EL SALVADOR: Gunfire in the Sun

El Salvador, the sunny republic on Central America’s Pacific Coast where a handful of banking and coffee-planting families dominate a tightly packed population of 2,520,000, broke out last week in rioting and gunfire. The bloodshed grew out of a clash early this month between students and other oppositionists and the cops of Colonel-President José Maria Lemus. When the oppositionists tried to demonstrate in the capital of San Salvador against a new law regulating the right of assembly, police beat one student to death, injured 350 other persons and raped jailed schoolgirls. Ten thousand citizens marched behind the dead student’s bier.

Branding students “gullible tools of professional Communist agitators,” Lemus slapped on a state of siege. Early last week 7,000 persons defied it and massed in protest against police. Then, on Independence Day, students and workers wearing black bands for police-violence victims turned out to demonstrate. They found cops waiting, shouted, “Killers!” Police opened fire. A 19-year-old university law student and two other demonstrators fell dying. That night the knifed corpse of a cop was found with the word Revenge painted across the chest.

Although Salvadoran supporters of Cuba’s Fidel Castro were feeding the ferment, Lemus did not have to look beyond his borders for its cause. El Salvador, Latin America’s tiniest country, has its second densest population (305 per sq. mi.). The average agricultural wage is 60¢ a day, and 20,000 are unemployed in the capital alone. As much as any other country in the hemisphere, El Salvador is in need of the social reforms proposed by the U.S. to the inter-American development conference in Bogota a fortnight ago.