or two, or a dozen of them, or, at least, until you can see them as some part of yourself--as an American or as a journalist or as a nun. There are cynical axioms in the newspaper business to cover such things. One dead hometown boy is worth ten dead Englishmen is worth 50 Australians is worth 200 dead Chinese or Indians or Salvadorans or. ...

But even the Salvadorans came to look at the numbers of the dead with a numb, sometimes vicious detachment. In their less discreet moments, some of the more extreme rightists would talk of the need to kill 200,000 leftists in order to clean up the country. No one was immune anymore. Everyone was somebody else's Communist or imperialist. No place was safe.

The war had become so much bigger than El Salvador. It was a symbol of the new battle between East and West, and individuals get lost in symbols. After the United States voted in November 1980 to make America tough and strong once again, to bring back its respect, no politician in Washington wanted to be remembered as "the man who lost El Salvador" in the face of the Kremlin's maneuvering.

Robert White tried in his sometimes clumsy, sometimes belligerent and excessive way to keep perspective. In his mind, the issue should have been whether anyone in Washington wanted to be remembered as a supporter of a "genocidal, nun-killing regime." But even White finally rolled with the tide.

When four or five oversize dugout canoes full of armed men landed on a Salvadoran beach just across the Gulf of Fonseca from Nicaragua, White all but called it an invasion. Nobody else, not even Duarte, went that far; but White had just signed off on a complete renewal of "nonlethal" U. S. military aid to the Salvadoran government, and this was an opportunity to make the point that it was justified.

The intelligence reports about massive deliveries of guns to the guerrillas had persuaded White that the U. S. aid was necessary. The memory of the nuns stayed with him. He was bitter at what he saw as a noninvestigation of their deaths. But the size of the threat, the hundreds of tons of arms supposedly going to the Communists, forced him to go along with the Pentagon at least that far.

Within days, the resupply was extended to include, for the first time since 1977, lethal weapons--$5,000,000 worth of M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, recoilless rifles and four Huey helicopters. Accompanying them would be U. S. advisors. Just for mechanical training. No combat personnel. Again, White went along with the decision. He hadn't wanted to escalate the war. But the Communists had already done it and the United States could not just sit back and watch. The Salvadoran troops had held off the final offensive "without a single cartridge" from the United States, but now they had started to run out.

There were worries, though. While White was playing them down, at least in public, his aides were despondent. They could see the door opening for the next Administration. Reagan was not even President yet, but Carter, old human-rights Carter, was setting up a Statue of Liberty play, handing him the ball and letting him sprint toward the goal. Carter had only a week left in office, but he was taking responsibility for endorsing the Salvadoran military with gifts of bullets and bombs and American soldiers. Reagan could put in more bullets, more bombs, more Americans, and they would be only increments, not the crucial first step.

Yet even that was not enough for the Pentagon. On the eve of Reagan's Inauguration, Colonel Eldon Cummings, head of the embassy's military group, the U. S. Army's main man in El Salvador, went to White and asked him to sign off on 75 more U. S. advisors Cummings said the Salvadorans had requested.

White exploded. This finally was too much. Let Reagan make the decision tomorrow; White was sure as hell not going to do it. A year ago, he had seen the quagmire coming, had seen the potential for the Vietnamization of El Salvador. He was not going to sign off on it now.

Within a month, Alexander Haig, the new Secretary of State, called White to Washington. Haig was not happy with his work as Ambassador and White was relieved of his post. As a career Foreign Service officer, he had to be assigned to some new position of equal rank. Haig made him some offers he had to refuse, then effectively fired him from the diplomatic corps.

•

Colonel Jaime Abdul Gutiérrez took a cigarette from the reporter and loosened his tie. The colonel was relaxing in the Casa Presidencial as he reminisced about the October coup some 15 months before. He smiled as he talked about his feud with Majano, who, after all, had never been a commander as he had, had never been in private enterprise as he had. The fall of the first junta brought a laugh. Now the Christian Democrats were irritated because the head of the treasury police was still at his post, contrary to their little agreement. But that could be worked out. Duarte had proved to be very flexible.

The war was going all right. Of course, Gutiérrez couldn't say that it would be over in four months or one year or two. The guerrillas were pretty heavily dug in in the mountains of the north. There was always the danger that if they pulled off some spectacular victory, the people who thus far had stood apart from them would suddenly and finally rush to their sides as saviors. But the government reforms were working better than anybody--especially Gutiérrez--expected they would, and maybe the government had won more hearts and minds than anyone knew.

Of course, the problem, thought the reporter, was that no one knew. No one ever knew anything. Elections were being planned with the idea that the people could finally express their preference for one man, one course of action or another. Gutiérrez was very enthusiastic about the idea. It would give the Salvadoran government some legitimacy. But both the left and the right were rejecting the elections as a ploy by the Christian Democrats.

Ah, politics. Gutiérrez just wanted to save his country from the Communists and his army from disintegration and humiliation, and always there were these politicians complicating things.

But finally Washington had come around. As Gutiérrez sat talking to the reporter, there were American cargo planes unloading new guns a few miles away. The Hueys patrolled the skies. Scattered around the country were 54 U. S. advisors to turn his troops into crack units. If more equipment were needed, more advisors, the Yankees now seemed to be dependable suppliers.

The reporter had met some of the advisors. Clean-faced and enthusiastic, full of talk about the great morale of the Salvadoran army and the fight against international communism. They were going to show the Salvadorans how to fight a guerrilla war "even better" than the way the United States had fought it in Vietnam, as Colonel Cummings used to say.

So the colonel had many reasons to be confident about the future. But he was a Salvadoran, and the future, he knew, was never certain.

What if there were peace? That worried him.

"I want to tell you," said Gutiérrez, "my impression is that peace is tougher than war. What I mean is that in this condition, in this present circumstance, you are concentrating everything on one objective. And no matter how many different trends there are in the army, you can manage, because there is one enemy, because there is danger, because of lots of things. But when all that ends, then comes the question of how to bring together all these forces afterward."

But, Colonel, aren't you worried that there might be some other Gutiérrez out there plotting against you? Would you know it if there were?

He thought for a moment. "No," he said, smiling at the reporter, "you can't know that. Really, when these things happen, the last to know. ..."

Outside the Casa Presidencial, the streets were quiet, more quiet than usual.

"There were guns in the streets. The university was shut down and Duarte was jailed, beaten...."