Rightist death squad on maximum alert

Press, 4 July 1983, Page 10

Rightist death squad on maximum alert

NZPA-Reuter San Salvador A Rightist death squad in El Salvador said yesterday that it had gone on maximum alert against Leftist guerrillas and punctuated its statement by dumping two bodies in San Salvador. The bodies, of a man and a woman, were found by the police in the car park of a hotel. A coroner reported that they had been beaten and strangled and had notes tied around their necks saying that they had been killed by the secret antiCommunist Army (E.S.A.). The E.S.A., a Rightist death squad that has been underground for the past

year, resurfaced two months ago when it murdered a suspected guerrilla and left his body in front of another hotel in the Salvadorean capital. The notes tied to yesterday’s victims said that the secret army had resumed activity to check an upsurge of urban violence by Leftist guerrillas, grouped under the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front. The notes, signed by “Commandante Cero-uno,” accused the Government of supporting the guerrillas through an amnesty programme rather than trying to eliminate them. “Our secret army, from

this minute, enters a state of maximum alert and promises it will hold war councils and condemn to death all of the communist bandits that have indirect or direct ties to the Front,” the notes said. “(It) has begun its action with the death penalty for two Communists of the Front.” Violence in San Salvador has increased in the past two months with a party headquarters machinegunned, an unsuccessful attack on the United States Embassy, and the murders of two policemen, an American military adviser, and the Rightist deputy, Rene Barrios Amaya.

’ A mission from Amnesty 1 International, the Londonbased human rights organ- ) isation, is now in El Salvat dor on its first visit since • 1976. : A spokesman said that i■. the three-member team i would collect information s about the Government’s process of death certification and investigate alleged t abuses of human rights. i About 42,000 people, most of them civilians, have died in the country’s bitter 3¥zj year civil war between s Leftist guerrillas and the American-backed Army. 1 Human rights groups blame j most deaths on Rightist death squads.