Mass Murder at The Cathedral

EL SALVADOR Mass Murder at The Cathedral A protest turns into slaughter

The political chaos that has long been threatening El Salvador moved closer to anarchy last week. The incident that touched off the latest round of violence started out like a picnic. Packing lunches and carrying red balloons, 200 gaily dressed and boisterous demonstrators gathered outside the cathedral in downtown San Salvador, which had been occupied by 35 protesters since the first week in May. Other dissidents briefly seized the embassy of Costa Rica, while a third group took the French ambassador and his staff as hostages. All the protesters vowed to remain in place until El Salvador's military government released five leaders of a 30,000-member mass movement organization called the Popular Revolutionary Bloc (B.P.R.) who had been jailed in April.

The demonstrators at the cathedral soon received a brutal reply. Columns of heavily armed national police appeared in the square facing its main entrance. A captain blew his whistle and fired a rifle into the air. While protesters scrambled for cover, the police cut loose with automatic rifles, firing volley after volley into the crowd. When the shooting stopped, bodies were lying everywhere on the steps of the cathedral. For six hours, the police refused to let Red Cross workers tend the wounded. By the time they were admitted into the cathedral, 23 persons were dead or dying.

A government spokesman claimed that the shooting had been in retaliation for an assault with an automatic weapon on a passing truck. Authorities reported that one policeman had been fatally wounded in that attack. None of the foreign reporters present at the cathedral, however, saw any such incident.

The next day, 20,000 angry mourners attended a funeral for 17 of then victims. They marched through the streets chanting, "The people will not fall before tanks or machine guns." Other groups reacted more violently. On the day of the funeral, guerrillas of the Popular Liberation Forces, one of the three terrorist groups now active in the country, attacked and burned buses in the town of Tecoluca; three persons were killed.

Though the government freed two of the B.P.R. leaders whose release had been demanded by the protesters, demonstrators at the French embassy would not release their captives, and the occupiers of the cathedral had not budged. Hard-liners continued to pressure El Salvador's President, General Carlos Humberto Romero, to crack down even more forcefully on the dissidents. For El Salvador, one of the Western Hemisphere's most densely populated (531 people per sq. mi.) and most turbulent nations, no end of violence was in sight. Indeed, at week's end four B.P.R. sympathizers were slain by police and nine members of the group occupied the Venezuelan mission, taking Ambassador Santiago Ochoa and several aides as hostages. Said one of the captors: "We will stay here until the government releases all our imprisoned leaders."

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