The white helicopter dropped out of a darkening sky, veered around a thick tree and sank its runners into the lush grass in the middle of a soccer field at El Salvador's leading military academy. A chubby figure dressed in blue jeans and a wind-breaker bolted from the chopper, dashed across the pitch and threw herself into the arms of her weeping mother. A moment later, Inés Guadalupe Duarte Durán was swept into the embrace of her tear-choked father, President José Napoleón Duarte, for whom the nation's civil war had lately become an agonizing personal ordeal.
The President's eldest daughter, a...