Darkening Horizons

As El Salvador winds up the campaign for presidential, legislative, and municipal elections scheduled for March 20, 1994, no issue represents a greater threat to the peace process than the rise in political murders of leaders and grassroots activists belonging to the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). These assassinations, which became more frequent, brazen, and selective in the fall of 1993, have continued into the new year. They have raised fears that notorious death squads which sowed terror in the 1980s have been reactivated if, in fact, they were ever disbanded. Several of these squads have publicly claimed credit for death threats, which have then been followed by abductions, attacks, or murders.