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- WORLD, Page 51World NotesEL SALVADORBrutal Law of The Land
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- Early-morning commuter traffic clogged the intersection
- when the armored Cherokee station wagon eased to a halt at a red
- light in downtown San Salvador. A moment later a man darted
- forward, placed a bomb on the car roof, then fled just before
- the explosion. The driver and a bodyguard escaped with minor
- injuries. But the man in the back seat was killed. He was
- Attorney General Roberto Garcia Alvarado, the highest-ranking
- government official to be slain in a war that has claimed some
- 70,000 lives over the past nine years.
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- President-elect Alfredo Cristiani blamed leftist guerrillas
- for the assassination. Charging that the attack was designed to
- destabilize his rightist government, which takes power on June
- 1, Cristiani said the F.M.L.N. rebels were "trying to provoke
- a vengeful response, but they won't get it." Within a day,
- however, the military arrested dozens of human-rights and union
- activists, claiming that they belonged to groups affiliated with
- the F.M.L.N.
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- Salvadorans fear the violence will escalate. Five days
- before the attack on Garcia, a bomb blast ripped through the
- home of another official of Cristiani's Nationalist Republican
- Alliance (ARENA), Vice President-elect Francisco Merino,
- injuring one of Merino's seven children.
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