For U.S. advisers in El Salvador, the war grows all too close
Students at the Central American University in San Salvador were drifting through the campus after their classes when U.S. Navy Lieut. Commander Albert A. Schaufelberger III drove up in his Ford Maverick to collect Consuelo Escalante, manager of the university cooperative store. Schaufelberger, 33, a bachelor, had been seeing Escalante regularly and often picked her up after work. The Navy officer was wearing civilian clothes, as he often did since coming to El Salvador nine months earlier to help administer U.S. security assistance and train government forces in their war against leftist guerrillas.
Just after Schaufelberger honked his horn to signal his friend, a small van pulled up beside him. A man described by witnesses as tall, young and well dressed stepped out and coolly fired four shots through the open window of Schaufelberger's car. His auto lurched forward, crashing against a parked car. Urging bystanders to remain calm, the assassin casually reached into the Maverick and turned off the ignition; then he and his accomplices drove off in their van. Schaufelberger, who had been hit in the head with three small-caliber bullets, was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. He thus became the first American serviceman killed in El Salvador since the initial U.S. military adviser arrived there in October 1980.
Schaufelberger was deputy commander of the U.S. Military Group, a six-member body that operates out of the American embassy in El Salvador and oversees the $60 million U.S. military-assistance program there. As it happened, he was also chief of security for the 53 U.S. advisers in the country, responsible for informing newcomers of safety regulations. Yet when the air-conditioning system in his Maverick broke down, Schaufelberger rashly removed the sealed bullet proof window from the driver's side.
In a taped message sent to a local radio station and later broadcast over its own clandestine station, the Popular Forces of Liberation (F.P.L.), second largest of the country's five major guerrilla groups, claimed responsibility for the murder as "an answer to the criminal intervention of Yankee imperialism." In Washington, President Reagan vowed that the murder would not affect "the economic or military aid which we are giving." In reply, Democratic Congressman Gerry E. Studds of Massachusetts, a longtime critic of U.S. policy in Central America, warned that "there will be a lot more deaths, Salvadoran and American," if the U.S. continues to maintain military personnel in Central America.