San Salvador

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.

Serious Problems?When I read of Congress' attempts to find painless ways to cut the budget, increase military spending, continue tobacco and sugar subsidies and, at the same time, reduce taxes, I am reminded of a remark made by a former foreign minister of France who was recently quoted by Time magazine: "It is hard to take seriously a nation which has deep problems if they can be fixed by a 50-cent-per-gallon tax on gasoline."Dan LynchBaltimoreViolence and DeathThank you for The Sun's special report on Battalion 316 which operated in Honduras in the early 1980s.

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- The name is almost comically sinister, and Salvadorans are quick to share some gallows humor over "The Black Shadow."But when the laughing stops, people who have suffered through death-squad terror and civil war acknowledge that there's something unsettling about this vigilante group called La Sombra Negra.About three dozen murders, most committed against suspected criminals, have been attributed to The Black Shadow's "social cleansing" since the group became known in late February.

SAN SALVADOR -- Central American presidents will carry the divisive issue of immigration to next month's Summit of the Americas in Miami, where they plan to tell President Clinton that only improved economies can staunch the northward flow of illegal immigrants.Expressing outrage at California's Proposition 187 and other symptoms of what they see as an anti-immigrant backlash, the region's leaders have begun a full-scale lobbying effort to prevent a feared massive return of citizens to cash-strapped and politically troubled home countries.

The connection was forged during the Salvadoran civil war and nurtured through times of poverty and upheaval.This week, members of St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church in Columbia met with their brethren at the parish of San Roque in San Salvador, the Columbia church's sister parish since 1987.The Rev. Richard Henry Tillman and three church members, who return Friday, made the week-long trip to deliver $5,000 in medical supplies and 33 pairs of prescription eye glasses to needy Salvadorans.

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- Almost a year after El Salvador's decade-old civil war ended with fanfare and high hopes, a U.N.-brokered peace is in danger of crumbling amid mounting political violence, deepening fear and delays in promised reforms.With this country's most important elections ever looming on the horizon, a resurgence of death squad-style killings has sent a chill of tension and anger throughout much of Salvadoran society.Two senior leaders of the former guerrilla group, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, were killed in one week.

MANAGUA, Nicaragua -- The prostitutes stalking the streets that ring the volcanic hills and craters of this gritty capital are young -- very young. Some have barely reached their teens. Some say they are selling sex to feed their starving siblings. Some say they were sent to this job by their unemployed, single mothers."I try to help them," says the Rev. Xabier Gorostiaga, rector of the Jesuit University of Central America. "I tell them I can give them a scholarship to the university. But they say, 'I already have a scholarship to the university.

A Roman Catholic priest who 12 years ago was feared killed in El Salvador while missing for 10 days was alive and well at Baltimore's Episcopal Cathedral of the Incarnation last night, pleading for an end to an Army school in Georgia.The School of the Americas at Fort Benning, as it is called officially, is widely known in Latin America as "the school of the assassins," the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, a Maryknoll missionary, told an audience of about 60 people.He said that the little-known school, founded in Panama in 1946 and moved to Georgia in 1984, has cost the U.S. taxpayer countless millions of dollars, training 55,000 officers and enlisted men from many countries in South American and Central America.

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- Two army officers convicted in the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests, their cook and her daughter were ordered released from prison yesterday as part of a new blanket amnesty sponsored by President Alfredo Cristiani.In response to U.S. pressure, however, government officials now say the amnesty, decreed last month for all Salvadorans guilty of war crimes, will not be granted to leftist guerrillas who killed U.S. servicemen during the conflict.The officers convicted in the Jesuits' murders, Col. Guillermo Alfredo Benavides and Lt. Yusshy Rene Mendoza, had been sentenced to 30 years in prison.

MARIA MADRE DE LOS POBRES, El Salvador -- It's a long way from Taneytown to the parish of Maria Madre de los Pobres, an impoverished shanty town on the edge of the capital, San Salvador.But last Sunday, Carroll County's Jim Small was among the congregation gathered in the small church to commemorate the 13th anniversary of the killing of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero.The 52-year-old owner of Taneytown Auto Parts Inc. and Small & Sons Auto Parts in Emmitsburg is part of a two-person team that drove more than 4,000 miles from Baltimore to San Salvador.