El Salvador: F.P.L. Spells Murder

Lieut. Colonel Ricardo Aristides Cienfuegos, 40, chief spokesman for the Salvadoran armed forces, evidently felt he had nothing to fear at the exclusive International Sports Club in San Salvador. The officer, who had wanted to leave his desk job for a field assignment in the five-year-old civil war against leftist guerrillas, was relaxing last week beside a tennis court when three men in tennis clothes approached. One pulled out a pistol and shot Cienfuegos in the head, killing him instantly. Before fleeing, the killers draped their victim’s body with the red-and-yellow flag of the Popular Liberation Forces (F.P.L.), a faction of the rebel Farabundo Marti Popular Liberation Front.

Cienfuegos was the highest-ranking Salvadoran officer to be gunned down in the capital since the guerrilla conflict began. Almost two years ago, members of the F.P.L. took responsibility for the murder of U.S. Navy Lieut. Commander Albert Schaufelberger, an attache at the U.S. embassy. Informed of the Cienfuegos killing, President Jose Napoleon Duarte denounced the crime as part of a leftist policy of “urban destabilization.”