San Salvador

Schoolchildren were led to safety in San Salvador, El Salvador, Wednesday after being held hostage for more than six hours by a 17-year-old army deserter and a 16-year-old girl. The government said the two were urban guerrillas, but the school principal said the youth was just running away from the military. In the incident, 947 children and 27 teachers were held by the two armed teenagers, who threatened to kill them, but then allowed them to leave and surrendered. There were no reported injuries.

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador - Central American authorities said Sunday that at least 66 people had died in six days of heavy rain that caused landslides, floods, and bridge failures throughout the region. Officials ordered evacuations as the rain was expected to continue. El Salvador's director of civil protection, Jorge Melendez, said in a news conference that at least 24 people had died in the country, most of them buried in their houses by landslides. The country is in a state of alert and preparing for "major disasters," Melendez said.

Hilda Naylor and Bob Smith are veterans of many demonstrations - Naylor as an advocate for the homeless and Smith as a member of the Swarthmore-based Brandywine Peace Community. But when the two activists demonstrated last month in front of a military command post out in the countryside of El Salvador - demanding that a squad of heavily armed soldiers give back a truckload of building materials to a group of refugees - it ranked high on their list of personal firsts. "I think for a couple of seconds, I forgot where I was as I held hands with two other women and blocked the door to the compound.

Round 2 of the bruising Central American peace process gets under way in El Salvador today. It won't produce the linked-arms-on-the-balcony photos that came out of Guatemala on Aug. 7, when the region's five presidents agreed to a broad though vague plan to defuse Central America's wars and to promote pluralism. This is a nuts-and-bolts session. But what happens in San Salvador may determine whether the process continues on course or crashes and burns, like other peace efforts have so many times before.

Already in El Salvador - before last week's hellish street-fighting, before rebel executions of village mayors and the right's bloody bombing of a San Salvador union hall - the list of the civil-war dead had reached 70,000. What difference will Thursday's murder of six Jesuits make - six of El Salvador's best and brightest, along with their cook and her daughter, 15, all shot through the head with high-powered rifles? Perhaps the difference will be this: It may foretell the death of wishful thinking in Washington.

Leftist rebels paralyzed much of El Salvador with a forced transportation boycott on the eve of the inauguration of rightist President-elect Alfredo Cristiani. Local bus services and transportation across the country came to a halt, and nearly all gas stations were closed in response to the call by the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, for an indefinite boycott. Cristiani, of the rightist Nationalist Republican Alliance, or Arena, takes power today from ailing President Jose Napoleon Duarte of the centrist Christian Democratic Party at a ceremony to be attended by regional heads of state and a U.S. delegation headed by Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R., Ind)

Six years ago, I was visiting San Salvador, El Salvador, and noticed the preponderance of shops selling Philips and Sony electrical applicances; 10 years before, there were none. During the course of my visit, I met a group of executives from General Electric, and they were in Central America for the purpose of acknowledging the efforts of regional sales and service managers for their work in promoting GE bilingual repair manuals. All of the stateside men were bilingual and of Latin origin.

Jose Napoleon Duarte, 64, who governed El Salvador for most of the last decade and saw himself as its democratic messiah, died at his home in San Salvador yesterday after a 20-month battle with liver and stomach cancer. As El Salvador's first freely elected president in 50 years, Duarte had embodied the hope of the U.S. government to shape a peaceful center between the country's violent political extremes. But his popularity and effectiveness were eroded drastically during a term of office marked by widespread corruption, a devastating earthquake, civil war and thousands of political killings.

Two weeks after six Jesuit faculty members were gunned down at El Salvador's leading Catholic university last November, the Rev. Charles J. Beirne volunteered to take one of their jobs. Father Beirne, a Jesuit completing his work as the academic vice president at Santa Clara University in California, was accepted. This summer he will replace the murdered Rev. Ignacio Martin-Baro as vice rector of Jose Simeon Canas Central American University (UCA) in San Salvador. Yesterday, Father Beirne, visiting Swarthmore College for its Faculty Seminar on Central America, predicted in an interview that the only ranking officer charged in the massacre would never be prosecuted for his predecessor's murder.

Across the street from the pile of webbed steel and broken concrete that was once the Ruben Dario office building, the earthquake widows mingle with relief workers, and Juana Melendez de Diaz wonders how she will feed her five children. Standing just yards from the excavation work, the stench of death heavy in the air, Diaz shields herself from the sun with a parasol and clutches an identification card bearing her husband's picture. All around her, other people hold small wallet-size pictures and large, framed family portraits.

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador - Central American authorities said Sunday that at least 66 people had died in six days of heavy rain that caused landslides, floods, and bridge failures throughout the region. Officials ordered evacuations as the rain was expected to continue. El Salvador's director of civil protection, Jorge Melendez, said in a news conference that at least 24 people had died in the country, most of them buried in their houses by landslides. The country is in a state of alert and preparing for "major disasters," Melendez said.

India seeks more in Bhopal claims NEW DELHI - Indian ministers called Monday for the government to extradite the former head of Union Carbide and pursue liability claims against Dow Chemical as part of a new push for justice in a 1984 toxic gas leak that killed 15,000 people. Anger over the world's worst industrial disaster - at a plant owned by a Union Carbide subsidiary in Bhopal - was revived this month after a court convicted seven former senior employees of "death by negligence" and sentenced them to two years in prison.

Rowan University senior Karl Martensen joked recently about flying over Cancun, Mexico, last month, where other vacationing college students were lying on beaches perfecting their tans. He and five other students had decided to try a different kind of spring break - one full of hard work and another kind of reward. They devoted their week off to Engineers Without Borders, a volunteer group that provides people all over the world with clean water and better living conditions.

El Salvador, a country of a little less than seven million people that is roughly the size of Massachusetts, struggles with poverty like many of its Central American neighbors. In 2005, approximately 49 percent of El Salvador's rural population lived below the poverty line, according to figures from the U.S. Agency for International Development. The residents of Las Delicias, a small community in El Salvador, received some extra help this summer from 16 students from Villa Maria Academy in Malvern.

My station was number three, Jesus Falls for the First Time. I carried it encased in bubble wrap and a towel in a blue tote bag into which it fit perfectly. On the plane, it seemed safer to put it in the overhead bin than at my feet. During the bumpy bus ride to this achingly poor village, sister parish to my congregation, St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church in Germantown, it stayed on my lap. The 19 of us from our interfaith delegation - Protestant, Catholic, Jewish - were relieved when all 14 clay tablets arrived intact.

President Bush concluded his four-day trip to Latin America yesterday by pledging to support Central America as it tries to rebuild from political unrest and natural disasters. He also denounced as "petty politics" Democratic accusations that he used the trip to pander to Latino voters. Bush met over lunch with the leaders of El Salvador, Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras and Panama, and reiterated his call for a regional free-trade agreement. He announced the proposal in January, but it is still far from landing on the congressional agenda in Washington.

I was nervous, I confess. El Salvador is not exactly the place most people would care to spend a vacation. But I'd already volunteered my time for this adventure. So one cold morning at JFK International, I tossed my apprehensions aside and ventured to meet the seven total strangers I'd be accompanying on a two-week work brigade. Through a nonprofit organization called Bridges to Community - or simply put, Bridges - I was introduced to those who would be leading us. There was Carter, Bridges director and ordained minister; Karla, Bridges president and mother of four; and Teo, a native of El Salvador who now lives in Arizona.

President Clinton all but apologized yesterday for U.S. support of a brutal military regime here that killed 200,000 people, one of the "dark events of the past" when the United States tried to help any Central American force that opposed communism. "It is important that I state clearly that support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression was wrong," Clinton said in a meeting with Guatemalan citizens. He told Guatemalan President Alvaro Arzu that the United States would continue to support efforts to examine and reveal the atrocities committed by the former regime here, "to shed light on the dark events of the past, so that they are never repeated.

The United States national soccer team will play a pivotal World Cup qualifying match against El Salvador today under decidedly difficult circumstances. The American Embassy in San Salvador has advised U.S. citizens not to attend the match because of the threat of fan violence from the throng that will pack Cuscatlan Stadium. Hostile environments are nothing new for the national team, and with El Salvador desperately needing a win and three points in the standings to stay in the regional chase for France '98, this could be an extremely rowdy crowd.

When Swarthmore College student Eugene Sonn got back from spring break earlier this week, he was sporting a noticeable tan. But he had not been vacationing in Fort Lauderdale or Daytona Beach. Sonn had gotten bronzed during a trip that took him and seven schoolmates much farther south, to El Salvador. It was not fun in the sun that drew the group to the troubled nation, but rather the opportunity to be part of a pivotal moment in El Salvador's history. The war-torn country of about 5.5 million, roughly the size of Massachusetts, is preparing for elections Sunday.