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Several journalists, venturing into the countryside to search out the facts for themselves, were engulfed in the violence. Among the casualties were Photographers Susan Meiselas, 32, on assignment for TIME; John Hoagland, 33, working for Newsweek; and Ian Mates, 26, a South African cameraman for a London-based television organization. Their small Japanese car was the target of a remote-controlled Claymore-type antipersonnel mine on a road about 15 miles north of San Salvador. Mates suffered severe head wounds from steel splinters and died the next day in a local hospital. Meiselas and Hoagland were evacuated to the U.S. Later in the week another photographer on assignment for Newsweek, Olivier Rebbot, 31, was shot in the chest by a sniper while covering the fighting at San Francisco Gotera. Another photographer on assignment for TIME, Harry Mattison, protected Rebbot till an ambulance arrived.
While the tide of battle continued to go against the guerrillas, exiled leaders of the F.M.L.N. assembled a new seven-member "diplomatic-political commission" in Mexico City. The leader of this umbrella group is Guillermo Manuel Ungo, 49, a Social Democrat who was President Duarte's running mate in the 1972 elections, as well as a member of the original junta that replaced the military in October 1979. Apparently embarrassed by the guerrillas' failure to produce a mass uprising, the commission insisted that the current offensive was not, after all, the "final" one. But what goaded the guerrillas into action at this time was their well-founded fear that Ronald Reagan, as President, will give the military all the American aid and advisers necessary to wipe out the leftists. Such a swing to the right, it is believed, could even sweep Duarte from power.
The civil war in El Salvador is a conflict with no victors, only victims; indeed, there are those who would argue neither side deserves to win. Despite its commitment to a sweeping land reform program, the junta headed by Duarte has been tarnished by its inability to control the security forces, which have condoned and perhaps participated in the torture and execution of suspected leftists by right-wing death squads. The F.M.L.N., meanwhile, has managed to alienate much of its potential support among workers and peasants by answering violence with violence, brutality with brutality. Leftist death squads may be fewer in number than those on the right, but they are no less efficient in the business of killing. On a railway embankment outside the capital last week, the body of a dead youth was propped up, with a cigarette in his mouth, bearing a sign that read TRAITOR; it was signed by the F.M.L.N.
By now Salvadorans are as cynical about the leftists' rallying cries as they are sick of the violence. "We know that the right has done most of the killing," says a young mechanic in a San Salvador barrio, "but the left is also responsible. It has become natural for us to distrust all people with guns."
—By Sara Medina. Reported by Bernard Diederich/San Salvador