El Salvador

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- On the first day of the cease-fire officially ending the Salvadoran civil war, the leftist guerrilla front served notice yesterday that while its differences with the political right have diminished, they have not disappeared."

WASHINGTON -- The Army has reversed itself and authorized a coveted combat badge for hundreds of soldiers who served under fire as advisers in El Salvador, recognition delayed in some cases for more than 15 years by domestic politics and Pentagon red tape.Gen. Dennis J. Reimer, the Army's chief of staff, has approved the Combat Infantryman Badge for soldiers -- mostly Green Berets -- who served as advisers from 1981 to 1992, when a peace accord between the Salvadoran government and Marxist rebels ended the conflict, the Army said in a statement yesterday.

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- At the height of El Salvador's civil war, soldiers and police officers more than once gunned down protesters who gathered in the main downtown square.But last week, when the guerrillas-turned-politicians of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front held the final rally of their election campaign, police were present only to provide security for the candidates and an exuberant crowd waving red flags.El Salvador, one of the main battlegrounds of the East-West conflict during the 1980s, is about to take another big step toward a civil society.

MEXICO CITY -- All these external events mattered in getting to the agreement signed at the United Na tions Wednesday toward a cease-fire in El Salvador's 11-year-old civil war:President Bush has allowed Central America to drift off the list of American obsessions. The Sandinistas lost the 1990 election in neighboring Nicaragua. European communist regimes supportive of El Salvador's rebels collapsed. The Soviet Union -- had developed a "hands off Latin America" policy.But what mattered most was the change in El Salvador itself: The people were simply tired of a war that couldn't be won.The conflict has cost more than 72,000 lives in the nation of 5 million, created over a million refugees, most of them now in the United States, and set the gross national product back to the level of 1978.

I HAVE followed with great interest, and no small amount of anger, the recent trial of two former Salvadoran generals who were cleared of liability in the deaths of four American churchwomen in El Salvador nearly 20 years ago. On Dec. 2, 1980, Maryknoll nuns Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, Ursuline nun Dorothy Kazel and lay volunteer Jean Donovan were abducted, raped and killed by Salvadoran soldiers who suspected them of sympathizing with leftist guerrillas....

Three men and two women protesters have been arrested for refusing to leave Sen. Paul Sarbanes' downtown office.The protesters were there to attempt to pressure the Maryland senator into co-sponsoring a bill that would end U.S. military aid to El Salvador.The five were arrested shortly before 9 o'clock last night in the George H. Fallon Federal Building about two hours after they refused to leave the office. All were charged with trespassing.The men were held overnight at the Central District lockup and the women at the Women's Detention Center pending bail hearings today before a District Court commissioner, police said.

WASHINGTON -- Hundreds of soldiers who served under fire in El Salvador should be awarded a coveted combat badge, according to an Army board that said the service mistakenly failed to bestow it and "must never again deny its soldiers due recognition."The four-member board unanimously recommended that infantry soldiers and Green Berets who served as advisers in El Salvador from 1981 until 1992 receive the Combat Infantryman Badge -- a musket bordered by a wreath signifying that they came under hostile fire.

Tuesday, El Salvador's Marxist rebels are to surrender the last of their arms bringing to a close a 12-year civil war that cost more than 70,000 lives and more than $4 billion in American taxpayers' money.In the days before the historic moment, Dr. Robert Kirschner, the deputy Cooke Country medical examiner, was putting together a puzzle of skull and bone.Dr. Kirschner and a colleague, Clyde Snow, a medical anthropologist from Oklahoma, had assembled similar puzzles in Argentina, Guatemala and South Korea.

FOXBORO, Mass. -- Embattled coach Steve Sampson promised he'd start a "dramatically different" national team against El Salvador yesterday.He did -- one forward, three defenders, and, count 'em, six midfielders, with four more on the bench.It worked. In the process, he may have found a new shooting star in that one forward, Brian McBride, whose two first-half goals headed the U.S. team to a 4-2 win in the final regional World Cup qualifier from this part of the world."We wanted to entertain the national TV audience and the people who paid to see this team.

PRESIDENT Bush likes to remind the foreign policy establishment that his ideas are good for business. He believes, as he argued on behalf of China's inclusion in the World Trade Organization, that "free trade supports and sustains freedom in all its forms." This simple sloganeering often sells many on the idea that commerce creates democracy. The intertwining of these concepts is an effective way to silence critics of policies that have little to do with democracy but a lot to do with economic power.