Salvadoran

MEXICO CITY -- The leadership of the Salvadoran rebels for the first time has announced a three-day election truce in hopes that opposition parties will gain a majority in the March 10 congressional elections and end the country's 11-year civil war.The agreement came late Thursday night after a four-hour meeting in Mexico City with El Salvador's principal opposition parties.Meanwhile yesterday, rebel forces struck at the country's main hydroelectric plant.The military said 17 soldiers and six rebels were killed in the fighting, with 16 government troops and 20 guerrillas wounded.

Indoor soccer Blast to open Eastern finals at home on March 10 The Blast (15-6) will host the opening game of the Major Indoor Soccer League Eastern Division finals at 1st Mariner Arena on March 10. The Blast has clinched the regular-season division title and is waiting for either the Rochester Lancers or Syracuse Silver Knights to earn the second postseason berth. Game 2 will be March 12. Honor: Blast forward Machel Millwood was named MISL Player of the Week.

WASHINGTON -- As recently as three years ago, American military officers in El Salvador trained a group of wealthy Salvadorans associated with right-wing death squads, State Department documents show.The training occurred at a time when the threat of Communism was receding and the Bush administration was pursuing peace settlements in Central America.The documents are the first to describe Americans as training civilians tied to political killings in El Salvador, and the first to link American support to Salvadoran death-squad activities in the 1990s.

In 10 short words, the United States government has given a Salvadoran family living in Maryland an unexpected gift — the assurance that it will not be torn apart by deportation. " DHS, hereby, moves to withdraw its appeal on this matter," wrote Nelson A. Vargas-Padilla, deputy chief counsel in the Department of Homeland Security's Baltimore office, on Nov. 18. With that terse statement, the government reversed its earlier decision to appeal an immigration judge's ruling that granted asylum to Maria Canales de Maldonado and her son, Pablo, 18. Mother and son fled a gang in El Salvador that killed another son and continued to menace the family.

MEXICO CITY -- Moving away from his coalition's ideological roots, the senior military commander of the Salvadoran rebel army asserted this week that his group could no longer be considered a Marxist movement and added that one-party rule in El Salvador would be "absurd."In his first major public comments since the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Joaquin Villalobos said his coalition's goals would not be achieved through armed revolution, but through participation as an unarmed political movement in a pluralistic, "competitive" democracy.

MEXICO CITY -- Peace talks between the Salvadoran government and leftist rebels appear headed toward a simple cease-fire agreement rather than a broad solution to a war that has claimed 72,000 lives.According to sources close to the negotiations, the best both sides can hope to gain from their unprecedented 20 days of talks is an agreement on a cease-fire that would permit the rebels to enter the political process under United Nations protection.The rebel aim is to capitalize on mounting right-wing pressure within the ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena)

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- A special peace commission reportedly agreed yesterday in Mexico City on an amnesty law for past political violence that would allow former leftist rebels to enter public life, but not erase blame for atrocities such as the 1989 army slaying of six Jesuits and two women.The controversial issue of amnesty has become a serious potential obstacle to the scheduled Feb. 1 cease-fire in the country's 12-year civil war. On that date, the army and rebels are to begin a gradual process of demobilization, but rebel leaders do not want to return here without a legal guarantee of safety.

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- A spate of bombings in Cuba this summer was the work of a ring of Salvadoran car thieves and armed robbers directed and financed by Cuban exiles in El Salvador and Miami, a two-month investigation by the Miami Herald shows.The ring's leader is reputed to be Francisco Chavez, son of an arms dealer with close ties to Cuban exiles. Chavez may have been in Havana just hours before the first bomb exploded at the luxury Melia Cohiba Hotel.The Salvadorans were only delivery boys for the bombs, paid and taught to assemble the explosives by a Cuban exile -- a man in his 30s who has participated in several other anti-Castro operations in Central and South America, according to the Herald.

MEXICO CITY -- The bloody Salvadoran civil war effectively ended yesterday, the last of the Cold War conflicts that divided ++ Central America and confounded three U.S. presidents, from Jimmy Carter to George Bush.Price paid: An estimated 75,000 dead, over 1 million refugees and the expenditure of more than $4 billion in U.S. tax dollars.Representatives of the Salvadoran government and the rebel Farabundo Marti Liberation Front (FMLN) signed the long-negotiated 94-page cease-fire document yesterday, ending 12 years of fighting Feb. 1.But for a moment it seemed difficult to remember what all the fuss was about, especially in an obscure, tiny country like El Salvador with a population of about 5 million.

SAN FRANCISCO -- The U.S. government allowed a former commander in El Salvador's leftist guerrilla army to settle in the United States and receive thousands of dollars in payments as an informant even though officials at the CIA and the Justice Department were convinced he had been involved in the killing of six Americans in 1985, a new report has concluded.In a summary of a classified report on the matter, the inspectors general of the CIA and the departments of State, Justice and Defense cited contradictory claims about whether U.S. diplomats or intelligence agents were ultimately responsible for allowing the former rebel into the country in 1990 in return for his services as an informant.

The 12-year-old boy's harrowing story tumbled out: Tormented by a gang in his native El Salvador. Sent by his terrified mother to sneak into the United States in search of safety. Nabbed by Border Patrol agents in Texas. Told he'd have to go back home, whatever the consequences. Santos Maldonado-Canales badly wanted to stay, and now, sitting in a plush Baltimore law firm in August 2008, his hopes rested with an earnest young lawyer. At 27, Azim Chowdhury was two years out of law school and knew nothing about immigration law. A partner at the Duane Morris firm had given him the case as part of its mission to offer free representation.

From our first taste of sweet, soft mussels, garlicky and sprinkled with chopped tomato, onion and cilantro, we knew we were in good hands at Mango's Grill. The small restaurant, with its overly bright plastic tablecloths and piles of what looks like folded laundry by the front door, doesn't give a great first impression. But it is a diamond in the rough. -- Poor:]

He was shy, slender and serious-looking. He liked to work on his cars and adored his children. He walked the eldest two to school in the morning and came home directly after work to watch his kids. His wife didn't speak much to the neighbors but was a problem-solver at home. She was pretty; she had long, dark hair and a soft smile. She missed her family back in El Salvador. Together, they were raising sweet kids: a 3-year-old boy, who was sometimes a rascal, and three girls, ages 9, 4 and 1.

There we were, some friends and I, sipping our sangrias and margaritas at El Trovador and dipping our deep-fried chicken taquitos in chunky guacamole, when suddenly, in a blare of festive trumpets, music began playing. Hadn't the music started just a few minutes before? We had been so engrossed in our drinks, our conversation and the enormous platters of food (and these were just appetizers) that we hadn't noticed when the music had stopped. A few minutes later, it happened again. A blaze of trumpets snapped us to attention, and happy music filled the restaurant.

POINT LOOKOUT -- On this jagged peninsula where thousands of Confederate soldiers met their deaths, the air is thick with the smell of charcoal and marinated beef. Soccer balls whiz past colorful hammocks. Several adults dressed head-to-toe in white stand on a rocky beach waiting to be born again -- baptized in the warm waters of the Potomac River. And everyone is speaking Spanish. Point Lookout State Park, once a Civil War prison camp, has evolved into a retreat for Latin American immigrants, many of them from El Salvador.

SAN MIGUEL, El Salvador - On Thursdays, she brings out the knife. The dull steak blade is part of an unimpressive array of tools - nose, fingers, plastic tub, afternoon sun - that Angela Maritza Carballo uses to detect contraband in packages being sent to the United States from this smallest of Central American countries. She is the sole inspector for Umana Express, one of hundreds of mom-and-pop courier services that have linked families in El Salvador and the United States for more than 20 years.

TO GET an idea of the carnage in El Salvador over the last dozen years, imagine a guerrilla war in the United States killing 3.6 million people. Proportionately, that's equivalent to the Salvadoran war's estimated 75,000 dead in a population of 5.2 million.The Salvadoran peace agreement signed at U.N. headquarters last Wednesday doesn't quite end this appalling bloodshed -- four more killings occurred the next day -- but it does lay a solid foundation for further talks in Mexico next month.

Once again, the end of the Cold War has provided an opening for the United Nations to close down one of the proxy wars by which the superpowers once battled one another. The latest beneficiary of this trend is El Salvador, where heroic efforts of U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar forced through a peace accord just as his 10-year service terminated and the new year began.This is not to say the 12-year Salvadoran war was not grounded in indigenous social inequities and murderous hatreds.

An Annapolis landscaper who caused a Thanksgiving Day car crash that killed his friend was sentenced yesterday to 18 months in jail. "You drank too much, you were speeding, you were driving recklessly, and you took another man's life," Anne Arundel County Circuit Judge Joseph P. Manck said as he sentenced Jose A. Munoz, 43. Manck said he was not taking into consideration that Munoz might spend months after completing his sentence in another jail awaiting...

LANDOVER - Edith Flores tried to look joyful yesterday as she graduated from Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring. She smiled wanly as she shook hands with her principal, as she turned her tassel and as she walked out into the parking lot amid her fellow graduates who whooped and posed for pictures. But when her mother gave her some red roses and a hug, Flores burst into tears. "I keep telling myself to be happy because I worked so hard. But I just can't. I'm not going to a university," she said, wiping her eyes with her gleaming white graduation gown after the ceremony, held at a megachurch in Landover to accommodate the large crowd.