World Notes EL SALVADOR

Early-morning commuter traffic clogged the intersection when the armored Cherokee station wagon eased to a halt at a red light in downtown San Salvador. A moment later a man darted forward, placed a bomb on the car roof, then fled just before the explosion. The driver and a bodyguard escaped with minor injuries. But the man in the back seat was killed. He was Attorney General Roberto Garcia Alvarado, the highest-ranking government official to be slain in a war that has claimed some 70,000 lives over the past nine years.

President-elect Alfredo Cristiani blamed leftist guerrillas for the assassination. Charging that the attack was designed to destabilize his rightist government, which takes power on June 1, Cristiani said the F.M.L.N. rebels were "trying to provoke a vengeful response, but they won't get it." Within a day, however, the military arrested dozens of human-rights and union activists, claiming that they belonged to groups affiliated with the F.M.L.N.

Salvadorans fear the violence will escalate. Five days before the attack on Garcia, a bomb blast ripped through the home of another official of Cristiani's Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), Vice President-elect Francisco Merino, injuring one of Merino's seven children.