Guerrillas launch fierce attacks on Salvadorean cities

Press, 10 March 1982, Page 8

Guerrillas launch fierce attacks on Salvadorean cities

NZPA-Reuter San Salvador Left-wing guerrillas fought fierce battles with Government forces in two of El Salvador’s main cities yesterday before withdrawing. Army sources said at least 30 guerrillas were killed in San Miguel for the loss of three soldiers. Bullet-ridden bodies were, left on the streets after a five-hour battle. In San Vicente the insurgents attacked at dawn and withdrew after seven hours of house-to-house skirmishes in which at least 15 people were killed.

The guerrillas distributed pamphlets saying the Leftwing groups under the umbrella of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front had started a new offensive to oust the civiliam military junta. The pamphlets also urged soldiers to desert the Army and join their ranks. Official sources said there

had also been clashes in the province of La Union, about 160 km east of San Salvador. President Jose Napoleon Duarte, who has called Constituent Assembly elections on March 28 in an attempt to resolve El Salvador’s undeclared civil war, yesterday denied charges that national guards had massacred peasants in a hamlet in San Vicente province. He issued a statement saying the charge was “black propaganda” by the guerrillas. Peasants in a guerrillacontrolled area close to the Campanario hamlet said national guardsmen had machine-gunned about 124 peasants in January. Reporters visited the place on Monday and found 14 skulls on a mound, human bones, and torn clothes. The president said it could have been a clandestine cemetery where guerrillas hid their dead “so as not to discourage their forces.” A United States embassy spokesman said the charges of a massacre in El Campanario were being investigated. Government forces in El Salvador were accused yesterday by Amenesty International of machine-gunning women and children from helicopters and decapitating unarmed civilians. They were just two of the atrocities described by Amnesty International in alleging “systematic mass killings

and torture” in the Central American country. , . • .

The worldwide humanrights movement published a gristy catalogue of atrocities ’which it said was based on the. description of civilian eyewitnesses. . The accounts were published in a special supplement to the monthly Amnesty International newsletter. It was said to be based largely on testimony collected by an Amnesty. International fact-finding mission which visited refugee camps outside El Salvador last year. The supplement said there appeared to be a programme of terror against Salvadorean • peasants in some areas by the security forces. In Washington the Senate Democratic leader, Robert Byrd, introduced a bill yesterday to prohibit President Reagan from spending American troops into combat in El Salvador without advance approval of Congress. The only exceptions would be the dispatch of troops to evacuate Americans from that country or to prevent an attack on the United States itself. "Now is the time to undertake a full debate on this issue, no matter how remote the possibility might be that the President would feel compelled to commit United States troops to El Salvador,” Mr Byrd told the Re-publican-controlled Senate.